Valentine's Day

Since my postings this year have been nothing if not erratic, sporadic, and ... nomadic, I give you my Valentine's Day feast! I roasted broccoli and green beans - you simply must roast green beans if you never have! Wonderful. I mashed up some celeriac and potato with cream and butter; and the star of the show was chicken breast with mushroom sauce. The sauce was really good.

When I was a girl - actually this continued into college years - my father gave us Valentine's Day bags full of candy and trinkets. It made my sister and I feel special and loved every February 14th, while simultaneously setting a standard for the future men in our lives. As an adult, after some disappointing Valentine's days with disappointing boyfriends, I think I have learned that I have to cultivate that feeling instead of expecting it to arrive from elsewhere. So I planned a special meal and made a special dessert for my valentine. Then I got on the phone with my sister and made a pact to send each other things every V-day to recapture that childhood sensation that we both miss.

I did not end up making Valentine cookies for the neighborhood, as I thought I would way back on December. Did I really think I would? I was just glowing from all the neighborhood connections I made while I dropped off my sugary Christmas creations.

I would like to celebrate Valentine's Day at the end of April, the way I recall the Catalans doing in Barcelona. It was April, right? I'll look it up. Anyway, it was el Dia de San Jorge (Jordi) and girls got flowers while boys got books. I would rather have a book, actually. So I think that I shall make a San Jordi feast this year - after I look up the date - and work in the garden and read a book.

I'll send my sister some flowers and a book too. Won't that be nice.

Supreme of Chicken, adapted a bit from Jacques Pepin's Fast Food My Way

2T butter

1-2 T olive oil

2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts

1/4 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. pepper

1/3 cup minced shallots

1 cup diced white mushrooms

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

1 T ketchup

1/2 cup water

JP says to cook the breasts in the oven at 180 degrees for 10-30 minutes. Mine were raw after 20 minutes, so I cooked them in a skillet with the olive oil instead. Also, his recipe uses four breasts, but I like a lot of mushroom sauce, so I used two and kept the same amount of sauce.

Remove the breasts and add 1T butter and the shallots, cooking over medium-low heat for about one minute. Add the mushrooms and stir, then leave them alone so that the water is released after a few minutes. When the mushrooms are sitting in their own juices, turn the heat to medium-high until most of the juices evaporate and the mushrooms caramelize. Add the vinegar and ketchup and continue to cook for one minute, scraping up the bits. Add the water and cook until the liquid is reduced by half. Add the remaining 1T butter, and stir to incorporate. Serve over chicken.

JP serves this with sauteed corn and peas, seasoned with salt and pepper, butter and chives, I liked my celeriac and broccoli.

Poulet en Cocotte

Have I learned nothing from cooking a turkey? Always check the temperature of poultry! Why did I think I was somehow eyeballing doneness? So, as I am sure you have figured out, I overcooked the darn bird. The breast was dry, but the rest was juicy. The gravy was awesome, so that made up for the aridity. Sort of. Not really.

A simple French bistro dish of a whole chicken cooked in a pot! Poulet en Cocotte. It is really simple. AND ... this is the first time I have cooked a whole chicken! What? I know. Amazing. This was, therefore, the first time I carved up a chicken. I have carved a few turkeys, so it wasn't hard. And I don't mind fishing necks and other things out of the cavity. I held onto the liver and neck for an hour thinking I would make pate and stock. Then I realized, Who am I kidding?

You brown the (salted and peppered) bird in 1T olive oil, 6 minutes on the breast side, with the aromatics scattered around it (1/2 cup onions, 1 celery rib, 6 whole garlic cloves, 1 bay leaf, one sprig rosemary ... or thyme, you know me so well!); then flip for 6-8 minutes for second side. And, golly, when will I learn that if Best Recipe tells you to jump up and down in step 3, you better do it! So it says to insert a wooden spoon in the cavity to flip for browning the second side. What do I do? I try to use tongs and nearly wrench a leg off. Dummy. When I did what the instructions say! it flipped without incident.

Everything gets nice and carmelized as the meat browns, and your kitchen smells like Thanksgiving! Once you are all browned, put heavy duty foil over the pot, clamp on the lid, and into the 250 oven until the breast is 160 and the thigh is 170, 80-110 minutes. Do yourself a favor and check the temperature. Who eyeballs a chicken? Can a body even do that?

You take the chicken out to rest and the juices are your sauce, plus 1 tsp. lemon juice. Dump all the remains into a sieve and press to extract all the liquids. Since the aromatics have been cooking for so long, they just sort of mush in the sieve. Then skim off as much fat as possible.

Good to go! The sauce is thin, but good. The skin wasn't crunchy at all, so I took it off. I know! More garnish! The poulet goes nicely with rice and braised vegetables, which will be my next installment because they deserve their very own entry.

