Dispatches From Whitcomb Street

shallow-fried chicken

We woke up to ten inches of snow on the ground and a power outage at the office today, so we had a little impromptu lunch party for the unexpected snow day. We made the summeriest food we could think of.

Chicken shallow-fried at home is a different beast entirely from restaurant fried chicken, which is usually pressure-fried or deep-fried. It has a shattering-crisp crust, dark and crunchy (but not hard or greasy) where it rested against the pan. It is good even the next day, cold. The meat is succulent and moist, but not at all greasy. It makes a mess of your clothes and stovetop and kitchen, and it takes fussing and poking and prodding. But it is good stuff. 

Frying chicken well is easiest to do on a responsive, high-powered gas stove; if you have an electric stove, you may need to do a few batches before you get a feel for how agile your stove is with temperature adjustments. Not that that’s a bad thing.

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favorite jerk chicken

This is not authentic, probably. It’s just good, on a long late-summer evening with rice and peas, a tall glass of beer, and good company. It’s also good in winter, when you need to be reminded of late summer evenings.

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pollo al latte

I’ve been trying to avoid roasting chickens in the oven—the high-heat method I like makes a serious mess, and while we like roast chicken, we don’t like it more than we dislike scrubbing appliances.

It’s easy to avoid in the summer, but as the weather gets colder, I’m starting to look for replacement treatments for whole chickens. As simple and fuss-free, if possible, as roasting a chicken is. I had what I thought was a brilliant brain flash last night: Why not braise a chicken in milk, as for classic Italian pork loin braised in milk?

Not so original, it turns out—cursory Googling revealed that pukka tukka/naked chef/healthy school lunch guy Jamie Oliver popularized this like a million years ago. So I pretty much just followed his recipe, and it was lovely.

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fast chao ga

When I was very small, my mom would make a giant pot of plain juk, Korean rice porridge, whenever I got sick. It would make its way to my bed on a tray along with a tiny bowl of soy sauce. I’d dip my spoon in the soy sauce first—just the tip, please—and then take up a little bit of porridge. 

As I got better, bits of shredded nori or cooked egg would get added. Then some scallions. When I was judged almost fit enough to be up and about, a miniscule portion of poached meat, cooled and shredded with chopsticks, would appear on the tray. 

Rice porridge, juk, congee, okayu, chao—ultimate comfort food. 

Plain versions are a fun novelty for the first couple of meals, but you’re going to need protein and interesting flavors if you’re going to get better. So if you’re feeling under the weather, here is a quick-and-dirty version of Vietnamese rice porridge with chicken, or chao ga, that only takes 10 minutes of upright time. Stick it on the stove to cook and crawl back into bed.

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hot smoked chicken

Hot-smoked chicken is…different. Deeply chicken-y, suffused with wood smoke, it can almost be a little disconcerting—there’s a mild cognitive dissonance thing that can happen (“This tastes like chicken, but it also tastes like bacon!”). Its texture is interesting, too: the long cooking works on the collagen and connective tissue in the meat to give it that classic slippery barbecue texture when hot and a firm, almost cured quality when cold. It might be too too for a whole meal centered on chicken, but let me tell you: It’s brilliant in a sandwich with a very ripe tomato and some good mayonnaise. It makes phenomenal chicken salad. It would be amazing diced and stirred into a pot of green chili or white bean chili.

Best of all, you don’t need to be a swaggering barbecue he-man, full of purist barbecue ideals and complicated equipment requirements, to make this. If you have a grill (charcoal or gas) that is any bigger at all than a chicken, three hours, and perhaps a refreshing beverage or two to pass the time, you can do this.

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chicken under a heavy thing

The peas are sprouting and I’m shivering in heels and cotton skirts, so it must be time to bust out the grill.

Butterflied chicken under a brick is my go-to lazy weekend grill dinner. If it’s just the two of us, it’s great on top of a tangle of sturdy greens. Or it slots nicely into a bigger spread for more people. The leftovers are fantastic for tacos or salad. It requires almost no attention or fussy cooking. Win!

We had it the other night with a little warm mushroom salad and polenta with tomatoes. Om.

Recipes after the jump.

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squash and turnip gratin

It’s getting to be spring! We’re getting to the bottom of our winter storage vegetables just in time—we’ve still got some hard-shell squash lurking in our pantry from last October. 

This gratin is as much about method as it is about ingredients. Any vegetable that tastes good simmered in milked and baked with cheese (read: any) will respond to this treatment—the direct heat of pan-roasting makes sure that the bottom is good and brown and able to pull cleanly free from the pan. The dairy gets good and dark, with that slightly sweet caramelized milk sugar thing that always works so well with cheese and root vegetables. Yum!

Recipe after the jump.

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faux pho ga

When you come in from the bar at 9:30 on a Sunday night, hungry because they roll up the sidewalks in your little town at nine o’clock, freezing cold because riding your bike is a brilliant idea at four but a terrible one once the sun has gone down, and grouchy because you have to go to work in the morning…you make faux pho. And then things are better.

In general I feel like pho from a good pho joint has a pretty high Good Value Index (cost::deliciousness…other things that have a high GVI include decent tacos, good Chicago dogs, and the prix fixe at Frasca in Boulder). I’ve made pho from scratch a couple times, mostly just to have the experience - fun, but not really a thing that makes sense to do on a regular basis.

Faux pho, on the other hand, always makes sense when you are cold and it’s late. You can put it together in ten minutes. It’s hot and soothing. It’s nowhere near as good as the simmered-for-hours real thing, but it’ll do. Ahhh.

Method after the jump.

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trofie e pollo

We ate dinner like grown-up people last night, with two forks and a knife and a change of plates and everything. First we had trofie (more on that in a minute) with last summer’s frozen pesto, and then we had a rosemary-roasted chicken and some long-braised romano beans, also frozen from the summer garden.

Green beans are the one vegetable I don’t mind cooked drab and slippery-tender - braised in plenty of fruity olive oil and the liquid contained in one or two home-canned tomatoes, they become deep and mellow-tasting. A nice long note of deepest summer - most welcome in dreary March.

More about trofie after the jump.

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roast chicken and bread salad

Marcy came to dinner on Sunday before the shoot. I had intended to make a tomato tart with some roasted romas, but had a tart crust fail of epic proportions - twice. With a pound of butter in the trash, for snacks we assembled some of T’s new pugliese, pickled beans, piave cheese, lemony olives, and some fast-fast-fast almonds roasted with rosemary and salt.

And then Judy Rogers’ bread salad with roast chicken, which always goes off well, looks great, and feels right at any time of year with seasonal greens.

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