Minimally Invasive

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter P. You may recognize it from such words as Parsley, Pecorino, and my favorite word of late, Procrastination.

Last weekend’s kitchen adventures were spent in the service of Cinco de Mayo with a chicken and hominy soup and a recipe for beans that took the better part of a day to make, but were worth every last stinkin’ second.

But by the time the fifth rolled around, I just couldn’t bring myself to post anything about it.

What’s that word again? Oh yeah, Procrastination.

Which brings us to today.

The aforementioned soup.

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We wish you a Merry Christmas …
and a happy new year! Take care, everyone, and thanks for stopping by.

For all Advent Calendar posts, click here.

recipe after the jump

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Thanksgiving dinner was a big, rich, traditional affair, followed Friday by pizza and Saturday by dim sum, all of which left me craving nothing more than fresh, bright flavors with a minimum of fat by Sunday. Because dim sum was preceded by a stockpiling expedition to the Asian market, I had big, new jars of sauces whose expiration dates hadn’t passed who-knows-when calling out to me and a recipe from Cookthink that served as inspiration for that light meal I was craving.

For our Sunday dinner, I brined a chicken in kosher salt and brown sugar for a few hours, rinsed and dried it, then marinated it for about 30 minutes in a mixture of sambal oelek, dark honey, and heroic amounts of garlic. In the meantime, I halved a two stalks of celery and laid them out in a roasting pan with two carrot sticks, half of a red onion, and some peeled, chopped fuyu persimmon. Just before I put the bird in the oven (at 500 degrees for an hour), I stuffed the cavity with the remaining half of the red onion and another peeled and chopped persimmon.

Because the chicken was so moist from the brining, I didn’t need to add any water at all to the pan, but did tent it with foil about 30 minutes in to keep the honey in the marinade from burning the skin to a crisp. The chicken was succulent again, but the real star was the persimmon chunks, which picked up just enough chicken flavor to add savory to their list of qualities, but almost no fat and definitely no greasy feel. I served the chicken and persimmon with a little fresh sambal and nothing more on the side than boiled greens topped with a little sesame oil and sea salt and felt nearly virtuous after our weekend of gorging and lounging.

Last night, I wanted to use some of the leftover chicken, so I threw together a quick soup when I got home. I sautéed a thinly sliced stalk of celery with a clove of minced garlic for a few minutes, then added enough chicken broth to the pot to make about four servings of soup. (Sorry, no measurements — I just eyeballed it.) I shredded the remaining chicken breast and added that to the pot, brought it to a boil, and lowered the heat to simmer. While those flavors were melding, I chopped a package of baby mustard greens and added them about 15 minutes later, letting them cook down for a few minutes before adding the final ingredients — chopped green onion, parsley, and celery leaves, about a tablespoon of Korean red pepper paste, and a drizzle of sesame oil.

The soup was more green than gold, which suited me fine. More vegetables, please! Oh, and a gym, if you don’t mind.

Posting will be light for the rest of the week, but will pick up again this Saturday, when I unveil my brand new project! You’re on the edge of your seat, I can tell.

When Gil’s traveling, I like to take advantage of my time alone to tackle projects I just never seem to get done when he’s around — things like cleaning, winnowing down my enormous stack of magazines, and outlining design/photography/home projects I want to do over the next few months. So when he left for Vegas yesterday afternoon, I got right to work. Literally. I offered to help a friend with a design project, so I spent some time brainstorming while cooking and cleaning and whenever a good idea hit me, I took a break to jot it down or do a little work on it.

Somehow, I’ve gotten a LOT done this weekend, even though I watched a ton of football, finished the last Harry Potter book, and even squeezed in another viewing of American Splendor after LSU’s 20-bazillionth turnover to Alabama. So I felt I’d earned a nice dinner this evening.

My weekend cooking experiment was supposed to be a smoked chicken, but I dry cured it instead of brining and wimped out when the time came to fire up the smoker. I thought it might be too dry without the extra moisture from brining (and trust me, smoking meat is too much work to attempt if you have doubts about the outcome), so I oven roasted it instead, using my grandmother’s time-honored technique: One hour at 500 degrees. After 15 minutes, I added some water to the pan and at about 30 minutes, covered the chicken with foil because the skin was starting to burn from the sugar in the cure. This cooking method never fails to deliver moist, tender chicken, so I knew it would be a winner, and set my sights on other parts of the meal I hadn’t yet tested.

