Recipe Review: Chicken Stew

Ny Mag recently ran an article that asked three chefs to give recipes for better brown-bag lunches. As a dedicated lunch-bringer/cafeteria conversation-avoider I was interested to see what they would come up with.

First up was Floyd Cardoz of Tabla, a restaurant on Madison and 24th I've never eaten at, but now that I look at their tasting menu ($59 for three courses, awesome! Have I lived in NYC too long when that sounds cheap?) I would like to. Anyway, he offered up a curryish chicken stew that he recommended as good over rice or in sandwiches.



Second up was Ryan Skeen of Irving Mill with a chicken sandwich with horseradish mayo and tomato relish. Now. I love tomato relish, but am not huge on mayo so already this option is looking meh. Add into it the fact that you essentially have to make two things all you get out of it is a sandwich, well forget it.



Option three is from Ilene Rosen at City Bakery. Basically, a tin of smoked oysters (ew?) some stale bread and home-made slaw. Well I'm prejudiced against bakeries anyway for their crimes against desserts, and also this lunch looks lame.



So, Floyd, you are the winner. Let's see how it turned out:

Spiced Chicken Stew
Floyd Cardoz, Tabla
“This warms up well in the microwave with some rice, or makes a great filling for a sandwich or wrap. This recipe makes six servings—enough to get you through the week.”

4 tablespoons canola oil (I used vegetable oil.)
1 cinnamon stick
4 green cardamom pods
3 cloves
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
2 bay leaves
3 sprigs curry leaves (I don't know what these are, so I added curry powder)
6 shallots sliced (I never really know how much "one" shallot is...so I think I only ended up using two bulbs of one shallot)
1/2 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
4 cloves minced garlic
Chiles, with seeds, quartered (I used both jalapenos and some dried ones I always have hanging around)
1 teaspoon turmeric (I think the point of this spice is just to make everything in your kitchen yellow)
4 tablespoons semolina (uh...all purpose flour....seemed to work ok)
1 tablespoon ground black pepper
2 pounds boneless chicken, cubed (leg meat is preferable) (cubing chicken is really annoying, chickens are not square)
2 carrots, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 cup baby turnips (I couldn't find any turnip, let along baby ones, so I left this out)
1 cup cooked chickpeas
1 cup potatoes, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
2 cups chicken stock
Juice of 2 limes (Limes are hard to juice if you don't have a juice and are a wuss like me)
10 ounce can coconut milk

Salt the chicken and let it stand for 1 hour. In a pot, heat the canola oil and add the cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves; stir until the spices are fragrant (this seemed to not happen, even though all my spices were new. Maybe I have a cold I don't know about). Strain out the spices and tie them in a sachet. (I guess this is cheese cloth? That's what I used.) Pour the canola oil back into the pot, then add the mustard seeds and bay leaves. Add the curry leaves (or not), shallots, ginger, chiles (sic), and garlic. Cook for 10 minutes. Add the spice sachet and semolina (flour); cook for 3 to 4 minutes. Add chicken, vegetables, and stock, bring to a boil, then simmer for 10 minutes. Then add the lime juice and season. Add the coconut milk and simmer for 5 more minutes (I ended up simmering it a lot longer than this, maybe 15 minutes, before the veggies were actually cooked).

(And, oh, hey, when I am supposed to take out the spice satchel? And those bay leaves? Can't people choke on those? Nothing to say? Recipe over? All right.)

Rough Cost: $4.12 (yeah right! where are you shopping, Floyd? Wisconsin? The chicken alone was 3.25, then all the spices--which, since I just moved, I had to buy all of, then coconut milk, and veggies...sheesh. More like $15.)

Verdict: Ok, all bitching and veering from the recipe aside, this turned out really well. I've been eating it all week for lunch over rice, turning all my tupperware yellow, and really enjoying it. It's pretty quick to assemble if you subtract all the time I spent being grossed out while "cubing" chicken thighs. I want to try it in a toasted pita, but I think I'm too lazy to to go the store tonight and get one before I happily eat the final serving of this for lunch tomorrow. Oh, also, his estimate of six servings was surprisingly accurate!