As I mentioned previously, for a dish like this you must start early enough in the evening. Josh and I sat down with our chicken at 9:30pm. Yikes. Now, if I had checked the temperature, it may have been only 9.

Tuscan Chicken

This is what it looks like coming out of the oven. The recipe calls for bread crumbs sprinkled over the top, then you stick the whole thing under the broiler. I decided to pull out my old cassoulet trick and do bread chunks instead. A fabulous idea, if I do say so myself.

"Back the truck up!" you declare. "You made cassoulet and you did not tell us? Where is it?"

Well, that was before this relationship. So, we'll just have to wait until a leftover night where I have nothing culinary to discuss, or I'll just have to make it again.

Tuscan Chicken is a classic stew in the sense that you brown the meat, take it out, throw in the aromatics for sweating, throw in the liquids, put the chicken back, cover and bake. I have executed this formula enough times to now be able to experiment, as I did with this recipe. That feels good. Why throw in only 8oz. pureed tomatoes? Hm. I've got a 15.5oz. can of tomato sauce, how about that? Sounds good. Why measure the white wine? Dunno. Not gonna do it. Add some carrots and celery because I feel like it! Outcome = nothing short of deliciousness.

And beans really complete something like this. What is it about those wee fiber powerhouses?

This recipe did remind me how much I dislike browning chicken. I keep trying to make it less messy and end up spending the first part of my browning making up for being a doofus. This time, I put the heat on mere medium. Doofus! The chicken stuck AND didn't brown right. I got to make up for that mistake in round two of chicken browning, so I got a nice crusts on the last three thighs. What I can't stand about browning is the mess. Splatter everywhere! It even gets on the floor and makes it slick. Plus, I rarely find time to clean the range, and chicken splatter just invites everyone to the stick party. Ug. Yes, I have a splatter guard. That would be another mistake I am always making, vis a vis, "Oh, I don't need that. Fat gets everywhere anyway." Doofus. Again. Just put it on there. Josh invariably walks into the kitchen during this phase of the cooking and demands to know where the guard is and why I don't have it in place. Yeah yeah. I relent, but unwillingly, like a child. I used another cassoulet trick on the chicken. Well, it's a New Best cassoulet trick. That is, remove the chicken skin after browning. The idea is that it has already lent itself to the fond, now it will only lend itself to grease. I did leave a bit on because the skin had all but melted off and left behind a really nice, crisp crust. I knew I would want that later.

After all that browning, you throw in the aromatics. Which brings me to my biggest cooking dislike: chopping onions ... followed in close second by peeling and chopping garlic. First, with the onion, that darn papery skin gets everywhere. How do I always manage to get a few pieces in my nicely minced onion? I inevitably catch it as I am tossing the bowl into the pot. And, oh yes, I do try to fish it out. I've got my chopping technique down; I know that I cannot truly avoid burning eyes; I have a great cutting board and chopping system in place. Really, the only thing that bothers me is the darned paper. Hm. The onion was definitely first when I had a narrow cutting board that allowed at least half of that aromatic - and everything else I chopped - to end up on the floor. Perhaps, in light of my new enormous board, garlic should move to first place. Yes, garlic is now first. Let's review its sins: (1) that darned paper! It sticks! It's hard to get off, then gets all ornery once it is off, trying to get back onto everything it touches. (2) Chopping it is like picking your torture. Do you want to slice through a fingernail as you use your chef's knife to mince? Are you going to slice, and risk taking off the whole tip of the finger? Mario Batali once called a garlic mincer "a Medieval torture device." I stopped using mine after I heard that, but have started right up again, accepting the inconvenience of trying to get all the gook out of the mini-tub just so that I don't have to try to use a knife. And don't think I can't see your sneers. Ah, she must have poor knife skills. No way! I use my knuckles as a backboard, like the pros, I swear. I can make eye contact in conversation while chopping, really. But garlic is so teeny-tiny. I just ... hate it. I said it. There.

What to serve with the stew? I thought of mashed potatoes to sop up sauce. But, then, I reasoned, we were supposed to have potatoes Saturday night with the Walkers, and we can't have the very same form of potatoes two nights in a row. So I went with what my sister calls Dirty Potatoes. I like this moniker. Unfortunately, I am going to have to call Mel out right here and dispel a myth she is currently living under. Dirty Potatoes were NOT, Mel, invented by your ex, one Mr. Jason Riehl. The recipe, in fact, in on the back of the onion mix packet. Sorry. I highly recommend making your own dirty potatoes because they rock the house. Look at that carmelization. I made us save some so that we could have them with bacon and eggs the following morning.

If only I had known that I was going to be sick today! Sucks. So, no fancy breakfast and no dinner with the Walkers tonight. I've got some tummy issues. Boo. What in the world will I talk about tomorrow?