Sweet fire: Chicken, chili paste and maple syrup?

East meets Nor’east in an improvised Chinese chicken dish that gets its heat from potent chili paste, its complexity from five-spice powder and its subtle sweetness from New England maple syrup. It’s paired with another improvisation, my first attempt at Szechuan green beans with garlic. Recipes below.

The first full day of spring in Chicago saw snowflakes the size of dinner plates. Lots of them. Just to the north of us, near the Wisconsin border, they got 11 inches of the heavy “heart attack” snow. Having lived here as long as I have, I’m not even surprised by this anymore. I am annoyed by it, though.

My first thought for this week’s post was something hearty—a soup, a stew—something that reflected the actual weather, not the calendar. But then I decided to turn up the heat with spiciness instead. My patented poking around—online, at the library, in our cookbook collection—got me started down the path to making something Chinese. When I found a pork dish that combined chili paste [you can also use chili sauce with garlic—see Kitchen Notes], five-spice powder—both Chinese staples—with maple syrup[?], I was intrigued. But having just served up pork here last week, I decided to adapt it for chicken.

The main course sort of nailed down, I started thinking vegetables. Just about our favorite restaurant in Chicago’s Chinatown is Lao Sze Chuan [the only reason I slightly hedge my bets here is that owner/chef Tony has recently opened two new restaurants, also wonderful, Lao Shanghai and Lao Beijing]. And one of our favorite vegetable dishes at Lao Sze Chuan is the Szechaun green beans, crisp and garlicky. I knew I wouldn’t match these, but I thought I might find a recipe to help me come close. What I found was a bewildering array of recipes, none of them even sounding vaguely close to this pared down dish. So I improvised, coming up with something very different but pretty good, if I say so myself. Best of all, the most exotic ingredient in it is soy sauce. So if the chili paste and five spice powder have put you off the chicken, give these a try.

But first, about those exotic ingredients. Living in Chicago, I have access to a dazzling array of ingredients from many cultures and cuisines. And in many cities, both these ingredients are available in Asian markets and in a growing number of supermarkets.

Chili paste or sauce is made of crushed chili peppers, oil, vinegar, seasonings and sometimes garlic. It has been accurately described as fiery hot, but you can control the heat by adjusting the amount you use.

Five-spice powder is a dry spice blend that incorporates the five basic flavors of Chinese cooking—sweet, sour, bitter, savory and salty. Used widely in Chinese cuisine, there are many variations on the theme. But a fairly standard recipe calls for fennel, cloves, cinnamon, star anise and Szechuan peppercorns. It is a very intense spice mix, not in terms of heat, but in terms of flavor. Recipes tend to call for fairly small amounts. Trust them.

I searched the Internet for what seemed like minutes for substitutes for these ingredients. Alas, no luck. The couple of recipes I found for chili paste sounded pretty dubious. And every recipe for five-spice powder called for Szechuan peppercorns. If you can find those, finding actual five-spice powder should be a breeze. And as Lydia over at The Perfect Pantry rightly points out, they’re not even really peppercorns, so substituting regular peppercorns will yield something that falls far flat of the real thing. If anyone out there has substitutes they’ve tried and like, please leave a comment.

Well, blah, blah, blah. How about some recipes? Continue reading “Sweet fire: Chicken, chili paste and maple syrup?” →

Roasted Chicken, with or without hangover

Versatile, delicious and brainlessly easy roasted chicken thighs—here with herbes de Provence. Recipe of sorts below.

We didn’t overindulge this New Year’s Eve. We really didn’t. But we did undersleep. We actually got home a little before one in the morning, sober as judges [or at any rate as sober as they’re reputed to be], because Nick’s, the no-cover Wicker Park bar that reliably delivers a decent mix of live blues and R&B most weekends had gone all unannounced private party on us. The door guy was apologetic, but someone apparently threw enough money at Nick to keep the riffraff out for one night.

So instead, we ended up taking a nice long walk in the snow in this bar-packed neighborhood, entertaining ourselves with a running commentary on our overserved, underdressed [talking hypothermia risk here, not style] fellow pedestrians. There were some spectacular examples out and about, hailing cabs in sparkly tank tops, shivering jacketless in doorways on cell phones, slushing through snow in perfect little pointy heels that probably cost the earth and are now in ruins… I wanted to yell, “This is Chicago, people. It’s winter!” But apparently it’s hipper to walk around hunched up and teeth chattering than to—oh, I don’t know—put on a jacket?

