Tandoori Chicken

Tandoori Chicken
 Not true Tandoori, because I don't have a 900' clay oven, but it tastes close enough to make me happy. I use lots of lemon juice to make up for the missing tang of yogurt.

Ingredients

A chicken's worth of parts. I cut up a whole chicken, but you could use 8-12 thighs
1/3 Cup of olive oil (needs to be an oil that won't solidify in the fridge)
1/3 Cup of lemon juice
2.5 T. of Tandoori spices (I got mine at Penzeys)
1 tsp of salt

Mix the marinade ingredients and marinade the chicken for 8 hours or longer.  Arrange chicken on a foil covered baking sheet (for easy cleanup) and bake at 375' for 30 minutes. Blast the heat up to 500' and cook until the skin is very brown and crisp looking.

Tandoori is usually skinless, but I love skin too much to remove it.

Braised Chicken Thighs -- No flabby skin!

I can't post the recipe because it was in Cook's Illustrated (June 2010, Vol. 104, Pg. 18) but I can tell you about the method. Braising chicken always has the issue of flabby, floppy skin.  I adore chicken skin, but I don't like it to be flabby.  I prefer it crisp, although unless you reheat it in the oven, it won't be for the left-overs.  However, if you do everything right, it also won't be flabby or floppy.

The recipe I used has you put eight thighs in an oven proof skillet.  On medium-high heat you brown the skin side for 5-8 minutes, until... duh... brown!  Then you flip them and brown the other side for about 5 minutes.

Remove the thighs and drain off most of the rendered fat, reserving about 2 tablespoons. Put your braising liquid in the skillet.  The recipe had about 3 cups of liquid for a 12" pan that was cooked down a bit.  Put your thighs in the pan, skin side up.  Then put the pan in the oven at 325 degrees for about 1 hour 15 minutes.  The meat should not be so over cooked it falls off the bone.

If the liquid is bubbling to vigorously then lower the heat until it is barely bubbling.

I stored the resulting thighs separately from their braising liquid so they wouldn't get mushy in the fridge.  But I reheat them together.

The CI recipe was pretty complicated but I think it this technique could work nicely for other braised chicken applications.

Oh yes, be sure to use thighs with the skin!  Thighs stay moister than breasts and they're the right thickness for this treatment.  And of course you want to skin because it's so delicious and it keeps the thighs moist on top.

Spicy, Roast Chicken -- Torture for the nose

I keep coming back to this chicken.  This is why I have a couple of marjoram plants in my yard.  In fact, one grew so big it took over my small planter, so I dug it up and took a bit of the top/roots and replanted and threw the rest out. Surprisingly I found a couple of cilantro plants growing underneath that bushy majoram!  So I'm nurturing them along.

I didn't use a cut-up chicken but instead butterflied one, less work and I love how much skin gets exposed and crispified.

The tomatoes caramelize, the juices and fats mingle with the garlic, marjoram and tomatoes and it makes an amazing sauce.

When I started cooking it I had the tomatoes piled up on top of the chicken, but knocked them down below partway through.  There's just so much flavor in that mixture.

I now have a cherry tomato, thyme, marjoram, mint and cilantro growing in my raised bed which I built from cedar fence planks and 2x4's.

Simple Chicken Wings

I am enjoying the heck out of my new range.

Anyway, yesterday I found some frozen chicken wings (raw) in the freezer and defrosted them. Actually, I wasn't sure what the heck part of the chicken they were, they were frozen into a solid block. So I defrosted them and saw one of my favorite parts of the chicken, the wing!

Here is a super easy recipe. 3 ingredient...

Chicken wings
Butter
Louisiana Style Hot Sauce (or whatever your favorite brand is).

Melt some butter, pour in some hot sauce. Coat the wings. Broil them a bit far from the heat source, I use the 2nd from the top rack spot and that worked fine. About 5 minutes, paint on more sauce and flip, another 5 minutes. Paint and flip once more. They should be crispy and browned.

Oh yes, cover your pan with foil for easy clean up!

I like to dip these guys in mayonnaise.

Chicken Soup

I got quite sick in the early part of February. It started as a nasty sore throat, the worst I've ever had, then developed into a nasty sinus infection. After suffering for over a week I saw my doctor and got a prescription for antibiotics to attack the sinus infection. I've had issues with clearing sinus infections in the past so I didn't want to go through that again.

Anyway, after I got to feeling better (I felt like a truck hit me) I decided to make some chicken soup. I've never really liked my soups in the past but this one came out just fine. I was still sick so I didn't want to work too hard.

Equal parts Celery, Carrots and Onions, chopped into soup-sized pieces.
Fat for cooking the veggies
Chicken (I pulled left-over rotisserie chicken off the carcass and used that)
Chicken broth -- Store bought, didn't have any made. Enough to cover the veggies and chicken and a bit more.
Herbs ( I used sage, thyme and a little basil)
Garlic: A few cloves either chopped well or pressed.

Optional: I used some left over compound butter (Garlic and Marjoram) to saute my veggies in a second batch of soup I made. This turned out even better!

