Chicken soup with leeks and dinosaur kale
First real fall weekend always calls for soup. To call this a recipe is a bit of an overstatement, it's just what we had.
Ingredients
2 lbs chicken thighs, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
2 yellow onions, diced
2 carrots, diced
3-4 leeks, cut into 1/2-inch slices
8 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 lb baby Yukon potatoes, quartered
1 bunch dinosaur kale, sliced into 1/2-inch ribbons
6-8 cups chicken stock
How to
Over high heat, brown the chicken pieces in olive oil. Remove the chicken and cook the onions and carrots until they begin to soften. Stir in the leeks and garlic and cook for a few minutes more. Add the potatoes, kale, chicken, and broth, plus any spices (bay leaf, thyme, parsley) or spare parts (parmesan rinds) you have on hand and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer until the potatoes are cooked though.
Roast chicken with fennel and baby artichokes
After what felt like three endless months of Polar Vortex, a momentary jolt of spring came this weekend. Sometimes unusual weather is all it takes to spur creativity. If the weather doesn't have to be the same today as it was yesterday, then why should my food be? So, spring cooking earlier than expected.
Whereas full-sized artichokes rightfully have a reputation as ornery -- threatening teeth outside and itchy, hairy hearts inside -- working with the babies is a breeze.
Ingredients:
1/2 lb. baby artichokes
1 lb. boneless, skinless chicken thighs
1 bulb fennel, sliced
1 small onion, sliced
1 cup chicken broth (or water or white wine)
Juice of 2 lemons
Peel of 1 lemon
1/2 tsp. chili flakes
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Rinse the artichokes under cold water; peel off the first couple layers of tough, dark green leaves to reveal the gentler ones inside; chop off the top half inch of each choke; and halve or quarter the tender remains. Keep the halves in a bowl with a tablespoon of the lemon juice to prevent browning.
Over high heat, brown the chicken thighs in olive oil with salt and pepper. Remove them from the pan and add the fennel and onion, scraping any brown bits off the pan. Lower the heat to medium and cook the fennel and onion until soft and semi-translucent, no more than 5 to 10 minutes. Clear a small space on the pan and add the chili flakes, allowing them to brown for 30 seconds before stirring them in. Then add the lemon peel, remaining lemon juice, chicken broth, and artichokes. Fold it all together, place the chicken thighs on top, and roast in the over for 15 to 20 minutes. The thighs should be a golden brown and the liquid almost full evaporated into a nice sauce. Serve over rice or Israeli couscous.
Turmeric chicken kebabs
A classic Bittman recipe: Fast, painless, sparse, and delicious. (The super-simple Persian salad was a winner too.) I had yellow fingernails for the next 3 days thanks to the turmeric but well worth it.
Vinegar roast chicken
Here's another riff on one of my go-to formulas: Brown chicken. Add some liquid. Bake till done. Reduce the sauce. The sauce, in this case, is a combination of chicken stock (or water) and balsamic vinegar. After a half hour in the oven the vinegar becomes sweet and mellow.
Ingredients
2 bone-in chicken breasts, skin on and well salted
2 shallots, minced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil
Equal parts balsamic vinegar and chicken stock (or water)
How to
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
In a cast iron or stainless steel skillet, melt the butter and olive oil over medium-high heat. When the bubbles from the melted butter have subsided, brown the chicken to a deep golden color. Remove from the pan and stir in the shallots for 2-3 minutes. Stir in the garlic for another 30 seconds, replace the chicken skin side up, and pour in the balsamic and stock. When the liquid is at a boil (this should happen almost immediately), remove from the stove and put in the over for roughly 20 minutes.
When the chicken comes out of the oven it should be deep brown with a crispy skin. Remove the breasts from the pan and reduce the remaining liquid to a well-bodied sauce. Feel free to add anything you'd like to the sauce (thyme, mustard, etc.). Serve over Israeli couscous.
Oven roasted chicken breasts, butternut squash puree and roasted broccoli
And so we return to that simple formula: Protein + Puree + Vegetable = Dinner. It really never fails. I've already extolled the virtues of roasted broccoli here, but the other two pieces follow below.
Oven roasted boneless chicken breasts
There are a lot of boneless chicken breasts in the world, but few taste all that good. Tonight's dinner was one of those where you take the first bite and have this sinking feeling:
Why do I eat so many underwhelming pieces of chicken when it could taste like this?
I wish I had a better answer. But until I do, I'll still try to spread the gospel of the roasted boneless chicken breast.
Ingredients
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 tbsp butter + 1 tbsp olive oil
A handful of flour
2 cloves garlic, skin still on
How to
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Add the flour to a shallow bowl with some salt and pepper. Apply a bit more salt and pepper to the chicken breasts and then dredge them through the flour. You want only the thinnest coating of flour.
