Brick chicken with garlic scapes and lemon.

Chicken second courses

One reason I love to cook is you never know everything. One of the reasons I like food52 is I am always picking up new and interesting tidbits. Garlic scapes for instance. I new I needed to pick them so that all the plants energy would be used for the bulb and not the flower. For years I would snap them off and smell them and always think, "my, oh my, these smell good I wonder if you can cook with them." I had not heard or seen that you could so I assumed they were to tough and would feed them to the chickens. In steps WinnieAb with her pickles with garlic scapes and I come to learn they are edible. Recently it seems I have been seeing a lot of recipes for brick chicken, there is a really good one right here at food52, in magazines, and even online at Saveur.com they have one from Marlow & Sons. All great recipes but I wanted to use my scapes and I just got back from having my flock of Cornish Game Hens processed. This is also one of the first dishes I cooked in culinary school but have not made it in years. You can see where this is going.... By the way the lemons become tender enough that we eat the rind and all, well minus the seeds. I removed the rib cage and the thigh bone but I am not sure it is necessary but I did use a lot of weight, like 22 lbs of weight. I haven't really experimented with less. This is by far my favorite lemon chicken.