Grade A-
Points taken off for lack of spiciness (maybe it was those missing curry leaves and shallots?) and some annoying things with the recipe, such as choking on bay leaves.


My lunch. I know it looks kind of unappetizing, but blame my phone's camera. You can see how yellow the tupperware is, though!

A Weekend of Eating: Part the Last

For this post, I'm skipping over a disappointing brunch at one of my FORMERLY favorite spots in the Slope, since it basically involved dry eggs and almost an hour of waiting for them. At one point my dad jokingly proposed asking the waiter if they needed any help in the kitchen--he was the breakfast cook at a priory a long, long time ago.

Yeah, so, we're ignoring that blemish on my weekend of eating, and jumping right into Meghan Presents: Dinner for Unpredictably Picky Parents.

My parents are, for the most part, adventurous eaters, but, like me, they both have their random things that they won't eat. Because of this, I submitted my menu ahead of time for approval from both parties.

Here it is:

The I'm Too Lazy to Make Appetizers Before Dinner Cheese Plate
Pork Chops with Sugar Snap Peas and Mint Julep Glaze
Caramelized Onion and Goat Cheese Corn Bread
Oh Shit I Forgot to Buy Ingredients for Dessert Chocolate Mousse

Initially when I sent my dad the menu he wasn't sure that corn bread would go, so I changed it to my Gruyere Mashed Potatoes with Tons of Garlic. However, he called me back two days later and changed his order back to cornbread.

I'm not super comfortable cooking meat, since I mainly learned to cook during my vegetarian years, and also because I rarely cook meat unless it's for a special occasion of some sort. Because of this, pork is one of my favorites to cook when I need to impress. Pork has a pretty wide range of doneness that you can get away with--from still pretty pink to cooked all the way through but still moist--before people start complaining, unlike beef or fish which can go from underdone to perfect to inedible in almost seconds.

I also thought my parents would appreciate the mint julep glaze since our house is a bourbon house and we also like horses--mint julep, Kentucky Derby, get it?

Anyway, so I started in on the goat cheese corn bread first, since that seemed pretty involved. It was the first recipe I had tried from Smitten Kitchen and I have to say I was impressed. The recipe was pretty specific, and had a few unnecessary or odd steps, but I thought I'd try being faithful for once, and it paid off. (Although I have to say that heating butter in the pan in the oven and then spreading it around with a pasty brush to coat the pan is pointless when you can just coat the thing with cold butter, but what do I know.)

The corn bread came out very nicely and was not dry at all. It does, however, involve a lot of time and a lot of ingredients, so be prepared.

I was also pleased with the pork chops: I'm always a fan of glazes instead of sauces, and you can't really go wrong with something made from bourbon and brown sugar. The snap peas cook right in this mixture (it has some beef broth in it for bulk), and so they soak in a lot of the great flavors. The snap peas, though they were perhaps a bit premature for truly seasonal cooking, were pretty crunchy, green, and flavorful, even when I snagged a few before dousing them in bourbon.

The mousse was not entirely....a mousse. It kind of ended up somewhere between a pudding and a mousse, I think because my chocolate was too cold when I was folding the egg whites in, and so no enough air ended up getting into it. It was however pretty delicious for something I scrounged up from the cupboards--random chocolate bar and left over eggs from something else--and I would totally recommend it for those times when too much day drinking makes you forget to buy the ingredients for an entire course.

All in all, I was happy with the way the meal turned out, and I think my parents were, too. I also think I did a good job of convincing them that staying out of midtown and, especially, eating in Brooklyn, is a non-Applebee's-loving tourist's best friend.

A Weekend of Eating: Part Two

My dad somehow has got it into his head that Brooklyn is filled with mobsters. I mean, I guess it used to be in the 80s--which was the last time he was here. Apart from an incident involving him saying "Bada Bing" over and over in a cab and, I think, almost getting shot by the cabbie who menacingly kept asking him to repeat it, with which he complied jovially now matter how many times my mom and I told him to shut up, these illusions of me living in mobster-ville are fine. The point is, he was really intent on eating some Italian food while in WASPy Brooklyn.

