Simple, Easy, Complete: Hainan Style Chicken, Mustard Greens with Double Garlic

So, as Bittman alludes to in his intro to this recipe, it's a bit bland. You definitely need a dipping sauce or three to rescue it. It's easy, though, and it left me with a ton of leftovers, including some stock. Also, it's really cheap since you can use a whole chicken, although I guess some people would rather use just breasts. If that's the case, I implore you, go bone-in. I think this would be really bland and dried out without the bone, since the stock probably wouldnt pick up all that much flavor from just plain breast meat.

All you do is boil water with some salt, ginger, and garlic, add chicken, cover and turn off the heat after 10 minutes and let it sit for an hour. This keeps it pretty moist and tender. Then you cook rice with the stock, and serve it with the chicken and Ginger Scallion sauce for dipping. It's nice and light, lets the chicken flaunt its poultriness, and tastes pretty good. Also, there was this whole thing in the recipe about tomatoes and cucumbers, but I didn't have any of those around, so I skipped it. Maybe the recipe would've been a bit more remarkable had I included it, but I mean, what are the odds of that?

I think next time I would slice up the chicken before serving, which would make it look a bit less sloppy, but other than that, this is a pretty good, pretty easy (if a bit time consuming) one pot dish. We made it with the How to Cook Everything recipe for dandelion greens (we substituted mustard greens), which was good, even though Talia oversalted it. Clownshoe.

There were pictures of this, but really, they didn't make it look very tasty, so they aren't getting posted here. It was worse than the Chicken with Yogurt debacle.

Feast for a Knucklehead: The Simplest Paella, Seared Baby Bok Choy with Bacon Vinaigrette, and Roasted Asparagus

Sunday was the one week anniversary of my least favorite brother Jonathan's 26th birthday. In honor of this occasion, I told him I'd make him and his friends whatever he wanted (so long as it was in How To Cook Everything, of course). So that's how we ended up with Paella, a deceptively easy dish that takes much less time than everyone thinks. Since it was a special occasion, I replaced half the shrimp with squid and added some chorizo to the recipe for good measure. Check it out:


Basically, it works like this: saute some onions in olive oil, add chorizo if you're using it, and then add the rice (preferably paella rice, though I used arborio at Bittman's suggestion and it worked) and cook it for a minute until it looks "shiny." At this point you add the stock that's been heating up with saffron in it (if you're me, you add the saffron with the rice instead of letting it heat with the broth, resulting in a still very tasty but less orange dish), stir in the shrimp and squid, and throw it in a 450 degree oven for 15 minutes.


It actually took more like 30 minutes, but my oven is trife). When the rice is cooked through and the top is getting a nice brown layer, you're good. This was completely delicious and the chorizo was predictably a great call.

For veggies, we had two dishes. Roasted Asparagus is something I've made 100 times before, and it turns out is also in HTCE. I burnt them a little. They were still good, in fact I think they were better than usual. That's one veggie that does real well under high heat. I think next time I may even try the broiler (the recipe was for Grilled, Broiled, or Roasted Asparagus so there's a lot of room for interpretation as long as the heat is high).


But that was overshadowed, I'm afraid. It's not that it wasn't good (which it was) and it's not that I forgot the lemon wedges Bittman recommends (which I did). It's just that the other vegetable dish last night had bacon in it. So you see, it wasn't really fair. Seared Baby Bok Choy with Bacon Vinaigrette is simpy unfuckwithable, and not just because of the bacon. You boil and shock baby bok choy, cut it in half, and then cook it cut side down, so it gets just a bit charred.


It's a really interesting flavor, one I didn't think would work at all, but oh how it did. The bacon vinaigrette is just, you cook some chopped up bacon (about 6 oz, I used less) deglaze with some sherry vinegar, salt and pepper, and then whisk in some olive oil. Pour that on top of the baby bok choy and you have a serious side dish. For those of you who don't like to cook with bacon, there's an alternate recipe with a chili vinaigrette that also looks killer.


I served it all with a salad, not from the book. Our guests were Sean, Eva, and Mike, who it should be noted really loves a good, creamy rice and a cool, icy glass of red wine. I expect all of your comments below. Diana, you need to try harder. Happy Birthday big guy.

Oh! And for dessert I broiled some nectarines. The were so SO good. They didn't even need the ice cream, though it certainly didn't hurt.


One thing that's so great about roasting or grilling fruit is that it doesn't even have to be that great quality fruit. The nectarines were hard as rocks going in, but in the broiler they became these super sweet, sorta tart warm soft charred flavor bombs. I think it was Sean who said it was like pie, without the pie. Awesome.

