The Return of Oven Season

I love autumn for many reasons—the angle of the sun… still, cloudy days with leaves slowly drifting down… cool nights followed by days of changeable weather… mowing season drawing to a close… open windows… the welcome quiet of a home absent the background hum of fans and air conditioners…. And of course I love being able to casually turn on the oven at any time of the day once again.

As I sat down to write this newsletter, I remembered that the return of oven season was front and center in my mind when I wrote my October newsletter last year. It probably will be next year, too. After four months of cooking dinner almost exclusively on the stovetop or grill…and baking only on “cooler” days (or early in the morning or late at night)…regularly turning on the oven for dinner is a treat. And since that is exactly what I have been doing for the past few weeks, easy dinners that make use of the oven is what I am sharing with you this month. First up, a roast chicken dish…and then an amazingly simple baked fish preparation.

An autumnal meal of chicken, sweet potatoes & shallots

Sweet potatoes are one of the first fall foods that I grab when the market and produce departments begin to shift away from summer ingredients. One of my favorite fall cakes includes sweet potato purée and I like to have them on hand for that. But I also buy them because they keep well. Summer ingredients still feel appropriate to me during the early, warmer days of autumn—so that’s mostly what I am still buying. But occasionally the temperature will dip…or the day will simply have a distinct autumn feel…and I will want a dinner to match the mood. That’s when the few sweet potatoes I’ve stocked will come in handy.

Recently when this exact thing happened, I decided to use the sweet potatoes in a roast chicken dish (keeping pre-salted chicken parts in your freezer makes spur of the moment dishes possible). I chose a recipe I have always liked from Maria Helm Sinskey’s The Vineyard Kitchen. I wanted to share it in the newsletter not only because it is delicious, but also because it is a nice example of how a recipe meant for a larger crowd (all of the recipes in her book are calibrated for 8 servings) can be reconfigured into a recipe for two.

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