Spiking your stuffing

The one part of Thanksgiving dinner I refuse to make from scratch is the stuffing.  I don’t know why, but no stuffing has ever lived up to the Stove-top brand blend my mom puts together: one box of turkey stuffing, one box of cornbread stuffing, mixed up and tossed together and then, rather than just stirred into boiling water, baked in a casserole dish for twenty minutes or so right before serving, so the top is crusty and crunchy.  This is easy to do, since it takes my dad at least twenty minutes to get the turkey carved.  This is smart to do because it makes a texture contrast and provides a gravy sponge.  Other stuffing mixes I’ve tasted, and the homemade one I attempted this past year for A., who doesn’t like celery (have you ever tried to find a stuffing mix without celery?  Impossible!), just haven’t measured up.

And then, Bittman.

“26. Chop corn bread into cubes. Sauté cherry tomatoes, scallions and corn kernels in butter or oil. Deglaze the pan with beer, then empty the pan over the corn bread. Bake in an oiled dish or use as stuffing.”

You guys, this was amazing.  And given how you now know I feel about stuffing, that’s saying something.  Amazing.  Here’s what I used:

6 cups (roughly) corn bread cubes, toasted (use your favorite recipe)

4 TB butter

6-8 beefy green onions

1 pint red cherry tomatoes, rinsed and dried

1 cup corn, fresh or frozen (if frozen, defrost it first)

Salt and pepper

12 oz. beer (I used Drifter)

I made a pan of cornbread from my favorite recipe in a larger pan than usual; I thought this would result in a slightly drier bread, so it wouldn’t become mushy when the liquid was poured over it.  The cornbread was still pretty moist and springy, though, so after it had cooled for a while I cubed it, scuffed it around in the pan a bit to separate the clinging pieces, and tossed it back in the oven at 400F for fifteen minutes or so to get some toasty edges and dark golden spots on it, then set it aside to cool completely.  This worked beautifully and I’d recommend it, especially if your cornbread is moist and cakey.

While the oven was occupied by an herb-stuffed chicken (again, I know.  I can’t help it), I melted the butter in a skillet over medium heat and sliced the green onions, using the white and green portions.  I tossed these little rings into the sizzling butter along with the corn, and agitated them gently.  When the onions were soft and the corn just beginning to caramelize, I added the cherry tomatoes and seasoned the whole skillet with salt and pepper and, on a whim, a few shakes of garlic powder.

I turned the heat up to medium high for just a few minutes until the cherry tomatoes started to burst through their skins, spilling pulp into the mix, and the corn had browned delightfully, leaving the kitchen smelling like summer.

I then switched off the heat and poured in a full bottle of beer, nutty, yeasty, and brown (Drifter is a pale ale, so it has some body and depth – I wouldn’t go any lighter than pale ale, and might in fact prefer something darker: a brown ale like Newcastle, or even a porter if it’s not too strong).  The aroma changed from summer to fall harvest in an instant as the beer fizzed over the vegetables.

After scraping the bottom of the skillet gently with a spatula to remove any persistent browned bits, I poured the whole steaming bubbling mass over my pan of cornbread cubes and tossed gently to distribute the liquid evenly.  Then I stowed the pan in the oven: 350F for 25-30 minutes until the top is deeply golden and just crunchy.

We ate this with roasted chicken and creamed spinach.  Vegetarians shield your eyes, but the chicken just collapsed so beautifully across my carving board that I felt I had to show you:

But the stuffing!  The stuffing was incredible.  The cornbread soaked up the beer, and the sweetness of the bread plus the sourness of the ale created this yeasty glory I couldn’t stop eating.  And I don’t like beer.  It was just such a perfect liquid for this dish, contributing just the right amount of malty bitterness.  The tomatoes got richer and sweeter in the oven, as did the corn kernels, and they partnered with the green onions to make such a good accompaniment to the cornbread that I’m almost tempted to add them into the batter in my next pan.  Or maybe into a compound butter to spread on top.  That would be better, texture-wise.  Green onions, cherry tomatoes, and corn: three musketeers. 

