Dinners with Becky and Mark

I'm visiting my friend Becky in Washington DC. We went to college together; after college we traveled through Europe and then lived together in Paris for a half a year or so. I'd never cooked before. I started to learn to cook from her.
We lived in half an apartment in the 16th arrondissment (the fanciest one) in Paris. Madame, our widowed landlady, lived in the other half. In French fashion, she kept the kitchen, we had the bathroom. She used our bathroom to take a full bath once a month or so.
So my first cooking experience was in the bathroom, cooking on a hotplate, one of us sitting on the toilet, the other on the bidet, stirring our dinner in the bathroom. We put groceries on the fire escape to keep them cool, and shopped for dinner on the way home from work at l'Ecole Berlitz, where we both worked teaching English to our mostly French students.
Becky's still a cook, and so now am I. Her kitchen has most of the same things to cook with that mine does. She and her husband Mark are going through some nasty health issues and I'm here cooking and helping get the car inspected -- and making more messes than I want, like spilling coffee on the dining room rug and freezing the lock on the porch door.
The first night we served up a bunch of leftovers. For the second night I cut up a bunch of vegetables that were almost over the edge -- cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, celery. I started by sauteeing garlic and onion and a few red peppers, then added the vegetables and a cup or so of water. Hmmm. How do you get this to taste like vegetables but not too bland? Becky had a jar of Nellie's African Sauce, mild. I added a couple of big tablespoonfuls.
Then, we went shopping at Whole Foods. I had planned to cook a chicken, but we'd gone to get the car inspected and the chicken would take too long. So I found some haddock -- a long way from Gloucester -- and poached it in the vegetable broth. It was good.
Tonight we did the chicken. The 4lb. roaster from Whole Foods was super. I cut up a lone potato, an onion, and a weary bag of little carrots. Becky produced a beautiful blue pottery roasting pan from Poland. I added the vegetables to the pan and tossed them in olive oil, and found fresh thyme in the 'fridge which I put in the "cavity" along with about 7 or 8 whole cloves of garlic.
Joy of Cooking suggests a preheated 400 degree oven for an hour or so, plus a 15 minute wait before carving. I melted butter and olive oil and dribbled it over the chicken, and then dribbled a bit more a half an hour later. After an hour the chicken was not quite done. We upped the temperature to 425 for fifteen minutes and then let it sit for a while before carving. It was delicious. The vegetables were wonderful. I hope they use all this to make a great soup next week!
Becky's daughter Alexandra has a brussels sprouts recipe which we did tonight. You cut the sprouts in half, melt butter and olive oil in a frying pan, sautee chopped garlic and then remove it from the pan, then place the sprouts carefully, face down, in one layer in the pan. Sautee the sprouts until they are close to cooked, then add the garlic back in and stir it all around.
I'm going to try this with big pieces of garlic - maybe half a clove each.