You Screw Things Up Enough, It’s Bound To Go Right

I had been thinking about the almost baked pate-kebabs from lamb we made the other day so when we were at the store the other day I picked up a pack of meatloaf mix (pork, veal, beef), which obviously isn’t lamb but which I figured might work anyway. Conceptually, it was something along the lines of “South Asian Meatloaf Ke-balls.”

So today I pull out the copy of At Home With Madhur Jaffrey and opened it to what I thought was the recipe I mangled and after I prepped the paste that the meat gets mixed into I realized that I was using the wrong recipe. I had the book open to the Lamb Kebabs with Mint recipe (page 116) and had dutifully measured out all the requisite cumin, coriander, cayenne and ginger and was going to mix it into the ground meat when I noticed it said “Mix well and prob the lamb cubes with a fork.” Hrm. It took me a while to figure out what the original recipe was, and only after referring back to this post was I able to reconstruct what happened — which is why I want to get this down in the first place.

One thing I changed was switching out plain yogurt for ricotta cheese, which we always have around. So: Ricotta cheese, lemon juice, salt cayenne pepper, ground cumin, ground coriander, two scallions (in place of an onion), ginger, the meat, and skip the mint but add the butcher parsley they always include in the meatloaf. Who eats that stuff? you might ask. We did. Tonight. It actually came in handy.

And then I turned the page to the actual recipe I mangled before which was when everything collapsed into itself. The only remaining issue was how long to cook the balls. The answer, I now Googled my way into, was 400 degrees for about 30-35 minutes.

The second part of the meal were the sous vide carrots (you know, those things), except this time I experimented with adding mushrooms. That part worked, too. Also, we used ghee instead of butter.

Roasted Chicken

A while back a friend told me about the famed Zuni Cafe method of roasting chicken. I resisted, mostly because it involved flipping the chicken not once but twice. The last thing I want to do in life is try to flip a hot half-raw chicken. It’s actually not that big a deal.

So eventually I tried the recipe and, man, it is good. The method calls for salting the chicken and leaving it in the fridge for one to three days. It sounds gross to keep a raw chicken in your fridge for three days, but it’s actually pretty good. The above link calls for the daintiest 3/4 teaspoon of salt. This is too little. Dump a bunch of salt in your plasticware and roll the chicken around in it. Salty roasted chicken is worth it. In summer I use fresh herbs from outside. In winter there’s no need; in the end, I’m not sure how much flavor is actually imparted by the herbs.

In essence, the recipe calls for cooking the chicken at a blistering 475 degrees breast side up for 30 minutes, then flipping it and cooking it for 15-20 minutes, then flipping it again and cooking it for 5-10 minutes. In general I do 30 minutes then 12 to 15 minutes then 5 minutes. And 475 will make your house smoke. 450 is fine and I’ve lowered it a little more, too. The trick is to make the skillet really hot and pat the chicken really dry. Also, it’s more important to make the underside dry — as opposed to the breast. The drier and hotter it is, the less likely it will stick and rip off precious skin. At the end the skin is crispy and salty and ridiculously addictive. Perch it on a baking rack while it rests to make sure the undercarriage skin stays dry.

Before we had a fancy stove with a self-cleaning feature, it was a challenge; high-heat chicken makes a fuckin’ mess of the oven and cleaning the thing, while not impossible, is annoying. You’ll need a razor blade implement (called a “razor blade scraper”) to scrape off burned grease. It’s still probably worth it.

The byproduct of cooking a chicken in a skillet is of course the fat. At any given time I have several plastic containerof chicken fat, labeled by date. I don’t like to waste stuff, so it’s nice to find new ways to use it. Solution: Madhur Jaffrey’s South Indian-Style Green Beans. It’s just one pound of green beans, boiled for 5 minutes, then cooked in olive/canola oil with whole cumin seeds, whole brown or yellow mustard seeds, sesame seeds and cayenne pepper. And salt.

The flavors are great, but you know what is even better? Cooking shit in the chicken fat leftover in the pan. So, so good. We did the same with potatoes. Also, good.

The Problem With Steak

The problem with steak is that you sometimes feel you need to “atone” with something “less heavy” the next day. Which is how one of us started leafing through Madhur Jaffrey’s At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. Honestly, everything I’ve made from that book has been great, it’s just that it’s hard to gear up for vegetables. Part of what makes At Home so good is that most, if not all, of the recipes are super simple and not very time consuming. Jen alighted on Potato and Pea Curry (page 168). Which was good. She compromised by suggesting a kofta of some sort. I flipped to the Baked Pate-Kebabs recipe (page 23) and got distracted by “pate.” So instead of a loaf of ground turkey sliced thin we had ground lamb mixed in with a bastardized version of chicken liver pate (using livers from the baggies in some whole chickens we had) along with the fragrant flavors of the Indian spices the original recipe details. This was good, though liver becomes really sticky for some reason, at least until you add the egg.

Chicken Liver Sort-Of Pate Bowdlerized From Joy Of Cooking (Page 725)
Not 8 tablespoons of butter but rather one or two;
No shallots (didn’t have any);
No apples (I’m sure it’s a good touch but no);
Two chicken livers (not a pound);
Hoochy brandy, instead of Calvados or Cognac;
Either ricotta cheese or yogurt instead of heavy cream;
Immersion blender suffices.