Beer Can Chicken, a Guest Recipe from Andy

We gave Andy and his family some dried herbs from our garden for Christmas. He coated a chicken with them, refrigerated for 24 hours, and then made this Beer Can Chicken:

We like beer can chicken. It's dead simple, easy to clean up, keeps the chicken moist, entertains Abby... it's a winner. I'd recommend getting one of the can stands; they sell them in kitchen stores or even in the supermarket for like 5 bucks. The stand makes it easy to stabilize the chicken, although I've done it with just the can as well. Any beer works or really anything in a can... I've used Dr. Pepper. Just jam a bunch of your favorite spices in the cavity, drink a little of the beer, jam some more spices in the beer can and poke a few more holes in the top of the can, shove the chicken on so its legs are hanging down, maybe put a little olive oil and spices on the outside, put it on the grill on medium (if it's gas) for about an hour and 15 minutes for a 5 pound bird... a little longer for a larger bird... easy. I take it off the grill with a couple metal spatulas and put it on a big wooden cutting board to rest and cut.

Crop Rotation in New Mexico, and a Quinoa Pilaf

We stayed at Percha Dam State Park along the Rio Grande River in southern New Mexico again last week. Last October when we visited there, the surrounding fields were full of red chile pods awaiting harvest. Now, in May, those same fields were planted with onions, with many acres of alfalfa interspersed for healthy crop rotation. If the Midwest is the breadbasket of the world, this valley is surely the salsa bowl of the world.

I made a delicious, though unrelated, dish in the camper while here. I sauteed sliced onions, garlic, sliced red bell pepper, and strips of chicken breast in olive oil in a skillet. I added 1/2 cup quinoa and stirred until lightly toasted, then added a cup of chicken bouillon, covered the pan, and simmered until the quinoa was tender and the liquid absorbed--about 20 minutes, I think.

Greek Chicken with Sage

We have two varieties of sage in the herb garden at present. I don't know their names but I certainly admire the way they hung in there over our record-hot summer. I don't use sage very much except at Thanksgiving, so I was happy to find this vinegary, flavorful recipe in Susanna Hoffman's The Olive and the Caper. A bonus: it's very easy.

Chicken with Onions, Tomatoes, Capers and Sage

2-4 tablespoons olive oil

3-4 large boneless, skinless chicken thighs, halved

1 sliced onion

1/3 cup dry red wine

1/3 cup balsamic vinegar

1 cup canned diced tomatoes

3 tablespoons capers, drained

1 teaspoon or more fresh chopped sage leaves

Salt and pepper

Heat the oil and brown the chicken and onion for about 10 minutes. Add all the remaining ingredients and stir to mix. Simmer, partially covered, until chicken is tender, perhaps about 45 minutes. Reduce the sauce at the end if it's too liquid.

South American Food

Sam and Grace came over for dinner on Friday. We sat outside for the cocktail hour, with wine, fresh veggies from the garden, and Swiss chard empanadas which I baked outside.

For the main course we had Argentinian chicken, a quinoa pilaf, and zucchini cooked with corn. And Easy Almond Tart for dessert. I make this tart so often--it's not enormous like my other tart recipes, and so easy, and everyone loves it. I am reporting here that Sam ate two pieces.

Desert Camping

We escaped to the desert last week--Organ Pipe, Joshua Tree, Death Valley, and Mojave National Preserve--all National Park Service areas. Long live public lands!

We saw lots of wild flowers and hiked and drove in such beautiful country. We cooked in the camper every night, including meals of salmon patties, buffalo chili, chicken sausage and pasta, and finally a sort of chicken piccata with quinoa.

I sauteed the peppers and onions, browned the chicken, and then made a pilaf with the broth and quinoa. Delicious served with Brussels sprouts.

The last night we camped in our favorite sort of place, out in the wilderness with geology all around.

Diagnosis: Purple Soup

The strange cooking slump continues. This has never happened to me before for more than a few days: it's like I've lost both confidence and sense. I've made some good food and some crummy food, but I haven't felt right about any of it. It's like being a pitcher or shooting free throws -- something is off, and I don't know what, but the fact that I know it's off reinforces the offness of it.