Eventually, even in our sensible layers, we got cold. So we headed for the El. Every New Year’s Eve, the Chicago Transit Authority does this great thing, making rides on all subways, Els and buses one penny—free, if you have a transit card. We made our way home too sober to be ushering in a new year and with our downstairs neighbors’ party going full tilt, with the volume set “at 11.” They are really, really nice, really, really quiet neighbors at all times, so we figured this party was a gimme.

We settled in with some champagne, slices of Marion’s wonderful pear cake and The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night DVD on the telly, cranked loud enough to sort of be heard over the interesting music mix from downstairs—Kanye West, Johnny Cash, David Bowie and [ten points if you know this group’s single hit] Ram Jam, to give you an idea. By the time their party wound down and we’d achieved the proper champagne dosage, it was around 3:30 in the morning.

Oh, yeah. This was supposed to be about roasted chicken. Well, originally, it wasn’t. I had another dish planned for my first post of the year, something that’s nice and easy to make, but requires a little planning ahead. I was so not ready for that. By the time I dug the car out [as I said, “This is Chicago, people. It’s winter!”] and made my way to the grocery store, I was totally operating at half speed and looking for something auto-pilot simple, but still real food. Hence, herb-roasted chicken thighs.

A whole roasted chicken can be a festive thing of beauty for company dinners, a wonderful centerpiece for the table. But many home cooks stress out [and not totally without reason] over the breast cooking faster than the legs and thighs, achieving crispy skin without the bird drying out, timing it to the rest of the meal and any number of other culinary landmines. We seem to have overcome many of these issues with the addition of a Staub La Cocotte oval roasting pan to our kitchen that, as Marion says, creates a mini-environment in the oven, roasting the chicken evenly and beautifully.

But for speed, ease and sheer versatility, give me some chicken thighs to roast. They cook quickly—about 45 minutes once they’re in the oven—and they readily pick up the flavors of any spices, herbs or other flavorings you use. [Stuff the cavity of a whole chicken with anything you like and you’ll be lucky if the legs and thighs even hint at the flavors.] And maybe best of all, they make great leftovers. Heat and eat them as is or cut them up and add to a pasta sauce, some mac & cheese, some stir-fried vegetables… They also can be turned into this delicious, spicy chicken salad.

What follows is not so much a recipe as it is some guidelines and variations—and just a reminder that they’re really easy to make [and hard to screw up] and delicious to eat. Continue reading “Roasted Chicken, with or without hangover” →

More spice than fire: White Chili

A mix of traditional and non-traditional ingredients—fresh ginger, bay leaf and oregano, for instance—give this White Chili a satisfyingly big flavor. Recipe below.

Easy to make, this white chili recipe is lively, robust and flavorful without being obvious. Lots of spices and herbs come together to create a satisfyingly complex taste without too much heat. I used to make it a lot, but it had fallen off the radar screen for reasons unknown. With chili season upon us, though—well, it’s always chili season at our house, but around late fall or early winter, it gets serious—it was time for it to make a comeback.

For the most part when we’re thinking chili, we stick with two takes on it, Marion’s and mine. Which gets made depends on which flavor we’re craving and who has the time and inclination to cook. What made me remember this big-flavored white chili was a recent bowl of ersatz white chicken chili from a restaurant near my office. The restaurant chili would have been fine had they called it soup. It had lots of clear broth, a definite sign of soup to me. And it had no cumin, a definite sign of, well, not being chili.

This recipe is definitely chili. It has a robust flavor and packs a little heat. There’s no mistaking the cumin presence. And—sorry, Texans—it’s got beans. But just like our two mainstay chili recipes above, it’s got some decidedly non-traditional touches too. Fresh ginger, for instance, and mushrooms. Bay leaf and oregano. And the only tomato you’ll find in it is a little used for garnish at the end. Based on a recipe from the Chicago Tribune’s excellent Good Eating section, it is hearty and satisfying—and the perfect antidote to a cold winter’s evening. Continue reading “More spice than fire: White Chili” →

Anniversary notes from the road

The first anniversary of Blue Kitchen finds us on the road. If you’re even a semi-regular reader, you know we’re big fans of road trips.

Well, this one’s a doozy. As a belated celebration of another anniversary, a big-numbered wedding anniversary for us, Marion and I are driving California’s Pacific Coast Highway, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Big city fun with friends at each end and hundreds of miles of ocean vistas, redwood forests and mountains in between—along what has been called one of the most beautiful, scenic coastlines in the world. With stops in Monterey, Big Sur and Pismo Beach [fans of Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny will understand why we’re delighted to be staying here]. If you’re reading this the day it was posted, we’re probably about halfway to LA right now.