(just kidding Diana, I owe you one, hope you're feeling better)

Gaff Factory: Shrimp Jambalaya and Broiled Pineapple

We weren't five minutes into cooking, and Mom was already worried about how she'd be portrayed on the internet. "Are you going to write on your blog that this was my fault?" See, the Jambalaya recipe calls for uncooked shrimp, but my mom grabbed the bag of cooked shrimp in the freezer aisle instead. It's a common mistake, and I blame not my mother but the companies that make the packaging so hard to distinguish. These packages need to say "RAW" or "COOKED" in bigger letters than they say shrimp. Making one label blue and the other red does not clear anything up. Get it together, seafood distributors of America. Luckily there were so many more goofs to be made during this meal, precooked shrimp was the least of our troubles. Surely it was not enough to derail our meal.


Family dinner! "I've been thinking of making the jambalaya from the book," Mom said when she called me at work. So here was my first chance to take the project on the road, to a whole new (and extremely well lit) kitchen. I came over after work and we got down to business. It's always fun to cook at my parents' place, because they have a dishwasher, the aforementioned lighting, a really nice stereo in the kitchen, basically they've just got it all figured out. And the company's not half bad either. The snacks provided while cooking (pictured below) are also far superior to those in our usual digs.


In a perfect world, the recipe works something like this: heat up some oil in a large skillet or pot, throw in diced onions and red peppers and let those brown. Then you add the rice, thyme, cayenne (Mom didn't have any so we used chili powder, which did the trick) and garlic. Then you add some canned tomatoes, and let that go for another few minutes. Then, you add the stock, and lower the heat a bit. This was where gaff number two came up, which I will take responsibility for (though I really blame a certain high quality supermarket in Red Hook, BK).


Not satisfied with the kosher salt I'd usually use to season such a mixture, I dug out a disposable plastic sea salt grinder from said Red Hook market. Somehow, my fervent grinding twisted the whole top off of the container, and about 1/3 cup of very coarse salt tumbled right into the pan. Kind of not good. I fished out as much as I could, and we decided to dilute with more water and more rice, a cup and a cup and a half at a time (respectively). I think we ended up adding 4-5 more cups of water than the recipe called for. It still tasted a little salty, but not as bad as it had before. So, you let the rice and stock bubble away for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, uncovered (surprising, right?) until there's just a small amount of stock left. At that point, you add the shrimp. We didn't, because our shrimp was already cooked. What we did was let the rice absorb the rest of the stock, and then stir in the shrimp after we'd taken it off the heat. This way we figured they wouldn't get all rubbery, just warmed through. Then we chopped up the parsley, which (gaff #3) we then forgot to actually add to the dish. Which is fine, because as he reminded us during dinner, Jonathan HATES parsley. He was pretty offended we'd thought of putting it in at all.


Anyway, all in all, it was pretty delicious. Yeah, it might have been richer without all the extra rice and water, and it could have been shrimpier if the little guys had actually cooked in the pot instead of just warming up in it. But it was pretty delicious overall, Reva and Steve kept the wine flowing, and, you know, there's something about a meal with your family that you can't get anywhere else. Next week, Mom wants to make pizza, so we'll see how that goes. I can say this: I will be sticking with regular salt (seriously, they don't have any of that sea salt left anyway).


Oh, and for dessert, we broiled some pineapple. Ever had grilled pineapple? Same idea: just stick it in the broiler until it gets nice and charred. It's a fruit that's just totally unleashed when you get a nice char on it. Brush it wish some vegetable oil before you cook it. I never thought to do it under the broiler but I certainly will be doing it again.

Tastes Like Chicken: Arroz con Pollo

No one knows for certain the origin of the term "Arroz con Pollo" or even what language it comes from, but many etymologists believe it means "Hot Ham Water." Today, it is used to refer to a chicken and rice dish which, again, no one knows the true origin of.

We do know this: It's easy, and it tastes great. I'm sick of writing that already, but it seems to happen a lot in How to Cook Everything. Anyway, this one's easy: sautee some onions in olive oil, add rice and coat with the oil, throw in some heated up stock and a pinch of saffron (tastes good; turns it that nice yellow), bring to a boil, turn down the heat, cover, and let cook for something like 30 minutes. It's done when the rice is done, and it takes as little effort as it sounds.

This is a winner right here. You may remember me mentioning my mom's recipe for rice, and that's similar in that you take onions, sautee in some butter, add the rice and sort of toast it a bit like you do here, then add stock and simmer it (covered! no peaking! my mother shouts from inside my head) til it's done. I dare say that this is a better way of doing the same thing, as the chicken gives up even more flavor than just stock. It's certainly more convenient in that way, though there's no accounting for nostalgia, which usually just trumps everything else. So while I'm not throwing away Reva's rice recipe just yet, this is certainly a similar method that yields similar, more chickeny results. Pictures to come.