Filipino Fondness

Last year, at the suggestion of a friend who has very good taste in literature (for “good” read “compatible with mine”), I read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. A good portion of the story takes place in Manila. I hadn’t thought too much about the Philippines prior to that, and while this was a work of fiction and not history, it was still an interesting introduction to that part of the world. And then I read about this pop-up brunch restaurant* called Maharlika, which serves Filipino cuisine. And then the New York Times Magazine ran a recipe for a traditional Filipino dish called chicken adobo.

So, taking a cue from the Times itself, I decided that you only need three sightings to call something a trend, and declared this the season of Manila. (oh, look! That makes four!)

When M. came over for dinner a few weeks ago, she graciously let me dictate the menu. The chicken is really impossibly easy. Dump some chicken thighs in a bowl/ziploc/tupperware with a mix of vinegar, soy sauce, coconut milk, and aromatics. Let it marinate as long as you like, then transfer to a large pot.

Simmer for a half-hour. Given the amount of vinegar in this marinade, your kitchen is going to smell very tangy, but that’s a good thing. Run the chicken under the broiler (skin-side up) and reduce the cooking liquid. Turn the chicken, baste it, broil some more, and then return to the pot for a few more minutes.

Serve, in this case, with pea shoot salad (dressed in sesame oil and rice vinegar) and corn chipotle soup.

For dessert, I recommend inviting M., who is known to be very adept at managing such things.

*A pop-up restaurant is this bizarre thing where a place that’s normally only open for dinner, in this case Resto Leon, lets a different crew take over for a part of the day when they’re generally closed, usually for a stretch of just a few months. I actually did something similar myself, on two occasions, cooking dinner in the no-longer-active kitchen at my neighborhood Irish pub uptown.

Fear of Filo

Several months ago, Moody Food asked me if there were any elements that would instantly turn me off from a recipe. There’s not much I don’t like to eat (except smoked fish, and caviar), but I said that I do shy away from deep-frying anything, because it’s such a hassle to clean up. (Guests at my 2006 Superbowl party might not be aware that, after making up some wings from a pretty amazing Emeril Lagasse recipe, I proceeded to spill the–thankfully cooled–cooking oil all over my kitchen floor, while trying to dispose of it responsibly.) And recipes that call for gelatin (though I do love Jell-o). I also will generally skip past anything that calls for puff pastry or phyllo dough. Partly this is because, if there’s crust involved, I want to make the dough myself. And partly it’s because phyllo is notoriously a pain in the ass. 

This week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe, a Moroccan kind of pot pie called chicken b’stilla, helped me get over my issues with phyllo. 

Chicken b’stilla is not a simple recipe. Most of the dishes we’ve made from this book so far have caused me to think, “Wow, that was much easier/faster/less complicated than I was expecting.” Not so here. The chicken thighs must marinate for an hour. Then they simmer for another hour. The cooking liquid must be reduced enormously, and then turned into a kind of savory custard with beaten eggs. You’ve got to shred the chicken. And then there’s the phyllo to deal with. Thankfully, you can take care of the inside part a day or two beforehand, which I did. So when C. and J. were coming up for dinner on Friday, I just had the assembly portion to manage. 

I know I have cooked with phyllo before, because I have memories of ripping the stuff and getting cranky that it was all smooshed together in the package, and probably throwing some kind of tantrum that the finished dish wasn’t beautiful. It was probably a baked brie, and I probably got over it as soon as I took a bite, because, honestly, it’s baked brie, and you can’t really do it wrong. This time, I took a lot of internet advice and let the package defrost in the fridge over the course of 2 days. Then I unrolled the sheets, placed a sheet of plastic wrap on top, and then a kitchen towel on top of THAT. All of which seemed to do the trick, because the sheets came apart nicely and I had very few rips as I brushed melted butter onto each individual one and laid it into the baking dish. So the answer to phyllo, it seems, is patience and butter. Words to live by, truly. 

Then it was a matter of spooning in the filling, and topping with another 4 sheets, also buttered, stacked on top of each other, and cut into a circle. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar, and bake until browned. I served it with an arugula salad from Bon Appetit, to which I forgot to add the mint. 

C.’s response: “There are no words.”

J. went back for thirds.

So in the end, I think this is not something to make very often, but only because of the prep time on the filling, not because of the dreaded phyllo. Bring on the puff pastry.

I Am a Lazy Person

For the month of November, participants in French Fridays with Dorie are allowed to post about the selected recipes in whatever order we like.  As I had a small dinner party this week, the Roast Chicken for les Paresseux seemed the thing to do.