Too abstract? Here's an exhibit.

I made chicken tortilla soup a few nights ago. Homemade stock, nice roasted chicken, green chiles, tortillas fried in a mixture of peanut oil and schmaltz [I have a newfound academic interest in schmaltz thanks to Melanie] -- good stuff. I had some red cabbage in the fridge that I wanted to use up. "Cabbage would be good in tortilla soup," I thought to myself. But my cooking sense should have followed that up with "Green cabbage, maybe. Red cabbage would turn the soup purple."

But that second voice never spoke, and indeed, the soup was purple.

Tasty, but purple.

Now that I've identified the problem, I think the only way to solve it will be to ignore cooking for a short time -- to keep doing it, but to just stop thinking about it. Again, exactly like shooting free throws.

So last night we had grilled cheese sandwiches with pickles on the side. They were excellent. For lunch today I'm having black beans from a can mixed with cheddar and hot sauce and heated up in the microwave. It hardly counts as cooking. That's the idea.

Meanwhile, in the absence of cooking mojo, there has been more knitting. I made Lawson a kickass scarf. And here is part of a hat.

Chicken and Pastry

Here's a new one from the Southern food files: chicken and dumplings, aka chicken and pastry.

Southern dumplings are completely different from what we think of as dumplings, Mom -- these are more like big noodles, like those big 3" square Thai rice noodles except made out of soft wheat flour.

Most people here call the dish chicken and dumplings, but Lawson's dad's family calls it chicken and pastry, which I think is more descriptive. For me, the word "dumpling," what with that "plump" assonance and my own childhood memories, just describes balls of dough better than flaps of dough. So pastry it is.

There's another key way in which Southern chicken and dumplings is different from what we make elsewhere, and this difference took me longer to understand. It's not a soup, although it's made with a bunch of broth. It's got no vegetables, and it's not heavily seasoned. It's more like chicken and noodles in gravy. The dumplings thicken the stock as they cook, and you serve the chicken and dumplings on a plate or flat bowl with just some of the liquid, which clings to everything like a sauce. Vegetables go on the side.

Here is Lawson's grandma's recipe for chicken and pastry, as written down by his...maybe great aunt?:

Make a hole in the center of a pan full of self-rising flour. Get a cup full of hot chicken broth and pour it into the hole. Take a fork and stir it around and work in enough flour to make a firm ball. On a floured surface, roll it out thin. Leave it for a couple of hours to "die." (I don't know if you would have to "let it die" if you used all-purpose flour, we never had any of that kind at our house.) Then cut into thin strips and drop into the boiling pot of broth and chicken. Cook until tender, (not long).

Lawson remembers watching his grandma make chicken and pastry when he was a kid, so he was able to fill in some of the holes in that recipe for me. I also looked at Jean Anderson's instructions in the cookbook you gave me, Mom, and a few other places. And here's what I did:

Chicken and Pastry

Roast a chicken. Eat half of the meat at one meal. Pick the other half of the meat off and save for chicken and pastry.

Make stock with the carcass, skin, pan drippings, an onion, and a carrot.

(Most traditional recipes call for starting with a whole chicken and boiling it. But most traditional recipes are for tough old hens that have stopped laying, not grocery store roasters. Roasting the chicken first gives a bland bird more flavor. And since we can get several two-person meals out of one chicken, there's no use just boiling the whole thing.)

When the broth is finished, make the pastry dough:

• 2 cups white all-purpose flour -- I used White Lily.
• 1 and 1/2 teaspoons salt
• warm broth, not yet skimmed -- I used a bit less than a cup, but this will vary.

Mix together with a fork just until doughlike. Do not knead. Form into ball and set aside.

Skim the fat off the broth and heat the broth in a clean pan. Add salt, pepper, a fresh sage leaf, and a sprig of thyme and simmer for 10-15 minutes, long enough to get the flavors smoothed out.