This stuffing was gone in two days.  With only two of us eating.  It was that good.  If you’re in the Northwest, where Spring is shunning us, make this now while you still need your oven to keep warm.  Accompanying some baked sweet potatoes and leafy greens, this becomes a vegetarian meal.  If you use oil instead of butter and have a good egg replacement, it could be vegan.  If your cornbread is free of wheat flour and you use gluten-free beer, it could be gluten-free as well.  However you make it, make it.  This one is too good not to try.

 

Chicken’n’chutney

We’ve become huge fans of roast chicken this year. I rub a mix of herbs, salt, pepper, garlic, lemon zest and olive oil under its skin, and stuff it full of the same herbs, a few cloves of garlic, and half a lemon. The lemon is, I think, the secret weapon. It gives the finished meat a really nice light suggestion of citrus. I’ve also started creating my own rack in the cheap metal rectangular baking pan that subs in for a roasting pan in my kitchen: on Kelsey Nixon’s suggestion, I make a triangle in the bottom of the pan out of a few carrots, a few sticks of celery, and a halved onion. This gives the chicken a nice platform to sit on so it doesn’t steam in the juices it exudes. Plus, I like to think the extra vegetables impart a nice, delicate flavor into the meat as well. (Plus plus, the vegetables roast down and caramelize in the chicken fat and juices, and you can extract them from the pan and gobble them as an extra veggie with your dinner, as you can see I’ve done with the carrots below. Their skins maintain the tiniest resistance to the teeth, and they taste like all the goodness of chicken skin, but really you’re just eating a roasted carrot!) I roast breast side down, always, to keep the white meat as juicy as possible. I’ve done this vegetable trick with our Thanksgiving turkey the last two years as well and I’m ridiculously pleased with the results.

But this isn’t about Bittman, is it? To go with this chicken, I decided to go with one of his chutney ingredient combinations:

“5. Apple Chutney: Cook big chunks of peeled, cored apple with a little apple cider, Dijon or whole-grain mustard and chopped sage until the chutney thickens. Don’t cook it until it becomes apple sauce unless you want to.”

Between that day and this moment, I lost the small square of paper onto which I scribble quantities. Alas. So what follows are approximations from memory, but I think this is really a “how you like it” sort of dish, so you’d be using my values only as approximations anyway.

3 crisp, tart apples, peeled, cored, and cut into large chunks (I had Fujis, but Granny Smith or similar would also be delicious)

¼- ½ cup Gravenstein apple juice

1 generous TB whole grain mustard

1 TB finely minced sage

I tumbled these together in a small saucepan and cooked it over medium heat for fifteen minutes or so, stirring infrequently and gently, until the apples became soft but still resistant, and the juice had somehow thickened into what was not quite chunky applesauce, but was securely on its way.

We ate this draped over juicy, moist hunks of chicken, and while not the same perfect pairing as I think it would be with a well breaded and deeply fried pork chop, it was pretty delicious. I liked the combination of apples and mustard: they added a tart sweetness that balanced well with the sharp spice and the deep earthy flavor of the sage.

With this, in what must be one of the more monochromatic plates ever made, we had parsnip “puree.” I place this descriptor in quotations because my results were less than smooth. I didn’t core the parsnips or roast them long enough to make them sufficiently tender for my immersion blender. Alas. They were delicious, however, and they are a commodity I plan to revisit. Once I get the specs correct, I will certainly share the recipe here. It involved butter, and heavy cream, and roasted garlic, all in embarrassingly large quantities. But once you swirl them together you can’t see how much there ever was, which means it doesn’t count, right?

 

 

 

Brecht’s Restaurant

I have a Bittman success story to share with you, and I will.  Soon.  But first, in a continuation of last week’s celebratory post, I have a birthday restaurant review.

