An oldie but a goodie

I have been doing a lot of cooking from Mark Bittman's books lately. How to Cook Everything covers a huge range of food and delivers easy, non-fussy directions (a big plus when a hopeful cook is making something for the first time). I think my favorite Bittman recipe of all time comes from The Minimalist Cooks Dinner, however. The original title is "Pork Cutlet with Miso-Red Wine Sauce," but since the first time I cooked this dish (immortalized in this post), I've varied the fluids (white wine, sherry, beer, chicken stock, various mixtures), the miso (depending on the other ingredients, white miso may be a better choice than the red miso called for in the recipe), and the meat (turkey or chicken work equally well, though I think beef would be pushing it). Not only is it a good recipe in its original form, it lends itself well to mixing and matching different ingredients.

Last night I made it again. This time I seasoned and pan-seared three chicken cutlets in extra virgin olive oil and removed the cutlets from the pan to rest. Then I added a sliced onion and some smashed and minced garlic to the pan, following them with some sliced baby portobello mushrooms. After sauteeing all of this for a bit (until the mushrooms were sweating), I added a cup of white wine with two tablespoons of red miso dissolved in it and cooked everything down for a bit. Then I added the chicken cutlets and their juices. I was planning on serving this with spinach fettuccini, so when the pasta was done before the sauce, I just drained it and then added it to the pan too.

As usual, the end result was a rich and delicious meal that tastes like something from a fancy restaurant, but which takes so little effort to put together that it's an ideal weeknight dinner.

Teriyaki

I've been on a teriyaki kick lately. My basic recipe for teriyaki sauce is the one that Hiroko Shimbo gives in her book The Japanese Kitchen. Of course, you can find teriyaki sauces with all manner of ingredients in the aisles of your local supermarket, but Shimbo's more traditional version only uses shoyu, mirin, sake and sugar. Using her amounts of 1/2 a cup of mirin, 1/4 a cup each of shoyu and sake, and two tablespoons of sugar gives enough of a yield for two separate teriyaki entrees, but you could also make your own desired amount simply by using two parts mirin, one part each shoyu and sake, and sugar to taste. The ingredients are simmered together: first the mirin and sake over low to medium heat, then the shoyu and sugar are added. Simmer until the sugar dissolves, then continue to simmer over low heat for about 25 minutes. It's important to use drinking sake in this recipe, since the salt in cooking sake will throw off the flavor. I also prefer to use a dry sake in this sauce, since the combination of the mirin and the sugar makes it very sweet. A sweet sake style would be overkill.

You can use this as a simple sauce to dress some meat (as I did with a baked salmon steak the other night), but Shimbo's own teriyaki recipe pan-fries chicken in the sauce (with some orange juice). I ended up adapting her recipe for a small steak (since the steak came out of the freezer, I don't remember what cut it was, but it was probably something in the top blade vicinity). I pan-seared the steak in some oil over medium-high heat, then added the sauce. The sauce bubbled up at first, so I reduced the heat and basted the meat with it; I also turned the steak a few times. Ideally, one would remove the steak and let it rest while the sauce sopped up the fond, but I was feeling too lazy for that step.

When I cut into the meat to check its doneness, it was rarer than I wanted, so I solved that problem by the inelegant but effective expedient of slicing the steak, then turning the meat over in the sauce till it cooked through some more. It would have been ideal to serve this over rice, but since I didn't, I used the leftover teriyaki sauce (now augmented with beef juices and fond) over some udon noodles the following day. My pan-searing technique obviously needs more practice, but this is pretty simple, a nice way to make a special treat for a weeknight (especially if you have already made a batch of the sauce; it'll keep for about a week in the fridge).

I used the second half of that batch of teriyaki sauce for chicken a few nights later; I just simmered some chicken thighs in the sauce, turning them until they were done. Even though these were skinless chicken thighs, by the time they were done they were nicely glazed from the sauce. I can only imagine how good skin-on chicken thighs would look! The next time I do this I'll probably cut the chicken into more consistently-sized pieces so they cook more evenly. Other than that, I really can't complain.

