Just a quick one today, since I’m on deadline. This was an utterly unremarkable dinner the other night: fried chicken and cucumber salad. The chicken didn’t even get a buttermilk marinade, because there was neither time nor buttermilk; it just got tossed in seasoned flour (salt, pepper, smoked paprika, chili powder) and fried in a mixture of canola and peanut oils. It was perfectly fine. What made this meal something that you really want to…
Category: Chicken
Yesterday Mary came for a visit (and there’s some good news brewing on that front) so I roused myself from a humid torpor and wrangled a few things in the kitchen so we would have substantial yet heat-appropriate fare to buttress ourselves against all the wine she carries around with her everywhere. It was not a day for much cooking, so the sous vide rig seemed like a good choice; it gives off little heat and can be ignored for hours on end. It’s a brilliant way to prepare food on sweltering days. Plus, it’s been ages since I did a charcuterie post, so here you go.
The garden inspires. Besides its inherent goodness–the exercise of maintaining it, the healthfulness and flavor of what comes out of it, the incredible multi-level teaching tool it offers for parents–at the end of the day (often quite literally) it’s just the act of working in it and seeing what’s coming in, what’s peaking, and what’s going out that gives me the most ideas for immediate meals and more ambitious longer-term projects. One of the great beauties of growing food is that even things well before or past their prime can be used to great effect to flavor, garnish, or otherwise complete a meal. This dinner represented a good example of me just listening to the garden and letting the fridge and pantry do the rest.
It’s been alternately sunny and rainy lately, with a few straight days of each before it changes again. Spring has been pretty perfect so far, though I’m behind on the garden, but that’s pretty much a given. On nice days, we eat lighter food outside on the porch, and on cooler rainy days I try to make heartier things and we eat them inside. At least in theory; this meal was on the substantial side but the day was as nice as they come. Go figure. In any case, it highlights a technique that I don’t see talked about so much, but which makes for a superlative chicken in very little time.
Instead of fulfilling my patriotic obligation by whipping myself into a shopping frenzy worthy of Todd Palin in the Sudafed aisle of the Anchorage Piggly Wiggly, I have instead been a near shut-in, toiling away on this infernal device making CAD drawings in advance of an upcoming show. It has been fun, in its way, since the steep learning curve offers plenty of satisfaction; increasing fluency is its own reward. The resulting drawings are even more exciting, and I can’t wait to get the hundreds of little pieces milled so I can paint them and put them together. It’s been a while since I learned to do something new at this level, and it feels good.
Today was just gorgeous, so I tried to get a few outdoor chores done since it’s supposed to take a turn for the shitty tomorrow. Among the things I managed to take care of was digging up the Thai chili plant from the garden and potting it to bring inside. I’m always frustrated at how the hot peppers really seem to be hitting their stride right when the frosts come, and this specimen is so healthy and so pretty that it seemed crazy not to let it live. I have a bay laurel, two citrus shrubs, and the lemongrass (which is now three years old; I dig it up and bring it in every fall, and it’s happy as can be) so the peppers will be a welcome addition to that aromatic arsenal. And right off the bat, I got inspired to make use of them.
The heat has finally broken. We had 24 hours of good hard rain and lovely cool air, and yesterday I took advantage of a beautiful morning to get into the garden and rip out a bunch of bolted stuff to make room for the fall plantings. I also pulled all the garlic and shallots, and they’re drying on the porch along with lots of coriander seeds. No sooner had I gotten the last of the fall seeds in–carrots, turnips, radishes, burdock, lots of greens–then I heard rumbling and the sky got very dark. Grabbing the seeds, I made it inside just before the skies opened up with a truly impressive deluge.
This meal was sort of random, in that what we had hoped to eat wasn’t available, but happily it continued with the Korean-Spanish theme of the soup in the last post. I feel strongly that Korean food will be the next big culinary craze in this country, since it’s meat-centric, spicy, often grilled, and highly adaptable: perfectly suited for American eaters. It’s as accessible as Mexican and as varied as Japanese or Indian. Those trucks in LA are the leading edge of some major taste-changing.
Since there’s some sort of sports game event on the Teevee today, I thought I’d post about some of the high-end junk food I’ve made recently.
It’s not often (if ever) that I post a repeat of a given meal within a few posts of another incarnation of the same dish. But I’m doing it here for a good reason: because I can’t be bothered to post something new family values! Read on, and I promise to show you how I went from zero to Zero Mostel in 30 minutes flat.