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Farm and chicken update (and new poll!)

7 Jun

 

 

We headed over to Restoration Farm, our CSA, today to put in a little work and visit the chickens.

Leandro was a champion snap pea picker (he remembered his skills from last year) on this bright sunny day that showed hints of what a sweltering hazy, hot and humid Long Island summer can be.

Many peas didn’t make it to the basket, as they ended up in his mouth. He won’t yet eat the pods, preferring to open them up and eat the tiny peas inside, edamame-style. It’s a start. And at least he knows they grow on vines, not exclusively in the frozen food section! Mommy gets the pods, which are wonderfully crunchy and bright.

The boy was also introduced to the delights of picking strawberries, but won’t get a chance to pick his own quart until our pick-up day, later this week. Whether any berries he picks will actually end up getting home is doubtful. I will have to make sure he doesn’t get out of hand. He can devour a pound of strawberries at a sitting and since they are amongst the most chemical-laden of fruits when conventionally-grown (see http://ewg.org/) and very expensive to buy organic, I hope this is a good year for strawberries in our neighborhood!

We visited the chickens, of course. He still loves Donna’s future egg-layers and their roving chicken coop (now painted a proper barnyard red), but the now five-week-old eating birds, not so much.

“Ew! Stinky!” is all I got out of him today, as he ran away to see what he could spirit out of the berry patch. As we get closer to our first installment of locally pastured chickens, I am starting to think about what irresistible dish to concoct for him….

 

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Child Meets Chicken Dinner (Update)

27 May

Dinner at Three Weeks

Leandro thus far seems to have no problem with his exalted position at the top of the food chain.

He likes the laying hens and during this week’s trip to Restoration Farm, pestered Donna (Mother Hen) to no end until she took him over to visit the girls. The fact that they refused to come out from under the hen house was transformed into an exciting lesson in the predator vs. prey relationship when a pair of hungry hawks soared overhead. Chickens aren’t as dumb as they look!

He’s not as fond of Trisha’s chicks – the ones destined to become meals. He pronounced them stinky and boring. “One of them is going to be dinner for you one day soon,” I said, while we weeded the strawberry patch. “Dinner? What!?!” he responded. And then he sort of nodded, said, “Okay,” and went on with the business of sorting the good insects from the bad (and stompable).

"They're stinky!"

There are 30-odd chicks. They have just turned three weeks old, and they are still cute, if a bit pink in spots rather than feathered. They don’t stink, by the way. They are now out in the fields in a pasture box, fertilizing and weeding the berry patch with great enthusiasm, while Trish visits other farms and learns the art of slaughter. We volunteers can talk of nothing else but how to kill a chicken during lunch break, which might not be everyone’s idea of appropriate mealtime conversation, but I like it.

More on the chicken project as we move forward into the Hazy, Hot, and Humid Long Island summer.

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Baked Chicken Tenders (with hint of curry option!)

19 May

The best defense is a good offense, even when it comes to protecting your family from encroaching fast-food predilections. So I keep trying to build a better, healthier, more attractive chicken tender that I can freeze and have on hand any time a drive-thru strikes me as a really good idea.

These chicken tenders are a variation on a Rachael Ray recipe — and you thought this was a Rachael-free zone, didn’t you? C’mon, the woman is everywhere! Even here. And certainly on all the search engines!

I like to think my version of chicken tenders has a bit more pizzazz, but we all have our vanities.

Bottom line: these are easy, freezeable and adaptable and they helped carry me through another semester of packed lunches for pre-K. My kid and his grandfather both loved the subtle curry flavor (which bodes well for our next Indian buffet lunch!). You can really season it however you like; the infrastructure of the recipe is very sound.

Baked Chicken Fingers with an optional hint of curry (freezeable!)

2 lbs chicken breasts, pounded to an even thickness (do not pound thin, just even them out) and sliced, against the grain, into generous strips

Salt and pepper for seasoning chicken strips

2 cups flour

2-3 cups breadcrumbs, unseasoned

½ -1 tsp salt

2 Tbs dried parsley

2 -3 Tbs curry powder (optional; see herb options, below)

2-3 Tbs your choice dried oregano/basil/Italian herbs/French herbs (if you decide against the curry)

 3 eggs

¼ cup milk

Preheat oven to 375°F. Season the tenders with salt and black pepper. In a shallow dish, season the flour with salt and pepper. In a wide bowl, beat the eggs with the milk. In a third dish (shallow), place the breadcrumbs and season with salt, parsley and either the curry powder or the herb blend. Be generous with the herbs.

