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The Unnatural Cook

“a chronicle of weekly meal plans from someone who can't just throw a meal together”

Category Archives: Chicken

May 6, 2012 Week 16: Thursday Night

This is an old standby that I haven’t made in a while: Yellow rice w/Chorizo & Chicken. It was the best one I’ve ever made and I attribute that to the blog – I was able to adjust the recipe now that I’ve learned more about myself as a cook.

First, I finally broke the habit of trying to cook meat and vegetables that cook at varying rates together! So I cooked the meats separately, set them aside then cooked the vegetables. It was relaxed and actually, strangely, takes less time than trying to cook them together because I cook each item at a higher heat for less time rather than forcing myself to keep turning down the heat because something is burning and something else isn’t cooked enough!

Second, I got the family size Goya Yellow Rice box because I had a note on the recipe to double the rice. That also made for really nice proportions. Finally, I improvised (totally out of character for an Unnatural Cook) and threw in some leftover green olives I had. The olives plus some Louisana hot sauce and we had a nice little picante thing happening.

 

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April 26, 2012 Week 15: Wednesday Night

This is not the best dish I’ve ever cooked but its one of the ones I’m most proud of. It sort of makes me realize how much my confidence as a cook has grown since I began this blog mishegas. For lack of a better name (and because I love my son and this is what he named it) I present to you Test Taking Pasta.

Test Taking Pasta is this weeks “surprise meal.” The one where I get inspired by ingredients at the store. It’s called Test Taking Pasta merely because this is the week of the state math tests. The inspiration was actually last Saturday’s meal of garlic broccolini and chicken kebabs: my daughter pointed out that it would make a good pasta dish. I thought the asparagus looked nice so I added that to the mix along with wine, shallots, garlic and leftover onion.

It’s really the technique I like that I came up with. I roasted the broccoli and asparagus together with tons of minced garlic. I overcooked the vegetables a bit because I started them too early but my family is a fan of blackened vegetables so no one was disappointed about that besides me – I’m the only one who saw them while they were still beautifully green. While the vegetables were roasting I cooked the chicken in very small very thin strips, high heat, salt & pepper. Then I took out the chicken & sauteed the shallots and onion. I added more minced garlic at the end then deglazed with white wine and returned the chicken to the pan. While the pasta water was boiling I kept the chicken and onions warming in the oven with the vegetables. When the pasta was cooked I threw it all together and added parmesan.

I think the Test Taking name should stay. Maintaining this blog has been a test of my resolve, writing when I’m not sure what the hell I’m doing has been a test of my character, making meals up has been a test of my willingness to fail. The state may not be testing the kids in the most meaningful way but it hasn’t quelled their love of learning and that’s the thing that counts.

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April 23, 2012 Week 15: Monday Night

When we’re not lying ourselves, our children are making liars out of us. I just visited a friend with a new baby today who, though she has been yelling her head off for the past eight weeks, played the role of angelic cherub quite convincingly.

Sometimes I look at the blog and think – it’s making a liar out of me. I was always taught that lying was a bad thing. But I suppose it depends on the lie. A lie that’s told well enough, and often enough, and contains a portion of the truth can be very convincing. It can even become the truth if you tell it enough. It becomes your story of yourself.

The thing about the blog is that even I couldn’t help noticing it was telling a different story than I was. The pictures were so pretty – the food so tasty – how could it all be the product of someone who hated to cook? The blog gave me a different way to see something I didn’t know needed to be reframed.

Now how to connect that thought to mole is really beyond me. I’m just going to look at the beautiful, dark sauce and feel proud that I got another meal on the table be thankful for the family I shared it with.

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April 23, 2012 Week 14: Saturday Night

In an attempt to make up for a vegetable-less meals this week we had a four vegetable meal! We made zatar chicken kebabs (vegetables 1 & 2 – onion and red pepper) with cucumber salad (3) & garlic broccolini (4). The broccolini was an impulse purchase at the store. I’ve learned to follow those impulses lately instead of ignoring them. It’s the only way to move from Unnatural Cook to Natural Cook.It is bizarre to have to “learn” to “follow your instincts” its supposed to be, well, instinctual. But there it is.