Roll out the pastry on a floured counter. At first I rolled it to about 3/8", but Lawson said it should be still thinner, almost translucent, so I did that. Later we decided the thicker pieces were a bit better -- they had some chewy substantialness that was lacking from the thin ones.

Cut the pastry with a knife into rectangles about 2" x 3".

Add the chicken meat to the broth and bring to a boil. It should be a big rolling boil. I didn't like it and tried to convince Lawson to turn it down, though he swore he remembered a ferocious boil -- I thought it would make the broth taste scorchy and flat. But I understood after we put the pastry in that the broth has to be moving and hopping furiously to keep the pastry from sticking to other pieces. So do that.

Drop the pastry pieces one at a time into the pot. Once all the pastry was in, it probably took about 15 minutes for everything to cook through and the broth to thicken slightly.

We ate it with green beans boiled and then tossed with lemon zest and a touch of butter. Very simple, and perfect on a cold wet January night in South Carolina.

Curry Chicken

What do you do with leftover hoppin' john from New Year's Day? You re-purpose it as Caribbean peas and rice.

And what do you do with the unexpected midwinter gift of a few fresh homegrown chiles? You make Caribbean curry chicken.

On New Year's Eve, my friend Ken showed me and Lawson his nifty greenhouse and gave us a few fatalii peppers he'd grown in it. I'd never had them before. They were like small yellow habaneros, so I thought I would use them in a scotch bonnet-worthy recipe.

I used almost exactly the same recipe as I did for the goat, with two substitutions: 2 nice organic chicken leg quarters instead of lamb, and 2 regular white potatoes instead of sweet potatoes. All else was the same: rub the spices into the meat and let it sit for a while, then brown everything and make a curry.

The taste was warm and wonderful, quite similar to the curry chicken I've had at good Jamaican places. And it tasted nothing like the goat did, despite having the same spice blend. I served it with beet greens and leftover hoppin' john peas-and-rice.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

I don't think I've ever made tortilla soup. I looked at some recipes but didn't end up using any except to learn how to handle the tortillas.

The biggest surprise for me was that the tortillas end up being an integral part of the flavor and consistency of the soup. After they've sat in there for a few minutes, they thicken the soup slightly and pull all the flavors together.

Next time I roast a chicken again I will make this with the leftovers again.

Here's how I made it.

• 6 corn tortillas
• 1 small onion, diced
• 3 carrots, peeled and cut into 3/4" cubes
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/4 cup sherry
• green chiles. I used one can whole, diced up, but fresh would be better
• chicken broth -- I used half homemade and half high-quality carton stock
• hot sauce or other heat adjuster -- I happened to use homemade Tabasco sauce
• fresh lime juice
• salt
• pepper
• a few cups cooked chicken, shredded

Cut corn tortillas into strips and pan-fry them until golden/brown in a little peanut oil. Drain on paper towels. Set aside.

Saute onion lightly in olive oil. Add carrots, then garlic, and saute just until you can smell the garlic. Add sherry and cook it off, then broth and green chiles.

Simmer 15 minutes or so, until flavors blend.

Add salt, pepper, lime juice, and hot sauce to taste.

Add chicken and bring back to a simmer.

Put a handful of fried tortilla strips in each bowl and ladle the soup on top. Let sit for a few minutes. Serve with avocado slices and lime wedges.

Spicy Indian Kohlrabi

I bought some kohlrabi recently for the first time. I wrote to ask you about it because I remembered you and Dad used to grow it in Alaska. And while I want to try it the simple way you told me about -- boiled, with butter, salt, and pepper -- we were in the mood for something spicy. Also, it's easier to approach a new vegetable when garlic and chiles are involved.

So I was pleased to find that kohlrabi is used in Indian cooking a lot. This is a combination of several recipes I found.

***

• 3 kohlrabi (kohlrabis? sputniks?) with greens
• 2 T olive oil
• 2 bay leaves
• A few garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 2 small hot chiles, fresh or dried -- I used a fresh immature tabasco and a few chiltepins
• 2 t ground coriander
• 1 t cracked black pepper
• salt to taste
• 1 cup water
• 1-2 T fresh lemon juice

Peel the kohlrabi and cut it into fat matchsticks, about 3/4" per side. Roughly chop the greens.