Dredge the chicken strips in the flour to coat. Shake off excess flour. Dip the strips in the egg to coat. Then coat with breadcrumbs. Place chicken strips on a baking sheet, or, ideally, a rack that lets them heat all around. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes, turning once.

Once cooled, I pop them into freezer bags and take them out as needed for lunches and such, reheating at 325°F for ten minutes.

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Pastured Chickens: Should a 4-year-old meet his future dinner in the coop?

15 May

I'll be eating one of these in a few weeks

So we were down at Restoration Farm C.S.A. doing some work (or I was supposed to be doing some work, but we were chatting more than anything, what with the little guy wanting to run around). We’ve bought a chicken share; Trish Hardgrove, one of the growers, has initiated a pastured chicken project: $125, five months, five chickens. I was in, of course, but this brings the question of my son to bear.

A few generations back, it would be quite normal for kids to look at farm animals as a future meal. But today, it is a bit less usual. I am all for Leandro knowing where his meals come from and plan for us to follow the chicks’ progress from farm to (our) table. I figure, if it puts him off animal products for the rest of his life, is that such a terrible consequence?

Looking forward to hearing your opinions on the topic! If you clicked directly to this post, please note that there is a poll in the next post. Click the right hand arrow at the bottom of this post!

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Spring Roast: Chicken and Vegetables with Rosemary & Mustard Sauce

3 May

Surprisingly light!

The weather is showing signs of heating up for summer, but there is still cool weather enough to turn the oven on and roast up a chicken, which is exactly what I did for my part of Easter Sunday supper. I always feel like a French country lady when I have roast chicken and vegetables; it’s honest and true food that is not at all plain or boring.In fact, done right (and it is easy to do right), it can be luminous.

This dinner came on the heels of a visit to Long Island’s North Fork, so the vegetables were fresh, organic and local (carrots from Sang Lee Farms, turnips from Garden of Eve, plus my dad accompanied his sublime grilled baby lamb chops – hope to snag you that recipe — with smashed fingerling potatoes and baby spinach from Sang Lee).

It was an easy-going day and an easy-going meal that really celebrated Spring and Family and Resurrection and all that. A crisp Sauvignon Blanc from Chile was the refreshing accompaniment. A pretty day.

Roast Chicken and Vegetables with Rosemary-Mustard Marinade

Chicken:

1/3 Cup your favorite prepared mustard (Dijon or whole-grain works well. I used a somewhat spicy Swedish-style brown, which was nice and subtle. I stay away from ballpark-style flavored mustard here and you should too!)

1/3 cup olive oil, plus a tablespoon or so

1.5 Tbs. chopped fresh rosemary leaves (and one whole sprig)

1 4-5 lb. roasting chicken, giblets removed

Vegetables:

2 large red onions, peeled and cut into eight wedges each

1.5-2 lbs mixed turnips and carrots, peeled and cut into 1-1.5” chunks

1/2 cup low-salt chicken broth

Preheat oven to 375°F. Whisk mustard, 1/3 cup oil and rosemary in a bowl. Pat chicken dry with a paper towel and place in a roasting pan. Brush with half of mustard mixture. With your hands, rub extra Tbs olive oil on the breast side of the chicken, under the skin. Place rosemary sprig in the chicken cavity.  Roast until thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the thigh registers 170°F, chicken is golden brown and the legs move easily in the sockets when jiggled.

Meanwhile, toss vegetables with all but one tablespoon mustard mixture (reserve that for sauce) and spread into a lightly-oiled large rimmed baking sheet. Roast until tender and slightly browned (about one hour), stirring twice. Finish with a grating of flaky sea salt, if you’ve got or just allow diners to add salt at table.

Transfer chicken to serving platter. Spoon off the fat from the pan, then heat the pan over two burners. Whisk in broth and reserved mustard mixture and boil until reduced to about a cup. Add salt and pepper to taste and put in a gravy boat or other serving bowl. Arrange vegetables around chicken on the platter, garnish with any extra rosemary sprigs  and serve with sauce.

(Note: the chicken and vegetables were so moist, none of us actually did more than try the sauce. Go ahead and put it on the table, but don’t be surprised if your guests find it superfluous).

(Note 2: Leftovers make great sandwich/salad fare. I also simmered the bones with onion and parsley for stock for a future meal. It is frozen and ready to go!)


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Zesty, Zingy, Zarela – Reinterpreting Pollo al Limón

4 Feb
 
 

Fab cookbook by my hero - ¡Zarela!