I’m one to believe in the power of skill over talent so I’m willing to do what it takes. This time it took buying the broccolini first and then figuring out what to do with it. Which turned out to be blanch it for two minutes then saute it in a pile of minced garlic. My one mistake was not letting the garlic brown long enough before I put the broccolini in the pan. I didn’t realize how much water it would release, thereby turning my saute into a sort of unwanted steam. Blanched garlic doesn’t pack quite the kick that fried garlic does, but no one complained.

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April 12, 2012 Week 13: Wednesday Night

I used to be really daunted by this chilaquiles recipe – so many steps & bowls & ingredients halved and mixed with other ingredients. But now that I’m thinking about cooking differently – trying to understand technique – I was able to simplify it for myself. The recipe is by Grace Parisi from Food & Wine. I cut out the sour cream & the scallion from the original recipe and added an onion. I do not cook the sauce as she does and I use more chips. I rewrote the recipe, breaking it down into sections that help me understand the process and thereby feel like less of a slave to the directions. The changes have made it quicker and less stressful to prepare and somehow I’ve convinced my daughter, the last hold out, of its merit. For me this is true comfort food. Basically warm, flavorful mush. My son calls it the soggy chip thing which is just about right.

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April 9, 2012 Passover Weekend: Saturday Night

Saturday dinner was another family favorite of the Kaplans (and now mine) Chicken Marbella.

Chicken Marbella is a Silver Palate Recipe, those ladies who, in the eighties, made sun dried tomatoes and tarragon part of every day cooking. I never bought into the tarragon, but I was a sun dried tomato fiend and that particular ingredient has always marked, for me, a change in the American palate. The eighties were the decade when the tomato became the pomodoro and “macaroni” which my mother purchased from the fine people at Mueller’s, turned into “pasta” that retained its Italian name: penne or fusilli or, when we became more daring, orecchiette or orzo. “Gourmet food” became the signifier for “good food.” Regular home chefs started getting fancy; in our house, we breaded our chicken with a pecan crust and served it with mustard cream sauce.

Chicken Marbella is Roasted Chicken with green olives & prunes. Deb served it with quinoa (Kosher for Passover, who knew? It’s a grass not a grain!) and a salad of mixed greens, beets and avocado. I must invite myself more frequently to Vermont.

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April 9, 2012 Passover Weekend: Saturday Lunch

Because I am a selfish woman, it was not enough that I should be cooked for on Passover, I also had a secret hope that over the weekend, I would also be served Deb’s famous Mediterranean Roast Chicken & Vegetable Salad. I was not disappointed. This is a huge crowd pleaser for a huge crowd. It can be made in advance and keeps well for snacking, noshing and sending home with greedy guests who keep asking for more.

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April 7, 2012 Week 12: Wednesday Night

Chicken Indienne, Basmati Rice Pilaf & Roasted Cauliflower.

Another meal planned for quick and easy to get done after the kids get home from school. Indienne was from the freezer, and now, even the pilaf which I used to find intimidating is becoming something I can do almost by heart. Just have to remember the strange ratio of 1 1/2 cups of rice to 2 1/4 cups of water and I almost have the technique down.

The cauliflower couldn’t be easier. One or two heads of cauliflower cut into florets. Olive oil, salt, bake at 450° for an hour. 1/2 way through I check, stir and often add more olive oil. When finished, inhale.

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April 2, 2012 Week 12: Monday Night

Making the beans tonight and thinking about the corn avocado and mango salsa I was going to make up myself, got me thinking about memorizing. I basically know how to make the beans because I’ve memorized the steps. Lately I’ve begun trying to memorize recipes because it dawned on me when I memorize a recipe it teaches me not only how to make that dish, but how to cook. Memorization is a form of internalizing knowledge so that it becomes part of you in a way that you don’t really realize until, say, you go to grad school and someone points it out.

Last week in my literature seminar, the instructor was horrified to learn how few of us (myself absolutely included) had any prose at all memorized. When forced, I could come up only with the opening lines to Dante’s Inferno, in italian, which I misquoted horribly. The correct lines would have been: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, or, In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood. We won’t go into what I actually said, we will settle for the fact that it was a fitting two lines of poetry for a middle-aged woman feeling out of her depth.

But my instructor was not appeased. “What will you do if you’re thrown in jail?” he inquired of us with genuine concern. He was right. What would I do? But more importantly, how could any self-respecting grad student such as myself not have made it a point to internalize the very best of the language I purported to write in? And so he set us the task of memorizing an entire page of prose which is much harder than it sounds. Easier, were the two lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay I’d wished I’d remembered in class: Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand / come and see my shining palace built upon the sand.

