Chicken Parts

I've been anticipating learning to cut a whole chicken into pieces for a long time. For one thing, I love playing with large pieces of meat. I would be pretty happy being a butcher. I find the idea of buying an entire animal and cutting it into pieces to use much more appealing than buying a package of boneless skinless breasts one day, a package of thighs the next week, and a big carton of chicken broth every time I go to the store. I love making my own stock. Everything is better.

This weekend, I'm having people over for dinner and as I was looking through recipes for inspiration, the one that involved taking apart a chicken was the most appealing. Chicken is an obvious choice, and while I love eating a one-in, skin on thigh, I know that a lot of people don't. A whole chicken gives you a natural mix so everyone gets what they want. I've also heard that cutting up a chicken yourself yields better chicken than buying the same pieces.

I was nervous about taking this on, since I'd committed to the meal, bought these two chickens, and had arranged to serve it to people (people I've never cooked for) and I was attempting something I'd never done and been warned was difficult. But at the very least, I would still have chicken, and even if it was hacked up and weird, it's going into a stew.

Cutting up the birds went perfectly. The cuts all went along natural delineations, bones popped out of joints effortlessly. Taking out the breastbone was a challenge, but once that was done, even de-boning and splitting the breast was easy. Now I have a big pile of neatly cut up chicken parts and a big pot of stock simmering on the stove.

Paella

Tonight, I made paella. It's wonderful and easy and cheap and it makes everyone happy. I used shrimp and andouille sausage, but lots of things work. Combinations of seafood are common (like, maybe shrimp, clams and mussels) and they look really striking. I think having a few shrimp (maybe like 2 or 3 per person) and a decent amount of sausage is a good way to stretch it out. Chorizo or spicy Italian sausage are good as well. Or, you could do chicken and sausage, or chicken and shrimp. A quick epicurious search pulls up vegetarian paella (white beans and swiss chard, asparagus and sugar snaps), a turkey paella, even rabbit and artichoke. Snails are another traditional component.

Paella is a Spanish rice dish that is supposed to be cooked in a very thin, some would say very cheap, pan. Purists will insist that the title "Paella" requires a crunchy, almost burnt crust on the bottom of the pan. It's become a recurring theme in Top Chef (the TV show) for a contestant to make what they call paella. In most cases, they've used the high quality pans provided for them, and thus have produced a nice, evenly heated, perfectly cooked pan full of rice. This angers Chef Tom Collichio. In a few cases, the contestant has pulled this off (see: Ilan, Season 2, individual paellas, cooked in serving dishes, and not actual cookware. Clever, or lucky?). When this has happened, all the judges basically get off on this magnificent burnt rice. Padma Lakshmi, judge and host, delights in proding the crunchy bits with her fork, like an ethnic, stoner version of Amelie cracking the top of her creme brule, and she looks up and informs the viewers at home "the rice is soooo crunchy, you guys!"

But anyways. My "paella" did not have the crunchy bottum. I don't care for burnt rice, myself. I chopped up about 1 cup of onion and sauteed that till it was a little browned. I added in minced garlie (2 cloves), a big pinch of saffron and about 1/2 teaspoon of smoked spanish paprika. I used roasted red peppers from a jar, so I diced them and added them after the spices. (You'd add diced fresh bell pepper with the onions.) I poured in 2 cups of chicken broth (fish stock is good too), 1 cup of short-to-medium grain rice and an andouille sausage, halved and sliced. You bring the broth to boil, then lower the heat and cooked with the lid on for 15 minutes, till the rice is mostly cooked. Then I added the shrimp- I just layed them on top of the rice and pushed them into it so they were in the rice but not covered. If the rice looks dry, add more broth. Cover again and cook on very low heat till the shrimp are pink.

If you were using chicken, you would brown in in the pan before doing anything else, cooking it about halfway. Then, you'd add it with the rice and broth, letting it cook the rest of the way. Clams or mussels you'd add with the rice and broth. If you're using uncooked sausage, cook it with the onions and peppers. If (like I did) you havve cooked sausage, just add it with the rice so the flavor will infuse.

