Ginger Braised Chicken

1/2 chicken
1/2 lemon sliced in thin rings
3-4 celery stalks
8 oz whole button mushrooms
1 Tbsp olive oil

1 cup sake or dry white wine

2 thumbs ginger, diced

8-10 garlic cloves, bruised and peeled

1 Tbsp butter

1 handful celery leaves, roughly chopped

juice of 1/2 lemon

1 tsp soy sauce

2 good glugs fish sauce

2 tsp cornstarch

Combine sake, ginger, garlic cloves, butter, celery leaves, lemon juice, soy sauce, and fish sauce in a glass bowl. Microwave on high for 2 minutes; whisk lightly.

Preheat oven to 300F. Put a cast-iron skillet over high heat. Add oil and when hot, place the chicken skin-side down. Cook 4-5 minutes or until well-browned.

Turn the chicken over and remove the skillet from heat. Place lemon slices on the chicken and arrange the mushrooms around it. Pour on the braising liquid, cover loosely with aluminum foil, and place in oven for 60 minutes. Uncover, add celery stalks, and bake for another 15 minutes.

Remove chicken, mushrooms, and celery to a serving platter. Whisk cornstarch into the braising liquid; there should be enough residual heat in the skillet to thicken - if not put over a low burner.

Serve with rice.

Roast Chicken Salad With Homemade Mayonnaise

Spicy garlic mayonnaise

A variation on Alton Brown's recipe, adjusted for taste and on-hand. Using the food processor is awesome - your arms don't get tired!

2 T rice vinegar

2 T lemon juice

1 whole egg + 1 yolk

1 t table salt

1 t ground mustard seed

1/2 t garlic powder

1/4 t dark brown sugar

Scant 2 c safflower oil

3 T hot chile oil

Add all wet ingredients (except the oil which is a liquid but isn't "wet") to the work bowl of a food processor along with the salt, mustard and sugar. Pulse 5 times. Turn processor on and add oil in a steady stream until incorporated. Keep at room temperature for 2 hours. Refrigerate for up to 1 week.

Note: there's a good reason for leaving the freshly-made mayo at room temp for 2 hours. In the unlikely case that the eggs are contaminated with salmonella, the acidity from the vinegar and lemon juice will work to kill the bacteria, but that action will only take place at room temperature. Refrigeration slows down all biological processes including the massacre of the evil beasties.

Roasted chicken salad

both breasts off a roasted chicken, diced

1/2 a small onion, minced

2 stalks celery, chopped

2 small roasted potatoes (optional)

2 hard boiled eggs (optional)

3/4 - 1 c spicy garlic mayo

smoked paprika

Nothing fancy to the preparation; combine all the ingredients and sprinkle with paprika to taste. Other optional ingredients (though probably not so good all together): a bit of diced serrano or anaheim chile with 2 t honey; sliced grape tomatoes; sliced grapes; pitted and minced kalamata olives; 1-2 T [horseradish|honey|dijon] mustard.

Stoup

Yeah, for a lot of people every time they hear the word "stoup" their hatred for Rachel Ray gets just a little bit hotter, but I like the perky little spunkmuffin. I've gotten some good recipe ideas from her 30-minute meals show, though I have to say my experience shows she's usually cheating on the time just a little, if by no other means than having a fully-staffed prep kitchen just off-camera.

Anyway...

6-8 cups freshly-made chicken stock
chicken meat stripped from the carcass and shredded
1/4 cup red lentils
1/4 cup pearl barley
1/2 cup split peas
1/2 cup dry white beans
1/2 T garlic powder

8-10 grape tomatoes, quartered

kosher salt

1 large onion
3 stalks celery
1/2 bell pepper
1 moderately hot chile - an Anaheim or Serrano or Mirasol or New Mexico green
4 large cloves garlic, smashed and minced
olive oil
1 t sweep paprika

Strain the stock, return to pot and bring to a simmer. Add the lentils, barley, split peas, beans, garlic powder, tomatoes and salt to taste. Simmer covered for 2-3 hours until the white beans are tender. Coarsely chop the onion, celery, bell pepper and chile and add to a saute pan with the olive oil over high heat. Sprinkle on the paprika and toss to distribute. Saute for 2-3 minutes, then add the garlic and saute for 2-3 minutes more.

