A road trip and Roast Chicken Provençal

Chicken thighs are browned, then roasted with shallots, lemons, garlic and what sounds like way too much herbes de Provence. It isn’t. Recipe below.

Last week, I wrote about how we would spend Christmas. Christmas Eve dinner in Chinatown (at Lao Shanghai—delicious), a movie Christmas day (Spotlight, a surprisingly uplifting film for such a heavy subject) and a simple roast chicken dish for dinner. It was good. The dish you see above was my second attempt, cooked last night with a few tweaks. It was very good. Continue reading “A road trip and Roast Chicken Provençal” →

Humble ingredients made restaurant-ready: Braised beef short ribs, puréed cauliflower

Buttery-flavored braised short ribs are complemented by the mild tang of puréed cauliflower for a restaurant-worthy meal. Recipes below.

This week, you’ll find a pair of cooking posts here again. Individually, they’re quite good—together, they’re stellar. Also, Blue Kitchen has made the big time! Last week’s Hazelnut Rosemary Jam Cookies are featured in Bon Appétit’s Blog Envy holiday showcase. Go to the website and you’ll find nearly two dozen holiday recipes in all, all from bloggers—including me. Woohoo!

We watched the utterly charming film Ratatouille again this weekend [in case you’ve not seen it, I’ve included a clip at the end of the post—and even if you have seen it, you’ll enjoy it just as much the second time around]. As the lead rat-turned-chef Remy produced his beautifully architectural take on the title peasant dish, I suddenly remembered short ribs.

Increasingly, celebrity chefs everywhere are rethinking humble ingredients and dishes—reinventing them, elevating them to starring roles on elegant menus. Indeed, the ratatouille in question was actually created by Thomas Keller and served in his legendary California restaurant, the French Laundry. Pixar Animation Studios hired Keller as a consultant on the film and, according to an article in New York magazine, Remy is the embodiment of the famously fastidious, focused chef.

Short ribs are one surprising ingredient getting the star treatment these days. Layered with meat, fat, bone and connective tissue, they are as big on flavor as they are inexpensive [well, used to be before they hit the big time—but at four bucks or so a pound, they’re still reasonable]. As such, they have long been a popular ingredient for soups and stocks. Because of the long cooking times usually demanded by those chewy connective tissues, short ribs have also been a cut of choice for the traditional French boiled dinner pot-au-feu [“pot on the fire”]. Interestingly, Korean cooks take an opposite tack, butterflying short ribs almost to the bone, then marinating and grilling them. Continue reading “Humble ingredients made restaurant-ready: Braised beef short ribs, puréed cauliflower” →

Instinct and Improvisation

Roasted pears and onions pair nicely with pork tenderloin. Recipe below.

Okay, this is the second week in a row I’m talking about pork. For those of you who don’t eat it for religious, cultural or dietary reasons, please bear with me. I promise next week’s post will be 100% pig-free. For those of you who don’t eat pork because “I just don’t like it” [picture someone delivering this line with a pinched face and a whiny voice], what’s not to like about a one stop source for chops, ribs, roasts, a dazzling international array of sausages, hams and bacon, for crying out loud?

This is also the second week in a row I’m using fruit in a savory dish, this time pears. As far as I’m concerned, another reason to like pork is how nicely it plays with fruits and fruit juices.

As a quick aside, Mimi of French Kitchen in America just featured pears in a savory treatment, sort of, at her blog. A delicious sounding Pear-Ginger Crisp with Salted Almond Topping. I’ve had a link to Mimi’s blog in my Food Stuff section for some time now, but I’ve been remiss in not flat out telling people to visit it. You’ll find lots of great food and great writing there, including wonderful memories of her French grandmother. Mimi is a generous, charming hostess. Go there.

Another quick aside. See Other Notes at the end of the recipe for a tip about another great food blog.

Okay, back to the kitchen. Mimi recently did a post on chef James Haller’s instinctive approach to cooking. The more I cook, the more I understand instinct. More often than not, as I look at recipes these days [in cookbooks, online, in magazines], I find a technique or an intriguing pairing of ingredients that will have me improvising a completely different dish in my head. That’s one of the things that keeps cooking exciting for me.

It’s also how this recipe came about. Normally, I’m a stovetop kind of guy. Searing, sautéing, braising, stewing—anything you can do in a good, heavy pan over a gas flame—I’m all over it. But we had a couple of pork tenderloins that weren’t getting any younger, and Marion wasn’t finding time to do anything with them. And yeah, I could have sliced them into medallions and sautéed away, but I thought I should work on some roasting skills. Besides, it’s as cold as a witch’s, er, bazoom in Chicago right now. Firing up the oven to a toasty 400ºF for a while sounded like a good idea. Continue reading “Instinct and Improvisation” →

Chicken and Wine: An evolutionary tale

Herbes de Provence adds a nice complexity to my current version of Chicken and Wine. Recipe below.

No, the title doesn’t refer to the theory—still hotly debated, apparently—that birds evolved from dinosaurs [although the thought of dining on a dinosaur’s distant relative is pretty cool, you have to admit]. It has to do with how cooking and recipes naturally evolve over time.

This recipe is one I’ve made pretty much since I began cooking. And just as my cooking has, it’s evolved and become a little more refined, a little more complex over time. So it’s fitting it should be the very first recipe on Blue Kitchen.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with cooking times, tweaked the herbs and messed with the sauce in various efforts to freshen up a meal that family and friends already loved. There’ve been a couple notable failures: Adding chicken stock to the sauce for more flavor—the flavor it added was chicken soup. And adding a little dried thyme—everyone agreed the “thymeless classic” was better.

There has also been a notable success in the last couple of years: Adding Herbes de Provence, a wonderfully aromatic blend of [typically dried] herbs and lavender flowers used in the cuisine of the Provence region of the south of France. The mix of herbs varies—the blend I use contains rosemary, French thyme, tarragon, basil, savory, cracked fennel, lavender and marjoram. This simple addition gives the dish a complexity the bay leaves alone couldn’t deliver.

Chicken and Wine, as I prepare it, is quite distinct from the classic French coq au vin. It uses white wine instead of red, for one thing, and the cooking time is much shorter; coq au vin pretty much demands to be cooked a day ahead and allowed to swap flavors in the fridge overnight. This dish is best when served immediately after cooking.

There’s a comfort food aspect to this dish that makes it a great family meal. But it also has a kind of rustic elegance that makes it good company food too. So here’s the recipe—at least how I’m making it right now. Continue reading “Chicken and Wine: An evolutionary tale” →