I was happy to comply, since one of my favorite restaurants in New York just happens to be Italian and within "tourist walking distance" from my house (i.e. two blocks). Convivium Osteria is a weird little place on Fifth Ave. in North Slope. The front windows have a bunch of crap in them (wine barrels, wooden somethings, fake plants) so you can't really see in. While at first I was mystified by this, I get it now. Going to Convivium Osteria is like leaving Park Slope Brooklyn completely and entering some sort of Pan-Mediterranean paradise, and you really wouldn't want to spoil that by seeing some Park Slope mom roll by in Yoga pants.


Crap in the windows

First off, the host will speak Italian to you, whether you understand it or not. The waiter will joke with you in Portuguese, whether you understand it or not. Luckily, I have a vague grasp of both of these languages, but, even if you don't, you'll be fine. Just pretend they're saying whatever a waiter speaking in English would at that time in service.

There are three separate rooms in Convivium: the one by the door, the back room which is like a barn or something, and the wine cellar. The only room I don't like is the one by the door. But that's a thing I have. I've sat in the back before, and it was really cool--very rustic. However, we have a barn at home that my parents can go sit in whenever, so I figured the wine cellar was best.


The front room

Anyway, the food at this place is ridiculous. For an appetizer we had a huge pot of clams (cherry stone according to my mother) with chorizo (a family favorite). The broth was pleasantly spicy, and very buttery (I suspect) and supremely delicious. We were sad that we had acted like idiot Americans and eaten all our damn bread so we didn't have anything with which to sop up that glorious broth (in our defense, the olive oil was really good).


Good olive oil

For wine we had a Spanish Rioja that was around $37, I think. Basically, mom said "let's get a Rioja" and I said "ok" and the waiter just brought whatever with nothing more than an "I will get you wine." And then he laughed at my dad because he obviously had no choice in the matter. This is a great place if you are clueless with wine or even good with it, but trusting: just order your mains or whatever and tell the waiter you don't know what to get. With the endearing brusqueness of Europeans, they will just bring you something. And it will rule.

For said mains, I had Braised rabbit with prosciutto, olives and capers over polenta triangles (I'd never had rabbit before), my mother had Braised Berkshire pork baby back ribs with polenta (she's never had polenta before! what to they eat up in the great white north?), and dad had braised duck leg with black cherries over potatoes (they're big on braising here, and so am I). Sounds great, right? They were.


Ribs.

For dessert we had flourless chocolate cake (gooey and so good) but the real stars were the dessert wines. Yet again we just asked for dessert wines and they came back with something great. I had a port of some kind that was wonderfully full of stone fruits, and mom had...well...she went nuts over this: a 1927 dessert wine that seriously tasted so richly of raisins I couldn't believe there were any grapes in it. She (a raving raisin fanatic, apparently) kept the bottle (not that she drank the whole thing, just that her glass happened to be the last one out of it) after asking, of course. Dad just chilled out, extremely happy with the Rioja that he had no hand in picking.

We left happy and full, and I really cannot recommend this restaurant more. I know it looks weird and stodgy from the outside, but it honestly provides one of the best experiences I have had dining in NYC. Seriously.

A Weekend of Eating: Part One

My parents were in town to visit me this weekend, and, since they certainly contributed to my passion for eating and drinking, I thought I would share some of what we had.

They rolled in at about 12:30 on Saturday afternoon after driving down from Massachusetts. Immediately, they asked me "what do you got?"--family code for "surrender your booze." Anyway, by 1:30 we had polished off a bottle of chardonnay that I just happened to have chilling in the fridge (and thank goodness--I was otherwise out of anything to drink except vermouth and tap water).

Our first meal was at this cute French place called Le Gamin in Prospect Heights--we settled on this after being turned away from a few other lunch spots on Vanderbuilt that were too busy. Now that I look at the website, it looks like there are three locations of this thing. They must be doing something right! Anyway, we had to wait a bit, as is to be expected on a Saturday afternoon, but not too long. We had a bottle of Muscadet that we all enjoyed (wines were the miracle of the weekend since we usually vehemently disagree on them, but we kept getting lucky). I had a tuna sandwich on baguette which was nothing to go crazy over, but the baguette was pleasantly sweet and was perfectly crusty. My mom had eggs Le Gamin, which was eggs in ratatouille over a shredded potato cake. She liked the ratatouille, but was disappointed with how dry the potato thing was. On a more enthusiastic note, my dad had Croque Madame....and damn, it was amazing. The bread was Texas toast sized and very soft, the ham was perfectly salty, and instead of putting the egg inside the sandwich, as I have usually seen it, the fried egg was on top of the sandwich over a bonus slice of cheese. This made the whole thing ooey gooey and wonderful when you cut into the still runny yolk. All in all, the waiters, etc. were all very friendly and the food was solidy good. I had never been to this place before, but certainly took note of it as a place to recommend to friends.

