smitten kitchen

Sunday night, along with roasted stuffed onions and that apple tart for dessert, I made Martha Stewart’s Silky Braised Chicken with Wild Mushrooms and Pearl Onions for my family when they came over for dinner. But if you want to know if it was any good, you’ll have a hard time getting a straight answer. I thought it was dry and could barely eat three bites of it. Everyone else didn’t mind, and even called it delicious. Then again, they may have just been polite.

I’ve come to the realization that there are some recipes I would rather never write up. Here it is Friday night, five days after I made this chicken dish and I would still rather do Molly’s dishes than talk about chicken. Five days! Five days in which I have updated daily. Five days in which I decided I’d rather cook and write up something entirely new than get to that forsaken recipe. I am that ambivalent about it.

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There was a period a couple years ago when Alex was traveling a lot for work and I hated every single second of it, even–quite brattily–the parts where he got fancy rental cars and stayed in “Heavenly Beds” (which he still does not shut up about, even today) and got to eat awesome meals and expense them. What can I say? I haven’t lived by myself in a lot of years and all of those windows that flood our apartment with light during the day are scary as hell at night, especially you read stories about someone trying to break into a friend’s apartment through the skylight. I slept terribly.

One Friday night when he was supposed to get in by eight from LA, I decided to make a big, huge “welcome home!” meal with homemade challah and chicken dish I had always wanted to make because how could it not be the very best thing in the entire world? Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic. I can’t remember which recipe I used, however, but it was a big disappointment. The chicken had the quality I hate, dryness, and the garlic cloves that I had expected to be softly caramelized and oozy were bitter and greasy. Plus, the recipe had been an elaborate pain, fussy steps and in the end, completely not worth it. (Don’t worry, the girlfriends I had over and I got very drunk on red wine before Alex got home–typical–so it in no way ruined our evening.)

If only I had had this recipe! I took one look at it in the New York Times yesterday, I and immediately had to make it. Plus, Alex isn’t traveling or even working at the same place anymore, so I had the advantage of coming home to him with one gigantic pile of garlic skins on one side of him and 42 peeled cloves on the other, and a plume of garlicky air everywhere else.

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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.

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If there are any structural flaws to the standard backyard barbecue event (or as we do it in NYC, the standard rooftop barbecue event) it is that plates, forks and standing don’t go well together, especially if you are carrying a beer, or say, a Pimm’s cup, and let’s be honest–when am I not?

Sure, we’ve overcome this issue with various bunnage, from hotdogs to burgers and kielbasa, but outside the meat, veggie burger and salads-that-can-be-scooped departments, you’re still SOOL if you crave vegetables while standing.

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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.)

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