Whole Roasted/Braised Chicken with Polenta and Gravy

I’ve been roasting chicken breast down for about three years —  since my friend accidentally put the Thanksgiving turkey in the oven upside down a few years ago. It was the tastiest, moistest turkey any of us had ever eaten.

I found out only recently, chicken cooked this way is only partially roasted. It’s also partially braised. Typically with traditional oven roasting (i.e. not rotisserie) the juices drain to the bottom where the dark meat is. Cooking it breast side down has the opposite effect. What you end up with is moist, steamy, delicious white meat, infused with garlic and basil in this case. And the dark meat stays moist too, I assume because of its fat content. With the breast side down, the breast cooks in its juices (and a little water in this case), hence the partial braising.

The real kicker in this recipe is the polenta with the gravy. You’ll never want to serve chicken gravy with mashed potatoes again. Usually, I’ll cook up some brown rice to eat with the gravy, but yesterday I tried polenta with the gravy and whoa! so delicious!

The success of this recipe chicken depends on two important steps. They are both based on moisture. (And a moist chicken is a tasty chicken.)

• Place the chicken breast side down in the pan. This is how the breast meat stays so tender—it braises while the rest of the chicken is roasting.
• Use a meat thermometer. Timing is important on this one. I take the chicken out when it reaches 160 degrees. 165 is the minimum temperature for consumption, however the chicken will continue to roast under its internal heat for a few minutes after taking it out of the oven. How long the chicken is cooked it is not important; only the temperature is important—out of the oven at 160 (or 165 if you’re uncomfortable living on the edge.) Every minute in the oven beyond the 165 point results in a significantly drier chicken. I’ve read on internet message boards about people taking the chicken out at 145, claiming the temperature rises to 165 when its out of the oven. Talk about living on the edge.

Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken
• 5-7 cloves garlic, 2 slice in discs
• 2 onions
• carrots (optional)
• 2 tbs finely chopped basil
• 1 tbs olive oil
• rock salt
• pepper

The chicken

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees
2. Rinse the chicken, inside and out
3. Place the chicken on its back on a cutting board
4. Carefully separate the skin from the meat around the breast and leading over the legs
5. Insert the garlic discs between the skin and the meat, distributing them somewhat evenly
6. Insert the chopped basil
7. Manipulate the basil and the garlic using your fingers outside the skin to achieve a somewhat even distribution
8. Repeat with salt (about 1/2 teaspoonfuls, too much will dry out the chicken ) and pepper
9. Insert 1 or 2 onions (and carrots if you have them) into the cavity
10. Flip the chicken
11. Drizzle olive oil on to the back of the chicken
12. Rub the olive oil into the skin on the back and sides, onto the wings
13. Rub 2/3ds of the chopped basil onto the skin on the back and sides, onto the wings
14. Put the chicken into roasting pan
15. Fill the pan with about a cup of water
16. Drop the remaining 5 garlic cloves in to the water
17. Drop a half a small onion, roughly chopped into the water
18. Drop a tablespoon or so of basil in the water
19. Put the chicken in the oven.
20. Cook for 15 minutes or so at 375 degrees
21. Turn down the oven to 350
22. Cook until the breast meat reaches 160
23. Take out the chicken. Let it sit until the thermometer reaches 165

The Gravy

1. Pour the juice from the pan into a skillet over low heat
2. Crush the garlic with the back of a fork
3. Place the flour into a sieve
4. Gently shake the sieve, as the flour falls in the to pan, stir it in
5. Stir until the liquid thickens into a gravy

The Polenta

1. Mix the polenta with the water
2. Stir well to break up any clumps
3. Cook over high heat until the mixture starts to boil
4. Turn down heat until mixture simmer
5. Polenta will thicken, keep stirring until the individual grains have softened

Serve to someone you’d like to impress, then sit back and let the accolades flow!

Quinoa, pt. 1

Quinoa. If I were a medieval minstrel I’d write a ballad about it. And I’d be sure to work in Sir Gawain somehow.

But, being a blogger instead of a balladeer, my fondness for quinoa goes right to the heart of my reason for this creating this blog: I love food, but I don’t think I’m particularly insightful about it. I fancy myself a decent cook, and so say the reviewers (my friends). When it comes to food (dare I way cuisine?) I like what I like, though I don’t know exactly why I like what I like. But I want to get to the bottom of it.