Earlier in the week, I saw a recipe for cherry barbecue sauce on epicurious and thought that would be a good match for the chicken. Why is it that homemade barbecue sauces always surprise me? I’ve made them often enough to know they’re usually greater than the sum of their parts, but I always find myself making surprised “Oohs!” and “MMMMMs!” when I try them. And this one was no exception. Alright, it was maybe just the teensiest bit too sweet for me (I might try sour cherry jam next time), but it didn’t stop me from going back for seconds.

Rounding out the meal, I made wild rice with cherries and porcinis to tie it all together. And so at 5pm, I finally poured myself a glass of wine, put my feet up, tucked in, and enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment that comes from Getting Stuff Done.

recipes after the jump

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R - red bell pepper
O - carrots
Y - yellow bell pepper

G - green cabbage, cilantro, basil, mint, lime juice, green onions

B - OK, the conceit breaks down a little here
I - yeah, yeah, so sue me
V - purple bell pepper! Ha-HA!

To look at this site, you’d think we only eat brown or red food around here. I guess my weekday meals are more multi-hued than the dishes I make (and post about) on weekends, but still: They say you should eat the rainbow to get the most nutritional benefit from foods, so I thought I’d give it a go in one dish last weekend with a Vietnamese chicken salad from the pages of my beloved Cooking Light.

For once, I didn’t really depart from the recipe much, except to use a little less chicken and a little more veggies than called for. I might use the proper amount of chicken next time, but this salad already was delicious with its balance of salty, sweet, and sour, with unami thrown in for kicks. In fact, it was Gil’s favorite dish of the weekend!

Goooo, Roy G. ‘v!

recipe after the jump

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I’ve been kicking around the idea of making a coq au vin for a while now. But it’s a two-day process, according to the Les Halles Cookbook, and I just never remembered to start it a full day before I planned to serve it. But finally, this weekend, I got my act together.

Do you have the Les Halles Cookbook? No? Quel dommage! It was one of the better Christmas presents I got two years ago. Not only do you have Anthony Bourdain guiding you through recipes with his no-bullshit banter, but the recipes themselves are wonderful. And the design is gorgeous. I mean, really, a lot of thought was put into this book from start to finish. The butcher paper cover (hardcover ed.), the plain, serviceable, but elegant fonts, and the pictures announce exactly what you’ll get when you start reading — a no-nonsense approach to cooking some damned fine no-nonsense food.

So I started with the easy part — marinating the chicken and vegetables in red wine overnight. Even though I was warned right there in the recipe that this dish would start off pretty nasty, I didn’t think what 24 hours in red wine would really do to a whole chicken, and found myself unprepared for the horror that emerged from the fridge 24 hours later:

You know, I’ve been a carnivore all my life, but until today, I’ve never once thought of my food as a corpse. I may submit that photo to David Fincher for consideration in his next opening credits.

Soldiering on, I browned the wine-bloated chicken corpse in butter and olive oil, and the promised alchemy soon took place; it really did result in something magical, considering the — ahem — humble beginnings. But when a recipe calls for an artery-clogging amount of butter and 1/4 lb. of bacon, magic is bound to happen.

All in all, it was good. Satisfying. Tasty, even. And I got a real feeling of accomplishment just from seeing it through to the end. But it isn’t something I’ll be making again soon — while good enough for a Sunday lunch, it just didn’t seem to be worth the effort.

Sigh.

Oh, if you ever decide to make this, take his advice and clean as you go along. It’s something I do anyway, but you’ll appreciate tackling the dishes before they grow into a mountain in the sink.

No matter how hard I tried this morning (after waking up at 4am), I couldn’t get the idea of pasta out of my head. It was a little frustrating, as that’s the last thing I wanted to attempt following our week in Milan. After pondering for a little while, nothing else would come to me, so I resorted to searching through my files for something to cook today. That’s when I ran across a soy-poached chicken recipe I’d filed away a couple of weeks ago and it dawned on me: Umami!

So off we went to Zeytinia at 7:30, where we had the place to ourselves. I’ll have to keep that in mind for future sleepless weekends. Don’t laugh — it happens. While we were shopping, I saw a nice package of bone-in country ribs and thought I could get a lot of my cooking for the week done in one day, so we came home loaded with groceries and I set to work.