Heat the oil and saute the bay leaves, garlic, turmeric, chiles, and coriander, being careful not to burn them. Add the greens and saute for a few minutes. Then add the chopped kohlrabi and salt and pepper. Saute a few minutes more.

Add water, cover, and simmer until tender. Some recipes called for as many as 40 minutes, but I think we had some very young kohlrabi, and it was extremely tender in about 15 minutes.

Let the water cook away and add the lemon juice. Serve.

***

Lawson was quite charmed, and I think he is going to grow some kohlrabi now.

In the back there is a half-invented chicken-rice dish. Lawson said it was like an Indian chicken bog. It was okay, but not perfectly balanced. It contained onions, garlic, cardamom, saffron, a cinnamon stick, ginger, almonds, yogurt, jasmine rice, chicken thighs, and some other stuff I can't recall. Nice idea, one I'll try again, but with some modifications.

South American Dinner

Maybe the Republicans are right, and the country will lapse into moral decline now the Democrats are in power. Starting with us--this was the second morning in a week that we woke up to unwashed dishes and the multi-bottle litter of entertaining.

I served a South American dinner for six. The menu:

Sweet potato chips (purchased)
Basque sheep cheese
Nuts
***
Shrimp Cebiche
Vegetable Cebiche (hearts of palm, broccoli, mushrooms)
Homemade Bread
***
Chicken in a Red Chile Sauce with Peas and Olives
Quinoa Pilaf
Pickled Onions
***
Fruit Tart

The loaf of bread pictured above contained 1 cup unbleached flour, 1/2 cup spelt flour, 1 1/4 cup whole wheat flour, and 1/4 cup coarse cornmeal. I used molasses for the sweetener.

The tart was pretty with mixed berries, all on sale this week!

Remember we wondered how to make pickled onions like Santos? I found the method in The South American Table by Maria Baez Kijac.

Peel a medium red onion, cut in half, and slice into paper-thin half moons. Cover with hot water and soak 15 minutes. Drain and rinse with cold water. Add the juice of 1 lemon, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper to the onions, mix well, cover, and let stand at room temperature for three hours or until they turn pink. Best served the same day.

Grilled Chicken Wings

In Chew On This! last week I said teriyaki wings were useless, that the only proper role of a chicken wing is as a vehicle for hot sauce. But I forgot about Lawson's chicken wings. So to make up for my overgeneralization, here the recipe.

Buy a few pounds of chicken wings. We usually get about 20 to share between the two of us if it's the main dish (which is a little too much) -- around 2 pounds, a mix of drumettes and wingy parts. Earth Fare has them on sale a lot, all trimmed and fresh and organic. The above are not trimmed and are from Piggly Wiggly, but they were okay, too.

Sprinkle wings with a few teaspoons of five-spice powder, if desired. Then marinate wings in a ziplock bag containing:

1 part soy sauce
2 parts water
several star anise pods

Prepare a wood and/or charcoal fire (here it's a mix of hickory and generic woodpile wood) and let it burn down to hot coals. Grill wings for 30-50 minutes, staring intently at them as they cook (at least that's what Lawson does), turning often enough that they don't burn but not so often that they stick to the grate. When they're done, the fat should be rendered out and the skin browned but not burned.

I think there's probably some other secret to Lawson's technique, but this is what I've observed. Jason, give it a try and see if it's right!

Chicken Kapama

I forgot to take a picture of my chicken dish. Fortunately we have lots of beautiful barrel cacti in bloom right now to enhance my post.

This recipe is adapted from The Olive and the Caper by Susanna Hoffman, reviewed here. The sauce is so dark and delicious, and it's a very convenient dish to cook ahead for company.

Chicken Kapama

Olive oil
1 cut-up chicken, or 8 boneless/skinless thighs
1 thinly sliced onion

Brown the chicken thoroughly on both sides. Remove chicken and brown the onion for one minute.

