Chicken & Artichokes

I made this for dinner tonight after buying some chicken breasts on the cheap at my least favourite grocery in the world, Kroger. It’s easy and pretty fast.

Chicken & Artichokes
Source: Cuisine At Home, issue 38, April 2003

Ingredients:

.25c Olive Oil
.25c Lemon Juice (bottled or fresh)
2T Honey
2t Garlic, finely minced or pressed
1t Dried Thyme (or 2t fresh)
.25t Salt
.25t Red Pepper Flakes (optional)
4 boneless, skinless Chicken Breasts
1 13.25oz can Artichoke Hearts, drained and halved (or 1 package of thawed Artichoke Heart halves, thawed)
1 Lemon, thinly sliced
1 package Orzo, cooked according to the manufacturer’s directions

1. Combine the first seven ingredients in a small bowl, whisking well to combine; set aside.
2. Heat 2T of olive oil in a large skillet.
3. Season chicken well with salt and pepper, then cook in hot skillet, about 5 minutes per side on high heat.
4. Reduce the heat to medium and cover; cook an additional five minutes.
5. Add the artichoke halves and the olive oil mixture.
6. Cook an additional three to five minutes; cook until the liquid has reduced one-third.
7. Top with sliced lemon; return to high heat; cook until sauce has thickened.
7. Serve over cooked orzo.

Suggestions: Slice a small yellow or white onion into moons and sweat it in some butter. Add the onions to the chicken during step 4. Also, I would definitely use fresh thyme if I had it handy. Dried thyme doesn’t have quite the same flavour profile as fresh. If using fresh, double the amount. Dried herbs pack more leaves into a teaspoon than fresh.

Roasted Chicken Thighs with Chèvre, Rosemary and Garlic

It was a test. I didn’t know how it would turn out, but I figured it couldn’t be terrible. My wife had purchased some bone-in, skin-on thighs for me at Costco, and I had one left over. The chicken was done up in several packs, with three thighs per pack. The first two I just pan seared, chopped and ate over rice with a bit of soy sauce and shichimi togarishi. But that third…what to do? And then it struck me: why not put chèvre under the skin and pan fry the little beggar? And so I did just that. I minced some rosemary and smashed it into a bit of the chèvre, and then rubbed that on the thigh under the skin. It’s a great way to introduce flavour to chicken, because whatever you put there stays there, and it’s protected by the skin. About four minutes on a side and I had beautifully crisp skin which hid a luscious cheesy surprise. It’s a minimal investment of time and money with a huge payoff.

The next night I got another pack of thighs out and I’ve made the cheese/rosemary mixture again. This time I added a single (small) clove of garlic, finely minced. Heaven! So here’s the “recipe” for Roasted Chicken Thighs with Chèvre, Rosemary and Garlic.

4 Chicken Thighs
2-3oz plain Chèvre, softened
2 tsp fresh Rosemary, minced fine
1 sm clove Garlic, minced
salt and pepper, to taste

In a small bowl, combine the last four ingredients. Mash well with a fork to combine.

Slide your (washed) fingers under the skin of the thighs to make a sort of pocket there, and smear a bit of your cheese mixture. Repeat with the other thighs. Set aside to rest for a few minutes. This can be done well in advance, even the day before. Season the thighs with salt and pepper just before cooking.

Heat your oven to 375°F. Sear the thighs skin side down in a hot pan, then flip and transfer pan to the oven for about ten minutes or to desired doneness. Allow to rest for five minutes, then serve.

Notes: you could add a bit of lemon peel to the cheese mixture if you like. Anything added should be minced as finely as possible, except for the garlic, which will become more potent the more finely it’s minced. Although if you LIKE strong garlic, be my guest. You could also substitute breasts for thighs here, but whatever you do, do NOT remove the skin. You don’t have to eat it, but it’s here to protect the cheese. And really, there’s no harm in eating a nice, crispy piece of chicken skin. Most of the fat gets rendered out in the cooking process anyway. You can encourage this by scoring the skin. Just be sure to not pierce the skin.

More recently I have taken to roasting the thighs from start to finish in the oven, doing six at a time. You should start them skin-side down and then flip them after ten minutes. Cook for at least another ten to fifteen minutes and then pull and rest the thighs before serving.

