Another recipe from the Hunan cookbook I’ve been working through. It was quite a lot blander than I had expected, with very little vinegar kick – maybe I need a rice vinegar with more oomph? But we’ve been trying to eat lightly during the week and this certainly fit the bill. One nice side product was the broth from poaching the chicken. Part of it went into the final stirfry, but I also used it to cook chard for a side dish, which made for wonderfully flavorful greens. I also froze some of it to use later.

This struck me as a good “gentle” dinner to make when you’re feeling a bit frail.

Dong’an chicken

from The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook by Fuchsia Dunlop

• 4 chicken thighs (bone in, skin on) or one small chicken cut into pieces
• 2 inch piece ginger, cut in half
• 3 scallions
• 1 fresh hot chile
• 3 dried chiles
• 2 tsp Shaoxing wine or sherry
• 2 Tbsp rice vinegar
• 1/2 tsp whole Sichuan pepper  or Sichuan pepper oil
• salt to taste
• 1 tsp cornstarch stirred into 2 tsp cold water
• 1 tsp sesame oil

Bring a quart of water to a boil and add the chicken pieces, half the ginger and one scallion (lightly crushed). Reduce the heat to a simmer and poach 10 minutes. Remove the chicken from the liquid and cool, then shred/cut into long pieces with the grain. It won’t quite be cooked through. You can add the bones and skin back into the poaching liquid to make stock.

Sliver the fresh chile and remaining ginger and scallions. Heat a spoonful of peanut oil, add the fresh and dried chiles, ginger, and Sichuan pepper and cook until fragrant but not burning. Add the chicken and stir-fry, splashing wine around the edges, then add the vinegar, Sichuan pepper oil (if using) and salt. Pour in a half cup or so of the poaching liquid. Bring to a boil, turn down and simmer. Add the cornstarch and scallions, cook briefly to thicken, finish with the sesame oil and serve with rice or noodles.

Last week, after Thanksgiving, I absconded with my father’s copy of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Hunanese cookbook. I gave it to him for Christmas last year but don’t have a copy myself, so I spent the holiday sighing over the recipes until he offered to let me borrow it for a while. Ha!

I adore Dunlop’s Sichuan cookbook and make stuff from it constantly, but I’ve been intrigued by the spicy, yet more subtle flavors of Hunan. Some of the recipes use pungent ingredients like preserved vegetables, fermented tofu and salted chiles, but many are very simple and lightly flavored with soy, rice wine and aromatics. It seemed like the perfect type of food to make in the inevitable detox weeks after Thanksgiving.

The first thing I cooked, after we got home and I was feeling a bit frail, was this lovely chicken and mushroom stir-fry with rice noodles. The recipe called for dried shiitakes, which I don’t have, so I used the excellent fresh shiitakes that are grown locally. I was also delighted to find thin-cut chicken breasts at our Co-op, which made it easy to sliver the chicken. The dish was very good, full of vegetables, and refreshing after a long week of heavy eating, with just a little kick of spice to keep it interesting.

Stir-fried rice noodles with chicken and mushrooms

adapted from Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook

• 1 lb chicken breast, cut into slivers
• 1 Tbsp soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp rice wine
• about 10 fresh shiitake mushrooms, sliced
• 1/2 pound rice noodles
• 2 tsp fresh ginger, finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic, finely chopped
• 2 tsp salted chiles (I haven’t made these yet, so I used Thai pickled chiles)
• 1 package bean sprouts
• 3 scallions, cut into 1 inch lengths
• soy sauce
• sesame oil
• sweet chile sauce (optional)

Combine the sliced chicken in a bowl with the soy sauce and rice wine, mix well and set aside.

Cook the rice noodles in boiling water until just done, drain and rinse. (I know everyone always says to just soak them, but I’ve tried this and I’m tired of crunchy noodles)

Put a large wok over high heat and add a couple spoonfuls of peanut oil. Add the chicken and fry until the pieces separate, then add the mushrooms, ginger, garlic, and chiles. When the mushrooms are soft, add the bean sprouts and cook for a moment, then add the noodles and scallions and mix it all up. Add a bit more soy sauce and a little sesame oil to taste. Serve as is, or with additional soy sauce or Thai sweet chile sauce (what we call “sauce for chicken” in our house).

It looks like we’re finally getting a dose of summer here this week – just in time for school to start, naturally. I’ve been meaning to post about this grill-smoked chicken we made a few weeks back, maybe I should get it up here before autumn decides to settle in. I’m not likely to make it again any time soon, not because it wasn’t fantastic, but because the chickens we’ve been cooking (from Well Fed Farms) have been enormous and this bird fed us for a really long time, and I’ve had it up to here with the taste of smoked chicken. Hopefully you don’t have that problem, though, so you should totally try this.

