The Art of Simple Chicken

The Art of Simple Chicken

We've made this chicken, from Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food, twice now. Both times, the resulting bird has been juicy and tasty.

Start with a high-quality chicken (free-range, no hormones added, etc.). This is the most important step.

The day before you intend to roast it, clean the bird out and rub it with salt and pepper.

An hour before you intend to roast it, remove it from the fridge and let it rest on the counter. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Then (and here's the second most important part), start the bird breast-side up and set your timer for 20 minutes. Flip her every twenty minutes until she's done (maybe an hour and a half for a four-pound chicken).

We roasted the chicken on a v-rack, placing some sliced yellow onion in the (dry) pan below. We served it with red potatoes tossed with olive oil and rosemary and roasted, covered, on the lowest rack of the oven. The chicken cooked on the middle rack at the same time. Also along for the ride was broccoli and fresh dinner rolls. And, of course, the perfectly carmelized yellow onions and accompanying jus, which we sneakily referred to as sauce.

Buffalo Chicken and Bleu Cheese Sausages

I wish I could say that I made these tasty sausages, but I haven't been much for scratch cooking lately. Alas, we are packing up the kitchen.

These flavorful sausages, filled with ground chicken, hot sauce and bleu cheese, came from Whole Foods. I served them hot dog-style with tabasco-spiked ketchup, a green salad, and champagne grapes.

I think these could easily be made with a sausage/grinder KitchenAid attachment, and we intend to try it in Tucson. Stay tuned!

Barbecue Baked Lentils with Chicken Apple Sausage

Since learning that we will be moving in a few short months, Lee and I have started forming our grocery lists with an eye on clearing out the cupboards.

Some time ago, we bought lentils (I think they were for Smoked Cheddar and Lentil Burgers) and I noticed this week that we still had a couple cups leftover. It's finally starting to warm up here in Chicago and we're not in the mood for soup these days, so I started hunting around for a unique way to use these little beans. Lo and behold, Cooking Light listed a recipe for Barbecue Baked Lentils.

We served the lentils with chicken apple sausage and some Dijon mustard and a side salad--a nice spring welcome at our table.

I made the lentils according to the recipe, but I wouldn't do it again. The method (pre-simmering for 20 minutes, baking with a sauce that includes some of the cooking liquid) is a keeper, but I found the sauce to be one-dimensional and altogether too sweet. Next time, I'd create my own sauce or use one of the fabulous-sounding recipes from Epicurious.

Chicken Frittata

Lee and I love a frittata. We'll eat one for breakfast, brunch, lunch or dinner. So today, when we found in our fridge a bit of leftover chicken (from the Chicken with 20 Cloves of Garlic), a half-empty bag of frozen potatoes O'Brien, a red bell pepper, some Chihuahua cheese and five eggs, there was only one thing to do for brunch.

I used to be an omelette fan, and I like them. But more and more often, I find myself drawn to the foolproof frittata, which is basically a baked omelette. Just saute vegetables, mix in the pre-cooked meats and a few beaten eggs, top with cheese, and move the skillet directly from the stovetop to a 350-degree oven. Thirty minutes later, you have breakfast for eight!

Frittatas are often quite fluffy, but you'll notice that this one is pretty flat. As I mentioned, we had only five eggs. I could have used a smaller skillet, but decided instead to make a flatter frittata that would yield more servings with fewer eggs. With our wedding just around the corner, we're trying to eat light.

Chicken with 20 Cloves of Garlic

Lee and I are always on the lookout for a meal that we can transform into different dishes throughout the week. Tonight, we made one of the tastiest, easiest dishes I can remember--Chicken with 20 Cloves of Garlic, adapted from a recipe we saw on the Cooking Light web site.

Start by combining a bit of butter with a bit of olive oil (perhaps a teaspoon of each) into a large covered saute pan. Take a whole cut-up chicken and brown it in the pan; you may need to do this in two batches. The chicken needn't be cooked through at this point; you just need three or four minutes per side.

Once the chicken is browned, set it aside for a moment and saute 20 whole cloves of garlic until they're just starting to tan. Then arrange the chicken evenly over the garlic cloves. Add in 1/2 cup of white wine and 3/4 cup of chicken broth, cover and simmer for about 25 minutes. When the chicken is cooked through, remove it (along with the garlic cloves) and reduce the sauce for five or ten minutes.

This simple meal is perfect with a little bread (the garlic will spread like butter) and a salad or green vegetable. Though Lee and I were dining as a pair, it would be a perfectly appropriate entree to serve to a small dinner party, provided you were looking for something a little rustic.

One note--the braise this chicken gets does no favors to the skin, leaving it pale and flubbery. The skin adds a ton of flavor during the cooking process, but I'd recommend skinning the chicken before serving. With the moisture and flavor imparted by the wine and stock, I assure you, you won't miss the skin a bit.



The next day, we made lovely little chicken salad sandwich bites with the leftovers.

