Chicken Marbella

 

We had this at the Bozeman Co-op Downtown when our good friend, Lori, was in the hospital and had to try to make it for ourselves, so Ben researched recipes on the net. The recipes all called for red wine vinegar, but we didn’t have that, so we just used apple cider vinegar. Here’s how Ben made ours:

 

 

Ingredients (These amounts, of course, are approximations)

1 four and a half pound chicken cut into serving-sized pieces

For marinade:

1/2 head of garlic, diced fine

1/8 cup of dried oregano

1/8 cup dried parsley

3 bay leaves

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup canola oil

1/2 cup chopped dried plums

1/4 green olives

1/4 cup capers with a little juice

salt and black pepper to taste

To add just before baking:

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white wine

Mix the marinade. Place chicken pieces in a flat plastic container or a large zip-lock bag and pour the marinade on top. Let marinate for about 24 hours.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lay marinated chicken pieces in a shallow baking pan and pour the marinade over them. Pour  the white wine into the marinade around the chicken pieces. Sprinkle the brown sugar over the chicken pieces. Bake for about an hour until the chicken pieces are nicely browned on top.

Chicken Marbella is excellent served either hot or at room temperature. We ate this hot out of the oven, but the Co-op served it at room temperature; both were delicious. And this is relatively low in fat, especially if you peel the skin off the chicken when you cut it up (which we did not, except on the breasts ).

Summer is Almost Over!

Okay, so I’m getting ahead of myself, there’s still a lot of it left. It’s a nice fantasy, though. It has been too hot and too dry to be enjoyable. Ben and I hiked up a trail on the south end of the Crazy Mountains and even on top of the mountain it was too hot. It wasn’t that great of a trail, either, though it had a few nice highlights.

 

We also hiked on a very hot day over by Big Timber with Jackie and Don, up to Indian Cave, which has some nice pictographs. It wasn’t pleasant weather, but the company was good.

We’ve done a couple other hikes with Ursula, Dee Dee and Nancy, too. Those were much better, though still too hot for me, and we had a very good time.

We’re done with our landscape job for the year, so Ben has kept us busy building a shed.

And we’ve harvested broccoli, cauliflower and green beans for the freezer. We’ve been eating a lot of tomatoes, salad and green beans, a little broccoli and cauliflower, some peas, and we just harvested our first beets and carrots.

So, despite the hot, dry and very smoky summer, our harvest is really good.

Notice the conspicuously missing mountains in this picture, from a very smoky day.

 

We take the good with the bad, of course, and soon (though not soon enough for me) it will be autumn turning into winter and the snow will fly again. Autumn is my favorite time of year: I love the bright colors, the cooler temperatures and finally getting back into the studio. I’ll look back and remember the hikes and the garden and think that summer wasn’t so bad, after all. Because that’s what we do to survive; we remember the good parts of our past, water down the bad parts and know that life is worth living.

The Glory of Summer

It seems that suddenly spring broke into a searing summer. I don’t harbor my dislike for summer along a shoreline of secrecy, but this summer has been worse than most: hot and dry and filled with smoke from fires near and far.

But there is, as my title designates, a certain glory in summer.

Ben and I took off on Sunday morning to ride our bikes up River Road toward the mountain. We’ve driven that road many times on our way to hike and camp, but the slower pace of riding a bicycle allowed me to really see much more of the landscape. I forgot to take my camera again, but it was a magnificent day that will remain in my memory to carry me through several stormy, cold and dreary winter days. Mountains are my favorite places on this earth and when I cannot be inside them, I love gazing at them from various points of view. The world would be a drearier place without them.