You also can use this teriyaki sauce recipe as a base for for your own variation on the theme. Those bottles in the store can look awfully tempting sometimes, but I think it's more fun (not to mention cheaper) to make your own.

Roast chicken, veggies and ginger

It's still a few days away from Thanksgiving, but this weekend I decided to roast a chicken anyway. It was a 4 1/2 pound chicken (about 1 1/2 pounds more than I normally roast); I followed Mark Bittman's recipe from How to Cook Everything. Rather than using a rack, I piled the chicken on top of a bed of chopped potato and carrot chunks, plus a few unpeeled garlic cloves and some sliced ginger (a couple of inches worth of ginger, sliced thin); also two cups of homemade chicken stock to keep everything from burning.

The ginger was a last-minute inspiration, but it worked great. It gave a certain zing and clarity to the roasted veggies (possibly abetted by the chicken stock). You don't have to eat the ginger if you try this; it's intended to add flavor to the dish only (in the vein of adding a bay leaf to soup or stew).

Coq au vin

I can't believe that I haven't blogged about coq au vin before, but searching the blog archives indicates as much. The first foreign language I studied as a kid was French, and I have fond memories of dining at Pierre au Tunnel in NYC with my dad. Coq au vin was always one of my favorite French dishes.

It's also one of those dishes with five billion variations, and I think I have a lot of them in my food library (even though it's a small library by my standards). As a result, this is the way I did it this time, but I've done it differently before and probably will again (I was out of dried porcini mushrooms this time, which is usually a must-have ingredient). My basic recipe comes from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

Take four bone-in skin-on chicken thighs, pat dry, roll in all-purpose flour seasoned with salt and cracked black pepper. Shake off the excess. Fry some chopped bacon (in this case, maple-honey bacon from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market, but any bacon will do). Remove the bacon from the pan and saute the chicken thighs in the bacon fat until brown. Remove the chicken from the pan, pour the remaining oil into a pot, then saute one chopped onion, two chopped portobello mushroom caps and two chopped garlic cloves in the oil. When the onion starts sweating, add a cup each of red wine and chicken stock, a good squirt of tomato paste, a bay leaf, chicken blood if you have it, the bacon and its juices, the chicken thighs and their juices, a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme and another shot of salt and cracked black pepper. Cover, turn the heat to medium and let simmer for a while.

After at least an hour, uncover the pot and turn the heat up to reduce the sauce. Coq au vin works well with crusty bread, noodles, rice or potatoes.

About that chicken blood: it's a traditional ingredient of coq au vin, in the vein (sorry) of using everything for the dish (which was originally a peasant stew intended to use up an old played-out rooster). But just do a search online and find plenty of argument about it. I don't go looking for chicken blood, but just taking the juices out of a chicken package (particularly a whole chicken intended for roasting) will involve some blood. I've made coq au vin with and without blood, and both are good, but it does make a difference. Coq au vin with blood has a unique blackish tint and an extra something to the flavor that is difficult to describe, but you know it when you taste it.

Back in the kitchen

One of the reasons I started this blog was to keep notes on my various culinary efforts. Despite the recent hiatus in posting here, I haven't stopped cooking, but I've also grown to realize that I miss being able to refer to those notes. So here I am again.

Another thing that's been going on lately is more non-Asian cooking. For example, a few nights ago, I wanted something quick and easy, but something more than a packaged meal. It finally dawned on me that I could toss together some "Pasta Alla Gricia" from Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks Dinner. Just brown some chopped bacon in olive oil (I didn't have pancetta on hand), reserve the bacon and its juices, cook your pasta (again, capellini was what I had on hand, so that's what got used). When the pasta's done, add the bacon and juices plus grated Pecorino Romano cheese. The result is fast, tasty and gives the pleasure of cooking your own food without a lot of work.

Not that I've turned my back on cooking Asian food, by any means. I've been enjoying reading and cooking from Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. That last dish I tried was from Land of Plenty, namely "Chicken with Chiles." I made a few changes in the recipe, most notably skipping the initial velveting step and treating it as a straight stir-fry.

