Chicken Adobo Variation #1

Spanish for seasoning or marinade, adobo is also a term used for the name of a well-known Filipino dish typically made from pork or chicken (or a combination of both). I first read the recipe in Greg Atkinson’s great Seattle Times article Food for the Crew which made it into Best Food Writing 2001. It looked so good and easy, which is a big selling point for me, I decided to give it a go. After a quick search of the net for alternate recipes I decided on a mix of things I saw. The result was really good. Salty and tangy balanced but maybe leaning a little heavily to the salt side. As we were eating I mentioned to L that adding something sweet to balance the savory would really make it for me, maybe honey. One recipe called for fresh grated ginger, one called for replacing vinegar with lemon juice, another for adding pineapple bits and some of the syrup—it all sounds good to me. There are so many different takes available online that for the next couple of months I’m going to keep experimenting and posting the variations. This will be Chicken Adobo Variation #1:

CHICKEN ADOBO

Ingredients
2 pounds organic, free run, skinless chicken breast
1 cup vinegar
1 cup soy sauce
3 + 1 cloves roasted garlic, crushed
1 tbsp fresh cracked pepper
1 bay leaf
unsalted butter

Method
Wash the chicken and cut into about eight pieces. Throw the pieces into a pot with soy sauce, vinegar, water, 3 garlic cloves, pepper, and bay leaf. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to medium-low. Cover and keep chicken bubbling for 25 minutes or until done. Remove chicken from the liquid but keep the liquid boiling. Heat some unsalted butter with the other crushed garlic clove in a separate fry pan. Add the chicken and fry until brown. Return the chicken to the liquid (which will have reduced a bit).

Serve with steamed white rice.

Baked Sweet Potato & Roasted Cherry Tomato Soup

One of the easiest recipes I’ve done lately was from Tamasin Day-Lewis’s Good Tempered Food. Roast some onion, sweet potato and cherry tomatoes with olive oil, sprigs of rosemary and thyme and when all weepy and carmelly good, you peel the sweet potatoes and bung the lot into a food processor with some hot chicken stock (that has been mixed with some brown sugar). Throw it back on the stove and boil, then taste and season. Really delicious. Very simple, but bold, flavours all coming together. I served it with a slice of roasted garlic-scraped sour dough toast.

Now a word about the cookbook. I haven’t tried many things out of Day-Lewis’s book (Good Tempered Food) but I agree with Renz over at Little Bouffe that it’s a good book but there are problems with her recipes. There has to be a certain amount of caveat emptor in creating a Day-Lewis dish as it rarely turns out as good as claimed or expected. But this gives you room to move about and swing your elbows a bit. Luckily for me, I’m useless at reading recipes anyway and tend to work on the Nigel Slater theory that a recipe is a guideline (unless baking or candy making, of course) and that you should personalize it a bit. But beware of her cooking times, best to keep your eyes open. If my incorrigible little Magic Chef ® gas range (with its upside-down clock) has taught me anything it’s that sometimes it’s best not to force a recipe and sometimes you gotta step up and hammer it until it fits. But the decision is yours.

Beer & Cheddar Cheese Soup with Bacon

“He was a wise man who invented beer,” Plato correctly noted, but it was an even wiser person that coupled it with aged cheddar to make soup. Come to think of it, it was probably a couple of people, the same ones that first mixed chocolate with peanut butter. I rooted around the lumber room of the internet looking for the history and found nothing. The origin of cheese predates recorded history and beer is one of the oldest human-produced beverages, so I’m assuming the recipe is likely as old. Beer (due to the brewing process) was safer to drink than the water and milk (which was usually preserved as cheese) so I’m sure the nomadic Turkic peoples sat around the yurt campfire eating this wonderful silky soup while listening to a Manaschi reciting some beautiful epic poem as the sun slowly nodded below the horizon and the stars began glistening wetly over the dry evening, they relined in the silent embrace of nature and nibbled peanut butter cups for dessert. Don’t quote me on this I never did well in history.

This curiousity for Cheddar Cheese & Beer soup started about a month ago while watching Master Class at Johnson & Wales on PBS. It was the episode #318, “Cooking with Beer”. I remember the beer-marinated skirt steak looked good, couldn’t really remember what the chicken saltimbocca was all about, but the cheddar cheese soup stuck in my head. Over the next couple of weeks I would search the net trying to track down the simple recipe that was produced on the show. But to no avail. The people at the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales should post the recipes from the show as a public service. Anyway. I found an abundance of other recipes and finally decided on one from Gourmet magazine. The only changes I made to the recipe was using a lager beer (Taps Premium Lager, I prefer cooking with it than drinking it) and the bacon was organic and nitrate-free (I won’t make that mistake again, I read an essay in one of Holly Hughes’ always enjoyable Best Food Writing books about artisanal bacon. The point that stuck out was that you need at least a little nitrate in bacon otherwise it doesn’t taste like bacon. I can’t find the volume it’s from at the moment. But, I can now attest to this, my nitrate-free rashers tasted more of burnt ham that crispy bacon. The next time I make this soup with be with good bacon that is low in nitrate and I’ll see how that works).

The soup was a complete success, even though I diced the vegetables a little larger (OK, a lot larger) that the recipe called for which more than doubled (OK, maybe tripled) the amount of time it took for them to soften. Long story short, creamy and tangy and wonderful. L loved it, and in the end that’s what it’s about, isn’t it?

