Corny Chicken

Now that I've starting corning meat, along with help from a hefty paycheck, I can't stop corning or better known as brining.

I started with a refrigerator check though and found that I had beets and a giant Costco box of spinach that needed to be eaten. I roasted the beets in the oven at 450°F for 30 minutes (they were tiny), and combined the following into a dressing:

6 tbs balsamic vinegar

3 tbs oil

2 tbs honey

1 tbs dijon mustard

1 lemon juiced

1 hefty pinch of crushed black pepper

I tossed all this together with the baby spinach and homemade feta cheese that Gbomb gave me. With that, I give you this:

For the chicken thighs, I brined them for 4 hours in:

1 gallon water

1 c sea salt

1/2 c sugar

5 tsp pink salt

5 tsp dried garlic

5 tsp dried onion

5 tsp dried tarragon

3 tbs black peppercorns

1 bunch parsley

2 bay leaves

2 lemons halved and squeezed and tossed in.

Note: I used the massive excess of brine to brine a whole chicken.

Finding a pack of Bockwurst at the back of the bottom shelf in the icebox, I grilled those too with the thighs.

Post-grill:

Plated:

Note the rosy corned color of the chicken. I made it superscharf with German toothpaste tube mustard.

Cornography

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

I'm not Irish by any means, but as I tell Europeans, all Americans think there's some Irish in them and especially so on this holiday when most everyone crams in the cured beef and boiled cabbage. I've been making this annual dish for some years now, but this is the first that I have made it bottom up; i.e., starting at the corning.

This dinner had to take a bit of elementary planning, as I had to make sure the beef brisket will have been brined enough to be fully corned, which generally takes about three days. I've found through experience that any longer for the first cut brisket makes for a saltier brisket of corned beef that must be simmered longer to reduce the saltiness. That meant buying the brisket by Monday. I managed to get it by Monday evening, and I thought it'd be fine if I started brining that evening.

Lets start on St. Paddy's day though. The morning involved pulsing the following together in the food processor for the soda bread:

4 c flour

2 tbs sugar

1 tsp salt

1 tsp backing soda

4 tbs cold butter

This is kneaded together after the addition of 2 c buttermilk, scored with an X about 1/2 in deep, and baked at 425°F for 40 minutes. Bang! Baked while dealing with my morning work files.

Before brining the 10 lbs of brisket I trimmed about 1 lb of fat from it, so I could render the beef fat for later use.

rendering...

Around 4 o'clock I rinsed the brine off of the brisket and set to boil it by 6 pm when people would start showing. My single bedroom apartment was at capacity tonight with a total of four people in it, so I missed a few photos opportunities, but I think everyone knows what a pot with liquid covering meat looks like. This is what a brisket of corned beef looks like after two hours of simmering.

I whipped up a mustard glaze with the following ingredients:

6 oz whole grain dijon mustard (half a Trader Joe's jar)

3 tbs honey

1 tsp pepper

1 tsp ginger (1/2 in piece)

1 tsp onion powder

1 clv garlic

Off to the grill!

After the glaze has formed a nice crust, I put it in a pan and tacked it against the outside wall of my apartment.

I then Sandra Lee'd it and made a tablescape out of my food. In case any of my guests had digestive issues with the meal, I left out some super gas treatment.

Boiled vegetables are boiled vegetables: generally boring even if you throw parsnips into the mix of cabbage, red potato, and carrots. It still all goes into the greasy corned beef broth that leeches more flavor that contributing. Good for later soup use, crappy for tonight's side. I suppose it cooks the veg though...

At any rate, this is when the rendered beef fat enters, and everything is tossed in the fat and seasoned with crushed black pepper. See!

The cabbage was never the star of the show though. The corned beef is, and I really couldn't stop laughing as I fluffed it like this.

Everything was delicious, and again I made way too much food for such a small dinner party. For some reason, it made sense that each person should have 2.5 lbs of corned beef. Despite the ingurgitating pleasure, I goofed the corning. I should've bought the brisket on Sunday. It only brined for 2.5 days before I cooked it. It could have benefited from an additional day. I spoiled everyone's meal by allowing certain parts of the brisket to have this unsightly appearance.

Chicken Jerk

For the past couple weeks I've been trying out a couple new things, but haven't posted because I either didn't take accurate notes for respectable posting, or they were simply lame. But now...the chicken jerk...

I won't bore you with the origin of jerked chicken, as I am assuming you can research it yourself by the fact that you are reading this, but I will say that my favorite origin story involves "jerking" the chicken around poking holes in it and stuffing the holes with spices. Despite the legend, I do it differently. I've made jerked chicken on several occasions before: first combining and blending the marinade and "jerking" the chicken overnight before grilling to island perfection (sometimes perforating the flesh, most times not). I took a different tact with it this time by first making a spice rub of salt, cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg and letting that get comfortable on the chicken thighs for about an hour before searing both sides in a cast iron skillet.

I put the rest of the usual ingredients together in the blender: garlic, scallion, ginger, habanero pepper, lime juice, soy sauce, white vinegar, and I think a little thyme. This is poured into your favored Dansk enamel pot over the seared chicken and let alone covered to simmer for 2-3 hours. I went three awaiting a visitor at the expectant time.

The chicken is removed and set aside to cool.