Aromatics are important in this dish; it calls for dried red chiles, garlic, ginger, Sichuan pepper and scallions. Of course, I only have ground Sichuan pepper, so that burned when it hit the hot oil (whole peppercorns are preferred). None of these seasonings are meant to be eaten; they're there to flavor the oil. Again, I kept the pan too hot, so there was little oil to be had by the end of the proceedings. I had a cup of chicken broth on hand, though the recipe doesn't call for it, so to keep the pan from drying out, I made sort of a pan sauce from the chicken marinade (dark and light soy sauce, Shao Xing rice wine and salt) and the broth. In the end, the chicken meat had complicated spicy flavors, very intense but still a light meal. Serving this over a lot of white rice would be a good idea.

Another tweak to donburi

The joy of a hearty, simple dish like donburi is that once you've mastered the basic technique, it's easy to start changing some of the variables and experimenting. The other night I followed my usual recipe for chicken donburi but used chicken thighs rather than breast meat. Knowing that this would give a stronger flavor to the completed dish, I decided to use shrimp stock as the base for the broth, rather than dashi (shrimp stock recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything). I also added a few drops of pepper sherry to the broth.

As expected, the shrimp stock enhanced the darker flavor that chicken thigh meat gives to donburi. The pepper sherry was not noticeable in the broth, so I guess I need to use it less timidly next time. I'm still deciding if I like it this version of donburi or not, but playing around like this is part of what you do when you start making a dish your own. Besides, donburi is forgiving.

Roast chicken

Sunday night was an excuse for frivolity with The Cruise Director, The Fireman and family. The Deacon and The Frog Collector also stopped by. The Cruise Director put yours truly to work in the kitchen slicing onions, boiling green beans and offering advice on when to add ingredients to the saute pan. The main course was roast chicken with a nice peppery crust. Rather than a rack, the chicken was roasted on a bed of vegetables. This eliminated the problem of the chicken sticking to the bottom of the pan as well as providing a tasty side dish.

To say the chicken was moist is an understatement. When it came out of the oven, The Fireman held it over a bowl to allow it to drain for over a minute before putting it on the carving board. Once carving commenced, however, the cutting board quickly became awash in chicken juices. A turkey baster was pressed into emergency service for "reverse basting" and more chicken juices were added to the discard bowl. On the bright side, there is sure to be some excellent chicken stock in the offing. Besides, the chicken was tender and moist.

Chicken thigh donburi

Thanks to this post over at Nihon no Ryori, I realized that though I have loved chicken donburi for a long time, I've never made it with chicken thighs; I've always used breast meat. That seemed like a challenge, so the other night I gave it a go.

I used my usual method for making chicken donburi (or oyakodon), with the exception of using chicken thigh meat and turkey broth rather than dashi for the stock (no dashi in the house; I need to do something about that). When all was said and done, it was surprisingly different in flavor from my usual chicken donburi. Where the chicken breast version is sweet to the point of blandness (the flavor seems to concentrate itself in the broth-soaked rice), here the meat was as flavorful as the sauce. The strong flavor had a strong salty component, too, which I didn't expect. It wasn't bad, by any means, but it was so different from what I'm used to that I think I'll need to get used to it.

It was a worthy experiment, however. It's always good to see an old favorite dish through new eyes, and often hard to do because a cook (this cook, anyway) tends to get into a routine.

Rice-stuffed game hen

I love cooking Cornish game hens but once I start eating them, I remember how much work it is to disassemble such a small bird. A couple of nights ago, I tried another game hen recipe, this one from the Frugal Gourmet's original cookbook.