In honor of this pair of anniversaries, I’m reposting the first dish I ever posted on Blue Kitchen, Chicken and Wine. It’s especially appropriate because it’s also the first dish I ever cooked for Marion. And like our life together, it just keeps evolving and getting better.

Chicken and Wine: An evolutionary tale

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 “Anniversary notes from the road” →

A hearty, hot soup for chilly nights

Loaded with lentils, vegetables, chicken and plenty of spices, this crowded Curried Lentil Soup makes a satisfying meal by itself. Recipe below.

Broth is all well and good in soups, but I like my soups crowded. Even as a kid, I would scarf down all the noodles and little cubes of chicken in my Campbell’s Chicken Noodle and leave a bowlful of broth, aggravating my mom and missing out on the liquid benefits of soup. Now that I’m all grown up, I can appreciate a nice slurpy bowl of miso soup on occasion. But crowded soups—soups packed with vegetables and chunks of meat and maybe some noodles—are still what I really crave.

This soup fits the bill perfectly, a true meal in a bowl. It’s got lentils and a whole host of vegetables, including spinach. It’s got nice chunky bites of chicken. And it’s got spices—curry powder, cumin, red pepper and fresh ginger—to fire it up a bit and make it as interesting as it is satisfying. For the curry, I used Hot Curry Powder from The Spice House. Any Madras curry is a good choice for its heat.

It’s easy to make this vegetarian too. Just leave out the chicken and use all water or vegetable stock in place of the chicken stock.

Speaking of chicken stock, I lucked out big time. Marion made some homemade stock recently to freeze and I nabbed some of that. Just before Thanksgiving, we’ll post her recipe for chicken stock as part of a cold sweet potato soup that has become a delicious tradition of our Thanksgiving dinner. If you don’t have homemade stock for this lentil soup, be sure to use low sodium chicken broth. You can always add salt later—you can’t take it out.

With soup season in full swing, this crowded lentil soup is a hearty, flavorful meal with enough heat for the chilliest night. It’s also relatively easy to get on the table after a busy day. Continue reading “A hearty, hot soup for chilly nights” →

Elegantly rustic: Chicken with white beans

Simply prepared Chicken Breasts with White Beans would be at home on a French farm table or in a cozy neighborhood bistro. Recipe below.

Before I start this week’s post, I want to ask a quick favor. I know most of you are just here for the food. I respect that—that’s what Blue Kitchen is really about, after all. But we lost a dear old friend this week, someone I think you should know. Please read about him in WTF? Random food for thought. Okay, here we go.

My first thought with my first bite of this dish was that something this simple shouldn’t taste this good. I don’t mean easy to make, though it was that too. I mean simple ingredients—chicken, bacon, onion, carrots, garlic, some beans, a little wine, a little broth, some dried thyme—nothing exotic, nothing trendy or pricey or precious. All combined in a simple, straightforward way.

But it was good. Restaurant good. Not a rock star chef restaurant where a simple dish like this would be deconstructed and reconstructed into a well-meaning homage to the original, flashy and exciting but somehow off the mark. No, you’d find this dish in a little corner bistro that similarly combined a handful of simple ingredients—a good kitchen, a friendly, hip [but not hipster] staff and a handful of tables in a comfortable room—to produce a place you come back to again and again.

I called this dish elegantly rustic. It’s not so much its visual presentation. To be sure, it’s a handsome, hearty looking meal, something that will stir anticipation when it’s set before you. But it doesn’t lend itself to artful, architectural platings. In fact, to do so would be to do it a disservice. No, this is a meal whose roots are found on a rough wooden table in some French farmhouse. Or in a Tuscan one, perhaps.

Its rustic elegance comes instead from the way the simple ingredients come together to create something that is at once so comfortably familiar—like something you’ve eaten all your life, even if it’s the first time you’re tasting it—and surprisingly elegant in its subtle undertones. The thyme and the wine elevate the delicious, but big-flavored bacon, garlic and onion with a nice, refined finish.

I could smell the flavors layering and evolving as I cooked. You start by frying bacon—off to a good start, right? The original recipe only called for a teaspoon of thyme. I upped it by half and sprinkled about half of it on the chicken before browning it in the bacon fat. I did this partly to give the browned chicken flesh nice flecks of herbs and partly to impart a little more flavor to the blank canvas that is a skinless chicken breast. The immediate result of adding thyme earlier, though, was to shift the smells emanating from the kitchen from Waffle House to storefront bistro. As each new ingredient hit the hot pan, the aroma added a new layer.

