h o m e * e c o n o m i c s

madhur jaffrey's broiled chicken strips

 

After hearing Andrew Tropicana, I mean Andrew Glass, praise Madhur Jaffrey to the skies for the millionth time, I realized that she was published by the house I work for, and I picked up An Invitation to Indian Cooking. Needless to say, it took me many months to cook from it, but this weekend was the weekend. My excuse was that I wouldn't try to make a spice paste without a Cuisinart; now that I am nicely nested, Cusinart and all, I gave it a go. After all, there's only so much buttery, Frenchy food I can cram down a boy's throat.

I have never had a Cuisinart before. For me it is associated with my mom and pie dough, altogether too adult an implement for me to own--an impression only reinforced by the terrifying warnings the Cuisinart people slip into their packaging, apparently (correctly) imagining that I will slice off my fingers the first chance I get. It was Nigel Slater's lovely descriptions of green curry in Appetite that convinced me I had to have a food processor, and so here I am, hauling it down from a high shelf to make chicken bits.

The seductiveness of Madhur Jaffrey's writing surprised me. One forgets that cookbooks were, at one time, written, not just churned out with headnotes about how "awesome" the recipe is or relating some authorial anecdote that feels false. I chose this recipe because Jaffrey promises that "its taste is heavenly, lightly but definitely spiced" and "it tastes as good cold as it does hot." How could I resist?

Though it was not what I would refer to as "lightly spiced," it was very yummy. I am always surprised and delighted that it is so easy to make something "exotically" (sorry) fragrant at home; the first time I cooked with fresh ginger--six years ago--I thought I was an absolute genius. Anyway, I cut her recipe in half, down to the proportions I've listed below. Some notes: she says to cut the chicken into 1.5 or 2 inch pieces, 1/2 inch wide; I did this and found that it cooked much too quickly (I removed it after 12 minutes, not 20, and it was dryish). Perhaps my broiler differs substantially from hers, but I will do stir-fry size chunks next time. Though I cut the recipe in half, I forgot to cut the oil and vinegar in half. It was still delicious, but I suspect the effect is different (i.e., even better) with the correct proportions. She says ground coriander, by which I imagined she meant dried coriander; now I'm not so sure. In any case, dried coriander--boy, is that musty or what? Because I had no tomato sauce, I used a dab of tomato paste. And I used a whole teaspoon of cayenne--it didn't seem like much, but the finished dish was so spicy I wished I had used only a heaping quarter teaspoon.

1.5 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breast
2.5 tbs vegetable oil
2 tbs red wine vinegar
1 small onion, peeled and chopped
1/2 head of garlic, cloves peeled and chopped
a small piece of ginger, peeled and chopped
1 tbs whole fennel seeds
1 tbs ground cumin
1tsp ground coriander
seeds from 4 cardamom pods
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
4 whole cloves
10 black peppercorns
1/2 tsp cayenne (for a slightly heated dish)
1 tsp salt
1.5 tbs tomato sauce

Pulse everything but the chicken in a food processor until it forms a smooth paste. Cut the chicken into bite size pieces and marinate in the paste in a plastic bag for four or five hours. Preheat your broiler. When the oven is heated, line a baking sheet with tin foil, spread the chicken over it, and cook for 10 minutes. Flip and cook for 10 more minutes or until the chicken is lightly browned. Serve with rice (or, if your cooktop isn't working and you don't know how to make rice in the oven, on a kaiser roll. Ahem).

monkey bread and dutch pancake

I'm a bit reluctant to share this picture, but it sums up last weekend so well that I feel I have no choice. Between Friday night and Monday morning I ate nothing but baked goods and cheese. OK, I also ate a couple of pieces of fruit, but I didn't even see a vegetable, let alone eat one. As you can see, by Sunday morning I had turned into the crazy carb lady. I'd like to blame my indulgence on the still non-functioning cooktop (thanks, Department of Buildings!), but only having an oven didn't mean I had to make monkey bread...and making monkey bread didn't mean I had to eat all of it myself.

Have you ever had monkey bread? I know it as the addictive, warm, butter-oozing first offering at the tearoom in Neiman Marcus in Houston, where it is served with strawberry butter and a tiny cup of consomme. Imagine brioche, but even more buttery and tender; imagine one of those foods with which it is pretty much impossible to be generous ("you insist I have the last piece? OKAYTHANKYOU!") It is just as much of a treat to go to lunch at Neiman's with my mother and sister now as it was when I was a little girl, and I find that the greedy consumption of monkey bread before constrasts nicely with the polite nibbling of chicken salad and sipping of tortilla soup after. You can see a totally seductive picture of monkey bread as I know it on the cover of the Neiman Marcus cookbook. Friday night a glass of pink wine inspired me to bake something happy, and I turned to the NM cookbook for the first time.

My monkey bread was not as sublime as the stuff in the store--it was a little tougher and, shockingly, could have used even more butter--but it was pretty good (not to mention heartbreakingly gorgeous, at least by my standards). Let's just say that I ate a lot of monkey bread this weekend--hot, cold, with jam, without...if I had had more restraint, I would have realized my dream of eating it with chocolate; maybe next time. I remembered that Heidi at 101 Cookbooks tried it once, too, and hers is covered with crunchy sugar; a fantastic idea. An internet search turns up some frightening concoctions of canned biscuits, margarine, and cinnamon. Friends: do not be fooled. This is not monkey bread.

In any event, I want to experiment before posting a recipe.

After eating monkey bread for breakfast and lunch on Saturday and bread and cheese for dinner, what was there to do but try the tempting Dutch pancake for Sunday breakfast? I followed the Food Section's recipe and was delighted. Not only was it delicious, it was also terribly exciting to put so little effort into something that puffed up with such topographical drama. This is my un-powdered, un-lemonspritzed pancake--and a document recording my reunion with my beloved cast iron skillet, sprung from storage at last so that I can feel like Ma Ingalls in the city once again.

blueberry buckle (and another blueberry treat)

sugar, butter, and lemon zest await creaming; the forlorn (and slightly soggy) last bit of buckle

The fourth of July was a gloriously pretty day here. I celebrated by walking all the way down Fifth Avenue to the Shake Shack, eating a hamburger with a caramel milkshake (!!!), and stopping at the Greenmarket for some blueberries for the blueberry buckle in this month's Cook's Illustrated. Friday was a surprise day off from work, which I had spent shopping for staples to fill my bare pantry. I drifted through Fairway in a daze, filling my cart with bulgar wheat and baking powder, red wine vinegar and cinnamon sticks, panko and peanut oil. In short: I was finally equipped for baking in my new oven.

Alas, this was not my favorite Cook's Illustrated recipe. To be fair, 1)I'm not crazy about blueberries anyway, and a buckle, as we learn in the magazine, is a very fruit-heavy thing, 2)I had to use an 8 inch cake pan because I didn't have a 9 inch, so I had to guess how much to add to the baking time, and 3)it wasn't half bad--I happen to have inflated expectations for Cook's Illustrated. I still managed to choke down most of the cake myself, much to the shock and displeasure of the one who had supervised the buckle-making [N.B. reader, this person had recently snatched the last homemade gruyere crouton from my plate and popped it into his mouth, claiming he thought it would be "funny"--do we save cake for crouton stealers?--I didn't think so].

In any event, a blueberry recipe I liked much better than this can be found on Epicurious: blueberry muffin tops. I don't have a muffin top pan, so I made these in regular muffin tins, with frozen blueberries, and they were still so good. They are very sweet--more of a dessert than a breakfast muffin--and I recommend them highly, so long as you don't mind a cakey fruit bread.