cooking with chicken

[calimac]

Since the addition of chicken to our household diet, I'm still figuring out just what to do with it. Used to be that, on the rare occasions I used a little chicken, I'd buy a can of cooked chicken for salads from the meat & fish aisle. But that was expensive, and the quality of the food has declined markedly over the years. Now I make it a habit that, whenever I have chicken on my own for lunch - I'm especially partial to the wonderfully tender grilled chicken from a supermarket near our old home (their secret, they once told me, is that they boil it, as if it were a bagel, before putting it on the grill) - I save the inner breast meat and take it home, cutting up and adding it to bulk up stovetop casseroles or such for dinner, the same or the next day. This suits me fine because I don't much care for the breast meat in whole chicken pieces, but it makes an excellent ingredient in something else.

Sometimes, though, there's a recipe that requires the chicken to be uncooked beforehand. For instance, with the aid of the seasonings to be found at the many fine Indian groceries around here, I've learned to make butter chicken from scratch, putting bliss on the face of my B. At first I bought what the supermarket calls "breast tenders", which can be added untouched. I have very old and sore memories of unsuccessful attempts to cut up raw chicken. But on my last occasion, much lower prices tempted me to buy a package of half-breasts. To my surprise it wasn't difficult to cut the inner breast meat out, and the remaining piles of skin and ribs with a little meat went back in the fridge, to be baked for my lunch the next day. (I'm the one who likes to savor the skin and munch on the bones. My favorite chicken piece, it will not surprise you, is the wing. Some critic once called the chicken wing "a little bag of bones." Yes! That's why it's so good.) Success, and I shall do this again.

There's also been advance on the veggie front. A short bike ride from here, I've learned from our neighborhood association, hidden in the back of the suburbs is a small educational farm that opens up for a couple hours in the afternoon three days a week to sell whatever produce they've harvested that day. I stopped by there yesterday and picked up some corn and green beans. My mother remembers from her midwestern childhood going out in the country and picking corn so sweet it could be eaten raw, on the spot. I tried munching on this freshly-picked (or so I'd been assured) corn raw without satisfactory results, but stripped from the cob it did cook up nicely along with the beans.

I'm not exactly sure what to call my favorite method of cooking vegetables. I put the vegetables in a pan with butter, but instead of sautéing them in an open pan, I cover it, turn the heat down, and essentially poach the veggies, except in a layer of butter instead of one of water. It's less work than sautéing and gives better results. Add a little seasoning (I have Italian and Provençal herbal mixes - which country do you feel like tonight?) and it's done.

Comments

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Did your mother grow up on the northern East Coast? Corn there is simply better.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Midwest. The corn belt. Well, near it.

But I will testify to eastern corn. I once had a crab feast on an island in the Chesapeake Bay. The crab was good (although I don't intend to try softshell crab again: it tastes like fingernails), but what I mostly remember is the sheer deliciousness of the accompanying corn, grown extensively in nearby fields. It was cooked, though.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of chicken wings myself. (Crispy chicken skin, yummmm.) Due to chicken being a traditional Friday night dinner food, I have a lot of chicken recipes, and due to hating to clean the stove, none of them require browning in advance! Unfortunately, Stephen dislikes chicken so most of these recipes are now going to waste...

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

I've got my own way of cooking vegetables that doesn't seem to have a name for it. Put 1/4 inch of water in a pan with some butter or oil, bring to a boil covered, add the vegetables, and sauté/stir fry/steam them covered, stirring a couple of times. It is very fast. If you get the amount of water right, there will be a very small amount left over than needs to be poured off. The veggies come out with just enough butter so they are tasty but not greasy. Compared to sautéing, it's faster and lighter, and the water prevents any burning. Compared to steaming it's faster, it brings out the colors of the veggies, and it avoids off flavors that can concentrate when steaming. When cooking very strongly flavored vegetables such as brussels sprouts, sometimes I will substitute the juice from 1/2 a lemon for some of the cooking water. That breaks down some of the bitterness, making the sprouts more mild and delicate.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Considering that you add water, and I don't, perhaps my method would strike your tastes as somewhat greasy. I don't find it so. There's usually a bit of butter sauce, flavored by the herbs, which I like.

But yes, my method needs to not cook for too long, or it will burn, and it also needs to be kept on low heat, or else it will fry instead of poach. Frying can be tasty (I make stirfry vegetables and rice often, using oil), but this is quite different.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that we've got all these cooking techniques that are somewhere inbetween the ones that have names.

[a-blue-moon-cat.livejournal.com]

Good fresh organic chicken tastes better than the regular stuff. I'm quite fond of baking it, mostly with lemon pepper, these days. I don't fry anymore--too fattening, but the crunchy skin is yummy. Another thing that I like to do is a chicken bake, with rice and butter and some cream of mushroom soup. But I prefer the leg and thigh to any other part. :) I find that the dark meat is superior in taste and tenderness to the white meat of the chicken, but others think just the opposite.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

White meat is often dry, but it depends on how you cook it. The dishes I'm talking about here are pan cooked with sauce or rice, and slow cooking is the answer. While I could do a certain amount of mixing when I'm adding small amounts of diced chicken to a recipe, dark meat fillets would be too strong and fatty for B's tastes.