Grampa's Chicken & Onions

A few times a year I go visit my grandfather in either Florida or New York, and aside from his pickled herring for breakfast (I'll just have a bagel, thanks), the food's usually great. Baked eggplant parm, lentil soup, damn good bagels. For some reason I've had roast chicken on the mind recently, so I called to get his recipe, which is cooked in a pyrex dish with onions and potatoes, and there's few things better than onions & potatoes cooked in chicken fat. Of course when I asked about it he shrugged and passed the phone over to his wife, but I'm calling it Grampa's chicken anyway. So there.

This is everything I want in a dinner: easy, one dish, and friggin' delicious. You basically chop op the onions and potatoes, put them in a pan with the chicken, season, bake, and serve in the pan, nothing to wash but a knife, cutting board, and said pan, after you finish the chicken. The whole thing takes an hour or two (depending on your chicken), but active time is about 15 minutes, tops. Sounds about right for a worknight.

I left the onions in quarters to save space, but sliced thin is better.

Grampa's Roast Chicken & Onions
1 chicken, or assorted bone- and skin-on chicken parts
A few onions
A few waxy potatoes, washed
4-5 garlic cloves
Olive oil
Salt &  pepper
Herbs/spices of your choice
Chicken broth
A splash of white wine (optional)
Any other veggies you want to roast (optional)


1) Preheat the oven to 350. Give the chicken a rinse & pat it dry. (I used a pair of chicken breasts - whole bird's a bit much for one person.) Set it in the biggest pyrex baking dish you've got, with a little olive oil underneath to keep it from sticking.

2) Cut the potatoes into quarters. Slice the onions. Arrange them and the garlic cloves around the chicken in the dish. Any other vegetables you feel like roasting should go in here too - I'm thinking cauliflower would be good.

3) Add in enough broth to fill about a centimeter up the side of the pan, plus a splash or two of white wine if you've got it handy. Drizzle a little olive oil over top, then salt, pepper, whatever herbs you like (I used sage and smoked paprika; rosemary or thyme would be good too).

4) Roast for about an hour at 350, depending on the size of the chicken, then finish it off for 15 minutes at 400 to crisp the skin. It's done when the you can easily stick a fork into the potatoes, the juices run clear, and there's no pink when you cut into it.


5) Serve with a simple green salad (arugula & avocado did it for me), all doused in the chicken juices from the pan. Feel free to pour the fat off the top if you like, but that's kind of missing the point.

Catching Up: Meat and Potatoes, but Classy

I just got back from a four-month stint living and doing dissertation field research in West Papua, Indonesia. (See Climbing Volcanoes to read about that.) The food in Indonesia is wonderful, full of spices, chiles, coconut milk, tofu, tempe, and deep-fried bananas. What it is not is varied, and while I absolutely love my landlady's young jackfruit curry, by the time December came around I was seriously jonesing for some bread, prosciutto, red wine, and real cheese. White rice is good, white rice three meals a day gets old. So when I got home one of the foremost things on my mind was to catch up with all the old delicious things that I'd missed, and one of those things was lamb chops. Rare, seared, salty, tender lamb chops like the ones I got in New Zealand, with a side of green beans and oniony potatoes. For one thing, lamb costs rather a bit more here than it did in Auckland and isn't quite so fresh either, but I got a decent package of loin chops from the co-op here. The potatoes are adapted from a recipe I got from Saveur a while back, but with olive oil instead of duck fat because even I have limits I couldn't find duck fat on short notice. (The original, amazing but slightly pickier recipe is here.) The beans are an old family favorite. Altogether my kitchen smelled amazing and it made me happy to be back in the US, despite the January weather. The hot showers helped too, but there's definitely something to be said for the lamb.

Lamb chops wit the works.

Lamb Chops
This isn't even a recipe; I don't know why I'm even writing it down except that it would be odd to post about a lamb dinner and not put in instructions for the lamb. So here goes.

Set lamb loin chops on a plate; generously salt & pepper both sides. Let sit for a few minutes.
Put a little olive oil in a cast iron skillet and let it get really hot. Add the lamb, and let each side cook til it's brown and crusty. Cover for a slightly less rare chop. In any case it'll be pink in the middle and delicious. Hold the edges onto the pan and let them brown too. Let rest for 10 minutes, then enjoy.

