Cider-Stewed Chicken with Root Vegetables

It's a bright, clear, late-fall day here. Gorgeous. (Yup, that's our backyard.) The sun is glinting off the tree trunks. The leaves are all down, as you can see. (Except for the pines, of course.) But the air is so fresh. It almost feels new. Have you ever breathed in air that somehow seemed new? Do you know what I mean?

These are the late days of fall that we savor in New England. Our bits of heaven. The tourists are gone: the summer renters, the leaf-peepers. The roads are empty. Really, if you want to visit New England, plan a trip around this time of year. You'll have the place to yourself. And you can end up with some glorious days.

If you can't get to New England soon, try this traditional dish from our neck of the woods: chicken stewed with apple cider. It's a great, fall perk-up, a lovely dinner whenever the air is crisp. For about 4 to 6 servings, here's how it goes:

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Cider-Cured, Braised Ham

Welcome to ham month on the blog. Don't worry: it won't be ham all the time. But all month, I'm going to be featuring snippets from our new book: HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER. Up top on this page sits the ham for today: a cured, braised one. And there to the right on the page sits the book itself. It's already available on amazon--and will be published in just a few weeks.

I can't wait until you see it! It's the first time I've written a book in first-person. All our other books are written as "we." This one's "I." It's my fractured, at-times hilarious take on how Bruce developed those 100 recipes, plus the story of how we raised our own pig, took it to slaughter, tried to cure one leg, failed, tried again, and learned more about ham than you can imagine, including tres chic European hams and down-home American country hams.

To quote from the introduction:

From that first fateful day when we started this project [you'll have to read about it--let's just say it involves the lethal combo of Eudora Welty and porn], Bruce and I have endured refrigerators full of ham leftovers, with hunks of pork being delivered by UPS every afternoon; I've been to northern Kentucky in the dead of freeze-butt winter; both of us have been to a ramshackle slaughterhouse in rural Massachusetts; and we have borne witness to an enormous toe-on pig leg in our back refrigerator, a swarm of maggots in a French charcuterie, and a group of chic, black-bedecked New Yorkers eating a quivering pile of ham in aspic.

So let's get our first sneak-peak recipe from the book: the way to make your own wet-cured ham.

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