Le Gamin:


My short attention span is making the task of writing all this out at once, so stay tuned for more eating, drinking and swearing with the parents.

Irish Food

Let's be serious, people, St. Patrick's Day is pretty horrendous. I had sort of forgotten how bad it really is since I have spent almost all of my Paddy's Days either at home or in Ireland--where at least the drunken idiots are Irish.

The reason I usually go home is because my father's birthday is the day before St. Patrick's. His birthday occurs on this day because my grandmother drove to the hospital and demanded induced labor on March 16th because she was afraid that if she had her child on March 17th she would be forced by the Pope or Michael Collins or someone to name her child Patrick. Apparently, she hates the name Patrick. Enough to have induced labor. Yes, everyone in my family is crazy.

Anyway! So I had the utter joy this year of spending Paddy's Day in New York. Luckily, for most of the day I was hidden away in my office with no window. However, around seven o'clock a friend of mine and I decided to see if we could somehow defy logic and have a few drinks in a moderately crowded bar to celebrate her not having to go to Jury Duty that day. Long story short, everywhere was awful and crowded with Irish Americans celebrating whatever scrap of their DNA is Irish and wearing weird hats and left over Mardi Gras beads. We did find a place that was I guess vaguely Irish and had a table or two open, and I sat down to have two (bad, watery) Guinnesses and (here's where we get to the food part) a tuna wrap (also bad).

A Tuna Wrap?! On Paddy's Day? Yes. The truth is, and I know this is a shocker: Irish food is bad. Irish food is bad in America, and even worse in Ireland (well, except for full Irish Breakfast--delicious). And some of the stuff isn't even Irish:

Exhibit One and Only that I can think of off the top of my head: Every year, at some point, I get a lecture from my dad about how corned beef isn't Irish, and as far as I know he's right: the only place I know of that they serve it in Ireland is in Temple Bar in Dublin (tourist trap hell) and probably in some terrible place next to the Blarney Stone. Corned beef is, at best, Irish American. As in, when the Irish came to America, lived in slums and didn't have fridges, they ate corned beef because it was cheap. Newsflash, most people have electricity now. We don't have to eat that kind of thing anymore.

From my experience, on Paddy's Day, the tradition Irish meal is either fried chicken or lamb shawarma, or bad pizza, or nothing (Guinness is pretty filling...and it reminds us of how our ancestors starved in the famine--zing!)

Now, if you want to be genteel about it, Ireland really does have some wonderful food (see Anthony Bourdain's Ireland episode) and to celebrate you could have a salmon fillet, or a rack of lamb (lamb tastes way better in Ireland, btw. If you think you don't like it...try a grass-fed guy) as my grandmother recommends. Along with the traditional Manhattan cocktail taken directly after church. It is a religious holiday, you know.

Make Bittman: Cassoulet

I have a soft spot for the stew-y, rustic foods of Italy and France (sorry Spain--but paella? ew). There's something very comforting about these foods, though, believe me, it has nothing to do with childhood memories (we ate mostly Mexican food at my house...don't ask). I was excited to see, then, a recipe from Mark Bittman for cassoulet--a rustic dish with beans and meat and veggies--that didn't require the purchase of 800 kinds of meat. This is a economic crisis, people, and I am lazy and had already gone to the butcher once that weekend. In any event, here is my report on how my attempt at making it went.

First up, here's the original recipe.

Ignore the part about helping kids. I didn't do any of that.

