This Is Just To Say: Cooking Collard Greens In Ghee

I don’t know if it was the greens — i.e., CSA and tender and good, so not supersized, intense supermarket collards — or what but simply cooking blanched greens (4 minutes) in ghee, salt and white pepper was fantastic.

Meatball Technology (Cont.)

Flaxseed Meal plus extra fine bulgur wheat instead of bread crumbs in meatballs. The things were sticky, I’m guessing because of the soluble fiber in the flax seeds (factchecking self: yes, that seems to be it). One solution is probably to add them toward the end, and not let it sit there (which I did). When all was said and done (read: cooked), the meatballs were great. I’ve been using garam masala all the time now, so that was in there, as was a bunch of flat-leaf parsley from out back. I would just as soon not use bread crumbs as use them, so I think I’ll go ahead and stick with some combination of flaxseed meal and bulgur wheat, if it’s all the same to you.

If You’re Bored Of Negronis, This Is Good

It diverges quite a bit from the 1-1-1 recipe, but the Continental cocktail herein is quite good: six parts gin, three parts Cynar, two parts dry vermouth, and some stuff with lemon zest.

(This was the alternative, had we gone in that direction: 1-1-1 Aperol, dry vermouth and gin; dry vermouth is the curve ball here.)

This Week In CSA: Chelsea Dagger Discovers Broccoli Leaves And The Correct Way To Cook Mustard Greens

So the thing to remember with mustard greens is that even though they seem very wiltable/sauteeable/spinachlike (in other words, three consecutive words that don’t really exist), most recipes blanch them for about five minutes. Then you cook them in whatever junk you want for two or three minutes. [Holy shit, some fucking cat in heat outside is moaning in that horrible cat-in-heat way.] And the weird broccoli you get in the CSA load that has just a few florets and a bunch of leaves? Well, I googled it and learned you can cook them — not that it didn’t occur to me to do this, but the leaves in the CSA variety are just so big and inviting that it made me wonder: what are we supposed to do with this strange item?

Anyway, I cooked the whole thing in some chicken fat and it was good and whatnot.

Skin Is Cracked And I Realize That I Hate The Sound Of Chickens, A Thousand Grudging Young Fryers

We eat a lot of chicken — it’s something the boys will eat — so I’m always on the lookout for new chicken recipes, except that I’m kind of not, but that said, whenever I happen upon one from the Times on my Twitter feed, I’ll definitely click on it. Here are two I tried lately.

Sam Sifton immodestly tweeted that his three-cup chicken was “an easy, awesome recipe to cook weekly for, like, the next two years”. Of course I clicked on that. The recipe is pretty straightforward. (Notes: I correctly guessed that it was probably OK to substitute sake for rice wine though I’m pretty sure regular “soy sauce” — i.e., what I used — is “dark” and “light” means something different, and I went way light on the chili pepper flakes because I wanted the boys to eat the dish.) It was good; not sure it’s weekly good, but it was good, and I’d try it again.

Meanwhile, Mark Bittman’s Stir-Fried Chicken With Ketchup was as advertised. I feel like it’s somehow cheating to rely so heavily on ketchup, but the vinegar in the ketchup deglazes the pan so well that, when you think about it, the ketchup is kind of like an umami-rich dishwasher soap: you’re wasting time not finishing the chicken in a cup of ketchup. Suffice it to say, it tastes very good. Jen thought it might have been tomato paste. She was surprised, and in a good way, when told it was ketchup. I have no idea how I stumbled on the recipe: it’s from 2004 so it’s not new, but it was new to me. This is an extremely simple recipe that guests would be very into.