Spatchcock that chicken!

 

Spatchcocked chicken

Isn’t that a great word—spatchcock? Basically, it’s a method for cooking chicken. Scholars aren’t sure of the origin, but they think it comes from eighteenth-century Ireland. I find a little etymological confusion—since cock is another name for a rooster, maybe the term comes from spatching a cock. Except roosters are tough and stringy, and we don’t cook them. Maybe they did back in Ireland at the time. My theory falls apart though because I couldn’t find a definition for spatch, except in some arcane numerology systems or spatchcock cooking. The latter is circular—defining a word for itself.

All that aside, spatchcocking is a wonderful way to cook chicken. You need a good strong pair of kitchen shears. Flip the chicken onto its breast and cut along one side of the backbone, as close to the bone as you can. Then cut along the other side and remove the backbone. Turn the chicken over, and press both hands on the breastbone, as though you were giving artificial respiration. You’ll hear it crack. The spread the chicken out flat. This way it cooks faster and more evenly, and the meat is tender and moist, the skin crisp. It involves a lot of butter.

We’ve done it a couple of times. I don’t have much strength in my hands, so Christian does the actual spatchcocking. After that it’s fairly simple, though it involves the careful process of putting herb butter under the skin of the bird. Note that you must prepare the chicken hours ahead. Here’s what I did.

Turn the chicken skin side down, and season liberally with salt and pepper. Turn it back skin side up and put herb butter all over under the skin, careful not to tear the skin. For the breast you can start at what would be the lower end of the bird and work the butter around carefully with your fingers. It’s sticky work, and you just have to do the best you can. For the thighs and legs, start at the hip joint. Ignore the wings, though many recipes suggest you clip off the tips. Dry the chicken with paper towels before you add the butter. One recipe suggests reserving any left-over butter to pour over the bird before serving. Since I like the crisp skin, I prefer to pass the remaining butter rather than douse the whole bird.

Herb butter

It takes about a half a stick of softened butter to treat a three-to-four lb chicken.

Mix into the butter:

2 tsp. minced parsley

1 tsp. lemon zest

A pinch each of whatever herbs you want—thyme, marjoram, rosemary (go light with its strong flavor), basil, oregano, herbes de provence. I’d avoid such distinctive flavors as dill, cilantro, etc. And don’t overdo—choose maybe three herbs. You don’t want to get it what one of my kids calls “too herbal.”

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. pepper—use white pepper if you have it.

Place the bird on a greased, rimmed cooking sheet (what I call a jellyroll pan) and place it, uncovered, in the refrigerator for at least two hours. Overnight seems excessive to me but six hours is a good idea.

Roast at 450^o until juices run clear and skin is nicely browned but not burned. Forty to fifty minutes. I have found my new Breville oven cooks a bit hot, so we lowered the rack a notch and turned the heat back to 400^o. The chicken was done in forty minutes. You may have to adjust for your oven. Let it sit and collect itself for ten minutes before slicing. Serve with reserved herb butter if you want.

 You can also shorten the cooking time for the Thanksgiving turkey with this method. The internet has lots of recipes for spatchcocked turkey, but it takes a lot more hand strength.

Are mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard passé?

 

Remember when condiments, if you ever even used that word, meant mayonnaise, ketchup (not catsup, please!), and yellow mustard? For years that triumvirate was the American choice of American condiments. They sat in home refrigerators, and they sat on café tables in their containers. But in the last fifteen or twenty years, the American palate has become much more sophisticated and integrated new cuisines into our daily diet. Along with that come some condiments which at first confused me.

The other day I was reading an article about five tuna salads, one of which was made with kewpie mayonnaise instead of the American version we’re used to. (See “I am a Food Blog” miso tuna salad.) Invented in 1925 by a Japanese businessman who had just tasted mayonnaise, Kewpie has only recently found its way into use in our country. The basic difference: it is made using only egg yolks instead of the whole egg, which means it has a different texture and is more yellow in color.  It is praised for its “rich, bold taste” and umami, another term that’s sometimes hard for us traditional cooks to define.

Umami is the fifth taste, beyond sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. It is best described as savory, but I still find that a difficult concept to wrap my mind around. When I think savory, I think anchovies or capers

Kewpie, which at first brought to mind Kewpie dolls, is available labeled as Kewpie mayonnaise in upscale or specialty stores (not my Central Market though) and often comes in a squeezable bottle. You can find it on Amazon.