Saffron and Spanish Paprika are pretty strongly associated with paella. Saffron is amazingly expensive, and if I hadn't helped myself to my mom's supply, I'm sure I would not be using it in my own kitchen. I've made this with a little tumeric in place of saffron and been quite happy with the results. I think I even called it "Paella", not "Seafood and Sausage Rice Dish with Eclectic Blend of Spices and Without Bottom-Crust". It's very flexible- a 2:1 liquid:rice, as much meat or seafood as you like (or, as much as you have), and whatever vegetables seem appropriate (red or green bell peppers, tomato, green bean, peas, artichokes, asparagus...) This is a good dish for using vegetables that maybe aren't as great as they could be, whether they're canned or frozen or just leftover, because they'll be cooking in a really flavorful broth.

Roasting

I love making roast chicken, especially when it's cold outside. It looks gorgeous and it makes my apartment smell yummy. And you can do plenty of stuff with the chicken, including making stock. I got a chicken at the Christmas farmer's market yesterday. This is my first local chicken. I've been buying the organic free range chickens at the grocery store, even though it's a little more expensive, but considering I get like 4 or 5 meals out of it, it seems worthwhile to start with better quality chicken.

I rubbed the inside and outside of my little chicken with salt and sat it in my fridge all day. I rubbed it with canola oil and roasted it at 425, upside down for half an hour, then flipped back over for 15 minutes.

I also love roasting vegetables. Someone reminded me that, maybe a few months ago, I said cauliflower was the last thing I had yet to developed a taste for. I love roasting cauliflower; I love the browned, slightly caramelized outside that brings out that nuttiness. At the farmer's market, there was a spread of broccoli, white cauliflower and purple cauliflower. I am a sucker for heirloom-y, different looking vegetables. In the summer, this mostly concerns tomatoes- I love the wonky looking ones with weird protrusions and stripes. But i absolutely had to get a little of each, so I'd have a pile of green, white and purple roasted veggies. Thanks to my P.O.S oven, they ended up a little more roasted than planned. Still delicious, still kind of awesome looking-


I mean, seriously! That purple is insane! I was worried the color wouldn't be vibrant and awesone after blasting the shit out of it in a 450 degree oven, but that weird Cauliflower From Neptune color just got better.

(Random aside- on Top Chef, four teams had to prepare dishes based on "Old", "New", "Borrowed" or "Blue". Obviously blue is the hardest. How bad ass would it have been if they'd found piles of purple cauliflower and made some blue-violet cauliflower puree, and maybe a blue-cheese stuffed piece of meat? Really, they should have called me)

Offal!

For someone who makes an effort to eat vegetarian most of the time, I really love playing with meat. When I worked in a restaurant, during prep I'd try to trade with the other line cooks to get the raw-meat handling jobs that no one else wanted to do. Most people seem to be turned off by food that looks like a part of a dead animal. I'm totally cool with it. It is a dead animal, and there's nothing wrong with that.

My first significant culinary memory was when I was 8 and I made a roast chicken with stuffing. I wasn't just helping Mom by stirring the sauce, it was my meal from start to finish. (At least that's how I saw it at the time. I was 8, I'm sure I had a lot of help.) I learned that there were lots of parts of chicken- there were the obvious structural components, and then inside there were these slimy bloody organs. Seriously, that's a heart! That I just pulled out of a chicken! With my hand!

While I was standing on my little stool, gleefully elbows deep in my dissection, my little friend from down the street had ridden his bike over to hang out. I couldn't wait to show him what I found in the chicken. "Look, that's the heart, and that's the...what is it, mom? The liver. you can eat it." And that was enough to send him running out the door.