Frug called this "Game Hens with Lebanese Dressing." The dressing is really stuffing; "dressing" makes me think of salads. The recipe is written for four game hens; I cooked one hen and halved the stuffing ingredient amounts. First off, you saute half an onion (sliced) in a tablespoon of butter until the onion is just starting to brown. I discovered that my butter was all played out, so I used olive oil instead. Once the onion has browned, add half a cup of rice, a cup of water, some pine nuts (1/16 of a cup, if you really want to halve the recipe precisely), quarter of a teaspoon each of allspice and cinnamon, and salt to taste. As this cooks down (I let it go until most of the water was absorbed), it looks dirty from the spices, but I suppose it really shouldn't be called "dirty rice."

Anyway, once the stuffing is done, pack it into the cavities of two game hens (if you have one, like I did, you can just use the rest of the stuffing on the side). Set the oven to 325 F and cook for an hour. Frug recommends serving the hens split in half, but I didn't do that.

The stuffing flavor was rather subtle, but nice. The spices and pine nuts added sweetness but not in an excessive way. The chicken juices made their way into the rice as well. Most of the skin was done to a paper-like brittleness that was very chewy; I probably should have brushed the skin with something (honey would've been good, and would've fit with the other ingredients) to keep it a little more moist.

All in all, it was a little something different in terms of roasting a bird, and very simple.

Creaky chicken

Last night I had dinner with LaLa at Ya Ya Noodles. Perfect Tommy has been raving about Ya Ya's "creaky chicken" lately; it seems to have become one of his favorite treats for dinner. Thus it was that both LaLa and I were eager to try it. We decided to share two entrees between us; LaLa's choice was "soft tofu with winter mushrooms."

The creaky chicken has a hot and spicy asterisk next to it in the menu, but despite the occasional tinge of chili heat, it was not that spicy. LaLa was somewhat puzzled because she said it was the same as the chicken and ginger she'd ordered from Ya Ya the last time she'd eaten there. Despite those quibbles, we found that that it was, indeed, quite delicious. The thin slices of ginger added some bite to the rich savory sauce. The chicken morsels were perfectly done, moist and tender.

The soft tofu with winter mushrooms was also excellent. This dish had the classic "wok hay" smokiness; the tofu chunks were velvety soft and melted in one's mouth, while the mushrooms were juicy. They were dressed in a light brown sauce, thinner and milder than the creaky chicken sauce.

It was a great dinner out. It's probably just as well I don't live closer to Ya Ya Noodles, because then it would become a serious temptation.

Salt mine 2

As noted in the previous post, what was once challenging cooking has now become somewhat routine. Simply recording the results of recipes has also become somewhat routine, in terms of this blog. I continue to ponder how to shake things up a bit, but in the meantime, I'll blog a few more dishes in an effort to catch up.

The next "salt mine" dish was "Lemon Grass Chicken with Chilli" from Ken Hom's Hot Wok. This called for marinating some chicken thigh meat in a combination of two stalks of lemongrass (crushed and chopped), two tablespoons chopped garlic, half a teaspoon black pepper, two tablespoons fish sauce and two teaspoons sugar. Once this has marinated for 40 minutes or so, stir-fry the chicken and marinade ingredients in a tablespoon of peanut oil until the chicken is golden. Empty and drain the pan and reheat it without wiping it out completely. Once it's hot, return the chicken to the pan, along with two teaspoons fish sauce, one teaspoon sugar and one teaspoon chili powder. Stir-fry for three minutes more, then serve.

This came out quite salty, possibly because of the extra fish sauce content. There was nothing wrong with it, but it didn't thrill me, either. It's sort of a generic southeast Asian stir-fry, simple and relatively quick (apart from the marination). I suspect that I've cooked enough other meals using many of these ingredients that this one didn't quite step out from the crowd. Maybe a little tinkering and/or some other ingredients could give it more of its own personality.

Nasi goreng

The Asian fried rice tour of 2006 continues here at SevenSoy Central. A few nights ago, I turned my hand to Indonesian fried rice, or nasi goreng. Parenthetical note: I'm typing this post in MS Word before posting it on Blogger, and MS Word insists on automatically changing "goreng" to "goring." Me, I like to type words and have them stay the way I typed them. I guess it's a control thing.