And then there’s kimchi, which I confess I haven’t tried yet. Kimchi, of Korean origin, is basically fermented vegetables. Originally a side dish, it is often used as a condiment or dip. Basic ingredients are napa cabbage and Korean radish, but carrots, spring onions, and cucumber can be used too. The vegetables are seasoned with Korean chili powder, spring onions, garlic, ginger, and a Korean salted seafood called jeogal (a fish sauce or you can use anchovies). Kimchi has sweet, salty, and sour flavors. And umami—there’s that word again.

In Korean cultures, kimchi is served at every meal, including breakfast. It can be used in a basic stew but is also used in everything from fried rice and stir fry to sandwiches and noodles. You can even pickle eggs in kimchi. It is available commercially, especially in stores specializing in Asian food but also in upscale groceries (Central Market where I shop has thirteen varieties available, so it’s a matter of finding out which taste you like—and that requires experimenting).

You can easily make kimchi at home. Multiple recipes are available online, and it requires as few or as many ingredients as you want. You can experiment as you wish, adding vegetables, leaving out the fish for a vegetarian version. It does require time in the fridge for fermentation, but after that it will keep several months refrigerated.

And finally there is chimichurri. (The whole reason I got into this subject is that for a

long time I was uncertain about the difference between chimichurri and kimchi.) Chimichurri moves us to the other side of the planet—Argentina to be specific. It is an herb and vinegar sauce used on meat and fish and even some veggies (Jordan put it on broccoli the other night.) You can mix some mayo in and use it to dress potato salad or mix it with olive oil and use as a marinade for vegetables. Mix it with a bit of olive oil and brush on bread before grilling for an alternative to garlic bread. It will keep in the fridge for some time, improving in flavor though it may lose its bright green color.

We had marinated flank steak with chimichurri the other night. It was a recipe I’d apparently made before, because next to the chimichurri part, in Jordan’s handwriting, was the word “Love.” I am not fond of several meats if they don’t have sauce—flank steak is one. I need something to soften what I perceive as dryness and chewy texture. Chimichurri is perfect.

Again you can vary the herbs as you wish, but here’s the basic recipe I used:

Chimichurri

1 cup fresh parsley

1 cup fresh cilantro

1/3 cup olive oil

½ medium onion, sliced

3 garlic cloves, peeled

3 Tbsp fresh lime juice

2 Tbsp red wine vinegar

½ tsp each salt and pepper

¼ tsp. red pepper flakes

Throw it all in the food processor and process until smooth. Chill until serving time.

If you try kimchi, let me know about it. I’m curious but uncharacteristically timid.

Chicken thighs and sheet pan cooking

Chicken and vegetables
ready to go in the oven.

Chicken thighs are not popular at my house, partly because I insist on fixing bone-in, skin-on chicken and partly because Jordan says one is not enough for the male members of the family. My solution to that is to cook two for each of them—and then we usually have two left over.

Sheet-pan cooking is not popular either, mostly because we haven’t given it a chance, despite the current popularity. A friend of mine who makes clear she is not a cook said she discovered the easiest dinner—chunked up kielbasa, cut-up potatoes, and I think cabbage. I forget what kind of sauce or dressing she used, but her point was that it’s so simple. I did post a few weeks ago about the salmon sheet pan dinner we did, which was well received, especially by Jordan and me because it had spinach and artichoke hearts. It also had cherry tomatoes—another experiment we won’t try again. They turned to mush. I may try cod next.

Chicken thighs and sheet-pan cooking came together for me when I discovered a recipe in Facebook’s Not the New York Times Cooking Community (It used to be a NYT page but they pulled out of it).

This calls for two “handfuls” of vegetables per person—I ended up with so many we had to do the potatoes separately. But I chunked up carrots, green beans, broccoli, Brussel sprouts, and sweet onion. The green beans and sweet onion did not fare well—the high temperature got to them. Next time I’ll do potatoes. Sweet potatoes would be good if your family eats them—mine doesn’t—and cauliflower, but I admit I’m not crazy about that. The neat thing about this assortment of vegetables is that you can include a favorite for most at your table—if they don’t like it, they don’t eat it.

Line a rimmed baking sheet with heavy duty foil (do not use a glass pan with this high heat). Toss the vegetables with salt, pepper, and olive oil. You can add other spices if you wish—rosemary, curry, thyme, even taco seasoning. Spread the vegetables in the pan but be sure not to crowd them together. A little space between.