For example, I love quinoa, eat it everyday. As soon as this post is complete, I’m heading down to the grocery store to buy a bucketful. I wish I could go on about qionoa like a poetic lover of pino noir describes his beloved grape. I’d love to say “When I taste quinoa my imagination is swept away suddenly by an Andean breeze. Quinoa in the pot at a rolling boil — the scent infuses my kitchen with the dreams and passions of the South American quinoa farmer, Manuel Something-or-other, a man who invests in his labor nothing more than the simple desire to produce the honest fruit of the soil beneath him, the soil watered with the sweat of his ancestors, that soil—his past, his future. This is why I love quinoa.”

Well, obviously I can say those things but I want to say them without being utterly full of shit. Basically, when I think about quinoa, I don’t even think in words. I just want to grab a fistful and shove it in my piehole.

Right away my imagination hits that wall—the wall around the impenetrable fort of pure subjectivity: I like quinoa because it tastes good to me. You’ll never hear a respectable food critic say those words. I’m pretty sure even “tastes good” is off limits. How would you feel about a food critic who was writing of his opulent meal of duck confit and he simply said “it tasted good.” He might as well throw in yummy.

But now that I think about it, the sentiment behind “it tastes good,” if it were to catch hold, could be the basis of roots movement that could turn the bookish world of food criticism on its head. Food criticism needs a punk rock of its own. Where’s the pissed off British working class when you need them? I’m sure they love quinoa.

Do I really like porridge?

I guess I do. Quinoa porridge, that is.

Porridge. Not the most appetizing word. I’d rank it somewhere between goulash and gruel.

However, recently I’ve gone bonkers over quinoa. If Pizarro had taken quinoa back to Spain after he raided the Incas, the landscape of Western cuisine would look vastly different than it does today.

I made porridge for the first time today — and ate it for the first time for that matter. If you’d asked me yesterday if anybody at all  eats porridge,  I’d have said not since Goldilocks.

Here’s how I made it. One cup cooked quinoa, one cup rice milk, a teaspooon or so of raw honey, ten or so blueberries. Warm the quinoa and the rice milk in a saucepan, add the  honey, transfer to a bowl. Add the blueberries. Enjoy.

Tastes kind of like tapioca, but better. And not a drop of sugar in it. Yum.

Brown Rice and Me

I’m a rice person. My earliest memories are of my dad’s rice farm where my family lived when I was pretty much a baby. On the back of our station wagon was a bumper sticker that read,  ”Eat More Rice.” I was eighteen before it occurred to me that rice was an Asian food. I remember the day, standing the kitchen, “Dad, is rice Asian?” “Yes,” he said. That settled that.

For most of my life, like most people, I vastly preferred white rice over brown. Let me rephrase, I hated brown rice. And i didn’t just hate the rice, I hated everything it stood for: healthy, unimaginitive, not quite yucky but without-a-doubt boring food. It reminded me of every time I’d ever been in  some situation where eating “healthy” was unavoidable,  perhaps at some an all-day seminar or something — lunch is served, usually an underwhelming sandwich stacked with sprouts and next to it (and the carrot stick), invariably sat an uninviting little clump of brown rice just waiting for me to throw it in the trash. Each time I took a bite (and I would only take one bite),  it only served to confirm what I’d learned by the time I was eight years old: brown rice sucks.

Flash to 2003 or 4, carbs are on the verge of being outlawed, and I’m in my early 30’s. Much like the epiphany I’d had many years prior when I realized rice was an Asian food, I realized something else: I’m not going to live forever. Maybe I’d better start thinking about what I eat. I was already a budding foodie with a serious kitchen fetish and having grown more imaginative in culinary matters, I was unwilling to accept that “healthy” had to be bland.

Anybody who was alive and using the web in 2004 will remember pop-up ads with a juicy, dripping hamburger paddy with lettuce for buns (Jack in the Box: Hey everybody, it’s not this artery-clogging chunk of greasy cow meat that’s gonna kill ya, it’s the bread!), this is the atmosphere in which my epiphany occurred. Up until that point, as far as the average man on the street was concerned, carbs were neutral. But through a complex series of cultural shifts (best left to other writers), Atkins went mainstream and carbs became the new killer. Overnight decades if not centuries of culinary norms were declared nutritionally bankrupt. Someone invented carb-free bread. Suddenly there were giant billboards advertising products to help people deal with carb withdrawl. Carb withdrawl–an affliction no human had ever suffered before 2004.

