Drumsticks with Dates

There was only one time on this blog when I focused on perfecting a single dish, Tarte Tatin. And even then I was not so much attempting to perfect a single recipe as I was exploring variations thereof. I am habitually scattered. After Tarte Tatin it seems that where cooking is concerned I want to try many things, and not try, try again the same thing.

Hence while I have been cooking the same core ingredient (chicken drumsticks--they’re cheap) over and over recently, there has been very little work involved. I just try something different every time. What I try is largely dictated by what is around: lemons one day, cherry tomatoes another, and today, dates. The beauty of these things is transient. It lies in the coalescing of an improvisation into something that tastes good, miraculously. Subtlety and discernment are out of the picture. Those finer qualities only take form and may be tasted through repetition. But these dishes, unless they are a disaster, are the best thing at the moment they’re served. Very rarely do they happen again. Yet I write recipes for them.

5 chicken drumsticks
1/2 onion
1 small carrot
~15 pitted dates
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons cooking oil
1/2 teaspoon cloves
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
~1 teaspoon salt

Two hours ahead of time salt both sides of chicken drumsticks--a generous pinch for each side of each drumstick--and let sit on a plate to warm to room temperature. In a small bowl pour lemon juice over pitted dates, add cloves, cinnamon, and black pepper, and mix together with a spoon. Slice onion half in half against the grain, and then chop into small pieces with the grain. Slice carrot in half lengthwise and then chop both halves into small pieces. Set oven to 450 F. Oil a small square baking pan, place onions and carrots in the pan, and put it in the oven. In a large saucepan on medium-high heat with a bit of cooking oil, quickly brown both sides of drumsticks (this should only take a couple minutes per side). Move drumsticks and date-lemon-spice mixture to baking pan, mix everything together in pan, and let it continue to bake at 450 F. After twenty minutes, flip over drumsticks, stir vegetables, add 1/2 cup water, and continue baking. When drumsticks are done and the bottom of the pan has turned to a thick sauce, it is done.

Sour, Spicy, Smokey Drumsticks

In moments of unfounded, starry-eyed optimism, I think of myself as one who can and will eat whatever. I think I’ll eat the dregs of the pantry, making strange yet nourishing dishes!

What such notions actually lead me to is standing lightheaded in front of the fridge, wanting something even mildly appealing to appear, and making myself sick with toast and butter. It is a terrible thing because not only is everything worse without food in the belly and sugar in the blood, but also in such a state it is impossible to think creatively about what to eat. Just give me something. Having fallen off the boat so to speak, I have been awash in endless Costco food items, which I choke down (whoops, there goes the ocean metaphor) in insufficient and nauseating quantities.

I realized that cooking for myself in a deliberate way is not an indulgence, it is a way to get myself to want and not just to need to eat. It keeps me in a stream of gustatory desire, so that I do not wither away in disgust. There is undoubtedly some psychological peculiarity belied by my need to control and be actively involved in the process of making food. But the point is, cooking is important, damn it!

And so we arrive at the last thing I cooked. It is in some way inspired by Adobo, which is not something I have ever made, and have only tasted once. Having been mostly distrustful of sourness in savory cooking, it is now a novelty that I want to explore.

2 tablespoons cooking oil
4 chicken drumsticks
1/2 a medium cabbage
1 large onion
3 cloves garlic
3 small dried jalapenos
juice of 2 lemons
juice of 1 large orange
2 teaspoons smoked paprika
salt (1/2 teaspoon?)

Sprinkle salt on both sides of drumsticks. Cut cabbage half and onion into thin radial slices. Smash garlic cloves and chop into largish pieces. Chop dried japapenos into largish pieces. Juice lemons and orange and reserve juice. On high heat, heat oiled saucepan until oil begins to smoke. Being careful not to burn yourself, lay drumsticks in pan and cover with lid or towl to keep oil from splattering everywhere. Brown both sides (a few minutes on each side) of drumsticks and remove to a plate. Reduce heat to medium-low. Fry garlic and dried jalapenos for about ten seconds before adding cabbage and onion slices and stirring to coat everything in oil. Increase heat to medium and fry vegetables for five minutes, stirring every minute or two. Add chicken drumsticks, blanketing them under the vegetables. Add citrus juice and smoked paprika. Reduce heat to medium-low and cover. Cook for roughly half an hour, or until chicken is cooked all the way through. Salt to taste.

Baked Sweet Potatoes With Nutmeg-Paprika Sauce, Leftover Roast Chicken, and Bok Choy

For once I'm writing a recipe (with pictures!) for one of my dinner improvisations.  The idea for the sauce came from my friend who likes sweet potatoes with olive oil, paprika, nutmeg, and salt.  The lemon in the sauce--used mostly because I had excess lemon juice from making a pear tart--is a bit intense, but seems to mellow over time and with bland sweet potato.  At first I thought it was a mistake using lemon juice, but it quickly grew on me.

The paprika didn't really taste like parika, and considering
that it didn't turn the oil bright red either, it probably wasn't.
Maybe it was mace.

For two:

2 sweet potatoes (I used "Japanese yams" which have dark purple skin and light yellow flesh)

1 largish bok choy plant

some leftover roast chicken

sauce:

juice of 1/2 a lemon

1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

1 egg yolk

1/3 cup chicken stock 

1 teaspoon paprika

1 teaspoon nutmeg

~1/2 teaspoon salt

for bok choy:

1 tablespoon cooking oil

2 teaspoons tamari

2 teaspoons mirin

Put sweet potatoes in oven, and heat to 375 F.  When sweet potatoes are soft all the way through (maybe 45 minutes), take them out.