Peel the skin back from the thighs to season the meat with salt and pepper. (If you are squeamish about raw poultry just go ahead and season the skin, but under the skin it gives more flavor to the meat). Fold the skin back in place and pat the chicken dry with paper towels—this step is essential for crispy skin. Put the chicken skin side up directly on top of the vegetables so that the chicken juices soak down and flavor the vegetables during cooking.

The recipe called for a 500^o degree oven for 50 minutes. My toaster oven reaches its limit at 450^o and even that was too hot for the onion and green beans. I’m going to try a lower temperature next time. The trick, of course, is to be sure the chicken is thoroughly cooked. Chicken breasts will work, but they aren’t as good, and you have to cook them longer.

I took a picture of the pan ready to go in the oven but of course forgot the picture the finished product. But everyone loved it, particularly the chicken with its crisp skin.

Smooth as velvet

 

Obviously several years ago, but here are the boys in the kitchen.
Christian is often in the kitchen, cooking for us. Yum!

Christian fixed Mongolian beef for our dinner the other night, using flank steak. It was everything I don’t associate with flank steak—tender, flavorful, delicious. His secret? He “velvets” the meat. So I asked him to explain.

Ever notice that when you eat stir fry in a Chinese restaurant the meat has a special tender quality that you never can achieve at home? It’s due to velveting, a Chinese cooking method used primarily for stir fries but useful in all kinds of dishes.

Christian, a great cook who loves to experiment, was researching Asian cooking and came across the velveting technique. You don’t often, he said, see the words “velvet” and “beef” in the same sentence. The name may come from a velvet-like texture on the outside of meat that has been treated. Or some descriptions say the meat becomes “soft as velvet.” At the same time, velveting locks in moisture.

Christian tried it and found it was genius for cheaper cuts of meat like flank steak or sirloin that you intend to cut into strips for anything from stroganoff to tacos al carbon. Velveting tenderizes round steak for chicken-fried and is magic for some chicken dishes. Recently, I made coq au vin, with white wine and chicken instead of the traditional red and beef, and the sauce was delicious but the chicken too chewy—Christian said next time he’ll pound it flat and velvet it for me.

Velveting is fairly easy but it does add time to the cooking process. You slice the meat against the grain first, to expose all those tough fibers. It does not work as well with one large piece of meat.

Next, make a slurry of 1 Tbsp. cornstarch, 1 Tbsp. rice vinegar, 1 tsp. salt, and one egg white. Whip the mixture as though you’re making scrambled eggs. Then pour it over the meat, stirring to be sure all strips are evenly coated, as you would with a marinade. Let the meat sit in the mixture for thirty minutes, and then dip it in boiling water or boiling oil for 45 seconds. (Christian always uses water because working with boiling oil is difficult and dangerous—and it would take a lot of oil.) Drain the meat on a plate coated with paper towels.

There is another method, slightly easier. Simply coat the meat with baking soda and after the thirty minutes rinse. If you let it sit at all longer than the half hour, the taste of the meat will be affected by the baking soda. Christian prefers the slurry method (though he wishes for a better word).

Christian Burton’s Mongolian Beef

1 lb. flank steak, thinly sliced, cut into bite-size pieces, and velveted

¼ cup cornstarch

½ tsp kosher salt

½ tsp finely ground black pepper

2 Tbsp. sesame oil

1/3 cup light soy sauce

1/3 cup water

2 tsp. freshly grated ginger

3-4 garlic cloves, minced or micro planed

½ cup dark brown sugar

½ cup vegetable oil

¼ tsp. red pepper flakes, optional

2-3 green onioned, chopped, for garnish

Sesame seeds, for garnish

Heat sesame oil, soy sauce, water, ginger, garlic, and red pepper flakes in small saucepan and simmer until mixture reduces by one-fourth. Remove from stove and set aside.

Separately toss beef pieces in cornstarch, salt, and pepper.

Heat vegetable oil in large skillet over medium heat. Working in batches, if necessary, cook beef in a single layer. Each piece should have a crispy crust on both sides. Drain excess oil from the meat on a plate lined with paper towels.

After the beef is cooked, wipe out skillet with a paper towel to remove leftover grease. Add the beef and the soy mixture to the skillet and again let it cook over medium heat until liquid is reduced to a thick glaze. Do not cook until all liquid is evaporated—you want that delicious sauce.

Serve at once over white rice and garnish with sesame seeds and green onions. Chopsticks not required.