We got this recipe from the recent barbecue issue of Saveur: a spatchcocked, spice-rubbed chicken cooked very slowly in smoke, then shredded and served on hamburger buns with a mayonnaise-horseradish sauce. It was very rich, so I added rather a lot of chopped green onion to brighten the flavor, then served it all with sliced sauteed zucchini from my garden. The greenery definitely helped – salad would have been good, too, or bread and butter pickles like the recipe suggests. Anything to balance the smoke and mayo. Also, the homemade buns we used were a bit too substantial – this would probably be a good time to use fluffy, squishy storebought buns.

Maybe by next summer I’ll be able to handle smoked chicken again. I sure hope so.

Many years ago there was an Indian restaurant in town that really knew its way around a tandoor oven. It closed, of course, leaving us deprived of tandoori chicken and naan. I’ve started experimenting with naan recipes, but I’ve only just gotten around to trying out tandoori chicken at home. Turns out it’s a little tricky.

Various recipes (I consulted a lot) give very mixed messages. Some tell you to use a very hot oven, others to use a regular temperature oven. Others say to grill over the hottest coals you can manage, others to grill on indirect heat. My own thinking at this point is that a tandoor is rather like a pizza oven – extremely high heat, but without direct exposure to the heat source. The chicken is supposed to cook quickly but not burn. We tried grilling our chicken directly over coals and had trouble getting the meat to cook through without completely charring the outside – I think next time we’ll try a longer, slower technique.

The main thing that all the recipes had in common was the yogurt-and garam masala-based marinade (made with yogurt drained of some of its whey), rubbed into de-skinned and heavily slashed chicken pieces. I used a marinade from Sanjeev Kapoor’s new book How to Cook Indian, and while it was tasty it seemed far too mild, hardly flavoring the meat at all. In future attempts I will probably get it marinating further ahead of time and add quite a bit more salt.

Despite all the difficulties, it made a great dinner, and some really fantastic chicken sandwiches for several days afterwards. More experimentation is certainly called for – anyone else had good luck doing tandoori at home?

Yet another highly successful recipe from 660 Curries! Saag murgh (chicken with spinach) is a classic Indian dish, and this version kicks it up a little by substituting mustard greens for part of the spinach. Our local grocery, somewhat bafflingly, nearly always has exuberantly fresh mustard greens in its produce department, so this was an easy dish to put together.

Bone-in chicken would give the most flavor, but I used boneless skinless chicken thighs (as I often do – they’re easier to take to work as leftovers). A marinade of spices, cilantro and yogurt gave it excellent flavor.

I browned the chicken, took it out of the pan and fried some onions, then added the mixed spinach and mustard greens and used their liquid to scrape up the fond in the pan. The chicken went back in for a long simmer amid the greens. I tried pureeing the greens (minus the chicken) before serving but made the mistake of using the blender instead of the food processor, and nearly exploded the lot. I settled for “pleasantly chunky”, which was still just fine for scooping up with chunks of chicken and fresh Afghan-style naan.

We’ve been in the mood for Chinese food a lot lately, but were wanting some new ideas. Opening some Chinese cookbooks at random led me to a chicken recipe in Land of Plenty that I’d never noticed before. It’s called Tai Bai, apparently in honor of the poet Li Bai. It’s easy to put together and involves very little chopping, which is a real selling point some nights. It has no garlic or ginger – the primary flavors are chiles, both dried and pickled, plus Sichuan pepper. It’s moderately fiery, so I wouldn’t recommend this one if you don’t have much spice tolerance. We think it’s delicious.

The recipe lets you substitute Thai pickled chiles for the Sichuan variety, which was lucky for us as we happen to have a large jar of Thai peppers that we bought on a whim last year, but it also tells you to add a spoonful of pickled chile paste to support the flavor. I used sambal oelek.

The first time I made this I had some fresh chicken stock on the stove that hadn’t been defatted, so the final dish was good and schmaltzy. The second time it was less oily, but still delicious – the chicken gets really tender and infused with flavor. We also tried steaming broccolini and then stirfrying it with the chicken at the very end so it would absorb some of the chile flavorings. Rice is a must with this – we particularly like it with slightly sticky sushi rice.

