Buttermilk Roast Chicken & Green Bean Salad

This is the closest you are likely to come to the ethereal ideal of the Southern fried chicken without frying the chicken.

It pulls out all the tricks of marination to make it memorable.

Most importantly, it can all be made ahead of time and quickly assembled on a Monday (attn: office monkeys!)

Also, this assembly totally and utterly rocks for a picnic (or an office) eaten at room temperature.

For the vegetarians, the side salad is slap-your-mama good^™ so there's something in here for everyone.

It just requires a tiny bit of effort ahead of time. For about 5 minutes. Surely even you have that!


Ingredients (Buttermilk Roast Chicken)

8 chicken thighs, or legs (with skin)
2 cups buttermilk
5 cloves garlic (smashed)
1 tbsp sweet paprika
4 tbsp fresh ground pepper
2 tbsp sea salt

Recipe

Marinate the chicken with the buttermilk, smashed garlic, sweet paprika, pepper and sea salt for at least 24 hours. Preferably 48.

Preheat the oven to 425°F.

On a baking dish, arrange the chicken legs. (Throw the marinade away.) Drizzle with olive oil lightly and sprinkle some more paprika, sea salt and black pepper.

Roast for roughly 30 minutes until they are a bit brown.

Ingredients (Green Bean Salad)

1 lb green beans (trimmed)
1 large red onion
2 stalks celery
4 radishes (sliced real thin)
1/2 cup whole almonds
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup water
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp sea salt

olive oil

Recipe

Slice the onion into really fine rings.

Whisk the vinegar, water, sugar and the sea salt together. Soak the onion rings in the mixture for at least 30 minutes, preferably an hour.

Heat a small skillet with the olive oil. Fry the almonds until they are golden. Remove and let cool. When cool, cut into halves or thirds. (Yes, this matters. Roasting the almonds is simply not the same here.)

Assemble an ice bath. Water + Ice.

Heat a pot of water. Dunk the trimmed beans into the boiling water for about 5-6 minutes until tender. Dump out the water. Dump the beans into the ice-bath.

Remove the onions from the pickling liquid. Keep the liquid.

Assemble the salad. Beans, celery, radishes, almonds.

Make a vinaigrette with the pickling liquid and toss everything together.

Slap-your-mama^™ while eating!