Michael Pollan speaks at Google on In Defense of Food

This video is about an hour long but is the most interesting thing I’ve seen in a while. You may have heard of Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. His message can be boiled down to this: Eat food. Not too much; mostly plants. The things he says in this address resonate with me. I’ve been thinking a lot about my diet and how and when and what I eat. I’ve resolved to try to buy ingredients when I go to the store, and not loads of processed shite. Pollan discusses this and has a fairly simple rule for shopping: stick to the perimeter of the store. That’s where all the perishable goods are, and these are what we need to eat more of. He also says to eat only foods your great-grandmother would recognise as food. Anything else is probably an “edible food-like substance”. Chuckle and grin but he’s RIGHT. He seems to be an advocate of the local food movement, as well as organics. I’m not convinced these are anything other than fads. I’ve yet to see any real science to suggest that organic food is easier on the environment or more nutritious, but then I don’t really keep up with these things. I wouldn’t care much anyway, because I buy food that tastes good. Local food is fine when we’re talking about produce, but I don’t care if my meat is local. I can’t get excited about it.

This was a worthwhile investment of my time. I’m going to have to track down the books – there are yearlong wait lists at the libraries here so I might have to buckle and buy them. Meanwhile, enjoy the video. It’s entertaining and really very interesting. It’s also behind the cut.

Playing with my food so you don’t have to

To inaugurate the blog, here’s a post I was working on for my LiveJournal. I’ll post it here instead because, frankly, I can.

Let’s say you’re me. I know, you’re not me, but just for a second pretend. You like cornbread. You like it a lot. You could eat it pretty much daily. You’ve even gone so far as to make your own creamed corn and then use that in a batch of corn bread. You really, really like cornbread. But you don’t like all that work. What’s a body to do? Well, you could just add cheese. But if you were me, you’d get even more creative than that. Starting with a simple boxed mix you’d add .33c of thawed frozen corn and a cup of shredded cheddar. You’d also heat the milk called for in the recipe with a sprig of rosemary and let it steep for a couple minutes while the milk cooled. And it would be AWESOME.

I started my project with a box of generic store-brand cornbread mix from Kroger. This calls for one egg and half a cup of milk. AB’s recipe for creamed corn (linked above) calls for a sprig of rosemary to be present in the pot while the corn is cooking, so I decided to try it here. I brought that half cup of milk just to the bubble and then added a sprig of fresh rosemary to steep for a couple minutes. (note: I let the milk cool to near RT so it wouldn’t cook the egg while mixing.) Then I made the bread according to the directions on the packet. At the end of the mixing I added the cheese and corn, then poured the bread into a greased pan and tossed it in the oven.

The results were quite satisfactory. I think the rosemary was a bit forceful, so I trimmed the time (which is reflected above). The bread seemed at bit more cakey than I would like, so I think perhaps next time I’ll let the milk cool completely before I do my mixing. Having to heat the milk and steep the rosemary well in advance of baking does add a layer of complexity but I think it will yield a more pleasing result. Otherwise I’m not sure I’d change anything.

Transition

Well, if you were one of the zero people who was looking at this blog you can stop looking now. This just hasn’t worked out for me. I wish I could say it was because I was super-busy in real life or something, but the honest truth is I just don’t care about doing this. It seemed like a good idea at first, but in practise it’s really pretty boring.

I don’t listen to my music in any particular order. I listen to what I want to hear at any given time. I got through the first couple of ABBA CDs (yes, I like ABBA) and decided that there was no way I was going to be able to listen to eight CDs’ worth of ABBA in a row. It’s too much. I started skipping around in my library. And then I discovered that the longer I put off listening to ABBA the less I wanted to listen to them. And by then a month had passed. So I just let it go. And now it’s been over a month since my last post.

I wish I could stick with this, but I don’t think I can. It’s tedious. I just don’t CARE. I’d rather talk about food. Food is a lot more interesting to me than music. Music is important to me, but there’s very little which MOVES me. Food, on the other hand…there is precious little in this world that makes me happier than cooking for friends. So I’m closing down the music aspect of the blog. I’m going to leave it open and start talking about food.

