Entries from The Amateur Gourmet tagged with 'chicken'
A Pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving
In case you haven't noticed, food blogs, food magazines, food networks and the like love Thanksgiving. They love it because, for once, the nation is intent on cooking dinner. For 364 days out of the year, that's mostly not the case--what with fast food and frozen dinners and all the other instant options at our fingertips. But Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving is something you've gotta cook. That is, unless you're me....
Sweet and Sour Chicken
My proudest kitchen moments are the ones where I am at my most resourceful. On Sunday, I opened my refrigerator to find two raw chicken breasts leftover from a chicken segment we shot for food2.com. The easy option would've been to roast them in the oven (I was going to write "bake them in the oven," but doesn't roasted chicken always sound better than baked chicken?), but instead I decided to channel my inner Chinese cooking goddess. I flipped open my copy of "The Breath of a Wok" by Grace Young and looked for recipes you can do easily with chicken breasts. I found one for Sweet & Sour Chicken and, even though I didn't have a wok or several of the ingredients, I proceeded anyway. This is my story....
Coq au Vin
Dear New York Weather: it's almost June, and yesterday I was wearing a sweatshirt and I had the heat on. And it's almost June! I understand you have your peculiarities, that you're grappling with a diminishing ozone and toxic emissions, but I bought some cute new short sleeve shirts from UniQlo in SoHo (what a deal!) and I want to wear them, ok? But in the meantime, I forgive you because if it weren't for your unseasonable chill, would I have tried my hand at Coq au Vin, a traditional cold weather dish? The answer, I think, is no. And what a loss that would've been because this dish, this French classic of chicken braised in red wine, may be one of the best dishes I've ever cooked. We devoured it....
Turkey Oysters
Mark Bittman waxes lyrical over the part of the chicken the French call "sot-l’y-laisse" (which translates to "“the part that only a fool leaves behind”) and others call "the oyster" when he finds a bag of them from a large turkey at a French market. Do you dig these out when you roast a chicken? I know I often forget about them and Craig digs them out when I'm not looking....
The River Cottage Roast Chicken
My go-to roast chicken recipe, that one from Chez Panisse (here's a video I made on how to make it), is such a gut bomb of fat--and fat from just the chicken itself--that any roast chicken recipe that requires the addition of more fat (butter, olive oil) usually provokes my inner Richard Simmons who bursts out in short shorts and says, "You don't need all that fat you fat fat fatty!"...
Make Your Own Chicken Burrito
Running on the treadmill, it's useful to dangle an image carrot in your brain: something you can run towards, something to look forward to, a reward for all your hard work. And last week, for me, that was definitely a chicken burrito. I was craving one, hardcore. The problem is that where we live in Park Slope? The chicken burritos leave much to be desired. Craig is very much NOT a fan of Los Pollitos; I think it's passable, but certainly not a reward for burning millions of calories on the treadmill. No, if I wanted a good chicken burrito, I'd have to make one myself....
Chicken Stock, 1 2 3
It's cheap and easy to have homemade chicken stock on hand: all you really need is time. And thyme. But mostly time. Sure, it can be expensive--I still can't get over The Barefoot Contessa's recipe which calls for not one, not two, but THREE whole chickens that you boil for three hours and discard. That seems extraordinarily wasteful, don't you think? I've played around with lots of stock recipes, but my latest foray into stock making was a pretty happy one. The recipe comes from Molly Stevens and it's simple and straightforward and cheap, cheap, cheap....
Mustard Chicken with Bacon and Cream
This is not a recipe for the faint of heart. It's a recipe you can only get away with in cold weather--VERY cold weather--and even then you may hear that spiky haired fitness guru from the 90s, Susan Powter, in your head screaming: "Stop the insanity!" Susan Powter has a point: you're about to bake chicken with cream (almost 2 cups) and bacon (1/2 a pound). The recipe, like the recipe below this, also comes from David Tanis's "A Platter of Figs" only I substituted chicken for the originally intended protein: rabbit....
Alex's Birthday Dinner
You may recall that the worst meal I've ever cooked for people in my life was the meal I cooked for my friends Alex and Raife in March of 2007 (see here). Rereading that post, I don't think it was as awful as I remember it being; but the pressure was high because Alex, one of my closest friends from college, had never experienced my cooking (she'd only seen me defrost California Pizza Kitchen pizzas when we lived together) and I wanted to impress her. Well, I'm pretty sure I didn't. Luckily, Alex has a birthday. And now she lives in New York and so does our friend Raife who was also there at that disastrous dinner. So to celebrate Alex's birthday, which was in October, I invited them both over for a gigantic do-over. How did I fare?...
Fear of Broilers
My favorite childhood movie was "The Phantom Tollbooth," which most people know as a book, but I only know (and insist on knowing) as a movie. Milo, the young protagonist, must travel through Dictionopolis and Digitopolis to make his way to the Castle in the Air to rescue Rhyme and Reason. Only, whenever he says the words "the castle in the air" thunder claps and the sky explodes with lightning. Which is precisely what happens in my head whenever a recipe says: "use a broiler."...
Fried Chicken & Collard Greens
The plan was for my usual roast chicken (which, by the way, you should only salt until it has a light coating: those who said it was too salty took my recipe too literally!) but then, as I was standing there in the grocery store, I spotted collard greens. "My, my," I said to myself in a Southern accent. "It's been a long time since we here attempted fried chicken." (You may remember that was a disaster). "And I done never cooked collard greens before. Why, I see a mighty fine supper in my future." (My apologies to Southerners)....
AGTV: How To Roast A Chicken
Of all the dishes in my repertoire, this is the one that gets the biggest wows, the one that Craig requests the most often, the one that never fails to impress: it's the roast chicken from the Chez Panisse cookbook with a few touches of my own (namely: potatoes and garlic). This video will show you how easy it is and then, after the jump, I'll post a recipe and a few more tips....
Truffle Butter Chicken
I had a dream. No, not that kind of dream. This was a dream about chicken and truffle butter. For the past year, every time I bought a chicken from Key Foods I'd see D'Artagnan truffle butter sitting higher up on the shelf. The price didn't intimidate me--it was only $7--but its use did: what could I do with it? How does one use truffle butter? And then the other day it came to me: I could rub it all over a chicken (a D'Artagnan chicken, as a matter of fact), put some under the skin, and roast it. And that's exactly what I did....