Yesterday, N. took me to Portland to celebrate my birthday.  Because I’m so sophisticated and urban, of course what I wanted to do most was go to the zoo.  Only after we’d seen every animal (and returned to a few exhibits on the way out to see if anyone had decided to come outside yet) did we embark on the more culinary aspects of our voyage.  We spent close to an hour in Sur le Table, a store that makes me swell simultaneously with desire, longing, and anxiety.  It is bright and beautiful and artistically merchandised, and I can’t help but want everything in it (do I need a handheld KitchenAid electric mixer in every color of the rainbow?  Of course not.  But do I want them, after seeing them lined up and shining prismatically on the shelf?  Yes I do).  I imagine the fantastic food projects I could embark on, the dinner parties I could have, the appetizers I could construct (the tiny tart tins only big enough to hold a tomato tart made from a single slice of tomato, the edible silver pearls for cupcakes, the souffle dishes… oh the souffle dishes…), and there’s where the anxiety sets in.  Yesterday, I had a gift card to spend.  I needed to be careful and thrifty and try to not to exceed the card’s value by too much, because beauty doesn’t come cheap.  That meant excruciatingly rigorous examination of everything. in. the. store.  I ended up with equipment that fills several notable gaps in my kitchen repertoire, and that was good.  I was practical.  But it still didn’t quell my girlish longing for cookie cutters in the shape of a crab, a cupcake, or a golden retriever, or a spring-loaded icing syringe, or a huge octagonal serving platter.

And yet we pressed on.  On several trusted friends’ recommendations, we went to Montage for dinner.  Located under a bridge on the east side of the river, it was hard to find (thanks, road construction), but clearly well loved, as at least a dozen people were waiting outside for the restaurant to open when we arrived at 5:55pm.

When we went inside and the hostess showed us to a table set with pristine white linens and folded, creased paper menus, my impression was of a Brechtian dreamscape.  If Bertolt Brecht had designed a restaurant, it might be something like this.  In French, “montage” means “assembly” (roughly, forgive my linguistic impreciseness, amis).  Here, “assembly” took the form of a collage of high and low.  From my seat at our table, when I looked to the left I could see long, long shelves against the far wall stocked with bottle after bottle of wine.  As their extensive wine list proved, some were good vintages and all were pretty reasonably priced.  When my eyes slid upward, however, I got a view of the wall-sized, quasi-cartoon Last Supper painted above a row of two-tops.

Looking to my right, on the deep windowsill near the entrance I could see a classical-style statue, complete with broken limbs and barely disguised indecency, standing next to the cast of an alligator’s skeletal jaws and a fully blown pufferfish, both suspended from the ceiling by fishing line.

This, then, was a conscious pastiche of high and low.  The paper menus revealed not only the lengthy wine list, but a full range of Cajun and Southern American classics.  N. ordered the jambalaya, but I couldn’t resist the call of the fryer.  I ordered “Buttermilk fried chicken hindquarters,” which were advertized to arrive with garlic mashed potatoes, seasonal vegetables, AND a salad.

Before any of that, however, we got our beverages and shared a plate of hush puppies.  My dry Riesling was crisp and tart and just barely fruity, and our server really topped off my glass because there wasn’t enough left in the bottle for two.  I told him it was my birthday, so he could use that as an excuse and he chuckled.  Wine managed, we plowed into the hush puppies.  These were moist and chewy and had kernels of corn in the batter for that pop of sweetness and texture.  They were accompanied by two aiolis: one garlic and one red pepper (I think.  It was extremely mild and our server wasn’t sure).  The garlic aioli was delicious: slightly vinegary and herby, much more complex than a regular mayonnaise.  The fritters were not very crunchy on the outside, but their flavor more than made up for any textural shortcoming. 

While we waited for our dinner to arrive, another aspect of the Brechtian theater of the place became clear.  Behind the white, linen-clothed bar, the kitchen was partially visible, and every time a plate came out the expediter bellowed the name of the server responsible for it.  After an initial surprise, no one in the restaurant seemed put off by this practice, and it started to blend into the clatter of dishes, happy conversation, and David Bowie’s vocals soaring effortlessly up into the background.