Long story short–good information was scarce. Where was a rational person to turn? For me it was books, this one to be exact. Eat, Drink and Be Healthy, by Dr. Walter C. Willet of the Harvard School of Public Health. To me the title was just what I was looking for, a guide to healthy eating with an undercurrent of hedonism. The lesson taken from the book: eating well means eating food that tastes good. If the food doesn’t taste good, you won’t stick with it and if you don’t stick with it, you might one day find yourself holding a dripping hamburger patty with nothing to keep the grease off your hands but two wilting peices of lettuce.

So…brown rice, carbs, 2004. What I learned was that  we do need carbs —  complex carbs, i.e. the kind found in fruit and whole grains. And what was the first grain that came to mind? Brown rice. Only now I had some cooking skills and a better attitude. It was time for brown rice and me to become friends. And oh how we did, pretty soon I was frying it, putting it in chicken soup, stuffing it in burritos, whatever.

In a short order, I discovered something awesome — in most contexts I actually like brown rice better than white rice. All it takes is a littlesomething and brown rice comes to life. Fry it up with some olive oil, fatten it with butter, sprinkle it with furikake, or douse it with hot pepper vinegar and brown rice springs off the plate. A few drops of soy sauce were all that was needed to unlock the vast potential of those little boring beige piles all those years ago.

Unlike white rice, which has all the nutrition refined out of it until it’s little more than pillowy fluff, brown rice brings something to the table not only nutritionally, but with flavor as well. Take fried rice for example, white rice in that context is little more than a vector for a the other ingredients in the dish, the ones that give it flavor. Brown rice on the other hand imparts a nutty, earthy flavor that compliments the others and lends a general heartiness to the dish not found in its milder, whiter version.

So brown rice and me? We’re old bro’s now. We throw the frisbee on the weekends and I went to its wedding–to soy sauce of course, its childhood sweetheart.

East Meets Southwest Fried Rice

• Brown Rice, cooked   3 cups
• Black Beans, cooked 1.5 cups
• Chicken, cooked, chopped 1 cup
• 1 Med. Red Onion, chopped
• 3 Hot Peppers, chopped (more or less depending on your spice preference level)
• Garlic, chopped, 4 or 5 cloves
• Ginger, chopped, 1/6 cup
• Soy Sauce to taste (an important ingredient)
• cumin, about 1 teaspoon–to taste
• Olive Oil, 2 tablespoons
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• 1 Egg

In a skillet heat the olive oil over medium heat, add the chopped hot peppers, swirl them around in the heat to infuse the oil. See to it the oil does not get hot enough to scald the peppers. Do the same with the ginger. Add the onions and turn the heat up to high. Saute the onions until nearly translucent, then add the garlic. It’s ok if the garlic turns brown, but don’t let it sit still long enough to become crispy. Add a teaspoon or so of the oil, then add the rice. Stir the rice up so all the ingredients are evenly mixed. Turn heat to medium. Now add the chicken. Stir until evenly mixed. Add beans, stir until evenly mixed. Now add the soy sauce and cumin and perhaps a little more olive oil until you are satisfied with the spice level. You can add salt and pepper at this point as well, keeping in mind that soy sauce is salty and between the two, you can over do it quickly. When you are satisfied with the flavor, turn the heat to low and add the egg. Crack the egg so all of it goes onto the rice, not the skillet. Stir until the rice is evenly coated. (The steam from the rice will cook the egg.)  Now you are ready to eat!

notes:

• This recipe is hard to screw up because the flavoring is done while you cook, just remember the #1 rule of cooking you can add, but you can’t take away. In case you add too much spice or flavor, it’s good to have an extra cup of rice handy to even it out.
• If you are cooking with hot rice, after you add it, turn the heat down to medium. If you are cooking with cold rice, leave it at high until the rice is good and hot, this way your egg will cook nicely as it’s mixed into the rice.
• The measurements in this recipe are approximate: I add, taste, add, taste–and that’s what i recommend
• I’ve made this similar recipe with quite a few different ingredients, red peppers work nicely — I’ve even used pickled cactus — yum! Regarding the meat, I’ve used sausage, ground beef or shrimp as well, all excellent and of course, each is little different. I like to make this dish after I’ve roasted a whole chicken — once the chicken has been eaten to the point where I figure it has about a cup of meat (usually mostly dark meat) I’ll make this dish. It’s also delicious vegetarian.