Chicken curry with rice

Tonight, we ate a wonderful meal that was half bottled and half fresh. Williams-Sonoma has some wonderful bottled curries, for those of us who have yet to attempt serious Indian cooking. We simmered chicken breasts with one of their curries and some frozen broccoli and okra until the chicken was tender and delicious.

The bottled curry alone, perhaps, is not post-worthy. But the basmati rice that accompanied our dish was so lovely that I must share it. Basically: prepare the basmati rice according to the package, adding one whole vanilla bean and one cinnamon stick to the water. When the rice is finished, fish out the vanilla and cinnamon and you're done. The rice is unbelievably fragrant and delicious without being overpowering.

Yum and yum.

Chicken Strips with Blue Cheese Dip and Kale-Cabbage Saute

We have a few foods that we like to go back to from time to time. Some dishes that are nice and easy, and that cook up pretty fast. One thing that pops up every few weeks are chicken strips (from a recipe that we found in Cooking Light).

They're very simple. In one dish, mix milk with some hot sauce. In the second, paprika, red pepper, black pepper, and salt are sifted into flour. Heat some oil (we use organic canola) in a frying pan. Dip the chicken into the milk, then roll it around in the flour. The whole batch cooks up in around 15 minutes.

The dip is one thing we keep toying with, and this time around we discovered a wonderfully creamy blue cheese at Whole Foods. It made a chunky, flavorful dip that blended well with the spicy chicken strips.

For the side dish, I put together a kale-cabbage sauté, also from Cooking Light. We love leafy greens, and this was a neat twist on a coleslaw-like dish, served hot instead of cold and without mayonnaise. There is a little bit of fresh ginger and jalapeno in the dish, but I might increase each the next time around.

Avgolemono & Greek Salad

After receiving the America's Test Kitchen big book of chicken and poultry recipes, I was looking forward to making a true chicken stock from scratch, something I've never tried before. When Jennifer requested her favorite soup, avgolemono, I thought that would be a perfect place to start for a rainy, windy winter's day. I decided to pair it with a simple Greek salad, once again dipping into Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

First, the avgolemono. Made of about 4 pounds of whole legs, one diced onion, two bay leaves, and 12 cups of water, the stock simmered uncovered for three hours. I only poked at it every once in a while to skim off the foam and fat that settled on top.

According to America's Test Kitchen, you can simmer up to five hours to get a fuller chicken flavor, but we were getting hungry. So, I strained the solids and discarded them (the chicken at this point had really good texture but hardly any taste; we might have been able to save it by turning it into chicken salad, but neither one of us thought it would be worth it). Then I added a cup of arborio rice, which simmered for about 20 minutes while I prepped the rest of the ingredients: 1 cup of fresh lemon juice, 1/4 cup chopped parsley, and four eggs whisked together. When the rice was tender and plump, I whisked the juice/parsley/egg combo into the soup. I whisked as quickly as I could to keep the eggs from cooking into egg-drop strands. There were still some slight bits of white, but overall the soup was thick and creamy.

The salad was really basic, and I stuck to Bittman's recipe word for word, mostly to see how it would come out. He uses all the usual suspects (lettuce, olives, feta, mint) and one unexpected (radish). A little olive oil and fresh lemon juice on top finished it off.

Pan-Seared Chicken Breasts with Sweet Potato Fries

Tonight, I made pan-seared chicken breasts in thyme-peppercorn sauce with steamed green beans and brown sugar-glazed sweet potato fries. The chicken is really simple: just pound two half chicken breasts until they're about a quarter of an inch thick, then sear them on each side for three or four minutes in a bit of oil. Set them aside, and sprinkle a little flour in your pan (a teaspoon, maybe) and start scraping up the fond. Deglaze the pan with half a cup or so of chicken stock and maybe a quarter of a cup of half-and-half. Stir in a couple of teaspoons of dried thyme and a few peppercorns.

The fries were a great find from Cooking Light.

In other news, Lee and I have decided to try alternating the menu planning. We share the cooking duties, as it is, but we hope we'll cook more often if we take turns taking charge of things. So I'm playing executive chef this week. I hope he'll post his meals next week--Lee's an excellent cook.

Jen

A Year in the Kitchen.

Happy New Year!

I thought it would be fun to document some of the things we cook in 2007.

Lee and I kicked off the new year with a roast goose, which we shared with some wonderful friends at a New Year's Eve dinner party. We bought a frozen goose from Whole Foods and, following Mark Bittman's recipe from How to Cook Everything, we roasted the goose, uncovered, in a 350 degree oven for 3 hours, pricking the skin about every twenty minutes. Geese have very thick skin, and pricking it allows the excess fat to drip off, leaving a tender, juicy bird with crackling skin.



We stuffed the goose with chestnut sausage stuffing and seasoned the skin with salt and pepper. Rounding out the dish was a plum and port wine sauce, which was good enough to drink from the pan.

This was our first time cooking and eating goose, and we were thrilled with the result! I think it may become our new holiday bird of choice.

Jen