Add the chicken meat and sauteed vegetables to the stock, cover and simmer for another 15 minutes. Adjust the seasoning.

Chicken and Dumplings

Cracker Barrel may be a despicable corporate entity: racist, sexist, homophobic, abusive of their workers, and pretty much a canonical instance of the faux-friendly jes-plain-folks Disney fake of actual human-to-human contact - but their chicken and dumplings hits my comfort-food sweet spot. When I'm on the road and I have the time for a sit-down meal I've been known to bite down hard on my principles, stop there and order some. And overtip the waitron.

So when I got a hankering for some chicken and dumplings, I canvassed the internet and quickly found a recipe that claimed to be theirs or as near as matters. I made it a couple of times and it is very very close to what you get in the restaurant. But I also realized that when you're not on a long and lonesome highway the comfort-food aspect is not so compelling, and it can definitely be improved. So I'm going to reproduce the recipe here and annotate it as prepared this evening.

Here we go:

3 quarts water
1 3-4 pound chicken cut up
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 small large onion sliced
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 4 cloves garlic, peeled and quartered smashed and minced
1 t garlic powder
1 bay leaf
4-6 whole parsley leaves
1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Dumplings

2 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 1/4 teaspoons of salt
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons milk

Get a little oil very hot in a large pot and sear the chicken. Add water to cover and bring Bring the water to a boil in a large pot. Add the chicken, 1 teaspoon of salt, onion, celery, garlic powder, bay leaf, and parsley to the pot. Reduce the heat to simmer and cook the chicken, uncovered, for 2 hours. The liquid will reduce by about one third.

Tonight I replaced part of the water with leftover egg drop corn soup.

When the chicken has cooked, remove it from the pot and set it aside. Strain the stock to remove all the vegetables and floating scum. You only want the stock and the chicken, so toss everything else out.

Pour 1 1/2 quarts (6 cups) of the stock back into the pot (keep the leftover stock, if any, for another recipe-it can be frozen). You may also want to use a smaller pot or a large saucepan for this. Add coarsely ground pepper, the remaining 1/2 teaspoon of salt to taste, and the lemon juice, then reheat the stock over medium heat while preparing the dumplings.

For dumplings, combine the flour, baking powder, 1 1/4 teaspoons salt, and milk in a medium bowl. Stir well until smooth, then let the dough rest for 5-10 minutes.

While the dough is resting, coarsely chop the onion and celery and saute it in a little oil over medium-high heat, adding the garlic as it starts to soften. Saute, tossing frequently, until the onions start to caramelize.

Roll the dough out onto a floured surface to about a 1/2 inch thickness. Cut the dough into 1/2 inch squares and drop each square into the simmering stock. Use all of the dough. The dumplings will first swell and then slowly shrink as they partially dissolve to thicken the stock into a white gravy. Simmer for 20-30 minutes until thick. Stir often.

While the stock is thickening, the chicken will have become cool enough to handle. Tear all the meat from the bones and remove the skin. Cut the chicken meat into bite-size or a little bigger than bite-size pieces and drop them into the pot, also adding the sauteed vegetables. Discard the skin and bones. Continue to simmer the chicken and dumplings for another 5-10 minutes, but don't stir too vigorously or the chicken will shred and fall apart. You want big chunks of chicken in the end.

Makes 8-10 servings.