Tai Bai Chicken

From Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop

• 1 lb chicken thigh meat, boneless or bone-in, cut into 1½-2 inch chunks
• 1/2 cup peanut oil
• small handful dried red chiles, cut in half and seeds shaken out
• 4 Sichuan pickled chiles, or 6 Thai pickled chiles + 1 tsp pickled chile paste
• 5 scallions, white and green parts separated and cut into 2 inch pieces
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 1 Tbsp rice wine or sherry
• 2 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp Sichuan pepper (recipe calls for whole, but we used ground as I find biting into a whole Sichuan pepper a bit daunting)
• 1 tsp sugar
• pinch of salt
• 2 pinches white pepper
• 1 tsp sesame oil

Heat the oil in a wok over a high flame. Watching out for spattering, add the chicken in batches and stir fry about a minute, until it turns white but not cooked through or browned. Remove and set aside.

Remove all but 3 Tbsp of oil from the wok. Set over medium heat and add the dried chiles. Cook until fragrant but not too dark, then add the pickled chiles and paste. Stir fry briefly, then add the scallion whites and fry a bit longer. You don’t want any of the ingredients to burn, so go easy on the heat.

Add the stock, chicken, rice wine, soy, Sichuan pepper, sugar, salt and white pepper. Bring to a boil and simmer gently about 20 minutes, so the chicken cooks through and the sauce evaporates. Ideally you want just spiced oil coating the chicken by the end of cooking. You can remove the dried chiles at this point and discard them.

Just before serving, toss in the scallion greens (and steamed broccoli or other green vegetables if you want a one-pot dinner) and stir it all together. Drizzle in the sesame oil and serve with rice.

Being a complete sucker for a good sandwich (as you can see by the photo selection above – gee, that’s a lot of sandwiches), I was thrilled to see the new Saveur arrive in the mail with “The Sandwich Issue” blazoned across the cover. Woohoo!

This issue made me hungry. Really hungry. It covers sandwiches from all over the world, including banh mi, croque madame, Philly cheesesteak, PB&J, bacon butty, shawarma, pimento cheese, fried squid rolls and all sorts of other good things. It makes you want to go out and put things on bread with lots of exciting condiments. I’m particularly excited about the sardine sandwich ideas, and a recipe for Yemenite chile relish called schug.  I have plans…

After perusing it from cover to cover, though, I was shocked to see two of my favorites, the chicken salad and the egg salad sandwich, very underrepresented. I found two recipes for chicken salad, but both are the kind I loathe, with grapes and nuts and celery, or currants and curry powder. Ugh. Personally I find it hard to do better than chicken salad in its simplest form: cold roasted shredded chicken mixed with Best Foods mayo (neither Miracle Whip nor homemade mayonnaise will do).  I roast chickens just so I can have this for lunch the next day.

I might put lettuce on, or green chutney, or a slice of piquillo pepper if I have one, but more often than not I’ll eat it plain, preferably on a toasted whole wheat English muffin. Despite my love for more elaborate concoctions, this is really my perfect sandwich. The proper accompaniments are beer or iced tea, and a good helping of pickled okra, or perhaps dilly beans. Lunch just doesn’t get much better than this. What’s wrong with simplicity?

After a really odd week of record snowfall, record cold, cancelled school and lots of snow shovelling, we decided to treat ourselves by making a weekend supper of fried chicken, biscuits and collard greens. The fried chicken was inspired by my latest library find, Ad Hoc at Home by Thomas Keller – a gorgeous, heavy, hunger-inspiring book. The chicken, which called for brining followed by double-coating, seemed a bit more involved than the buttermilk fried rabbit I made a few months ago, but very doable. Well, it was indeed, but unfortunately my brain wasn’t fully in gear and we hit a few bumps along the way.

First came the brine for the chicken. I hadn’t read the recipe in its entirety, or I would have realized the brine needed to be assembled, boiled and chilled ahead of time. On Saturday morning I went to put the chicken to brine and panicked at the listing of five lemons and a whole head of garlic, then calmed down and realized we only needed a quarter recipe for the amount of chicken we had. I made a few adjustments, combining kosher salt with water, one and a half lemons, four bay leaves (carefully plucked from the cold-shocked, snow-buried tree in the backyard), two cloves of garlic, some peppercorns, and the top half of the picked-over bunch of parsley we had left in the fridge. I brought all this to a boil, then stuck the pot into the snow on the deck to chill it as quickly as possible. At least all that stupid snow was good for something.

Once the pot was cool, I combined the chicken and brine in a zip-loc bag and stuck it in the fridge. It was supposed to brine for 12 hours, but I think we only managed 7 or 8. It would have to do.