Dinner arrived on white dishes, but it didn’t smell highbrow.  It smelled homey and warm and wonderful.  N.’s jambalaya was well spiced and nicely flavored.  It was just spicy enough to merit a gulp of beer and a crumble of cornbread in between bites, and he has added this to the list of dishes he’d like me to try at home.  My plate came with its promised hindquarters still connected, dredged and crispy and beautifully caramel-brown.  A little heap of mixed sauteed vegetables nestled in the space between leg and thigh, and a mound of mashed potatoes rounded out the plate.

I started with the mash.  I think they were red potatoes because some shreds of dark mauve-y skin added an appealing squish between my teeth.  The meat of the potatoes was velvety smooth and creamy and just brushed with garlic flavor.  N. was permitted one taste and then somehow the whole mound disappeared into my stomach.

I moved on to the chicken.  I have to admit, I am pretty picky about my fried chicken.  It must be crispy, it must be just greasy enough to slick my fingers and moisten my lips, and I prefer dark meat (though that’s the case with any poultry, fried or not).  This chicken scored a two out of three.  The breading was crisp and the meat was moist and flavorful.  This breading, however, was fairy thin.  It did not have the nodules of thick crunchy fattiness I didn’t know I wanted, and as a consequence the grease factor was minimal.  It was delicious (oh was it delicious!), but it wasn’t my fantasy fried chicken. 

The play of culture and carnivale continued as we finished our meal.  Our server asked if we wanted our leftovers wrapped up, and when we acquiesced he disappeared with our plates and returned with a stylized cat and squirrel made of aluminum foil, holding our remaining dinners in their tin bellies.  As they faced off against one another at the table, our server walked over holding a plate leaping with orange and blue flames: dessert on fire for my birthday.  Unless N. ordered this while I was in the ladies’ room (I suspect not), this was our server’s doing alone.  I’d mentioned it was my day at the outset of the meal, but I hadn’t been expecting anything from it.  Instead, what I got was essentially ice cream pie set alight.

How do I begin to dissect this gorgeousness in words?  Writing about food is funny because so often language fails to capture taste.  I’ll go in the order my spoon went.  First, there was the ice cream.  This was either vanilla or very mild coffee, because we were getting hints of coffee flavor the whole way through.  I suspect, however, that it was vanilla ice cream, and that the spirit used to flame the dessert was Sambuca, and that’s where the coffee flavor came from.  Or else the ice cream was also drizzled with Kahlua.  Beside the slice of ice cream, there was an airy pile of whipped cream, also drizzled with chocolate/coffee sensations, and the whole dessert was topped with crushed chocolate Oreo wafers, and built upon a slab of compressed bittersweet chocolate crust.  Frozen but on fire, soft and creamy with crunchy accents, sweet but with an espresso bitterness, this captured the juxtaposition of the whole place on a single white plate.  N. is not often one for rich desserts, but this one he ate as continuously and determinedly as I did.  He laid his spoon down only two bites before I did, leaving the last swirls of melting ice cream and heavy liqueur traces to me alone.  It was, after all, my birthday.

We left satiated and impressed.  This was neither the fanciest nor the most amazing food I’ve ever had, but it was damn tasty, and the ambiance, as strange a collage as it may have first seemed, only added to the experience.  If this had been in a rundown, casually decorated diner, it would have seemed cheap and cheesy.  If it had been the same food in a “fine dining” restaurant with elegantly uniformed servers and long aprons, it would have seemed uncomfortably out of place.  But this Brechtian dance between high and low, with its conscious acceptance – nay, its intentional embrace – of both, made it a near-perfect show.  There are a lot of restaurants in Portland we want to try out, but we will almost certainly return to Montage.*

* or perhaps to its adjoining lounge which, in keeping with the play between cultured and vulgar, is delightfully titled la Merde.

