It only took me one month to break my new year's resolution, but I'm still gonna soldier on instead of giving up on a post a week. I did have a blog post sorted for last week, so I will share it with you now.
I took out a whole chicken from the freezer last week and brined it in water, sugar, salt, and dried herbs, thinking that I would simply make a nice roasted chicken, but a friend tentatively planning to leave for a teaching gig in Saudi Arabia (who left last Friday) decided to go on a fast until the Super Bowl. I decided not to allow him to go a week without eating--well, not really, but it turned out that way. When I told him I was making an enchilada stuffed boneless chicken last Tuesday he caved and ate something to prep his system because as you surely know you cannot come off of a fast with a heavy meal without any looseness down under, so he ate a salad that promptly slipped through his digestive track.
He suggested taking it to a friend's place to prepare, so I did that. Unfortunately, I am left with few photos due to socializing.
First thing first, I made the enchilada stuffing. That called for first roasting the pasilla peppers.
After roasting, I put them in a bowl and wrapped a produce bag around it to steam the skins off for 5 minutes. To a tall skillet, I first browned chorizo from the Mercado Loco butcher counter, sauted one onion, a few cloves of garlic, and the chopped peppers. To this I added a can of tomatoes, a can of corn, and a cup of enchilada sauce:
1 can tomato paste
1 cup homemade chicken broth
1 tbs chili powder (toasted and ground ancho, california, arbol, cumin, oregano, garlic powder, onion powder)
Seasoned with salt and pepper as well as cinnamon. I finished it with tearing up 10 corn tortillas and folding them in. I let this simmer for 10 minutes to reduce and thicken.
Had I thought a bit more about it, I would have added an egg after cooling to help bind everything together, but I didn't.
I've become pretty proficient at deboning poultry, and it still makes for a fairly horrific sight.
The stuffing is spooned in and trussed back together with butcher's twine. Although I can pull a bird's flesh away from its skeleton with dexterity, I forgot to turn the bird over to tie it up correctly.
The bird spent an hour on a full-sized Weber grill with the coals pushed to the sides for convective grilling with the lid on. It turned out a nice color, but not entirely that attractive.
End result: delicious according to all at hand. I regret not getting the sloppy cross-section shot.
3 comments:
OMG
Looks good! I admire your poultry-de-boning abilities. I have a weird dish I want to make but haven't yet mastered getting all the bones out without fucking up the skin.
yea, that can be hard with smaller birds. As I learned from watching Jacque Pepin, the key is not using your knife so much. You really only need to make like six cuts. The turkeys I did were difficult to do due to the size and amount of tendons and with which I also tore the skin.
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