About an hour before dinner, I got the chicken out, rinsed the brine off and set the pieces to air dry and warm up. Jon stemmed collard greens while I measured out the flour coating ingredients and the biscuit dough. I got out a measuring cup and reached into the fridge to get the buttermilk. Only it wasn’t there. Why wasn’t it there? We had bought some, surely? But neither of us had any memory of buying it, or even of it being on our shopping list. Shit.

Yes, I could have clabbered milk with vinegar or lemon juice and used it instead of buttermilk. But I wasn’t sure if the texture of clabbered milk would be as ideal for dipping the chicken, and I was also slightly worried about not having enough milk for coffee the next morning. Also, we noticed that there was hardly any canola oil left in the house. So Jon drove out to the store through the falling sleet and braved the icy, barely-plowed streets to buy the things we were missing. In the meantime I parboiled the collard greens and got everything else ready to go.

Once Jon returned with the buttermilk (and frying oil), everything went smoothly. I dipped the chicken pieces in the seasoned flour, then into the buttermilk, then back into the flour. The thighs went into the pan first and cooked for about 12 minutes. When they came out, the drumsticks went in. The cooked and drained collards sizzled in olive oil with red pepper flakes and our last clove of garlic. The buttermilk biscuits came out of the oven golden and dizzyingly fragrant. We opened a bottle of lightly oaked Santa Cruz chardonnay and more or less face-planted into our plates. The breading was delicate and very savory, and the chicken flesh was tender and seasoned all the way through. Maybe the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten.

And there were leftovers for lunch the next day – cold fried chicken on a wet Sunday made the whole ordeal completely worthwhile. I’m not going to make this a weekly event, as Keller so blithely suggests, but I will certainly make it again. After making sure to buy buttermilk first.

Last night I tried a recipe for hunter’s chicken from my friend Jen over at Last Night’s Dinner – a dish that earned her major kudos from the Food52 community. We served it with sauteed chard and soft polenta, and it was warm and comforting for a stormy evening. Leftovers were even better for lunch today.

It has a savory base of dried porcini and fresh crimini mushrooms, onions, grated carrot, sweet vermouth and red wine, and it really is the perfect dish to serve over polenta. We’ve eaten all of the chicken out of it, and I’m rather excited to use the remaining sauce as a vehicle for pork meatballs. I’ll let you know how that goes.

As it happened, it was an apropos evening to be making one of Jen’s recipes, as she had a rather major announcement yesterday over on her blog. Congratulations and the very best of luck to Jen and Michael!

This was an extra-nice sort of chicken curry dinner. We (loosely) followed a fairly involved recipe out of the Vij’s cookbook for tamarind-marinated chicken in a rich curry sauce, and it was well worth the trouble.

It’s a beautiful book, but the recipes suffer a bit from what I think of as restaurant-itis, where every part of every dish is complicated. The way I prefer to cook at home usually involves one involved recipe, like a sauce or fancy side dish, with plain vegetables or a piece of pan-seared meat or fish. But sometimes it’s fun to go a bit further and make something as written. In this case both the chicken and the sauce were good (and good together), and I could definitely see making either again on their own.

The chicken was especially good. Jon used most of a brick of tamarind pulp to make the paste, but you could also use the readymade stuff. The book called for chicken breasts cut lengthwise and grilled, but I used boneless chicken thighs and baked them. It worked excellently, but I do intend to try it on the grill when the weather gets better. This would make amazing sandwiches, perhaps with fresh tomato and cucumber. Mmmm.

The curry sauce had a base of lightly caramelised onions cooked with fresh jalapeño, chopped tomato, and spices, with water added to make it very soupy. Then I mixed some chickpea flour into more water and stirred it into the sauce, then adding coconut milk before simmering it about twenty minutes. The sauce thickened to a creamy consistency, and the end result was rich, yet light and flavorful. We ladled it over the chicken along with sauteed greens and roasted yellow potatoes, which was a really good call on my part, if I do say so myself.

We made way more curry sauce than we needed for the dinner, so I’m thinking of using it for a soup base. Maybe with noodles?

Tamarind Chicken

adapted from Vij’s: Elegant and Inspired Indian Cuisine by Vikram Vij

• 2 lbs boneless chicken thighs
• 2/3 cup tamarind paste
• 2 Tbsp chopped garlic
• a few dollops of oil
• 2 Tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp cayenne
• 1 Tbsp New Mexico chili powder
• 1 Tbsp paprika
• 1 Tbsp kosher salt

Combine all the marinade ingredients and toss with the chicken. Refrigerate for about 3 hours.

Preheat the oven to 400°. Put the chicken in one layer in a roasting pan and bake about half an hour, or until the chicken is cooked through. Serve with curry sauce and potatoes, or over rice, or in tacos, or in a sandwich, or…?