I am still working on the prose, the opening to Man in the Holocene, by Max Frisch. “It should be possible to build a pagoda of crispbread…” I am hooked now, on memorizing prose, hoping that it will do for me creatively on the page what memorizing recipes is doing for me creatively in the kitchen.

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March 28, 2012 Week 11: Mon & Tue Night

It has been a week of trading children with friends while the adults rush around doing adult things. On Monday, I hosted the kids and made  Oven Baked BBQ Chicken and baked potatoes. Tuesday night was my turn to rush around and my children were fed without any help from me!

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March 24, 2012 Week 11: Friday Night

I made up my own Thai Green Curry dish. Me. The Unnatural Cook.

It was inspired by the whole making Chicken Indienne is the same thing as making Tortilla Soup thing from last Tuesday. I really owe it to my daughter who convinced me a mere two months ago to challenge myself to make something up from what was in the pantry. Now there’s no stopping me.

The curry came out pretty well – it smelled fabulous but didn’t taste quite as good as it smelled. Not that the flavor wasn’t good, it was just weaker than I expected. I think next time I’ll add a third tablespoon of green curry paste. Here’s how I did it: I cut an eggplant into cubes and roasted it at 450° for one hour. Meanwhile, I browned 2 packages of boneless chicken thighs in olive oil. I removed them from the pot and sauteed one small diced onion. (Not too long, because I learned my lesson from Carbonara Night). Then I added 2 T. of green curry paste. I cooked the onion with the curry paste for one or two minutes and added chicken stock and coconut milk and returned the chicken to the pot. Then I simmered the chicken for about 40 minutes, uncovered. While the chicken was simmering I cut up one red pepper, one green pepper and trimmed a large bunch of string beans. I added them to the chicken for the last 10 minutes of cooking and put the lid on to steam them. Oh, and stirred in the roasted eggplant too. At the very end I tore up some fresh basil leaves and mixed them into the curry.

I think I cooked the chicken a bit too high because I was trying to get the sauce, which was very thin, to thicken. It never got any thicker, but the chicken did get a bit stringy which means it was overcooked. (Don’t think I knew this – it was my husband who explained it.) Next time I’ll simmer it lower, for less time & keep it covered like I do with the Indienne. I served it with Jasmine rice which, disappointingly, tasted exactly like regular rice. I expected something all fragrant and flowery. But that’s just quibbling. All in all it was an extraordinary success.

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March 18, 2012 Week 10: Sunday Night

I cooked Chicken Indienne using the recipe in a  different way than I usually do. Usually, I take plastic sleeve with the recipe out of my recipe notebook, (see: Meal Plan 101) prop it up on the toaster and follow it, line by line, while I’m cooking.

This time, I read the recipe before I cooked it and closed the notebook. My intention was to learn how to make it without having to refer to the recipe. It’s a recipe of my mother-in-law’s and I really like certain things about it. For instance, she gives nice proportions for flour, salt & pepper when dredging and browning the chicken. Reading it to memorize it made me read the recipe differently. It allowed me to make a mental note of the order in which she does the obvious stuff (brown chicken, saute onions, add spices, chicken stock & cream), and to focus on memorizing the few measurements I wanted to get right: salt, pepper, curry, candied ginger. I’m pretty sure I could make the whole recipe next time without looking.

By all accounts this was my best batch ever of Chicken Indienne. I don’t think it was a coincidence. I think I have finally learned to pay attention while cooking in a way that takes advantage of all my senses and does not rely solely on sight: ie, my ability to see a recipe.

Now the pilaf recipe, on the other hand, came out of the notebook while I was cooking. This is a Cooks Illustrated Rice Pilaf recipe that is so delicious and so absolutely reliable that I wasn’t going to do any guessing. However, I think I could memorize it too and I did, at least, perform the multi-step process with more ease than is customary.

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March 16, 2012 Week 10: Thursday Night

Last night I accidentally cooked Zatar Chicken Kebabs for a vegetarian, but luckily, I served it with greek salad so she did not go home hungry.

My salad eating friend was kind enough to trade food for babysitting and my husband and I went to the movies –  a documentary about Gerhardt Richter. I was curious to see the famous painter at work – something told me there would be a lesson for a writer in it. I was not disappointed.