When I went to France this summer, I was lucky enough to have a very authentic gastronomical experience. Really traditional European cuisine seems to feature more offal, or at least more of the animal that you see in the US. Always inclined to order the thing I haven't had before, I ordered tete de veau (head of veal) at a restaurant, much to the delight of my European travel companion. Our waiter played the roll of arrogant frenchman to a tee- "Do you know what zat eez?" After delivery our meal, he checked back periodically to see if that Americainne knew what she'd gotten herself into. I think tete de veau is primarily the thymus glands, or sweetbreads. They're so soft and savory, the unctuousness that you'd expect from an internal organ is barely there they practically melt in your mouth.

Today I bought a little roaster chicken and I was very excited about it. I forgot that I was going get a handful of organs when I reached into the little guy. I set that aside and put my chicken and veggies together, with the intesnsion of making a stock out of all of it. But while my chicken roasted, that liver was calling my name. I'm not sure I've ever eaten liver. I don't think I know anyone who likes liver. But they look like they'd be kind of amazing, right?

Ok, that might not be a universal reaction. But in spite of never having eaten liver that I or anyone else prepared, I had to fry it up and see what happened. I chopped in up and spread it on crostini with sauteed onions and it was amazing. And, I have all the iron I need for a week.

And like they were reading my mind, Iron Chef America picks offal as the secret ingrediant. Well played.

Rotisserie Chicken

There are a few things I keep hearing on TV that make me want to throw something at it. Carrie Bradshaw's monologues, Blayne on Project Runway's use and abuse of the suffix "-licious," those ads that try to argue that high fructose corn syrup is good for you because it's made from corn, any mention of or statement by Sarah Palin...

But the commercials that make me feel like I'm taking crazy pills are the fast food ones that present the idea that their chicken whatevers are healthy because they use all white meat chicken. There's always a pretty young mom, who is a Good Mom, because she would only feed her children white meat chicken. McDonalds, sure, but it's white meat. What is this? Who decided that breast meat was the only part it was ok to eat? Ok, sure, white meat has less fat, but that shit is deep fried! It just absorbs all of that fat, so instead of the normal chicken fat that you're meant to eat, you have lean chicken soaked in partially hydrogenated soybean oil. And if this was actual chicken breast that was breaded and fried I could maybe tolerate this claim, but it's about 10 steps removed from a chicken- it's been cooked, ground to a paste, bleached (all white!) and extruded through a tube and pressed into a patty-shaped mold. To meet the demand for chicken breast, the chickens are castrated and feed piles of estrogen so they grow enormous breast muscles, which they certainly can't use because they're stuffed in boxes, which is good because actually using those muscles tends to make them not quite as white a pristine. And as long as only 1/5 of the meat is useable, of course 5 times as many chickens need to be produced. So, kids, enjoy those chicken patties, and enjoy getting your period when you're 7, girls. "Mmm all white meat patties! Thanks mom!"

It's probably more upsetting that this enormous distance from where the meat comes from (the animal) and what people want to see when they eat is considered so normal. I've met too many people who say that they love eating meat but they won't eat anything on a bone, or anything that has a shape suggesting it was once a body part. How is this remotely ethical?

I'm not a vegetarian, it's jsut not going to happen. But I'd like to think I have an appreciation for where meat comes from. But I'm still a student, and when I stand in the grocerey store comparing prices on organic and store brand chicken, the wallet often wins.

But I can at least feel like I've gotten as much out of a chicken as I can. This morning I bought a rotisserie chicken, without any real plans for it. I stripped of all of the dark meat first and made a chili from a Fine Cooking recipe with white beans, chipotles, and canned tomatoes. I shredded the rest of the white meat, mixed it with some scallions and tomatoes and mayo, and made a chicken salad vastly superior to the crap I had for lunch from Wawa last week. The rest I threw in a pot with a few sprigs of parsely, bay leaves, the stumpy end of a small head of romaine. I've been planning on making tomatillo soup, from Kalyn's Kitchen, and this will save me having to buy the stock. I've never made chicken stock before; for some reason, I thought it would be hard. I think I'll be doing it a lot more, if only for the way it has made my apartment smell.

So, I've got an amazing chili, 2 cups of chicken salad, and soon, a quart of soup, 6-8 meals. Everything that went into all three probably cost between $10 and $15.