1 1/2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 lb. canned or fresh tomatoes
1 1/2 cups dry red wine
1/4 cup brandy
1/2 cup strong coffee (remember to save some from breakfast)
2 tablespoons honey
2 inches of cinnamon stick
3 whole cloves
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
Watercress or fresh basil for garnish

Mix the sauce ingredients with the onion and bring to a boil. Return chicken to pan. Cover and simmer 45 minutes. Remove cover and continue cooking for 30 to 45 more minutes, until sauce is thickened and chicken is very tender. Garnish with watercress or basil.

I like to serve this with a bulgur and walnut pilaf.

Carnitas, and the Evils of Too Much Entertaining

We have been cooking up a storm around here. There were people we wanted to see after our long trip, so we started inviting them for dinner.

We had a nice menu on Saturday:

Guacamole

Homemade salsa

Chips
***
Guisado de Pollo

Flour or spelt tortillas

Steaming Soupy Beans

Spinach Salad with Apples, Pecans, and Blue Cheese

***

Fresh Pineapple

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

Ice Cream

That cake was great, by the way. I spread the calories around the neighborhood, giving away several pieces. I used 2/3 cup each of whole spelt flour, plain white flour, and Bob's Red Mill Baking Mix. It dried out a bit the next day, but ice cream helped with that.

For general information, I make guacamole in the food processor, using 1 clove garlic, 4 fresh roasted green chiles (or a can), 2 green onions, 1/4 cup cilantro leaves, 2 avocados, seasoned with juice of a lime and salt. All to taste.

Then Dad requested carnitas for Sunday dinner with Grandma. I've had good versions in restaurants, but my favorite Mexican cookbooks basically directed me to boil pork chunks in lard until tender and brown. Not really my style. I ended up with an internet recipe which simmered the pork until tender, then browned it for a half hour in the oven. Not too bad--perhaps a little more fat was called for, but good.

Oh yeah, the evils of entertaining: it makes you fat. I tend to make lots of food and show off, and enjoy myself and eat dessert, etc.

Hash in the Yukon Territory

My mother made hamburger hash: hamburger, onion, and cold cooked potatoes fried together and served with ketchup. Yum.

I've made all kinds of hash since then, but we really liked this one--chicken hash with garlic, red onion, parsnips, and potatoes. With ketchup. I served it with a spinach salad and Rainier cherries.

We ate this at Kluane Lake in the Yukon, where you have camped with us.

Pipián Verde

So I made a pipián, the pre-Columbian dish made from toasted squash seeds, tomatillos, chiles, cilantro, and a few other things ground up and stewed with poultry. James Peyton's recipe called for duck, preferably wild, but I used a chicken.

I didn't know quite what it would taste like -- I'd never eaten one before -- and couldn't quite imagine the flavor, so I didn't tweak the recipes much (Peyton + Gabilondo + internet). Next time I will. It was rich but not as full of chile flavor as I would have liked. And a whole chicken was too much food with all that thick nutty sauce. It was mostly like a dull mole (and indeed, Peyton says pipians are like ancestors of moles -- basically pre-roux sauces thickened by tortillas or nuts).

Toasting the pumpkin seeds was fun; they popped and danced and browned nicely. But even with a whole cup of cilantro and some green chiles, the sauce was a kind of an icky light brown. Next time I'll use a whole bunch of poblanos and tomatillos and fewer pumpkin seeds. A little white wine or vermouth would be good. Maybe more oregano. Lime juice instead of vinegar for brightness. And I think I'll cook the sauce for less time -- use breasts or smaller pieces and only cook the thing for 45 minutes or so once the chicken is browned. I don't think it was improved by the few hours of stewing.

Lawson's growing tomatillos this year, so it shouldn't be long before I try again.

Fire Pit Chicken Wings

I don't know why it seems so much hipper to cook over the big copper fire pit than on a grill, but it does. Lawson built a fire, and when it had burned down to coals he cooked wings. We ate them with spoon bread and a salad of lettuce and avocado.

You can see our ugly makeshift tables in this photo -- our outdoor table shattered during a windstorm and we haven't replaced it yet.