Anyway, back to nasi goreng. Nasi goreng is the Indonesian method of using leftover rice to create a meal. It seems as though all Asian countries have their own versions of fried rice, i.e., a meal reusing previously-cooked rice. Thai fried rice has really captured my affection because the use of fish sauce adds a bracing quality to the dish. It ends up being very clean and simple, and puts the emphasis on the ingredients. On the other hand, if there's a Japanese version of fried rice, please enlighten me! I can't remember coming across such a recipe during my Japanese cooking excursions. The closest thing I can think of is salmon tea rice, which is not the same thing at all.

There's a recipe for nasi goreng here at Indochef, but I used a recipe from Ken Hom's Hot Wok. This presented the interesting proposition of an Indonesian dish being adapted by a Chinese-American chef for his book (UK edition), then being further adapted by a Swedish-Scottish-German-English-American who had some Indonesian ingredients on hand. Hom recommends hot bean paste to supply the spicy heat for this dish; Indochef goes for fresh chilis or sambal. The soy sauce component of the meal is Indonesia's ketjap manis, a thick sweet soy sauce; Hom substitutes a tablespoon of oyster sauce and two teaspoons of Chinese mushroom soy sauce. I just used one tablespoon plus two teaspoons of ketjap manis.

The meat for this version was a combination of chopped chicken thigh meat and shrimp; one thing I like about Hot Wok is its tendency to use chicken thigh meat in stir-fries, rather than breast meat. Breast meat is an obvious choice that I've opted for many times, but thigh meat adds more flavor to the dish. My default chicken stir-fry meat has changed from supermarket breast meat (well, ok, I am a Bell and Evans partisan) to chicken thigh meat fresh from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market.

Enough backstory; the recipe is roughly as follows. In some peanut oil, stir-fry some chopped garlic and ginger, a chopped small onion, chopped shrimp, a tablespoon of shrimp paste, and salt and pepper to taste. After two minutes, add the chopped chicken and stir-fry for another two minutes. Add the rice and cook for three more minutes. Add the ketjap manis and a tablespoon of hot bean sauce and stir-fry for two more minutes. Finally, add two beaten eggs mixed with two teaspoons of sesame oil. Stir-fry for a minute, plate and garnish with scallions and fresh cilantro.

The consistency of this version of fried rice was thicker than Thai fried rice; you could almost shape it into patties by the time it was done. The hot bean paste got lost in the final dish; the chopped ginger was more successful at spreading some heat throughout the food. Since the shrimp was one of the first ingredients added to the pan, it was leaning toward being overcooked by the time the meal was ready for eating. As expected, it was even better as leftovers for lunch (and dinner) for the following day. I finally got to use some cilantro out of the garden, too, which was nice.

Speaking of the garden, I planted some Black-seeded Blue Lake green beans (courtesy of mom) about a week ago. They popped out of the dirt Thursday and since then have seemed intent on world domination.

Not a mint julep

I'm not as involved with horse sports as I used to be (maybe I should make that "obsessed by") but I do at least try to make room for Kentucky Derby Day. This is a challenge because Derby Day is generally a week or two before the World Series of Birding, when birds are starting to arrive in earnest and scouting time is at an ever-increasing premium. This year, however, I managed to do my scouting in the morning and headed home afterward for the race and a good meal. Both race and meal turned out better than I could have hoped.

The meal was "Roasted Cornish Hens" (or hen in this case) from Ha Roda's A Vietnamese Kitchen (see my book review for Food, Bound) here. This was a simple marinate-and-roast recipe; the main quirk was covering the hen with foil during the roasting process in order to keep it moist and to contain the marinade flavor.

I took a small roasting pan, lined it with foil and put the thawed hen inside. The hen was marinated in the pan for three hours, with a turn of the fowl every hour. The marinade was composed of three tablespoons Chinese light soy sauce, two tablespoons hoisin sauce, a tablespoon of chopped ginger, two tablespoons Japanese rice vinegar, a tablespoon of Vietnamese fish sauce, a teaspoon of chopped garlic, quarter of a cup of water and a sprinkling of cracked black pepper.