Okay, enough rhapsodizing. Here’s the recipe. Continue reading “Elegantly rustic: Chicken with white beans” →

Two continents, one plate: Biryani chicken breasts

Indian biryani curry paste gets a little Tex-Mex help in firing up spicy Biryani Chicken Breasts with a side of Coconut Rice Pilaf. Recipes below.

THIS IS AN EXCITING TIME FOR FOOD. There are more options now than ever before, from global grazing to eating local. And palates are more adventurous than ever before, as the minds and mouths of diners open up to cuisines and flavors from just about everywhere. The success of the Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations is a perfect example of this growing culinary curiosity. Continue reading “Two continents, one plate: Biryani chicken breasts” →

Grilling and lessons learned: Grilled Hoisin Chicken Thighs

A mix of Asian seasonings and indirect grilling combine to create flavorful, tender Grilled Hoisin Chicken Thighs. Recipe below.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last week I wrote my little anti-grilling manifesto, and here I am doing a grilling post this week. It’s not that I don’t like grilling or the wonderfully smokey taste of something done right on the grill—it’s that I don’t like not being in control, not feeling like I know what I’m doing. Continue reading “Grilling and lessons learned: Grilled Hoisin Chicken Thighs” →

A little hot but very cool. Like summer.

Hot giardiniera gives this summery Spicy Chicken Salad a little heat and big flavor. It’s great on sandwiches or on its own. Recipe below.

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word summer? Okay, then what’s the next thing? Well then, the thing after that? No, the thing after… oh, never mind. The correct answer is chicken salad. Continue reading “A little hot but very cool. Like summer.” →

“Hot soup, comin’ through!”

Easy-to-make Creole Chicken and Okra Gumbo is flavorful, hearty and satisfying, with just the right amount of zing from hot pepper sauce. Recipe below.

The title to this post is a direct quote from my high school swim teacher and coach of the school’s swim team, Coach Otto. It was what passed for etiquette inside his grey crewcut-topped head. Constantly working in the damp, cold [even in warm weather] pool room, Coach Otto had hot soup every day in the cafeteria wihout fail. And every day, he cleared the path before him on his way to the faculty dining area, steaming soup in hand, with his own inimitable version of, “Excuse me, please”… “Hot soup, comin’ through!”

The weather’s been a real roller coaster ride this spring, especially temperaturewise. During one of those Six Flags Over Freezing My Butt Off spells recently, I started jonesing for some soup [for my non-U.S. readers, Six Flags is an amusement park chain—Six Flags Over Mid-America, Six Flags Over Texas, etcetera—that prides itself on having the scariest roller coasters around; they actually budget for a certain number of injury lawsuit settlements every year, rather than slow their coasters down]. But back to soup, I wanted something hearty and filling and warming. But it also had to be quick—it was a weekday, and I was at work.

That soup can even be quick was a revelation to me—and a recent one at that. I had totally bought into the notion that soup had to take hours to make. It was something you started in the morning and occasionally stirred, tended to, added to and fussed over throughout the day. And while there are plenty of soups that do indeed take this kind of time, there are also plenty that don’t. I was stunned and amazed the first time I saw a soup recipe whose total cooking time was in the neighborhood of 15 minutes or so.

In the interest of total honesty, many quick soups—this one included—depend on pre-made ingredients like miso paste or cans of broth, tomatoes or beans. Otherwise, they’d be slow soups.

But all’s fair in love, war and soup. So one recent cold afternoon, I went to Epicurious and searched for quick, hearty soups. I found Creole Chicken and Okra Gumbo. The name was promising, but when I looked at the recipe, I was less enthusiastic. Have you ever read recipes that sound too simple, too stripped down to possibly be good? That was this one in letters five miles high. Only a handful of ingredients and most of those either canned or frozen or somehow processed.

Still, it had okra in it, always a plus in my book. And I reminded myself that the lion’s share of really good New Orleans creole/cajun cuisine makes heavy use of processed foods and herbs and spices. Looking at cookbooks from the region, you’d be justified in suspecting that half the ships you see docked at the Port of New Orleans must be hauling in garlic powder or onion powder. I also reminded myself that I really, really wanted some soup, and I wanted it fast. This soup would be good enough.

Only it was better than “good enough”—really good, in fact. Maybe not omigod-company-dinner good, but flavorful and hearty and satisfying, with just the right amount of zing from the hot pepper sauce. And on an unseasonably cold spring night, it was exactly what we wanted. Continue reading ““Hot soup, comin’ through!”” →