Potato-Onion Galette
Waxy potatoes
Half as many onions, sweet ones work well.
Caraway seeds or chopped sage leaves
Olive oil, butter, duck fat, or some combination of the above.
Salt & pepper
Bacon or prosciutto (optional)

Preheat oven to 425. Slice the potatoes thin (it's easiest with a mandoline); put in a large bowl. Slice the onions equally thin; add to the same bowl. Add an handful of chopped sage leaves or caraway seeds, plus S&P to taste. Finely chopped bits of crispy bacon or prosciutto are good too, added either now or as a garnish at the end. Toss everything until well-mixed. Add a healthy amount of olive oil, melted butter, or whatever fat you're using and toss to coat. Put the mixture in a pyrex baking dish and bake 45 minutes to an hour, until potatoes are tender and everything's nice and brown.

Lemon-Garlic String Beans
String beans, washed
Garlic
Lemon juice
S&P
Oil
1/4 cup broth

Slice the end off of the string beans and cut them into reasonable lengths. Heat some olive oil in a pan on medium -high heat. Add the beans, and let them cook, stirring, til they turn bright green. Turn the heat down and add the garlic, stirring so it doesn't burn. Cook a minute or two, then add a large-ish splash of broth. Cover and cook for a few more minutes, not so long that the beans lose all their crunch. Take the top off so the broth evaporates. Add a few squeezes of lemon juice and s&p to taste.

Have a little priest!

After two months of eating and loving meat pies in New Zealand, I decided to make my own. Mike, Nicole, and Trevor came over to help, so kudos to Mike for fantastic mash, Trevor for owning the crust, and Nicole for having the foresight to bring salad to mitigate the fat/carb/salt bomb that is a meat pie. This recipe is kind of long and involved, but if you buy the crust it's mostly chopping and stirring. If you make the crust there's some additional mixing and rolling involved. Anyway, it's not hard.

I found two recipes that looked like they were along the right lines and mixed & matched. (Yes I know these are Aussie rather than Kiwi. Shut up.)
www.taste.com.au/recipes/11987/basic+meat+pie
http://australianfood.about.com/od/beeflamb/r/AussieMeatPie.htm

I always preferred steak pie to mince, but you can either get a fairly cheap cut of meat and cut it into bite-sized chunks or use ground beef/lamb/pork/turkey/buffalo/whatever. What animal(s) exactly you use are entirely up to you. These recipes all call for a puff-pastry top, but the two little stores near me didn't stock puff pastry and damned if I'm gonna make it myself, so we did the classic mashed potato top instead. Personally I thought it was pretty wonderful, but that might just be all the garlic talking. As always, a little crisped bacon and/or grated cheddar would not be an unwelcome addition to the filling, if you're into that sort of thing.

The result was something along the lines of this:

Pie, salad, sauce.

New Zealand Awesome Meat Pie

Filling:
~1 1/4 lb meat (lamb or beef is good; pork chop was a little dry but shoulder/butt would work)
1 onion
2 carrots
1 stick celery
3 cloves garlic
Other veggies (peas, zucchini, chopped tomato, whatever - also optional)
Bouquet garni - take your pick of herbs, I used thyme, rosemary, and smoked paprika
Worcestershire sauce
splash of cider or red wine vinegar
2 tsp tomato paste
1 1/2 cups broth of your choice
1/2 cup red wine (optional)
Salt &pepper to taste
Cornstarch or flour to thicken

Bottom crust:
Buy frozen shortcrust or google a recipe. I used this one: http://britishfood.about.com/od/recipeindex/r/scpastry.htm

Lid:
Use frozen puff pastry, or:
2 big Idaho potatoes
milk, butter, a dollop of garlic-chive cream cheese
garlic
S&P

1) Cut the meat into small (1cm?) chunks, unless you're using mince. Chop all the veggies into small pieces. Peel your potatoes, cut them into big pieces, and set to boil.

2) Drop the meat in a pot with some oil and brown over high-ish heat. Put the meat to the side in a bowl; leave the oil in the pot. (I'd crisp the bacon here if you're using it the get the juices in the pot, then add it to the filling at the very end.) Add the onions to the same pot and saute on medium til they start to soften. Add the carrots, garlic, tomato paste, and celery. If you're using something like turnips that takes a while add it now; things like zucchini and peas should wait. Saute for a couple of minutes.

3) When the veggies start to soften, add the broth, wine, and a few good shakes of Worcestershire sauce. Stir and scrape up all the good brown stuff stuck to the bottom of the pan. Add you herbs, put the meat back in, stir once, turn the heat down and leave it to simmer. If the liquid gets low, add more broth or water. You want some gravy in this, so it shouldn't be soup but is shouldn't be dry either.