(Served alongside Quick Sauteed Collard Ribbons, from Fine Cooking via The Bitten Word.)

Les paresseux are lazy people, and as it happens, the recipe is strikingly similar to my own standard roast chicken recipe. It involves a bird (larger than what I’d usually cook, admittedly), some bread, some herbs and garlic, salt, pepper, olive oil, and a hot oven.

Bing, bam, boom. A little trussing, a hot oven, and there’s dinner. My two usual variations on this involve either lining the roasting pan with bread (resulting in deconstructed stuffing–Best Thing Ever), or with chopped root vegetables (resulting in a slightly more healthful side dish–it’s still soaked in chicken fat but it’s vegetables, at least). Dorie says to start with the bread, and add the veggies around the edges partway through cooking.

Here is the brilliant lesson I learned this week: cook your chicken in an oven-safe pot. My roasting pan (which doubles as a lasagne dish and sometimes a brownie pan for double batches) is not for use on the stovetop, so roasting the chicken in a pot meant that I could do something with the resulting jus without having to dirty another pot. And while I am not a fan of real gravy, I looooove cooking down the jus that’s left in the pan with (as Dorie suggests) some white wine.

I don’t think of roast chicken as a difficult dish to make, so I found myself brushing off the compliments of my dinner guests (who helped me demolish the poor bird). But I did enjoy the meal quite a lot.

Chicken Soup with Rice (Noodles)

This week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe is for Vietnamese Spicy Chicken Noodle Soup.

It is a surprisingly simple preparation; the only difficult part is having your fridge and pantry stocked appropriately. I used my favorite chicken stock concentrate, which is one of the few convenience foods you’ll always find in my kitchen, and truthfully one of the only shortcuts I regularly take. I do have a growing stash of chicken bones in the freezer that will be turned into homemade stock as soon as they hit critical mass, but even then, I’ll just have enough for a big pot of risotto. So it’s with only a little embarassment that I reveal my dependence on “Better Than Bouillon,” as it’s called.

Other than a good quantity of chicken stock, you’ll need a pretty wide assortment of spices (star anise was the one I had to buy), fish sauce, and a few fresh ingredients. One of the flavorings for the soup broth is the stems of a bunch of cilantro, which is not something I’d seen before. (Dorie says to wrap them in cheesecloth along with some coriander and other things, but I’m more likely to have teabags for loose-leaf tea than cheesecloth, and I’ve discovered that they are incredibly useful for this sort of thing. That’s what I do now for even a traditional bouquet garni.) Also, coconut milk, garlic, ginger, and onion.

Basically, though, it’s a “dump everything in a pot and simmer” recipe (my favorite kind). Once it’s simmering, add a chicken breast and poach until it’s just cooked through.

Cook up some rice noodles separately, shred the chicken, and combine everything together. Finish it off with lime juice, and the chopped leaves from the cilantro, and then garnish however you like. I added in some julienned carrots and sliced red peppers, because it seemed like a good idea, drizzled in some hoisin, and topped with some sliced basil leaves.

Judging by the amount of liquid going in, I was skeptical of the “serves 4” annotation in the book, but honestly, it’s so damn good that 4 meals is basically how long it lasted me this week.

Yes, I Stir Fry

Last year, Stoneledge provided us with a sort of ridiculous amount of cabbage. Napa cabbage, bok choy, plain old green cabbage, an heirloom variety called Early Jersey Wakefield… So you’d think that I’d have at least a half-dozen solid, go-to recipes up my sleeve by now.  And yet, not so much. I have a favorite classic cole slaw, and there’s the black bean tacos with slaw, which is very good. But I am shocked to see that I have not ONE recipe for bok choy called out from last summer. Which just meant that, when this week’s head showed up, I had to hunt around for something to do with it (other than Deborah Madison’s stir fry with peanuts, an old favorite). Luckily, perusing the web for recipes is what I do best. And what I came up with was Ginger-Sesame Chicken with Bok Choy and Mushrooms from Food & Wine.

I had picked up some chicken at Whole Foods on a hunch that it would come in handy, and then I stopped by the mushroom stand at the Union Square greenmarket and got some oyster mushrooms.  I skipped the bell pepper, and everything else was just lying around.

First, mix together the sauce, one of those ubiquitous, slightly-different-than-all-the-others blends of soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, sugar, and a few other ingredients. I replaced the sherry with mirin and used probably more than a half teaspoon of crushed red pepper (why don’t recipes ever call for “1 dried red pepper, crushed”? I buy them whole, and I’m never entirely sure how one pepper translates into teaspoons).