I'd never tasted spoon bread before. I like it. I used the 2000 Joy of Cooking recipe for Custard Topped Spoon Bread, with my usual substitutions of yogurt for buttermilk. It was delicious.

I've been busy: I took over Chew On This!, the Free Times food news column, for one thing. And in two weeks I'm off to the beach. But I can get back to updating more regularly now that I have quit my corporate job. Plus, it's getting to be garden vegetable season, so there'll be plenty to write about.

One Small Chicken, Four Meals

I haven't roasted a chicken for while--previous ones have seemed too fatty and gross. But for Sunday dinner I had a hankering for the traditional roasted chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, so I bought a smallish--three-and-a-half pounds--"natural" bird which turned out to be just fine.

I rubbed it with a paste of salt, paprika, and olive oil, stuffed fresh parsley, rosemary, and thyme in the cavity, and baked it on a rack at 325 degrees for about one hour and forty-five minutes. I made gravy with vermouth. So good! I rounded out the menu with roasted red peppers and cold lima beans dressed with oil and lemon juice. And Grandma made her lemon pudding.

Instead of using the leftovers in a different dish, we had a repeat of the same meal the next day. Then chicken enchiladas, and finally some chicken broth which I'm storing up for a rainy day.

I'll get that Lemon Pudding recipe from Grandma tomorrow.

A Good Dinner Party

We had our friends Ken and Melanie and their baby Andrew over for dinner last Sunday (you can see Andrew's foot in the top left of the picture above). We didn't make plans until Sunday morning, and I happened to have bought enough food during my big weekly Saturday grocery run to cover dinner. It was a fun, spontaneous meal, and much more tasty and successful than dinner parties I've spent all week planning.

Here's what we made, clockwise from top left:

• Salad with fresh orange sections, walnuts, cinnamon, and an orange juice vinaigrette, modeled entirely after your own Moroccan salad. I don't have your recipe, but I guessed, and it turned out very well.
• Chicken wings marinated by Lawson in a mysterious blend that contained star anise and honey and who knows what else and then grilled slowly over charcoal.
• Those white beans with rosemary that I continue to be obsessed with.
• Shrimp, red and yellow peppers, and onions marinated, grilled over high heat, and then tossed with cilantro, more lemon, olive oil, salt, and pepper.

We didn't even miss the starch, because the beans seemed to fill that gap. Even Andrew the Baby tried a bite of beans. He also ate mashed avocado that his parents brought from home.

Chicken and Lentils

I've been thinking more about my last post, which sounds like I've got it all figured out. I don't. Knowing how best to think and talk about food is really hard.

And compared to many people I know, maybe I am obsessed with food. Certainly I think about food much more. In fact, that's the real difference between someone who cooks most meals and someone who doesn't: not the time spent preparing food, but the time spent thinking about it. Sure, I often spend an hour or two making dinner, but just as often I spend only ten minutes actually working in the kitchen -- no more time than someone who heats up a few TV dinners. The difference is that earlier in the day I thought about what to make. I probably talked about it, too, or sent a few emails. I didn't have to make myself plan dinner -- it just happened.

For cooks, food takes up a certain amount of constant head space. I just try not to let it take over.

So yesterday afternoon I went to Jason and Laura's to drink and play with their Wii, and before I left I put the following items in the crockpot. By dinnertime four hours later, we had a delicious stew:

- two onions, sliced and sauteed
- somewhat less than a whole chicken, browned (I used 1/3 of it in the soup earlier this week)
- two carrots, chopped
- two cloves garlic, sliced
- a two-inch chunk of ginger, sliced
- two tablespoons pine nuts
- two small dried red chiles, deseeded
- two bay leaves (I promise I didn't mean to put two of everything in)
- one scant tablespoon garam masala
- some peppercorns
- one cup French lentils, rinsed
- water to almost cover
- salt

It was sort of like a tagine, but one made from Indian, Mediterranean, and French ingredients. So I served it with quinoa (South American) and chopped parsley. It was great. I've been making meat-free versions of similarly seasoned lentils lately, too.