After the marination was done, I pulled the hen out of the fridge to sit at room temperature for half an hour. Then it was time to set the oven to 350 degrees F, add the hen and roast for 40 minutes. After baking for 40 minutes, I pulled the hen out, brushed it with a solution of one teaspoon honey and one tablespoon water, turned the oven to broil and returned the hen to the oven for 20 minutes, uncovered.

I've roasted Cornish game hens before, but this was by far the best result (not that the others were chopped liver, either). Maybe it was because the hen was covered with foil for the roasting part of the program. The meat was moist but not underdone; the skin was brown but not too crisp. The extra marinade pooled around the hen but did not burn during the baking process; I poured it off and saved it. This was very tasty and I'm sure I'll be making it again. Actually, I think "delectable" is really the word. It was one of those meals that works out so well it earns a place in the gallery of red-letter meals.

Enhancing my enjoyment of the meal was the result of the race. As I said above, I haven't been paying as much attention to horse sports in recent years. As a result, I hadn't realized that Michael Matz was now training racehorses. I remember Michael Matz as an Olympic show jumper and member of the U. S. Equestrian Team. He was a favorite, partly because he started riding relatively late and did not come from the stereotypical horsey family with tons of money. He gained further note by his actions in the wake of a plane crash in 1989, when he helped three unaccompanied children from the plane, then went back in to pull out a baby. Most of the country didn't know who he was before the crash, but it was nice to learn that he was a good human being, as well as being a good rider. You can read more about Matz's history in this article from The Blood-Horse.

Life went on and I became a birder (albeit a birder who casts lingering looks at any horses we may pass while on birding trips). I hadn't thought about Michael Matz recently, but that changed when I turned on the Derby broadcast and discovered that he was Barbaro's trainer. Normally, I wait for the post parade to pick a favorite. Not this time. If Michael Matz had a horse in the race, his horse was my rooting interest.

Barbaro went on to win the race in decisive and downright elegant fashion. The field was widely considered to be very strong, so that made his victory even sweeter. In the wake of that, probably the skimpiest TV dinner would've tasted like dinner at a gourmet restaurant. Luckily enough, I had a meal that was far better than that.

I love it when life comes together that way, even if for a brief shining moment only.

Pasta sauce comes from a jar

Well, that's my attitude. I can buy Newman's Own marinara or vodka sauce and have a lovely meal. But I'm trying to change my ways. It really doesn't take any longer to cobble together a homemade sauce than it does to open a jar...at least, if you pick the right homemade sauce.

Last night's pasta of choice (as it often is) was wide egg noodles from the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers market. The brand is Mrs. Miller's Homemade Noodles. They're very addictive, even though I know I can make my own. I was out of bottled pasta sauce, so I figured, why not throw together some of my own?

I sauteed some porcini mushrooms and sliced chicken breast in olive oil. When the pan started getting dry, I added the porcini soaking water and some crushed fresh rosemary. When the chicken seemed done, I fished the solids out of the skillet, then cooked the remaining sauce down some. To add a little sweetness to the juice, I also added about a tablespoon of mirin. The result still tasted much more of porcini than of mirin. All in all, rather tasty but not too rich. The chicken breast was bland, as is its wont (that's why I've been using chicken thigh meat more lately). Fit Fare had a good post about livening up chicken breast recently. Maybe the next time I try this sauce, I'll add some marination to the recipe. In the meantime, I'll just inhale the aroma of simmering oxtail stew drifting from the kitchen to perfume the entire condo. Mmmmm.

Signs of the season

Late this afternoon, I planted the first new things in this year's container garden. I planted some lettuce, some spinach and some mitsuba. We have a bit of a warming trend forecast for the next few days, so I decided to go for it. I would've planted the lettuce sooner, but the nights have been quite cold for the last week or so. As I rearranged dirt in the pots on my deck, I heard the Wood Frogs sounding off in the creek, another sure sign of spring. Wood Frogs, along with Spring Peepers, are the first frogs that start calling in the spring hereabouts.