Cook veggies in fat until they get as soft as you like. I don't like crunch in soup personally. Add chicken. Add stock. Allow to cook at low simmer about 20 minutes. If you use raw chicken that should be fully cooked by then.

This makes a hearty and filling soup!

Perfect Cold Chicken

It's still Chicken Month.

What's better than a salad with moist, tender chicken in it? But most of the time when I put left-over chicken in the salad, it's kind of dry and overcooked. I have found the right way to make sure the chicken is perfect for left-overs, you must poach it gently!

Succulent Chinese Chicken

This recipe is sheer genius. Not only is it incredibly easy but you can both eat and drink your chicken. The poaching liquid is a nice, if somewhat delicate, chicken broth. I'm going to use it to make a stronger broth. I have 2 gallon sized freezer bags full of chicken bones and gibblets and I'll use them, with this broth, some onions, garlic, carrots and celery, to make a stronger broth tomorrow. It'll lose its Chinese characteristics but gain a lot more flavor.

It was easy to pull the meat off the bone and put into a big container for later use. I saved the bones, of course, for stock. The skin I'm going to try broiling and see if I can get it nice and crispy. Flabby, poached skin isn't my idea of a good thing. So everything used except the cluck!

Now, what to do with that lovely moist chicken?

I would suggest making a nice salad. Here's how I did mine today:

Approx. 1 Tbl of bacon drippings
About 1 Tbl of rice vinegar
A touch of your favorite sweetener (Stevia, honey, splenda) to equal about 2 tsp of sugar.

Microwave the bacon drippings until they become liquid. Briskly stir in vinegar and sweetener.

I used these things in my salad:

Green onion
Mixed baby greens with herbs
Black olives
Some dehydrated onion for crunch
Succulent chinese chicken (from above)
Bacon dressing

It is wonderful! In particular the dressing really goes well with the chicken.

The Month of Poultry

Perhaps you can tell from my recent postings but I've been on a poultry binge. I decided to eliminate red meat for a month (mostly) and see if it changes anything. So far no changes in health detected. And I do love chicken... probably more than red meat.

My enthusiasm about spatchcocked chickens brought about a pointer to a link for Golden, Crisp Chicken Cooked ‘Under a Brick’.

It includes details on how to partially de-bone the chicken. In this case you remove the backbone, the breast bone (keel bone) and cut the chicken in half. Then you pare away the rib bones. Again, not really all that difficult. Be careful though. Working with chickens my fingers get very cold and a little clumsy. They also have you chop off the ends of the legs and that seemed kind of dangerous to me. I think next time I'll just loosen the skin from the bone like Jacques Pepin does. It kind of pulls back when it cooks and makes a nice handle. It looks cool.

I think it took me all of about 10 minutes to prepare the chicken and you have to realize I'm pretty new to this. I think once a person was experienced it be maybe a 5 minute chore.

Messy though, I dirtied up a large cutting board 2 knives and my kitchen scissors. Had to clean up the counter-top too (which really needed it anyway).

One again, all the bones and innards get shoveled into a freezer bag and will be used for chicken stock once I get 2 bags worth full.

Flatten that Chicken!

I'm excited. I have found something I really love. It is thrifty and delicious. It is butterflied or spatchcocked chicken.

Basically what you do is buy a whole chicken and flatten it. It isn't difficult at all, but it is a bit messy. Be sure you save everything you remove from the chicken and freeze it for making a good bone stock later on. And I mean everything, giblets, neck, breastbone, backbone. After you eat some chicken, save the bones!

I bought two chickens at Costco, .99 cents a pound. Compare that to $2.99 a pound cut-up fryer from Trader Joe's. What a deal.

Here's a tutorial of how to "spatchcock" a chicken, complete with pictures.

Ok, the price savings is nice but there are other benefits:

• More surface area: It is great for holding onto any sort of coating, like... ummm... a mustard crust perhaps?
• Faster cooking time: A whole chicken might take an hour or more to cook. A flattened chicken takes 30-45 minutes, depending on method and temperature.
• More skin! I adore eating chicken skin but you miss out on a lot of skin if you buy pre-cut up chickens.

I caught a glimpse of Jacques Pepin on PBS recently making this Mustard Crusted Chicken recipe and I just had to try it. I've butterflied a few chickens, thanks to Alton Brown's wonderful show displaying the technique, and when I saw that this was first cooked in a oven-safe skillet (to brown up the back, I suspect) it looked to me like it was winner. I've had such great luck cooking steak in skillet, then oven, that I could imagine cooking a bird this way would be fantastic.

The only differences were that I removed the legs and wings, misunderstanding his instructions which should just have had me cutting through the meat so they cook faster. But it also made the bird fit into my cast iron skillet a little better.

This chicken recipe cooks in a mere 30 minutes in the oven and the smell is intoxicating. The taste? Wow! I'm going to be using this recipe over and over.

I was trying to play a computer game upstairs while this chicken was cooking but the smell totally derailed my concentration. I had to stop playing and come downstairs to be closer to my meal.