Soon after, one of Gil’s friends called with ONE ticket to the Giants-Jets game today, so I cooked up a storm. Alone. Oh, woe unto me! Actually, it wasn’t a bad day at all, and I finished a lot of nagging chores that I usually put off when Gil’s around.

So back to the food. This poached chicken recipe couldn’t be easier, just as promised on the Cook Think blog. Assembling the poaching liquid was the only thing that took any effort, but seeing (and later smelling) the result was so worth it:

After simmering it for 30 minutes, I dropped a whole chicken into the pot breast-first, simmered for 15 minutes, then covered the pot to let it poach in the residual heat for 3 hours. I didn’t bother crisping the skin in the oven as instructed because I didn’t want to eat the skin, anyway, but I’m sure it would be a delicious addition to the recipe.

It wasn’t much to look at, I’ll admit, but I can’t rave enough about it: The house smelled glorious, waiting three hours for the chicken to cook was maddening (as was taking the picture before eating), and the chicken itself was perfectly moist and tender and a great counterpoint to the aggressively seasoned broth. This stuff is magical: I’ll be freezing any leftover broth to use in future dishes.

Immediately after covering the chicken, I set to work on the ribs, this time without a recipe. I’ve been reading about increasing the umami of meat dishes by coating the raw meat in porcini powder before browning, so I thought I’d give that a go. I whirled a few dried porcini mushrooms in my spice grinder, and added the powder to a hefty dose of chipotle chili powder, ground coriander, and a touch of salt.

I coated the ribs in the mixture and browned them in a pan in a few batches, then transfered them to my slow cooker. Once they were all browned, I deglazed the pan with 2/3 cup each of soy sauce and beer (Pacifico, because it’s what we had in the fridge), lots of garlic, the zest of one small Valencia orange, 1/2 teaspoon grated ginger, a bay leaf, and one whole clove. I poured the mixture over the ribs and set the slow cooker to 7 hours, then started my chores. Whew!

Seven hours later, Gil and I sat down to our slow-cooked dinner and were really pleased with the results. It’s a cliché, I know, but the ribs really were fall-off-the-bone tender, and they picked up a lot of orange flavor from the zest while staying savory. The taste of the mushrooms wasn’t really noticeable, but they added a nice depth to the dish.

We ate the ribs with long grain rice and sautéed bok choy, and won’t mind eating leftovers at all.

It isn’t the Colonel’s, but I do crave it fortnightly (and this from a girl whose chickennui has been lifelong). As it’s been about three weeks since I last prepared this dish, I’m overdue; it’ll be on the menu again this week, just as soon as the chicken thighs defrost in our colder-than-average refrigerator.

What is this heavenly dish, you ask? It’s something so simple, I can’t believe I never hit upon this particular combination of ingredients before. I’m a big fan of Mark Bittman’s show How to Cook Everything and caught an episode from Napa Valley in which he took on Chef Gary Danko’s fancy-pantsed grilled quail. The marinade sounded simple and the quail were adorable arranged with a bitter greens salad, so I thought I’d give it a go.

Because I didn’t feel like lugging quail home from the city (a matter of potential spoilage, not weight, though my arms aren’t getting me any free passes to the gun show), I picked up Cornish game hens and spatchcocked them good. The process was much simpler than I was expecting, but still more of a chore (and more expensive) than, say, using chicken thighs. (As agnostic as I am about chicken in general, I’m annoyingly evangelical on the subject of chicken thighs, so — fair warning — don’t ever get me started on the subject.)

The whole process was really very simple: The marinade takes one minute to throw together, then the chicken bathes in it for as long as you can stand it — up to a day — and then you slap it on the grill. The results far outweigh any effort you put into it. Because I felt the need to Do More, I also grilled asparagus and threw a foil-wrapped packet of potatoes, garlic, and onions with Cajun seasoning and olive oil on there with everything else.

There happened to be a gorgeous chive blossom squatting in my new herb garden, so I sprinkled that on the salad for a little color:

And there you have it. The chicken was juicy and bursting with flavor, especially after I drizzled a little balsamic vinegar on it when it came off the grill. Mmmmm … wonder if those thighs have defrosted yet.

If I can get excited about chicken, you know it’s a good recipe. Try it and let me know what you think.

recipes after the jump:

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