Poultry Archive

Thursday, October 4, 2007

arroz con pollo

arroz con pollo

I’ve already admitted that I’ve been a bit of a slack-ass with the whole cooking dinner on a weekday night, or pretty much any night, thing lately. Since I would hate to deprive you of all of the whiny reasons I’ve been inundating my husband with for not even making half an effort, I’ve decided to translate a few into bytes for you: I’m tiiiiired. I’ve been working soooooo much lately. Traaaaveling too! If I start now, we won’t eat until tomoooooorow. Also: I’m sooooo tiiiiiiired. Charming, right? Bet you wish you were here.

But I think that the one-pot meal could be the cure for all of your kitchen ailments. Don’t feel like cooking? But look–it’s dinner in one pot! Don’t feel like creating a pile of dishes? But it’s just one pot! (And a knife and a plate and a spoon, but shh, I don’t want to scare you off.) Have a lot of people coming over? One steamed vegetable and an easy soup and you’ve got a full-blown meal! Everyone arriving at different times? It’s okay, the one-pot meal is very forgiving of tardiness.

arroz con pollo

Continued after the jump »

Monday, April 30, 2007

chicken empanada with chorizo and olives

empanada, unbaked

Wow. I just… I mean… wow. These are so good, you’re going to kiss the cook, so be careful if her husband is in the room, okay? I don’t want to be the indirect cause of narrowed eyes or awkward silences. But first, in light of The Great Chicken Cutlet Hate-A-Thon of Aught Seven, I feel it is only right for me to add little more to this picture.

Some of you may know this already, but I suspect newer readers do not; I was dairy-eating vegetarian from the time I was 13 until I was 28 (that’s Alex smirking in the corner, he likes to take credit for breaking me of my bacon-eschewing ways), a whopping half of my life (though, sniffle, not for long). If you click over to the recipe index, you’ll see that in the eight months this Kitchen has been open for business, if you exclude the dessert section, you’ll find a ratio of 92 vegetarian recipes to 11 meat, poultry or seafood-related ones. It’s not hard to make the argument that I’m still just not that into that which I once swore off. To this day, I consider meat a side dish and probably always will, and unless that fleshy dish is going to be transcendent or spectacular, I’ll probably skip it altogether. What this means is, if chicken cutlets have failed me again and again, it’s cool. I don’t need to fix it, I’m not dying to get over it, I’ll probably just move on and try other things. (That said, I want to thank Abbey for her helpful comment; this brining method is truly the only one that’s ever successfully brought cutlets back to life for me, and I need to get back to using it.)

empanada, unbaked

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Thursday, April 26, 2007

tequila lime chicken

margarita chicken

If it’s true that the definition of stupidity is to do something over and over again and expect different results, then I am indeed guilty as charged, because I made something for dinner last night that I know I never, ever like. Somehow I believed it would be better this time, and when it wasn’t, I proceeded to take two bites and then returned to the kitchen to make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

yeah yeah

It seems unfair to blame the margarita chicken, as Alex ate it without complaint, but he’s always been the kind of boy who knows on which side his bread is buttered. Frankly, not only do I not blame the margarita chicken, I was downright jealous of it for getting to marinate for 24 hours in a freshly-squeeze, potent cocktail while I marinated in front of a flat screen monitor, shivering in an over air-conditioned low-walled cube. But in the end, I just can’t give an objective review of the recipe because guess what? I don’t like grilled, boneless skinless chicken cutlets and I never have.

Continued after the jump »

Thursday, December 28, 2006

magnificence au vin

brown-braised baby onions

Despite it being an amateurish cliché, blaming your mother and all, I have to insist because it’s completely her fault that that anything less than Julia Child’s coq au vin with brown-braised baby onions and sautéed mushrooms on Tuesday night would be inedible, cruel beyond comparison. You see, she is the one who after reading the post about my unending obsession with Paris and French food, bought me My Life in France, which is akin to putting a loaded, I don’t know — egg beater? in my infatuated hands. I am but 75 pages into the book and I’m ready (and not for the first time) to book my one-way ticket. If nothing else, I plan to hold my breath or at least cut off bacon-and-meat kitchen dallies until my husband sends me to the Cordon Bleu.

The book speaks to me, though. Julia, like myself, was newly-married when she went to Paris and not entirely sure what she wanted to do when she grew up. She fell in love with the French approach to food — making chicken taste more “chickeny,” I believe she said — and had the time to experiment. In case the volume on this site doesn’t clue you in, so do I, and more importantly, I did on Tuesday, bestowed on me by my wonderful corporate overlords in the form of an additional day off.

coq au vin

Of course, being a bit more lazy and recalcitrant that our heroine, I lollygagged in front of the television eating a soggy bowl of Shredded Wheat until nearly 3 p.m. before finally getting up the energy to walk four blocks to the store, thus beginning a dish at nearly 5 p.m. that took many hours to make. But my oh my; it’s not that I should be surprised that a dish of chicken cooked in a sauce of bacon, red wine, beef stock and butter would be outstanding, but I didn’t think my husband would declare it the best chicken dish he’d ever eaten, because that boy, he eats a lot of chicken. (He later abridged this to say that my chicken marsala is his favorite, but I think he’s wrong.)

I liked it even better the second day (last night) when all the flavors had snuggled more cozily into each other, but sadly, we’d greedily picked out all the onions on the first serving. I know that steeping more than a dozen baby onions in boiling then freezing water, peeling them, browning them in butter and then braising them for 40 minutes in beef stock sounds like a miserable process, but I promise you it’s worth your time.

either over or under-cooked

All of this is; her recipes are always ridden with steps that make you question her sanity, as well as yours for following them — for example, this one requests that you boil bacon, which some might remember caused Julie/Julia some hilarious righteous indignation:

Julia has suggested boiling the bacon for the quiche for five minutes. This sounds to me suspiciously like an activity that would prevent bacon from tasting like bacon. But who am I to question. I’ll boil the frickin bacon.

But myself and millions of others follow them because every single time we do, the end-product blows our tastebuds and beliefs about food — chicken, boring chicken! — out of their repetition-induced comas. If this isn’t an honorable exchange of a few more hours of soggy cereal and television bobble-heads, I don’t know what is. Oh right: I got to light the dish on fire with a match, my husband standing next to me with his phone on speed-dial to the NYC Fire Department. Now are you convinced?

FIRE!

[Update: Yes, so. There is really no excuse for it taking me one month and two days to finally type up this recipe for you, except that I am hopelessly forgetful and also, it is 850 words. But it’s here now and I’ll be plenty happy to avoid this procrastination and the ensuing guilt in the future, m’kay?]

Continued after the jump »

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

chicken skewers with dukkah crust

ta-da dukkah tenders

My inner seven-year-old told every single person she saw or spoke to today that she ate dukkah for dinner last night, but she pronounced it “dook-huh” to emphasize the very dookiness of it. My inner sever-year-old, mind you, not me. I am a civilized, professional woman of the age of 30 in sensible Italian boots and a tasteful cashmere sweater would never relish the first reaction of people who heard she ate something foul-sounding for dinner. Nope, not me, not at all.

dukkah, post-toast, pre-grind

But I did! Not only did I make some dukkah, I rolled fingers of boneless, skinless chicken thighs in it and served it to others on a platter. And we liked the dukkah because the dukkah is good. And now I have probably said dukkah enough times to drive up my search results for the term, only to offend each and every person who lands here looking for a sensible, respectful discussion of this Egyptian spice blend. My apologies, I’ve been trying to act like a grownup for some time now and I find it exhausting.

Continued after the jump »