Egg-Drop Corn Soup

Chicken stock:

a chicken carcass or equivalent

1 onion

1/2 bulb garlic

2 stalks celery

8-10 cups water

kosher salt

yield: 4-6 cups stock

3 ears corn

1 t grated ginger

1 T soy sauce

2 T cornstarch

4 green onions

2 eggs, lightly beaten

There's a grocery store nearby that has chicken leg quarters on "permanent special" if you buy 3 kilos or more. So every couple of weeks I go buy 3 kilos. I roast them or BBQ them or pan-fry them in a batch, and then I have a week's worth of lunch if I'm too lazy to whip something else up. And that leaves me with a big pile of bones. I give one or two to the kitten who makes the most amaaaazing moaning sound of pleasure as he destroys them. The rest get frozen until I need some stock. And then I do like so:

Put the chicken carcass, onion, celery, and garlic in a large pot with 8-10 cups of water. The vegetation is just for flavoring and will be strained out, so there's no need to chop it finely. I just cut the onion and garlic cloves in half and break the celery into pieces small enough to fit. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, all day - 6 hours, minimum.

If you keep the simmer at the proper level over the cooking time the liquid will reduce to 4-6 cups. When it reaches that point, remove from heat and strain. Voilà, chicken stock. Salt very lightly, not to taste - you'll be adding soy sauce in a minute.

Put the stock back on the fire. Add the freshly-cut-off kernels of three ears of corn, 1T soy sauce, and 1 t freshly-grated ginger. A Microplane® fine grater works best for this. (It's only recently that I learned that Microplane was a brand name. Duh.) Simmer 30 minutes until the corn is tender.

Raise the heat slightly until the soup is at a low boil. Put 1 T of cornstarch in a small mise-en-place bowl or ramekin. Skim off a couple tablespoons of the soup and mix it into a slurry, then stir it back in to the soup.

While the soup thickens, coarsely slice 2 green onions and lightly beat 2 eggs. While stirring the soup slowly, drizzle in the eggs so they feather as they cook in the hot liquid. Remove from heat, salt and pepper to taste. Garnish with chopped green onions.

Hmmm, the corn kind of overwhelms the egg flavors in these proportions. Maybe use less corn next time. And I don't like my soup to be thickened a lot so others may wish to use more cornstarch than I did.

It's only knife work, or, Phake Pho

I started out the evening by making Francis Lam's ginger-scallion sauce, even though I don't have a food processor. (I haven't bought one yet because the good quality models are ludicrously expensive in Israel.) I told a friend I was going to try making the sauce and she suggested I buy one of those mini-food-processoids, basically a glorified POS stick blender with attachments. But it only took about 10 minutes of knife work to reduce the ginger and scallions to the prescribed consistency.

There's certainly nothing wrong with using a labor-saving device. I don't have a food processor now but I used to. Actually, I used to have two. And a stick blender. And I still have an orbital mixer, a coffee grinder (plus another one for spices), and for that matter an automatic drip coffeemaker. Technology is a wonderful thing. I like wearing ready-made clothing and pooping indoors.

But if you have the time and if you enjoy it, there's something to be said for the sensual pleasure that comes from doing your food prep "by hand". I enjoy the rhythm of the knife rocking back and forth, the tension in my biceps and across my shoulders as I control the blade, the fresh aroma of the ginger rising up.

Francis Lam, by the way, is one of the few remaining interesting voices on Salon.com. If I detailed all the ways that that publication no longer satisfies me I would stray into a subject area that I promised myself I wouldn't allow on this blog, so I'll just leave it at that.

Now that I have some yummy yummy ginger scallion sauce, what to do with it...?

1/2 cup white rice (dry)

2 T miso

some kind of meat-substitute snausage

a medium onion

half a red bell pepper

a stalk of celery

oil for pan-frying

pizza pepper

soy sauce

Cook the rice. Dissolve the miso in 2 cups of water in a small pot. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer.

Slice the snausage into long, thin strips (almost bacon-like) and pan-fry it in more oil than you would normally use until it is very crisp. The more crisp, the better it will taste. Drain and set aside.

Slice the onion, celery, and bell pepper into thin strips and saute with a pinch of salt; finish with a dash of soy.

Put a scoop of rice in a deep bowl, then some of the vegetables and strips of snausage on top. Ladle the miso over and season generously with ginger-scallion oil. Eat with chopsticks and a big spoon, like pho. In fact, you could dress it with a squeeze of lemon, some fresh basil, and some rooster sauce if you wanted. I don't have any basil or rooster sauce tonight, but it was still pretty yummy.

Serves 2.