Heat a large saucepan to medium-high heat.  Chop bok choy into biggish pieces, separating the leafy pieces from the stemmy pieces.  Coat saucepan with cooking oil, and fry the stemmy pieces for a few minutes, browning them a little.  Add leafy pieces, tamari, and mirin, and cover for another few minutes.  Uncover, stir, and reduce liquid (on the same medium high heat) for a minute or two so it begins to coat the bok choy.  Transfer bok choy into a bowl.  Remove from heat.

Whisk together egg yolk, lemon juice, and chicken stock.  When the saucepan has cooled down a bit, put on medium-low heat and add olive oil and paprika and nutmeg.  Stir a bit while the spices temper for a minute.  Add liquid mixture, whisking as you do so.  Take a tablespoon or so size piece of baked sweet potato, remove the skin, and mash it into the sauce with a fork.  Continue whisking.  Reduce the sauce for a few minutes.  If it's too thin add some more sweet potato, or flour, but it shouldn't bee too thick--more of a gravy consistency.  Remove from heat.

On a plate open a sweet potato up with a fork, and pour sauce over it and heated leftover chicken (microwave or bake on low heat in a covered container).  Serve with bok choy.

Chicken Soup

Simmering stock from chicken carcass
and vegetable scraps that I've frozen
 over the past few weeks.

Making chicken soup from scratch is a long string of delayed gratification. It’s not just that there’s a lot of waiting, but also that there are so many stages of the process. This accounts, I think, for my enthusiasm for making soup. There are days of anticipation. First I have to salt the chicken, leaving the chicken to soak up the salt overnight. The next day I roast it, and if I’m feeling particularly impatient and productive, I begin simmering the stock in the same day. More likely it won’t be until the carcass is mostly picked off a day or two after I roast it that the stock is begun. Once the stock has finished simmering (usually I leave it overnight), finally soup can begin.

The above is a simplification of what’s involved of course. Before roasting the chicken really should be dried out a bit in the interest of crispy skin, although honestly I don’t often bother. Before making stock the carcass should be stripped of most of the good meat (but not all), which is at once satisfying and daunting (despite the fact that it takes less than ten minutes). After the carcass has simmered with flavoring vegetables, the stock must be strained and possibly skimmed. And of course the contents of the soup itself must be cooked and seasoned.

The stock is somewhat cloudy
because I misguidedly used
potato skins.

This time it was rice, carrots, and leeks. Planning and preparing the ingredients is for me a form of utopianism: “yes, this will be perfect in the soup.” And the soup I imagine will save any lack of care, binding everything together into a hot selfsame liquid. To reverse the sense of a Woosterism, once it’s in the soup, it’ll be spiffing.

At the end of all this the soup is--well it’s okay.

Chicken Attachments

My favorite parts of roasting chicken are the vegetables roasted in chicken juices and the soup.  That I think of the chicken meat itself as an added bonus probably reflects badly on the way I roast it. At least I began with some sort of guide: Beyond Salmon's notes on roasting chicken legs.

The potatoes, onions, and other vegetables (today it was broccolini) that I nest around the chicken collect and exude water, making the bottom of the chicken consistently soggy.  Because I don't have a meat thermometer I'm never quite sure when to take it out of the oven.  Testing for doneness involves cutting into it, which breaks the skin and exposes more flesh, so if it has to bake longer after testing it will lose moisture quickly.  Usually, paranoid, I err on the side of overdone, but this time by accident I undercooked it.  You can see in the photo that the leg meat looks fairly pink, as did the breast meat.  So I baked the meat sealed in in tinfoil at 300 F for another fifteen minutes or so.  Much of it is just going to go into the soup anyway.

Anyway, about the vegetables.  The slices of onion and potato were sidled up to the chicken after the first ten minutes of baking (at 450 F).  When the chicken was done (or so I thought), the potatoes were not.  At this point I removed the chicken, added the broccolini to the roasting pan, mixed it in, and put it back in the oven for about another twenty minutes.  The vegetables have been soaking up flavor from the chicken, olive oil, lemon juice (along with the lemon halves in the pan), garlic, black pepper, and salt.  (If it were summer, there would also be thyme.)  I adore them.

It occurs to me that the problem of soggy-bottom might be alleviated if I roasted the vegetables in another pan and poured the liquid from the chicken roasting pan into it when the chicken is done.  Alternatively I could make a gravy out of the chicken drippings and pour it over separately roasted vegetables.  But there is something appealing about this doomed method of roasting them together.

saucy leftovers: roasted chicken and mashed potatoes

sauce:

2 tablespoons butter

1/3-1/2 cup heavy cream

1 tablespoon mashed potatoes

~12 fresh sage leaves

1/2 teaspoon salt

sauceand:

a small pile of pieces of roasted chicken

~1 cup mashed potatoes

melt butter in a large saucepan on medium-low heat.  once melted, add sage leaves and fry until crispy.  butter should brown a little, but not blacken (if it does heat is too high).  remove sage leaves with a fork and set aside.  add heavy cream, tablespoon of mashed potatoes, and salt to saucepan, and stir thoroughly with a whisk.  lower heat a little and simmer until sauce reaches a somewhat thickened but still flowing consistency--this should take only a couple minutes.

heat up chicken pieces and mashed potatoes in somehow (a microwave probably), pour sauce on top, and garnish with crispy sage leaves.