 

Easy chicken casseroles

 

No, don’t yawn just because I mentioned casseroles. Those venerable reminders of the 1950s dinner table are among my favorite foods. But I am increasingly in the minority. Last night I fixed the entrée for a potluck with three friends. When I said I’d do a chicken casserole, one, watching her carbs, replied, “I don’t mind a casserole as long as there is a salad too.” It was sort of a left-handed compliment, but her thinking was that casseroles are usually heavy with pasta. She was pleasantly surprised last night.

So I thought I’d share two of my favorite chicken casseroles, sans pasta. A caution about chicken: somehow, I have lost the ability to poach or steam chicken so that it is tender. (After I made coq au vin with chewy chicken, Christian said he’d pound and velvet it for me next time.) For these casseroles and a lot of other dishes, I rely on rotisserie chickens. The catch with those ready-to-use birds is that they are often really high in sodium. Locally, I think Central Market chickens have the lowest amount. Since everything from soy sauce to canned soups is available in low-sodium form, you’d think they’d get around to roasting low-sodium chickens. Another hint: it’s much easier to bone a rotisserie chicken when you first get it home and it’s still hot. The meat slides off the bone. If you stick it in the fridge to bone later, it’s a whole different, difficult, and messy chore. (Jordan debones for me as soon as she gets home with groceries.) I usually have one or two deboned chickens in my freezer, ready to use. One chicken  yields about 2 cups of meat. A few stores offer breasts only, which I prefer. More meat for your buck.

Baked chicken salad casserole

2 cups chopped chicken

3 hard-boiled eggs, grated or sliced (I chopped them)

1-1/2 cups minced celery (do string your celery first)

2 cans cream of mushroom soup

4 tsp. finely minced onion (I used green onions)

½ cup mayonnaise

Juice of one lemon

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. pepper

Crushed potato chips

Once you get everything chopped, this is a breeze to make. Layer the chicken, celery and eggs in a lightly greased casserole dish (I used 4 x 6 or thereabouts—I think 9 x 13 is too big). Mix remaining ingredients and pour over meat mixture. Top with crushed potato chips and bake at 350^o for 20-30 minutes. Watch that the potato chips don’t burn.

Curried chicken salad casserole

For this you need to plan ahead, and you need a fridge-to-oven dish. If you have some valuable old Corningware, it’s perfect. This is a cold dish—salad really—with a hot topping.

3 c. cooked chicken

2 cups sliced or diced celery

2 tsp. curry powder

1 tsp. lemon juice

¾ cups mayonnaise

½ cup sour cream

2 cups crushed potato chips

1 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated.

           Mix everything together except the cheese and chips. Refrigerate overnight. Just before serving, top the casserole with potato chips and cheese mixed. Run it under the broiler just long enough to melt the cheese. Again, watch carefully—the topping scorches easily.

It strikes me that there is one basic sauce for chicken that you can vary slightly and make several dishes. It involves cream of mushroom soup (I’m not at all shy about admitting I love to cook with canned soups), mayonnaise, and sour cream. The other night I made white coq au vin and realized it was much the same as these two recipes but with wine. And lemon juice is often the distinguishing touch.

The best dinner ever…

 

Picture from The New York Times online cooking column

A few days ago, I bragged on the cooking skills of one of my grands; today I want to brag on my own cooking. The other night I fixed one of the best dinners I’ve done in a long time. In fact, Jordan pronounced it “the best dinner ever,” and Jacob liked it well enough to request the recipe for a file he’s keeping of things he really likes. It was baked cod with a buttery cracker topping.

My local family loves salmon—and those shrimp I’m allergic to—but they weren’t much on fish in general. I sauteed Dover sole one night, but it is as fragile as it is delicate in flavor and fell apart so that we ended up with fish hash—tasty but no eye appeal. The last time I tried cod I overcooked it, so we swore off it for a while. But the other night I got it just right—done enough for Jordan who has a horror of raw, yet still moist and flavorful. And it looked terrific. I am so sorry I forgot to take a picture, but I have “borrowed” the one that came with the recipe.

Cooking hint: when cooking fish filets with crumb topping, spread a thin layer of mayonnaise on the fish before adding the topping. It both hold the crumbs in place and keeps the fish moist. This is my addition and not in the recipe. Texas residents may remember the Black-Eyed Pea chain of restaurants and particularly their whitefish with crumb topping. I learned the mayo tip from them, I think.

Cooking hint two: for buttery crackers, you can’t beat Ritz original.

The crumb topping for this recipe was seasoned with plenty of butter, lemon zest and juice, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and chives (I used green onion tops). You can find the recipe here: Baked Cod With Buttery Cracker Topping Recipe - NYT Cooking (nytimes.com) I hope the paywall doesn’t keep you out.