Richter makes his paintings in stages. Working on two huge canvases at once he first uses a brush to cover them with large swaths of color. Then, the seventy-nine year old gentleman takes a squeegee as tall as he is and covers his creation from top to bottom, burying most of what lies underneath. He does this over and over, changing colors, changing directions, changing his pace, his angle, using his full body weight to obliterate and create, obliterate and create over and over again. It was like watching somebody dance a painting into existence.

Richter had the confidence to let each layer disappear, knowing it could never be recreated. Destruction is part of creation. Change an trust are essential components of art making. I will tack the postcard of his giant white canvas above my desk to remind myself not to be afraid to attack what I’ve already created until it can get no better.

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March 10, 2012 Week 9: Saturday Night

Green Enchiladas & John’s Fried Zucchini. My 85 year old aunt came to dinner and brought a bottle of French wine to go with it. Everyone ate too much and nobody minded.

I tried to show her the blog but she doesn’t really use computers. She was a book designer at Random House for many years and says that cookbooks are the only books that still make money. She does not like that I put my recipes online and she does not like seeing people reading Kindles on the subway. But that doesn’t mean she has given up learning new things. She attends more free movies, concerts, dance performances and art exhibits than anyone else I know. And she finds them all without the benefit of Google. Technology may change how we gather and share information, but it doesn’t make us want to learn: that’s built into our operating systems.

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March 3, 2012 Week 8: Friday Night

Two new recipes: Lemon Chicken & Sauteed Jerusalem Artichokes.

Both represent a bit of changing of the ways caused by the blog. The chicken because I made an effort to plan based on what was leftover – some unused chicken legs in the freezer. The Jerusalem Artichokes because I saw them in the store last week and wrote it down on my meal plan thinking I could try to find a recipe for them for the following week. Sort of a baby step toward being inspired by ingredients while I’m shopping.

Both recipes are keepers. I did burn the chicken at the last minute by putting it in the broiler to crisp the skin and then forgetting about it. It wasn’t ruined, just slightly to the wrong side of charred.

The Jerusalem Artichokes were another Jamie Oliver recipe. I like the way he writes his recipes: the directions are clear enough so that the food turns out, but free enough so that you feel like you’re really cooking, not following instructions. I realize that contradicts everything I thought I wanted in the kitchen when I started the blog. But now that the blog has forced me to see that cooking is easier when you understand what you’re doing instead of when you’re following rules – I’m also free to see that certain recipes can actually teach you to become a more confident cook.

In other words, the Unnatural Cook is discovering she has an interest in becoming a Natural Cook after all….

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February 19, 2012 Week 7: Saturday Night

You will never see a roast chicken on these pages. There is something about roast chicken that, well, grosses me out. I know it is a staple in most households because it’s easy and healthy, but not in mine. So I thought I should have my own chicken staple: kebabs. They could be broiled in bad weather & grilled in good. They are healthy and fast.

I chose a Mark Bittman recipe off the internet from How to Cook Everything. I find him a little fussy (he has too much time and interest for the kitchen, I have not enough of either) but the technique seemed good. First of all, he used boneless thighs which I thought was brilliant – won’t dry out, more flavor. The recipe called for sumac, a lemony middle eastern spice. My grocery store didn’t have sumac but they had something called Zaa’tar: a mixture of sumac, salt, thyme & sesame. The first three of those ingredients were in the Bittman recipe so I though it would be a perfect way to simplify the process. The one weird thing the recipe did was call for two onions : one to marinate with (then discard) and another to cook with. Why use two onions? Fussy. I followed the recipe (because that’s who I am) but I won’t next time. One onion for both jobs.

I served the kebabs with a second new recipe, wild mushroom rice pilaf from Real Simple. Ridiculous good.

The kebabs are (as my mother-in-law would say) “a keeper.” I have found my chicken staple and I’m already dreaming of an Indian version – broil the kebabs and find a way to make an easy tikka masala sauce. I think it’s a good sign, a basic technique that inspires me. This is the new me talking, the one who may be ready to allow some natural cook behaviors to replace her unnatural ways….