Yesterday I made Thai fried rice with chicken thighs. I've been using Nancie McDermott's recipe from Quick and Easy Thai, which really is quick and easy. I love the clean taste of the fried rice; there are few ingredients apart from chopped onion and garlic, meat, fish sauce, beaten egg, sugar and jasmine rice (of course). Last night I didn't even use the chopped scallions. As the meat stir-fries in the pan, it leaves some fond (the brown stuff on the bottom of the pan), but the rice sops it up so that it adds more flavor to the finished dish. The chicken thighs were by far the most assertive part of the dish, almost in an unbalanced way, but when I had the leftovers for brunch this morning, it all tasted good. Thai fried rice really is an excellent way of dressing up leftovers without a lot of effort, and winding up with a tasty meal. It's also an excellent lesson in the "less is more" style of cooking.

Chicken and shiro-sherry sauce

I liked Mark Bittman's miso-red wine sauce so much that I decided to retool it a bit. Rather than using red miso and red wine to make a sauce for pork, I substituted white miso (or shiro miso) and sherry to make a sauce for chicken thighs and mushrooms.

Brown a half-pound of chicken thighs in a hot skillet, then add sliced button mushrooms. Saute until chicken turns white and mostly cooks through, then add a cup of cream sherry (I used Hartley and Gibson's cream sherry) and two tablespoons of white miso (it helps if you smash up the miso some before adding it, so it will dissolve faster). Cook the sauce down by at least half, then turn out onto a plate of pasta.

This was a decadent dish. I've cooked with marsala quite a bit, but I can't remember trying a real sweet sherry sauce. This one delivered the goods, so much so that it induced a post-dinner coma. The mushrooms soaked up the sweet sauce, and were intensely flavored as a result. The dark meat of the chicken thighs stood up to the strength of the sherry flavor better than a milder cut like chicken breast would have done. When I try this again, I'll probably serve it over a flavored pasta like spinach fettuccini in order to add another taste element (this time I used wide egg noodles). If I really want to quibble, I would say that a well-chosen herb and some lemon juice would also add a bit of zing to the sauce, but even without that zing, the sauce was excellent. A keeper.

Chicken hijiki noodles

I froze some of my chicken stock in an ice cube tray so I could use it in future stir-fries, but that still left a generous amount of chicken stock hanging around. I ended up using it to help cobble together dinner last night.

I heated the stock in the big skillet, and added some shoyu and sugar. Then I put in some hijiki and somen noodles (somen are very thin Japanese noodles often used in soups). The combination of the straw-colored somen (ok, so at least some of the straw color came from the chicken stock, not the noodles) and the inky curls of the hijiki was reminiscent of some abstract Japanese print. I tore myself away to sit on the deck and enjoy the sunset.

When I came back, the liquid was all gone and the noodles were hydrated. The final result was a little bland, perhaps, but it was a great way to use up some random ingredients.

In other news, today I found a new sprout sticking up in one of the pots. The Chinese celery has decided to join the garden population.

Chicken stock

I get the impression that every proper cook has homemade from scratch stock of various kinds. At least, many cookbooks give that impression. You're just not a real cook if you don't make your own stock.

I've had this pile of chicken bones and giblets accumulating in the freezer for quite a while, so yesterday I finally decided that it was high time to make some stock. I used Bruce Cost's recipe from Asian Ingredients. The big attraction of that recipe was that it isn't as specific as some other stock recipes. It's all very well to call for three pounds of chicken bones, but I don't have a scale, and I'm not getting one any time soon.

I tossed the bones, necks, feet, heads and thighs into my pot and covered with water. I added some ginger slices, brought to a boil, then simmered for four hours. The aroma of the simmering stock was maddening. Somehow I managed to survive without going completely nuts.

Today I used some of the stock for chicken noodle soup (with wide Chinese noodles). For some reason, I frequently get indigestion from normal (i.e., store-bought) chicken broth. This soup, however, was fine, and gave me no digestive difficulties at all. It needed some seasonings to liven it up, perhaps, but apart from that it was fine.