 

Roast Chicken, part I

Last night I faced another one of my food anxieties and bravely roasted a whole chicken.  This doesn’t sound like much, but for a girl who is capable of producing every side dish in a Thanksgiving feast but is afraid of the turkey, it was kind of a big deal for me.  First, I did my research.  And my research, I mean I asked around for suggestions on Facebook.  I got two recommendations, both from clever friends.  A. told me to stuff an herb and garlic mixture under the skin and into the cavity.  J. told me not to skimp on the rosemary.  I heeded their words.  At about 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon, I traipsed out to the garden in the misting spurts of drizzle and picked a big handful of parsley, pineapple sage, silver thyme, and several large twigs of the tiny rosemary bush I am so proud of.*

Back in the kitchen, I chopped the herbs roughly, threw them into a container with four cloves of garlic, a few tablespoons of butter, salt, pepper, and a splash of olive oil, before attacking the whole mixture with my immersion blender.  What resulted looked and tasted like the best spread for garlic bread there has ever been.

The next part was probably the most fun, though it could also be construed as the most icky, depending on how you feel about raw chicken.  To get the best flavors going, I carefully loosened the skin of the chicken from the meat by jamming my fingers in between them and breaking through the thin layer that attaches the skin to the muscles.  When I had loosened quite a bit of the skin on the chicken’s back (I have adopted my mom’s suggestion to roast poultry breast-side down, so the white meat doesn’t dry out as much), I shoved several fingerfuls of my herb butter mixture underneath the chicken’s skin, massaging the flavor into the meat.  The mixture was visible from the outside, making the chicken look like it had grown green spots.  It was like some strange miniature speckled pterodactyl.

With the tiny bit of leftover butter mixture, I coated the inside of the cavity before placing my 4-pounder in the oven at 350F.  Almost exactly 90 minutes later, it was done.  I pulled it out and admired the crisp, brown skin for a few moments before quickly tenting it with aluminum foil to stay warm while I made our side dishes.

I steamed a bunch of asparagus to provide some greens, and then, with reverence, sliced up our first gigantic Brandywine tomato for caprese salad.  We wanted to be sure and put this first huge beautiful heirloom to good use, since our bush is only promising a few choice specimens, and with the weather as schizophrenic as it usually is at this time of year, we may not get many more.  Caprese seemed noble enough.  I layered the thick, meaty slices of tomato with fresh mozzarella and just-picked basil, then sprinkled the whole thing with salt and pepper before giving it a healthy drizzle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Gorgeous, no?  Who needs lettuce?

We dug in.  The caprese was marvelous; the acidic sweetness of the tomato juice mingled with the balsamic vinegar into a beautiful sweet-tangy jus that soaked into the fresh mozzarella, which had enough creaminess to stand up to the firm, meaty flesh of the tomato slices.  It was perfect.  And then it was gone.

The chicken was delicious as well.  It was moist and savory, and the herbs both added some welcome flavors and made it smell really enticing.  I forced myself not to eat more than a bite or two of the skin, which was crispy and golden and marvelous.  It’s a shame that fat tastes so wonderful, because it is always difficult for me to avoid it.  I love that marbling in any cut of meat, and I’m a fiend for the thigh and leg on poultry both because it is moister meat, but also because the skin often gets left on the leg, and I get to chew on some of it as a special treat.

Dinner was delectable, but almost more exciting than dinner was the fate of the leftovers.  There was plenty of meat left over after we were finished; even at our hungriest, I doubt that N. and I could polish off a 4 pound chicken with just the two of us, so I picked the carcass pretty thoroughly and will use the meat again soon.  As for the carcass, all I can tell you is to stay tuned for “Roast Chicken, part II.”

*Early this spring, I picked a sprig of rosemary from a bush in the neighborhood that was leaning out over the sidewalk.  I put it in a vase (read: cleaned and dried empty artichoke hearts jar) and waited.  It took about three weeks, but it sprouted roots and I, holding my breath, planted it in a small pot outside.  It flourished.  It is still pretty small, probably because I keep using its fragrant, pine-scented leaves to cook with, but next spring I will re-pot it to really let it go wild.