Meanwhile, everything gets chopped up.  It turns out that oyster mushrooms do not lose as much liquid when they’re cooked as something like a portobello.  Instead, they brown very nicely and get sort of a meaty texture. 

Then the chunks of chicken get stir-fried, too, just until browned.

And at last, the bok choy.  It is wise to cook the stems and the leaves separately.  Cut them apart from each other, chop the stems into bite-sized pieces and the leaves into ribbons.  Cook the thicker stems for a few minutes and then toss in the leaves just at the end.

Much like any stir fry, it is helpful to have all your ingredients chopped and measured ahead of time. Otherwise you’re going to end up with burnt garlic, and nobody likes that, no matter how much minced ginger it gets mixed with (before tossing back in the chicken, mushrooms, and bok choy). Finally, pour in the sauce, bring to a simmer, and cook just until it starts to thicken.

Serve over rice, and eat while basking in the sun in Bryant Park, reading Anthony Bourdain’s new book.

Ok, that last part is not strictly necessary.  But this DOES make an excellent leftovers-for-lunch-at-work meal.  And the book is great.  My favorite line so far, on the benefits of avoiding “writers’ bars”:

“As much as I admire the work of good writers, I’ve found that hanging out with more than one of them at a time is about as much fun as being thrown into a cage full of hungry but toothless civet cats.”

Touché, Mr. Bourdain.

Theories & Experiments

I have this theory that if I go more than a week or so without having people over for dinner, I start to get all twitchy. But it’s hard to test, because generally, I don’t go more than a week without having a dinner party of some kind. Sometimes it’s a big fancy to do, with 8 people and multiple courses, but more often it’s just a simple dinner with, for example, two dear friends whom I’ve known since we were born. 

M. and R. were having a pretty rough week for reasons I don’t need to share, and it was a chilly, rainy, March-like day on Tuesday. So the comfort of a roast chicken seemed the way to go. I had picked up a bunch of radishes in the greenmarket on Monday, and I’ve been reading about roasted radishes everywhere this month, so I thought I’d give that a try. And for dessert, the plan was one of my typical missions, responding to a challenge to make red velvet cupcakes, but since I’m me, I needed to find an alternative to red food dye.  So there’s your menu.

And now a brief aside: someone, years ago, presented to me the pyramid theory of relationships. According to this theory, there is one person in the world, one in 6+ billion (what’s the count these days?), who is essentially your soul mate. And if you should be so lucky to find this person, the capstone of your pyramid as it were, you would be so blissfully happy that you wouldn’t even know what to do with yourself. But then, there are a small handful of people (the next level of the pyramid) where, if you found any of them, you would be such an incredibly happy couple that you’d think you had found that first person, the capstone. And so on down the levels, with more and more people fitting each decreasing level of happiness (I visualize the world’s population all standing on each other’s shoulders). The trick, of course, is that you don’t ever really know where someone is on your pyramid, so you never really know if there’s someone out there better suited to you. (The other trick is that most people are not on the same level of each other’s pyramids.)

Anyway. I’m not sure how deeply I buy into this theory, but it has stuck with me for many years. And the thing is, I have no idea who originally presented it to me. None. I’ve asked around and no one is taking ownership. This method of roasting a chicken is similar (see? I had a point in telling that story), in that I no longer remember where I read about lining the roasting pan with slices of bread and sticking the chicken on top.

But in this case, I can attest with certainty that it is a brilliant idea. Stuff the chicken with something flavorful (a lemon sliced in 2, a few cloves of garlic, some fresh herbs), season it with salt & pepper and drizzle with olive oil, and pour a good amount of olive oil on the bread, too. Shove some of the fresh herbs under the skin of the chicken, too, if you like. And what you wind up with is something like deconstructed stuffing. Or (as M. suggested makes more sense) un-reconstructed stuffing. Either way, an hour at 400F later, it’s amazingly good. The bread will get a little singed, probably, but it doesn’t really matter. Also there is no basting, because all the juices that you’d normally use for that get soaked up by the not-stuffing. And if by some chance you don’t eat all the bread at dinner, chop it up as croutons the next day for the best salad you’ve ever had.

(It should be noted that R. served as my staff photographer for most of the night, which is a good thing for several reasons. One, I often forget about the camera altogether when I’m cooking, which makes blogging about meals kind of tricky. Two, he has an excellent eye, even with my little point-and-shoot.)

