A Guy’s Guide to Cooking: Start with a chicken

Starving musicians often sing for their supper, so the best way to get them to come over for a pickin’ party is to feed them.
                                                     

Our little band, Texas Switchgrass, had a date in a recording studio, and I got everybody to show up to practice by serving home-cooked meals for the boys. I’d make a salad, a simple chicken dish, mashed potatoes from scratch and steamed broccoli. They’d all show up. Such is the power of good friends, good music and good food.

A couple of them skipped the broccoli.

“Cooking doesn’t have to be hard, it can really be quite simple,” says Daniel Pittman, the executive chef at LUCK in Trinity Groves, West Dallas. “If you get overwhelmed, it’s not going to be any fun.”

Apparently, I’m not the only single man in Dallas who is learning how to cook, but I might be the oldest. Hipsters and millennials are cooking, too.

“Absolutely,” Pittman says. “I think younger people today are looking to enjoy local things, the better things in life. They want good coffee, good beer, good food. I think the males want to impress the young ladies, so they become foodies.” Bingo.

Pittman got his culinary training at El Centro College in Dallas and worked at Four Seasons Resort and Club Dallas at Las Colinas for 10 years before he and two partners opened LUCK. The restaurant features 40 locally brewed craft beers on tap.

“Our target audience would probably be craft-beer enthusiasts,” Pittman says, “people who like simple comfort food and people who are into things local.”

Working in the tiny kitchen at LUCK, he shows me how to make the most of a roast chicken.

“Simple roasting: You put it in the oven. You take it out when it’s done,” he says. “I oven-roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts and butternut squash all at the same time, right next to the chicken.”