One thing I wonder about is the cloudy appearance of the stock. I know that Chinese banquet-style stock is clear, and I wasn't trying for that. But the cloudiness bothers me. I suspect that means there's a problem with the broth, or maybe I'm just being paranoid. Further research is definitely needed.

In other news, yesterday I noticed some green threadlike sprouts in the spinach pot. It looks like the scallions are beginning to make themselves known.

Laotian (?) braised chicken with Thai noodles

Sometimes I feel guilty about blogging. "Why," I ask myself, "would anyone want to read what an anglo in central Jersey has to say about cooking Asian food, when there are so many real Asian food blogs out there?" I love Asian food, but it is hardly my birthright or heritage. So many people out there know so much more than me. Does the world really need one more well-meaning American indulging in cultural appropriation?

Take tonight's dinner. I decided I wanted to try Bruce Cost's "Laotian Braised Chicken with Shallots and Cracked Black Pepper" from Asian Ingredients. I've cooked this before, but it came out too salty; it was also one of the first dishes I ever cooked using fish sauce, so that threw me.

Once I decided on the menu, I got a little more curious about Laotian food. To say it has a low profile in the States is a vast understatement (though apparently there are a couple of restaurants in Philly that serve it). I did a Google search and found that most of the hits ran to reviews and sales links for a handful of Lao and partial-Lao cookbooks. There were a few restaurant reviews. But one phrase seemed to recur with worrying frequency: Laotian cooking doesn't use coconut milk. Since Cost's braised Laotian chicken leans heavily on coconut milk, I began to wonder whether I was cooking an Authentic recipe.

The most detailed information I found was in a review of a cookbook called Taste of Laos. The review is here, should you care to peruse it. I couldn't begin to paraphrase it, but it sounds convincing and makes me want to learn more about Laotian cooking.

Asking someone completely clueless about Laotian cooking to judge the authenticity of a dish claiming this nationality is probably too much, so I got back to the actual cooking. In spite of halving the recipe, there was still way too much food, especially sauce. I suppose I could have reduced the sauce further than I did, but I got impatient. I browned the shallots, scallions and chicken pieces in a cup of peanut oil, then poured out most of the peanut oil so I could stir-fry the chicken in the oil and coconut milk. Progressively, one adds water, shallots and fish sauce, then covers to simmer for about ten minutes. I omitted the chili peppers and settled for some Tabasco sauce, which was completely lost in the final product. I also omitted the initial step of salting the chicken pieces and letting them sit for half an hour. This time it wasn't salty at all, but probably sweeter than the recipe intended.

Once the dish is done, you are supposed to serve it over the scallions, but I decided to use Thai "rice flake" noodles instead. These were the big discovery of the evening. I got them at the Asian supermarket when attempting to find an equivalent for some wonderful wide egg noodles I had at a restaurant called Aroma in Franklin Park. The rice flakes are brittle large triangular pieces of vermicelli, for lack of a better description. When cooked, they rolled up into tubes like penne pasta. Tasting one was a rude shock, however, as it tasted like tap water. Bad tap water.

Eventually the rice flakes were done and I poured them into a big bowl. When the chicken and sauce were done, they went on top of the rice flakes. And what a change in the rice flakes! Now they had a wonderful buttery, egg noodle-like consistency, very rich and decadent. Like vermicelli, they take on the nature of the sauce or soup in which they are cooked. I will definitely be looking for more rice flakes when I go to the Asian supermarket next. Mmmmm!

So, whether or not the recipe was authentic to start with, it sure wasn't when I got through with it. But it was quite tasty.

This week's master sauce

This post goes back to Tuesday night. Since it was time for the master sauce's weekly refresher and I had some chicken thighs, I decided to combine the two for a light dinner. It worked out well. The surface of the cooked thighs was a uniform brown color, but since these were skinless thighs, I don't know if that has the same significance that it does when cooking a chicken with skin on in master sauce.