4) Start on the crust, which takes longer than you think. I blind-baked it thus:
 - Preheat your oven to 325.
 - Roll out the dough thinner than you think - it'll double or triple in thickness when it bakes. Use lots of flour to do so.
 - Sprinkle a few breadcrumbs in the bottom of each pie tin (I used over-sized muffin tins for individual-sized pies). Drape a sheet of dough over the pie tin. Push it down, form it to shape, smooth out the sides, and cut off the extra. You now have little pastry cups for the sides and bottom of the pie. Repeat for each tin, rolling out the extra you just cut off to re-use it.
 - Prick the dough a few times with a fork. put a layer of tinfoil in each cup to cover the dough. Fill each foil cup with rice, beans, small stones, pie weights, whatever. Bake for 10 minutes.
 - Take out the foil and weights to expose the dough. Up the temp to 350. Bake another 10-ish minutes until it gets golden.
- Set aside to cool.


5) When the potatoes are fork-tender, drain them and let them sit for a few minutes so all the water evaporates off. Then mash them with lots of salt & pepper (potato absorbs salt like it's its job, so taste as you go and don't wimp out with the shaker), crushed garlic, and the dairy products of your choice. We used a few tbsp butter, a splash of almond milk, and a big dollop of my vegan coconut-based garlic-chive cream cheese, which was really friggin good, but plain milk and normal cream cheese will also do the job, if you can digest the stuff.

6) Taste and season the innards as necessary. I found mine needed a little salt and acid. You could use lemon juice or a touch of vinegar; I stirred in a good squeeze of ketchup, and it did the trick. We're real classy here. This would also be a good moment to stir in any bacon or cheese you're using, probably before adding any extra salt.

7) Take some liquid out of the pot of filling (1/3 cup, maybe?), and mix in a few tbsp of flour or cornstarch, as much as it'll hold. Then stir that glop back into the pot. This is a good moment to add things like chopped zucchini. Simmer 5 minutes more to thicken. Make more slurry if need be - you want thick, gloppy, oozy gravy.

8) Fill the pie tins with filling. Maybe sprinkle some cheese on top or add a slice of tomato. (I didn't.) Cover with a sheet of puff pastry, extra short crust, or a dollop of mashed potato. (We pressed little pie-sized patties of potato together in our palms, then set them on top and added more around the sides as necessary. If you're trying to impress someone you could pipe it on.) Cut an X in the middle of the top if you're using pastry. If you like, brush it with egg to make it shiny.

9) For a potato top, bake at 350 for 10-15 minutes, mostly to heat everything through, then broil for another 3 to get the top a little brown around the edges. For pastry it's more like 20 minutes at 375, until golden. Set aside to cool.

10) Eat with plenty of ketchup and plenty of napkins. Salad is a good idea.

Update, Pi Day 2015: I made this for a Pi(e) Party with 1lb ground beef, 1/2 lb bacon (chop into bits, crisp up in the pan, and use the fat to cook everything else in), mushroom broth, carrots, celery, onion, and peas, (seasoned with thyme, herbs d'Provence, and a bay leaf), and it was phenomenal. Better than the steak pie the actual Aussie made. I win.

Phnom Penh & Potatoes

Recent recipes I don't want to forget:

Khmer Samla (with thanks to Carol Henderson)
(serves 10)  

10 stalks fresh lemongrass 
1/4 of a lime (kefir, key, or regular) 
1 tsp ground turmeric 
several pinches of salt 
1/3 cup minced galangal or regular ginger 
2 cups chopped shallots (sweet onions work well too, like vidalias) 
10 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed 
4 Tbs shrimp paste  
2 lbs chicken or tofu, cut in small pieces 
1 small eggplant, quartered & thinly sliced 1/3 cup olive oil 
5 c. coconut milk 
1 Tablespoon salt 
2 tsp sugar  

Blend the first 8 ingredients together in a food processor, until they
form a smooth paste. (Traditionally, this would be pounded in a
mortar, so you can try that if you like!)

Heat the oil in a large pot, and saute the blended mixture a minute
or two. Add chicken or tofu, and cook 7 minutes over medium heat.
Add half the coconut milk, salt and sugar, and simmer 10 minutes.
Add eggplant and remaining coconut milk. Simmer half covered
until eggplant is tender, about 10 minutes.

Serve over rice.

Mint Potatoes
new potatoes
crushed garlic
lots of chopped mint
salt, pepper, and olive oil

Cook potatoes. Add the other ingredients. Use a combination of
regular and sea/kosher salt for a nice crunch and distributed salt
flavor. Mix well. Let cool. Tastes better the next day.