The topping was so good on its own that I used it the next night to make salmon patties from my last can of good salmon, canned fresh where it was caught on the Oregon coast. (I hope to be able to order more in the spring when the salmon run again.) Salmon patties are a favorite from my childhood, and I often make them just for me. Mom called them croquettes, insisted on nothing but saltines for binding ingredients together, and then rolled the little round logs in more crushed saltines. I found the croquette shape to hard to deal with, patties much easier, and forgot the idea of a crumb coating. I also switched to Ritz crackers—they crush easily into fine crumbs. Ordinarily I season with salt and pepper, maybe a bit of dry mustard and a dash of Worcestershire, but with those already seasoned crumbs I just added egg to the salmon and then enough crumbs to make a mixture that would hold together. Usually it’s one egg for a 7 oz. can of salmon; last night, because my eggs were small, I used two.

With both the cod and the salmon cakes, I served a lemon/butter sauce: You can find it here: Lemon Butter Sauce Recipe (Versatile & Easy) | Kitchn (thekitchn.com) If I’ve said it before, it’s worth repeating: kitchn.com is a terrific source of recipes—and cleaning tips, though the latter don’t interest me nearly as much.

Next on my fish list: either salmon piccata or salmon with spinach and artichoke hearts. Wish I felt like splurging on lobster.

Betty Crocker cooks Chicken Stroganoff

 

A Betty Crocker catalog from the 1970s

Yesterday about noon I asked Jordan what was for supper, and she said, “I’m working on it.” Off the top of my head, I volunteered to make Chicken Stroganoff which I thought was in one of the cookbooks I’ve published. Turns out it wasn’t. How hard could it be? We just had Hamburger Stroganoff, I had a deboned rotisserie chicken in the freezer, and it seemed to me the principle would be the same—just chicken and chicken broth instead of beef. To be sure, I went online where I found complicated recipes with long lines of ingredients. But I found one that was fairly quick and easy. And guess whose name was on it? Betty Crocker.

Betty is a hundred this year. General Mills, who owns the fictional character, intends to keep her around for another hundred years. The iconic baker first appeared in response to letters from home bakers who wanted cooking advice. When the Washburn Crosby Company (later reorganized as General Mills) ran a contest promoting Gold Medal Flour, they were overwhelmed with letters asking for help, so Betty was born. Her first name was chosen because it sounded friendly; the last name was in tribute to a retired board member named Crocker. In no time Betty was on radio with “Betty Crocker’s Cooking School of the Air.” Her cookbooks appeared, often the first cookbook a young girl was given when she left the nest. The first product to bear her name was a pea soup mix. In the Depression, Betty dispensed advice on stretching what food a housewife had. She was among the best-known women in America, second only to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Today, she has her own web site, an entry in Wikipedia, and an online catalog. You can buy a Bett Crock mug, counter-top pizza maker, or any of countless cookbooks—even one titled Betty Crocker’s Lost Recipes which features vintage recipes. An online search turns up recipes from chili and Sloppy Joe to pineapple upside-down cake—remember when that was classic?  You can buy mixes for cakes, cookies, biscuits, muffins, and even casseroles. And what does this fictional character look like? There have been eight portraits over the years, but today she looks remarkably like she did a hundred years ago—your average American housewife, with straight brown hair framing her face and a slight, pleasant smile. Someone you’d ask for the best meatloaf recipe.

Here's her chicken Stroganoff, slightly adapted:

Chicken Stroganoff

¼ cup flour

1 tsp. paprika

½ tsp. each salt and pepper

4 Tbsp. butter (divided)

½ c. chopped onion

½ lb. baby button mushrooms, sliced

About two cups diced, cooked chicken

1-1/4 c. chicken broth

1 Tbsp. Worcestershire 

½ c. white wine   

1 cup sour cream

              Mix together flour, paprika, salt and pepper and set aside. Melt 2 Tbsp. butter in 12-inch skillet (or thereabouts) and sauté onion and mushroom until onions are translucent and mushrooms have released their liquid. Add remaining butter to skillet, add chicken, and let it brown slightly. Sprinkle flour mixture over skillet contents and stir to coat thoroughly. Gradually stir in broth, stirring constantly as mixture thickens. Stir in white wine. Simmer until serving time.

              When ready to serve, stir in one cup sour cream. Do not let mixture boil! Serve over egg noodles. We had shredded Brussel sprout with lemon as an accompaniment.