• Gourmet, March 2005

Sautéed Spinach with Onions & Garlic Confit

OK, first off, I love sautéed greens—let’s just get that out of the way. I look like a meat and potatos guy but when left to my own devices, I admit it, I’ve got a couple cloves of roasted garlic and some diced shallots or onions in the pan, a little unsalted butter and garlicky olive oil and I’m rinsing the spinach.

So, my wife L is coming home late, I’m hungry and reading the Cooking Journey food blog and Shayla has made some sautéed greens with shallots and it looks so good—and green, so very, very green. I think, yeah, I’ll have some of that. I had the garlic cloves minced and in the pan with the onions and the bunch of organic spinach glistening emerald before I remembered I had the Fine Cooking issue that she used (December 2006, on the back flap). So as I was sitting down with my big bowl of green garlicky goodness, enjoying that scratchy teeth feel you get, I scanned the recipe. I don’t know if I could give up the garlic cloves in place of the coriander and red pepper (although L might like me to). I prefer a much simpler and less spicy dish (not spicy hot, but spicy complicated), I like the peppery flavour of the spinach mixed with the warmth of the onion and garlic, and just a pinch of Fleur de Sel.

SAUTÉED SPINACH WITH ONION & ROASTED GARLIC CONFIT

This also works well with other greens, I particularly like it with rapini.

Ingredients
1 tbsp unsalted butter
¼ cup finely diced onion (or shallots)
2 cloves minced roasted garlic (Garlic Confit - recipe follows)
1 tbsp garlic oil (again, recipe follows)
1 bunch fresh organic spinach (thoroughly washed), longer, tough stems removed and discarded (I save all veggie cuttings in the freezer for stock).

Method
In a big fry pan stir the butter, oil, garlic and onion over medium heat until the onion is soft. Add the spinach. Cook spinach (I read a recipe recently that suggets while cooking the spinach you should be “stirring furiously,” I prefer “calmly” using tongs to turn the greens around so everything gets shiny and coated), cover and stir every now and then for a few minutes or until the spinach is wilted but still bright green. Plate and season with sea salt and freshly cracked pepper.

serves: me


N.B. - I have no idea where I originally came across my garlic confit recipe but it is so easy, as you’ll see, that I just do it when I have some surplus garlic.

GARLIC CONFIT

This is a great pantry staple. I use the garlic oil to brush on garlic bread, or to pour in the pan with butter for sautéed spinach or even eggs, home fries. The roasted cloves can be scraped across toast to liven up a sandwich or used together with fresh garlic to give a more complicated taste profile (ooo, listen to the boy, I mean it tastes really good). All in all, I could not live without this stuff. You could try putting fresh thyme sprigs while roasting, I read that Thomas Keller does that in his Bouchon cookbook.

Ingredients
peeled garlic cloves
olive oil

Method
Preheat the oven to 350° F / 175° C / Gas Mark 4. Half fill an oven proof dish with the garlic cloves and cover completely with the olive oil. Bake in oven for about 20 to 30 minutes, until the cloves are tender and golden. Put on your counter and let cool, uncovered, until it reaches room temperature. You can keep it for up to a month in an airtight container (we use it up well before then).

Beef Barley Soup with Cheesy Garlic Bread

Once, sometimes twice, a week I make a batch of soup. My wife and I takes turns deciding what type I will make and then on my way home from work I’ll stop in at the organic market and pick the ingredients up fresh. This week was L’s choice and reaching back into her comfort food memories she picked Beef Barley soup. I did a quick search and found a great recipe from February 2000 issue of Bon Appétit. I hadn’t fully read the recipe until I got home and found that before the meat gets added the soup has to sit over night. Postponing the soup night seemed a sad thing at first but over the next 24 hours the flavours had married beautifully and made it all worth while. I only bought about one pound of the filet mignon (the recipe calls for 1 1/2 lbs), but when cut into half inch pieces it was more than enough and cooked quite quickly. To accompany the soup I brushed some sourdough bread with garlicky olive oil and mozzarella cheese and grilled it until it was bubbly. We both had seconds.

• BEEF AND BARLEY SOUP - Bon Appétit, February 2000

Soup and a Box of Tissues

If soup isn't hot enough to make a grown man wince, it's undrinkable.

- Grey Livingston

When I was growing up, my father was the soup maker in our family. His soups were hearty, starchy, but above all, spicy concoctions. He said on a number of occasions that a soups quality can be judged by the need for a box of Kleenex tissues. The kitchen table would have a our bowls of soup, heaps of buttered white bread, curry powder, the ever present box of tissues and we would be tucking in, all sniffles and rosy cheeks. With my parents and my brothers the table was always full of laughter. In those days my idea of heaven was dunking thick wodges of bread into hot soup, buttery slicks forming on the surface and the way all those flavours came together in my mouth.

Perhaps the reason we all laughed so much during those meals can be explained by the researchers who claim that one of the most powerful ways to release endorphins is to eat spicy foods. Maybe it’s just that my parents made that time of breaking bread with family an enjoyment, a time of fun and sharing (and a bit of nose blowing). Since I have grown up and my parents have passed on, those times have been polished up and tagged the good old days. And they were—to be enjoyed with a box of tissues.