miso chicken and rice

How do you cook when your kitchen isn’t available for kitchen-ing? On a Sunday last April, I awoke at the crack of dawn jet-lagged from an (excellent) trip to Amsterdam* to an email from my apartment building that ConEd had found a gas leak in the main line to the building and had shut down service for safety. With this, I was indoctrinated into a society of New Yorkers I previously hadn’t known existed, as NYC is apparently riddled with tales of people who lived without gas for (what seemed like the minimum of) 6 months and up to 18 months while their building trudged at a snail’s pace through rounds of repairs and inspections.

Nevertheless, this is not a story of the woes of life in a place where the safety of a single pipe affects… everybody. No, this is about cooking, naturally, and how we managed in the (thankfully?) only four months in which my kitchen was not functioning as a so-called professional kitchen should. [Let’s pretend for editorial sake that my kitchen ever functions as a professional kitchen should.] Because while I might have kept my experience of this chapter of my cooking life offline forever — too niche! — I’ve recently received emails from two different people, one whose building is experiencing the same elsewhere in the city, and one who is about to undertake a kitchen renovation and both wanted advice on how a cook might cook when deprived of their galley. And I’m incapable of not answering a good question.

• A countertop convection oven: Not sponsored, but I love my Breville Smart Oven. I bought it a decade ago because it was the ideal second oven for me, a person with a significant mismatch between the scale of my entertaining ambitions (big) and the size of my space (small). I use it to heat up an additional dish or two when the oven is at capacity; we also use it as a toaster. What I learned when it became my primary oven was that it turns out almost 80% of the stuff we cook fits in a 9×13-inch pan or smaller, i.e. the oven can handle it. Another bonus? It cooks evenly and doesn’t heat up the kitchen in the summer, the way a full-sized oven often does. [Breville, Williams-Sonoma, Amazon]
• A plug-in induction burner: The gold standard of electromagnetic field/ferromagnetic cookware (just rolls off the tongue!) in test kitchens and almost anywhere you’ve seen a chef demo is the Breville brand one, but I wasn’t quite ready to cough up for it. Instead, I used the camping burners I keep around for video shoots. I can’t say I’d recommend them per se; they’re not winning any environmental awards but, as a temporary solution in a well-ventilated kitchen, it did the job.
• A slow-cooker and/or InstantPot: While I don’t lean heavily on slow-cookers and/or InstantPots these days, they’d also be heroic to call in for making dinner without an oven or stove. We did, however, use our small outdoor grill a lot, as it was warm out.
• The surprise item: A rice cooker: I’ve had two Zojirushi Micom 3-Cup rice cookers over the last 15 years and I’d still be on the first if it hadn’t slipped out of my hands once or twice. Oddly, it still worked fine even with, uh, a couple chunks of plastic missing but it was a little slower so replaced it this year. I aspire to keep my newer one forever. [Zojirushi, Williams-Sonoma (5.5-cup model), Amazon]

And what did I use that rice cooker for? Obsessively, this. I made miso chicken and rice (and variations) almost every week, and 10 months later we’re not even a little sick of it. It hails from the late Lucky Peach Magazine. I remember it having a kind of viral moment in 2016, which means it’s due for a reminder tour because it’s just plain excellent: full of flavor and honestly exemplary in weeknight ease. In the original recipe — Miso Claypot Chicken (No Claypot), the rice cooker is meant to act similar to a claypot, in that the rice is cooked with marinated meat and vegetables, although it doesn’t get the traditional crisped rice at the bottom. But you don’t need a rice cooker here, either. I find that this bakes in a foil-covered casserole dish in the oven in almost exactly the same amount of time, directions below.

* Oops, I forgot to finish writing this trip up. Please nudge me. It was so magical to be in the Netherlands during tulip season.

Previously

6 months ago: Focaccia with Zucchini and Potatoes
1 year ago: Classic Lemon Curd Tart
2 years ago: Crispy Potatoes with Mushrooms
3 years ago: Cauliflower Salad with Dates and Pistachios
4 years ago: Spanakopita
5 year ago: Parmesan Oven Risotto
6 years ago: Roasted Squash and Tofu with Ginger
7 years ago: Plush Coconut Cake
8 years ago: Sheet Pan Meatballs with Crispy Turmeric Chickpeas
9 years ago: Chocolate Dutch Baby
10 years ago: Blood Orange, Almond, and Ricotta Cake and Cabbage and Sausage Casserole
11 years ago: Key Lime Pie and Make Your Own Vanilla Extract
12 years ago: Pear and Hazelnut Muffins and Warm Lentil and Potato Salad
13 years ago: Lentil Soup with Sausage, Chard, and Garlic
14 years ago: Buttermilk Roast Chicken
15 years ago: Baked Potato Soup
16 years ago: Black Bean Soup + Toasted Cumin Seed Crema and Cranberry Syrup and an Intensely Almond Cake
17 years ago: Clementine Cake and Mushroom Bourguignon
18 years ago: Chicken Caesar Salad and Fried Chicken
19 years ago: Grapefruit Yogurt Cake