Ingredients:
I used just a pound of sweet Italian sausage since I don't have duck confit sitting around, leeks not onions, garlic, carrots, celery (though now I have a ton left over...grr), zucchinis not cabbage, a can of crushed tomatoes (I can never find chopped for some reason), parsley, thyme, bay leaves, canned cannelloni beans (I am not yet converted to this "cook your own beans" thing), some wine and stock, red pepper flakes and ground red pepper (I didn't have cayenne for some reason--shocking).

Here are all my ingredients in a pile:



Ok step one was to brown the meat, which I started to do, realized that they would probably stick to the pot if there wasn't some fat in it, added olive oil, and then smoke went everywhere. Of course. Good thing my roommates and I took all the smoke detectors down for just this reason. Always practice fire safety! Anyway, the sausages were nice and brown and the air was nice and smoky so I took them out and laid them aside. Then I added butter to the pan, just for fun.

Ok so I chopped everything up, exhibiting some wicked Jacques Pepin knife skills which you can't tell from this, but I swear it took all of a minute to do.




Then I threw everything in the pan and added more olive oil, salt and pepper, and stirred it for a while, added the parsley, thyme and tomatoes...and eventually the bay leaves once I remembered them. Whoops. I added the beans and sausages and set it to boiling. You can tell I'm kind of making a mess.




So, I guess I was supposed to add broth or wine or something at some point...it wasn't entirely clear...I just kinda added some wine and stock when things started to look a little thick. Not too much wine though since I wanted some for me. Then, I took out the sausages and the bay leaves, which took a while because one of the bay leaves was hiding from me even though it was the size of my head. I chopped the sausage into bite-size pieces and proceeded to try and give this thing some heat. Well, after all of the ground red pepper I had left AND a good douse of red pepper flakes went in and it STILL wasn't spicy, I just gave up and realized I should have just bought some freakin' cayenne. Whatever. So here it is! I even made it pretty for it's close-up and used my real camera:




Incredibly, this somehow only took me an hour to make. I have no idea how since I usually add another 45 minutes to whatever cooking time is given (40 mins here) for wandering around and getting distracted by various things.

Verdict: Success with a few caveats that are entirely my fault. 1) Do make the effort to get a variety of meats. Don't feel too embarrassed to buy one pork chop from the cute butcher guy. 2) Buy cayenne. 3) Sausages don't really need olive oil poured on them to brown up. I'm just crazy.

Cooking Magazines

While I know there are more pressing things to worry about in the current economic shitshow, one of the ones that keeps me up at night is the possible (probable?) demise of cooking magazines. I mean, I love the internet as much--if not more--than anyone, but there's something about a cooking magazine that makes its presence, as a complete thing you can purchase, have delivered, hold in your hand and cart around with you, special. While I have New York Times piling up in my entryway--nothing in there that isn't just as well on the web (except the crossword)--I eagerly await the arrival of my cooking magazines. In proof: earlier this month I was, probably inordinately, angry with myself because I thought I had drunkenly discovered and subsequently lost my newest issue of Bon Appetit. Turns out that was just a bad dream, and it arrived safe and sound a week later. Phew!

I mean, sure, you can get all the recipes you want on epicurious.com and other, less trustworthy sites (I don't care how Mary from Montana makes chicken, bigoven.com), and, sure, you can even print them out for that real world effect, but there's nothing like a couple of pages of Gourmet stuck together with tomato sauce to let you know that, if you can manage to pry the pages apart, there's a good recipe waiting for you on one of those pages. And, of course, who can ignore the joys of editorial food photography spreads: pies on chairs in the middle of a field or a pork loin inexplicably balanced on a porch railing. Sure the pictures might be online, but somehow, it's just not the same.

When I'm home, I love going through my mother's collection of these magazines from the eighties--if only for the abundance of ads for cigarettes (shocking!) and booze, and all the big hair. But I also like to see what she dogeared: Did she really intend to make that ridiculous cheese ball? Or was she just marking it to show to dad later for a laugh? More philosophically, they provide a more immediate and detailed account of what foods we ate and how--the minutiae of which is something that cookbooks cannot capture in the same way.

So please, oh captains of industry, though I know print media is allegedly going the way of the telegraph, dodo bird and marrying someone from your town, please keep cooking magazines alive--if only for future generations' amusement in our current cultural obsession with all things edible--and so they can laugh and ask themselves if we ever really made a tongue steak for valentines day.