Hillsdale

While I spoke at great length about Otium, my uncles's place, I purposefully didn't mention that we stayed at a hotel in Hillsdale. I didn't want the realities of who was staying where to be part of that discussion.

In any case, we were put into the large offset room because it had a tub and we had a baby. We thought that was generous and cool, and then we got inside the room itself: it was muggy and damp inside, smelling like mildew. The carpets were damp, the sheets were damp, the pillows and towels were funky at best (sickening at worst) and the AC seemed to be fighting a valiant fight to keep the temperature reasonable.

While we visited one place named for a Roman thing, this hotel was also named for a Roman thing. Because of the funkyness of the room I did make a few off color jokes at the expense of the hotel's name, but they're too easy and vulgar for this medium, so I'll just give you the Roman name and let your imagination run with it: Silvanus.

The night before the picnic where we divvied up Grandpa Tom I made dinner for everyone. Actually, I ran a little cooking clinic while putting people to work and had my Uncle Tom as a very willing sous as we cooked more chicken than was reasonable.

Uncle Tom had wanted to spatchcock a chicken, grill a chicken, and roast a chicken. That was his original idea: three chickens, three different cooking methods. He'd just heard of spatchcocking and was intrigued.

Of course we couldn't get three whole chickens, so we ended up with: one whole chicken; six half chickens; two double breast roasts; and two sets of leg quarters.

We sent two halves to the freezer, spatchcocked the whole chicken, carved and grilled two halves and the leg quarters, pan seared a breast and the wings, wrapped both double breast roasts in cheesecloth and slathered them with butter; and roasted the last two halves with oregano and paprika as an ode to their mother and my grandmother.

There was so much chicken: the oregano halves were coming out of the oven as we were sitting down to eat.

Spatchcocking a whole chicken (Courtesy MNB)

It was a good time, and while I felt like I was in the weeds for the first hour or so, everyone seemed to like the food. We got fresh bread and salad greens from the market, as well as braising kale and baby fennel. And the chicken...everything was from the local market, which is how we like to do it.

On the 4th of July we left for a quick drive into Massachusetts---to add a state to Cass's travels---and then headed to Joshua's, Corrie's cousin in Poughkeepsie.