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February 8, 2012 Week 5: Tuesday Night

I’m not sure how we’d get through the week without mexican food. Mole was the first spicy food the kids liked and when they did, we knew we could live with them for a very long time. We are dedicated to La Poblanita, a brand of mole sold in deli containers at our local bodegas. We usually buy the traditional chile & chocolate mole but recently we saw that they also sell Pipian – pumpkin seed mole. Pipian is something we already eat – the super market brand, Doña Maria. The bodega variety is much easier to use, it starts out the consistency of a very thick smoothie and slips right into the slow cooker. The Doña Maria starts out like a rock – I have to dig it out of the glass jar with a spoon and dissolve it in boiling water in order to get it to turn into sauce before I can put it in the crockpot. Turns out the two Pipans taste quite different. The La Poblanita was much spicier and had an almost citrusy flavor. I sort of messed it up by adding too much stock to the crockpot so the sauce was too thin in the end. Next time, I might do it on the stovetop. I could even bake the chicken first…

We had black beans & rice to go with it. The beans area wonderful recipe that my husband John created. I measured out the spices so I could include the recipe. Normally I just shake! Very natural cook of me.

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January 30, 2012 Week 4: Monday Night

Oven BBQ’d chicken. Most excellent. I found the recipe (technique really) online on a website called The Hungry Mouse. It gives very detailed instructions for a very simple technique. I liked seeing the step by step photos before I tried it out & she explains the reasoning behind the technique. I did have to rewrite the recipe so I could print it out and have an easy version to follow in the kitchen. The basic idea is to sear the chicken legs in a pan before baking them in the oven on 375˚ for 50 minutes. You baste both sides in BBQ sauce once before they go into the oven and once 15 minutes into the cooking. I added my own touch and broiled them for two minutes at the end to crisp the skin.

The combination of chicken and the vegetables worked out well because I was able to cook the vegetables (corn, tomatoes, onion) in the same pan I’d used to sear the chicken. I had enough time to make the side dish and clean up all of yesterday’s dishes while the chicken was cooking. This was luck, not good planning – I didn’t know how I was going to make the BBQ chicken in the oven before I looked it up online. The only thing that went wrong(ish) is that it wasn’t quite enough food. We were all snacking on almonds & clementines when the meal was over. I’m sort of still hungry. The leftover french toast from brunch yesterday is looking good…

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January 22, 2012 Week 3: Sunday Night

There are certain meals that become my husband John’s domain and I have a tendency to keep them that way for as long as possible. I think every married person does this to some extent – consciously doesn’t learn how to do something so they won’t be required to do it in the future. Tonight was only the second time we’ve made Pasanda Kebabs but I have already filed them under the category of things that John does, not me. The rice pilaf he made used to be filed there too but I eventually learned to make that and now take a perverse pleasure in the fact that I can. The kebab recipe is from Pakistan (via Saveur Magazine) and the marinade is a fascinating concoction of spices, yogurt, oil, lemon, and both cooked and raw onions. It’s delicious. I’m not sure how long I can fob my kebab responsibilities off on John, but one thing is for sure, it’s going to require that I learn how to use the grill – a task I’ve successfully avoided for twenty years. We even got a gas grill at the end of summer so I could learn but I managed to let the fall slip by and now it seems wrong to learn to grill in the snow. Maybe spring has the power to make me turn a leaf.

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January 10, 2012 Week 2: Tuesday Night


Week 2! It is very difficult for me to control the impulse to philosophize – it is, after all, my one week anniversary as the Unnatural Cook. Does that give me the right to look back and draw grand conclusions? If I were to indulge the impulse I’d say this: It’s hard to stay on top of all the cooking and cleaning that is necessary to keep a family running. I think what makes the blog such an exciting prospect is that it turns something that must be done, into an art form. After just one week of photographing and writing about my meal plan I am noticing the colors of the meals. When I look back over Week 1 there’s a lot of white. Where’s the green? We had salad and spinach and string beans but they’re not the featured items. Will taking these photos inspire me to make more vegetables? To think more about the colors on the plate? These are things real cooks think about, I know this. Will the blog turn me from an unnatural cook into a natural one? We’ll see….

Tonight’s dinner was Chicken Indienne. A great chicken curry recipe from my mother-in-law, Suzy Roach. It’s another meal from the freezer because on meal plan/shopping day I never want to cook. We always serve Indienne with a basmati rice pilaf recipe from Cooks Illustrated, one of the magazines we used to subscribe to before we had children and we had time for such things as cooking magazines. Maybe we will again when they go to college? Will there still be printed magazines? I hope so. Usually I make roasted cauliflower too but we just had cauliflower last week so I opted for frozen peas to get an easy vegetable in there. It wasn’t the best match, but it was green.

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