Melt the butter and oil in a cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. (Why use both instead of just one or the other? The butter provides its unmistakable richness, but the olive oil will raise the smoking point and prevent the butter from burning on the stove or in the oven. Your smoke detector will thank you.) Add the garlic cloves and then the chicken breasts. Don't fiddle with them! Let the chicken breasts develop a nice brown crust, flip the over and brown on the other side, and move them to the oven. It shouldn't take more than 10-15 minutes in the oven for the chicken to be fully cooked and still moist.
(Feel free to riff on this basic recipe. Add cayenne to the flour, or thyme to the butter, or lemon juice to the skillet at it heads into the oven. It's hard to screw this up.)
Butternut squash puree
Another simple but great base.
Ingredients
1 medium butternut squash, halved and with seeds removed
4 cloves garlic, whole
1-2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp butter
Salt and pepper to taste
How to
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Rub just a small amount of olive oil on the inside and outside of the squash; you're just aiming for a light sheen to protect it. Apply salt and pepper to the inside flesh of the squash and lay flat on a baking sheet with the cloves of garlic hidden under the hollowed out bulb of each half.
Roast the squash for 45 minutes to an hour, until you can cleanly insert and remove a fork without experiencing any resistance. Scoop the flesh out of the skin and into a blender or food processor along with the roasted garlic and the butter. Puree until smooth and season with salt and pepper.
Udon, grilled chicken, peas, quick pickles, egg, scallions
Sometimes I get ideas. Often they aren't very good ideas, but as a matter of principle I tend to stubbornly pursue them until they prove to be really, truly bad.
Making my own ramen broth certainly appeared to be one of these bad ideas. It required a trip to the further-than-usual supermarket to track down "meaty pork bones." (I soon triumphantly returned holding aloft a bag containing 5 pounds of pig vertebrae.) It also required turning the oven to 400 degrees in the middle of a heat wave.
But this idea turned out to be a great one. Not only because I have woken every day since to an apartment that still smells of smoky pork goodness, but because the broth itself is mighty fine.
David Chang's Momofuku cookbook is not the sort of thing you'd want to cook from every day. It's one part cookbook, but also one part picture book, one part memoir, and eight parts vanity project. Many of the recipes explicitly make the point that they relate exactly how things are made in Chang's restaurants while also implicitly making the point that you can't cook them because you're not David Chang.
Nevertheless, this broth is great. It is certainly a time-consuming production, but in terms of real work and technical skill it is a breeze, mostly just throwing various meats into a pot and watching to make sure nothing boils over. I will direct you to a literal relating of the recipe here and note only that it requires four pounds of chicken, five pounds of the aforementioned meaty pork bones, a pound of pork belly, a few strips of seaweed and a handful of vegetables.
Ruth the cat came over to help me and Anna consume the broth. Usually she just eats milk for dinner but on special nights we serve her ramen.
A few notes on the other accoutrements:
Chicken was done quickly on high heat on the grill after an hour or so marinating in a combination of ginger, garlic, canola oil, soy sauce and fish sauce. Hard boiled eggs were, well, boiled. Fresh peas, which are perfectly in season right now, required no work other than shelling and were sweet as could be when thrown into the bowl raw. Scallions were sliced and tossed in.
Quick pickles were also from Chang, and are simple enough: Slice the cucumbers thin. Toss with one part salt to three parts sugar until well coated, and leave for 15 minutes. If they taste a little too salty or sweet, rinse them in water. Otherwise, they're good to go.
Soba, cabbage, chicken, pickled zucchini
Wednesday was Fourth of July, meaning a whole crowd of people joined us in our backyard for burgers, chicken, hot dogs, coleslaw, and a few beers. But what to do with all the leftovers? Easy -- cold soba noodles.
The cabbage was undressed, and leftover from the slaw. Chicken cutlets were simply marinated -- olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano, lemon juice, a little hot sauce -- and we just yanked them out of the fridge when the soba noodles were ready. The pickled zucchini were a result of having too much fresh zucchini left over; rather than let it rot, I tossed it into the brine of some pickles I'd made for the Wednesday party. Two days later they still had some snap.
The rest is easy. Boil the noodles. Dunk them in cold water. Toss them with a dressing of ginger and soy sauce (see this post from last month). Fast, resourceful, refreshing, tasty as hell.
Balsamic chicken, tomato jam, corn salsa
Corn salsa
2 ears corn, kernels stripped
1 red pepper, diced
Handful cilantro, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
3 scallions, thinly sliced
1 lime
How to
Sautee the red pepper and corn for 2-3 minutes in a hot skillet with a tablespoon of olive oil. Add the scallions and garlic and sautee for another minute or two. Remove from heat and toss with the cilantro and lime's juice.
The tomato jam is a fantastic accompaniment. Times are sad when we don't have a jar of this stuff on hand. For now, I'll just send you to the recipe, though a full-fledged post on the stuff is definitely in order.