A – Hi-Fi Serious

Track listing

1. Nothing
2. Something’s Going On
3. 6 O’Clock on a Tube Stop
4. Going Down
5. Took It Away
6. Starbucks
7. The Springs
8. Shut Yer Face
9. Pacific Ocean Blue
10. The Distance
11. W.D.Y.C.A.I.
12. Hi-Fi Serious
13. Asshole

Here’s A’s third album, Hi-Fi Serious. Overall I think it’s better than Monkey Kong. It starts out hard and heavy with “Nothing” and loses a bit of steam from there on. An excellent example of Britpop.

Buy this album

A – A vs Monkey Kong

1. For Starters
2. Monkey Kong
3. A
4. Old Folks
5. Hopper Jonnus Fang
6. Summer On The Underground
7. Warning
8. If It Ain’t Broke, Fix It Anyway
9. I Love Lake Tahoe
10. Don’t Be Punks
11. Down On The Floor
12. Jason’s Addiction
13. Miles Away
14. Getting Around
15. She Said
16. One Day
17. If it Ain’t Broke (Live)

I’ve had this for a few years now. As with many of my more recent CD acquisitions, I’ve never really given this a good listening to, preferring instead to cherry pick the tunes which stuck in my head on the first listen. In this case, we’re talking about tracks 1, 3 and 4. Overall it’s not a bad effort. Britpop isn’t my absolute favourite genre so take that for what it’s worth. It’s definitely worth a listen.

Buy this album

A Slight Hitch

My DVD burner blew up (not literally, thank goodness) just as I was finishing the “E”s. This is a small problem as my MacBook’s internal CD-RW isn’t in the greatest shape either. This means I’ll need to switch to my PC, which DOES have a working DVD burner, even if it’s a few years old. It also means I’ll need to re-think my encoding process.

To date I’ve ripped with iTunes and encoded using iTunes-LAME, an iTunes script which calls the LAME encoder to compress the WAVs I rip. Now I think I’ll have to start using EAC with LAME. Which makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just start over? I’ve not heard any real problems with the earliest MP3s I encoded, but I’m hearing a bit of static (from the dying drives) in the most recent. I just don’t want to mess around with trying to find out where the static starts showing up in the library. All the PC needs is a new case fan and a power supply (the existing PS is making a horrible whining sound). Guess it’s time to take a trip to Fry’s.

Update

Well, I’ve gotten through the “C”s and am starting into the “D”s. Ripping and encoding my CDs has been labour intensive, but fun. I’ve discovered a few CDs I’d forgotten I had, and even found that I like some albums I hadn’t liked the first time I heard them. It’ll be interesting to see which albums and songs I listen to most.

The project officially begins next Saturday on my 41st birthday, and I hope someone out there will follow along. Even if nobody does, it will still be nice to have this blog as a journal of my listening experience.

The plan

Hi there. I’m Bruce. How ya doin’? I’m OK, but I’m getting old. I hate that, I really do. You get hair where there should be be hair, you get random aches and pains…you know, it’s a little like puberty without the horrible social awkwardness and acne.

I turn 41 on 5 April 2008, and on that magical date something very stupid will happen. I’ll start listening to my entire CD collection. I don’t know how long it will take, because I’ve got something like 1,300 CDs on the racks behind me. I’m going to try and keep track of it all with Last.FM, although frankly I’m not a big fan for various reason. Still, needs must do, and they’re the only game in town as far as I can see. It’ll take as long as it takes, and at the end of the year I’ll be able to take a look at my stats and see exactly how many tracks I listened to from which artists and…um, well, I don’t really know what I’ll do with that information. Preserve it for posteriority, I suppose. I’m also going to watch my entire DVD collection, which numbers in the low hundreds, I think. I haven’t actually counted. No way to keep track of that apart from just writing it down, I’m afraid.

And that’s where this blog will come into play. Since my own memory is fairly unreliable, I’ll use this as a means to keep track of who, what, when and what I thought afterward.

I plan to import my CDs to my MacBook using iTunes. Using an application called iTunes-LAME, I will encode the CDs to nice clean MP3s. I plan to start this process this week following a full backup and re-install of MacOS X. For some reason iTunes has started crashing when I insert an audio CD, hence the reinstall.

The DVDs I guess I’ll just watch in the bedroom on our TV. Or maybe I’ll encode them using Handbrake and watch them in iTunes. That might be fun. We’ll see.

So that’s it for now. See you in a month!