The chicken is then pulled from the bones and placed back into the jerk sauce until serving. I, myself being poor, put it on toasted sourdough that I keep stocked in the bread bin and served it (sadly to myself) with a simple cabbage salad of red cabbage, shredded carrot, julienned cucumber and a dressing of vinegar, oil, sugar, garlic, and thyme. I left out the salt, as I pre-salted the vegetables to draw out their moisture and break down their cell walls, so my dressing could properly penetrate them with flavor.

Note to self: macro shots of cooked meat frequently tend to be gross.

Cheap Soup

In continuation with making food on the cheap despite having a hefty payday last week, I raided the cupboard and freezer again to make a cheap soup. It's a tomato-based rainbow chard and garbanzo bean soup. Along with the cabeza broth leftover and since frozen from the cabeza tacos I made the other week, I also had some frozen Leberknödel made a month ago that I tossed in at the last second in order to overdo the protein.

In the ole Le Creuset pot, I sauted an onion and garlic, mixed in tomato paste, cumin, and chili flakes, followed with a large can of whole tomatoes and dried basil, and I let this simmer for a bit before adding a cup of the cabeza broth and a couple cups of water.

Thirty minutes later, I added chopped rainbow chard and softened for 5 minutes at the same heat. No re-seasoning was necessary because cabeza broth is basically gelatinous boullion. Before ladling into a bowl, I steeped the liver dumplings until reheated and presto! Cheap soup for lunch.

Combined cost: ca. $5.00

Total amount of soup: full stomach the rest of the week

Being Cheeky

Payday lapsed this week, so I've been reduced to pulling out cheap meat from the freezer and making something fantastico! I suppose it depends on who you ask on whether cachete de res or cabeza is any good. I got two hunks of beef cheek at the commissary at McClellan Park for a bit more than three bones. That's a bargain for 5 lbs. of beef in my book. I would guess that many prefer not getting it due to its extremely high fat content even when trimmed and cooked down. I won't disagree that it's fatty. It took a good 10 minutes to trim the fat and remove the silver skin that would only cook down to a chewy sinew akin to that of the skin of a Slim Jim; that is, you can chew it indefinitely and no amount of mastication will ever break it down.

Before:

Ten minutes later (check out the streaks of fat!):

Seasoned with salt and pepper and into the pot

I set the browned meat aside to saute some red onion, carrot, and garlic. After placing the meat back in, I zested 2 oranges and squeezed their juice into the pot and threw in 2 laurel leaves, fresh ground cumin and coriander, Mexican oregano, a California chili, an ancho chili, and a couple arbol chilies. I then brought the liquid up to level with Fiji water. I add only the best waters for beef cheek--that or tap.

This is brought to a boil and set into a 325°F oven and left alone for two hours to break down the fat and allow the flavors to marry.

The liquid has reduced to a dark gelatinous broth and is separated for a soup next week.

This is where I fork the meat apart and the angels sing...

Meat shredded means taco time, which means taking a small portion of the 5 lbs. of meat and placing it on warmed corn tortillas, topped with diced onion and cilantro, and drizzled with squeezed lime juice mixed with green El Yucatan.

You may ask why I cooked 5 lbs. of beef cheek for two tacos. Well, I do it for you dear reader. That and so I can refrigerate it overnight and make my own cabeza cheese, of course!

Enchilada Sausage

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.

Chicken Pot, Chicken Pot, Chicken Pot Pie

I don't know what made me crave a chicken pot pie, but I had the fever this week: making one on Tuesday and one last night for a friend and her son. So this week will be the first that I have a guest on Cooks with Skipper, as she helped me assemble and whipped up some mashed spuds. Since the server at my office has been down since Wednesday, I've had plenty of time to walk between my computer checking to see if it's back up and the kitchen to tend to broth.

I know, it's a dutch oven and not a stock pot, but my stock pot is still with a friend that I've been neglecting to pick up. Basically, I threw the following into le Creuset to saute golden brown in half a stick of butter:

1 onion

2 carrots

3 stalks celery

5 clv garlic

2 parsnips

1 large turnip

1/2 celery root

To this, I added 1.5 qts of water, half a bunch of parsley, and a bag of collected chicken bones from the freezer. Then I brought it to a boil and simmered for 1 1/2 hrs.

Meanwhile, I roasted three chicken thighs in the oven and took one of the most disgusting photos evar.

I've taken it this far, so I went ahead and made pie crust.

In the food processor, I pulsed 1 c flour with 1/2 tsp salt, added 4 tbs cold cubed butter and mixed until grainy, 1 shot vodka and enough water until the dough holds together when pressed with your fingers. This gets wrapped and chilled for at least an hour to let the flour proteins to do their thing.

I left my camera battery on the charger so I used a camera phone for the following photos.

After all this, you take everything to your friend's house and have her roll out the pie crust...

and lay them in pot pie tins that she will happen to have.

While your friend does this, you saute more of the same root vegetables in butter...

add the cubed chicken and frozen peas (yea, I know. I didn't go and fetch fresh ones); cover with flour, stir in, and allow to cook until the flour browns on the surface of the vegetables; add broth to cover, bring to a boil, and reduce the heat to simmer for five minutes. I realize that cream is normally added but since pot pies are heavy enough with butter, it really doesn't need it and working off my gut is hard enough.

Cover with the top crust and puncture holes with the initial of the person for whom the pie is intended.

Brush with an egg wash and bake at 375°F until the top is golden brown.

Break open and do what you want with it.