Now let’s move on to the radishes. I had used the greens for dinner for myself on Monday, in a stir-fried rice inspired by a recipe from Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables (more on this book later–Farmer John runs a CSA somewhere in Illinois and on the cover of the book he is wearing a bright orange feather boa, which should be enough to make you want to buy the book right now). But that left the plump jewel-like radishes themselves. Leite’s Culinaria (a blog you should read if you don’t) offered up a recipe from Fresh Every Day: More Great Recipes from Foster’s Market that seemed designed for this dinner.

Clean the radishes, leaving on a little nub of the greens, and if there are any that are ginormous, cut them in half. Toss them in something oven-proof with a bit of olive oil, a bit of butter, salt, pepper, and some thyme (yay windowbox!), and roast at 400F for the last 10-15 minutes that the chicken is cooking. And you’re done.

Then came the tricky bit: dessert. I love dessert, and I love to bake, but I’m a better, more confident cook than baker. I have mentioned, perhaps, that I’ve been bringing in the extras from recent baking experiments to the dojo where I practice aikido. This makes everybody happy, because it means I don’t wind up eating an entire loaf of banana bread myself (with the justification that it would otherwise go stale), and the uchi deshi, who spend 32 hours a week training, and are therefore perpetually hungry, get homebaked whatever-the-hell-I-felt-compelled-to-make-that-week.

Last week, when I asked one of the other members if he had any requests, he said, without so much as pausing to take a breath, “red velvet cupcakes.” And initially, I said, “um, no, that’s not really my thing.” But then I thought about it, and realized that it’s mostly not my thing because of the food dye (standard recipes call for 2 entire bottles of red dye in a batch of cupcakes). So I started hunting around for alternative, natural recipes. And pureed beets seems to be the thing to do.

I started with a recipe from Beauty Everyday, but thanks to the keen eye of M., who is a much more experienced baker than I am, we made some substantial alterations. She suggested cutting down on the sugar and the eggs, and also realized that the volume of icing was totally out of proportion with the amount of cake we’d be making. So I wisely stepped aside and let her take the culinary reins.

After the last step of folding in the pureed beets, we concluded that the batter was sufficiently cake-like to proceed. So into the muffin tin went this beautiful, almost magenta mix.

And we crossed our fingers for 17 minutes as we sat down to dinner.

But it turns out we needn’t have been so worried. The recipe was a hit (though it occurs to me that if you slather cream cheese icing on cardboard, it would be declared a success). The comparison we came up with is that it’s like carrot cake, just with beets, and chocolate flavored instead of spiced.

And most importantly, the cake is indeed red!

Final side note: I learned in my search for this recipe that originally, the color in red velvet cake came from a reaction between the cocoa powder and the acid of the buttermilk. It wasn’t a super bright red, more like brick or rust. But then cocoa powder began being manufactured using a process called “dutching,” which serves to stabilize it but also changes the pH so much that the reaction couldn’t happen. And by that time, red food dye (a.k.a. cancer juice) was widely available. And then there was no going back, because Americans for some reason like their food to be as brightly colored as possible.

Ok, class dismissed.

Chicken Soup with Dumplings

My kitchen smells so much like my grandmother’s that I might cry.

I don’t really know how my grandmother learned to cook. She grew up in Vienna in the ’20s in a household that can safely be described as “privileged.” She did not learn to cook at her mother’s knee, and given that SNEEZING was considered inappropriate (no, really), I’m guessing a little rich girl hang out with the kitchen staff to pick up a few pointers was just not going to happen.

Then she followed my grandfather to the United States and pretty much gave up all that privilege. And had some kids. And learned how to run a household the New World way, i.e. on your own. I know she had at least two editions of The Joy of Cooking, because my mom has one and I have one, but I don’t ever recall seeing her open a cookbook in the fifteen years of my life that I knew her.

The dish that reminds me the most of her is chicken soup, with farina dumplings.

I know chicken soup isn’t something that REQUIRES a cookbook, but ever since discovering the joy of summer savory, and learning about fricot, an Acadian chicken stew flavored with the aforementioned herb, I’ve been waiting for the weather to cool a bit so I could cook up a pot for myself. And also try, for the first time, making farina dumplings. (I asked my mom if she had Omi’s recipe somewhere, and she sent me that link. It seems about right, though I don’t think I’ve got the technique down because mine are a little too dense.)

I won’t bore you with an actual chicken soup recipe, though I do wish the pictures did better justice to the aroma of this meal.

I’ve now got a tupperware full of soup in my freezer, and another smaller one in the fridge. And a bag of farina waiting for my next attempt at dumplings. My sister and I are speculating that the trick is either smaller dumplings, or adding more broth to the batter, or whipping the butter and eggs together before adding the farina. I am envisioning a very happy dumpling-rich winter ahead of me.