I have a weakness for what Puerto Ricans call limones del país or “local limes”, the ones you may know as Key limes, one of many varieties of Citrus aurantifolia, native to Southeast Asia. They are the small, thin-skinned ones, sometimes mottled, often more yellow than green, definitely more acidic and sweet than the thick-skinned ones more commonly found in my New York area supermarkets or as woefully tiny and bedraggled triangles of peel, drowning ineffectually in bar drinks. 

My great-aunt Titi Quicio used to make me limonada from the ones from the tree in her yard in Mayagüez — every yard worth a damn back then had a lime tree for luck and on principle — as well as chickens and any number of useful medicinal herbs planted in glorious, battered, colorful, rusting tin cans – and that sweet-tart zing of acid and sugar syrup in a glass clinking with ice cubes and sweating into the disintegrating paper towel wrapped inevitably around the bottom remains one of the most powerful flavor memories I possess. Anything that comes even close sends me straight back to childhood places from which I wish I didn’t have to ever return.

So whenever I see a green net bag of those little round babies in a store, I have to buy it, no matter the price. Once I get home, however, I have no idea what to do…My Cuba libre consumption (the difference between a rum and coke and a Cuba libre is that the Cuba libre has lime; a Cuban might tell you that the difference is that there is no such thing as a free Cuba, but we’ll leave that alone) has dropped to nothing in the years since I left Puerto Rico and the likelihood of my making limonada in the middle of winter is decidedly small.

So I slice one open and suck out the juice, prompting much pleasurable wincing and squinting and squirting of salivary glands. Then I agonize over how not to waste the rest.

Fortunately, last week when limones del país showed up in my local supermarket, I thought of my hero, mentor and friend, Zarela Martínez.

Zarela, who grew up killing rattlers with a lariat on a ranch in Mexico, toughed her way through a bad marriage to haul her twin boys to New York and make a dramatically wonderful and interesting career in restaurants (Her eponymous restaurant on NYC’s 2nd Ave @ 50th & 51 has been going strong for 22 years!), making PBS programs and writing wonderful books. I met her through the James Beard Foundation Awards when she and her son, Food Network hottie Aaron Sánchez, hosted a few years back, and I am grateful that we have been friends ever since.

She is utterly candid, hard-working, stylish and just fabulosa. And her book: Zarela’s Veracruz, was just the thing, because Mexicans know exactly what to do with limes without making life difficult.

So here is my adaptation of her Chuletas de Pollo al Limón, made with things I had around the house…I used my limes, but whichever kind you find in the supermarket will work just fine. Honestly, my adaptations resulted more from mistakes (I am not very good at following recipes), but that just proves how flexible and resilient this one is. And the leftovers – very adaptable too!

Pollo al Limón Verde – Lime Chicken

 (adapted from Chuletas de Pollo al Limon, Zarela’s Veracruz)

4 tsp soy sauce

2 tsp Worcestershire (chicken or classic) sauce

(if you have Maggi sauce, change the soy/Worcestershire  comb to 2 tsp soy sauce and 1 tsp Maggi sauce)

¼ cup lime juice

1/3 cup olive oil

1.25 lbs boneless skinless chicken thighs, pounded to half the thickness

Mix soy sauce, Worcestershire or Maggi sauce, lime juice and olive oil in a cover/sealable container big enough to hold marinade and chicken together and marinate for at least an hour (if you have time)

Heat a skillet until fairly hot and place thighs in it with room to spare (reserving marinade). Unless you have a pretty big skillet, you’ll have to do it in batches. Sear to white on each side, then cook an additional  5-6 minutes on each side, lowering heat to medium. When all the chicken is cooked, turn up the heat in the skillet, pour in reserved marinade and boil for a minute. Pour over chicken and serve.

(I loved this dish both straight from the skillet and as leftovers. I sliced it up and added it to a vegetable stir-fry at the end after adding a bit of soy sauce to the vegetables, just to warm up the chicken and it added great substance, texture and taste. This chicken is also good cold with mayo/mustard in a sandwich, wrap or salad.)

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Chicken Aversion Averted

10 Jan

I have to say it up front: Chicken grosses me out.

I don’t particularly like working with it raw, I find it boring to eat, and the whole factory chicken thing makes me kind of sick.

There are exceptions of course; chicken soup (sopa de pollo) from the Dominican 4 Restaurant in Farmingdale could make a dead man…resuscitate, shall we say. My dad grills chicken in any number of delicious ways and he also rolls it up with sundried tomatoes and other delicious stuff and bakes it, all with irresistable results. And the ultimate: is there anything lovelier or more civilized on a cold day than a roast chicken with winter vegetables?

Fighting chicken is a useless battle. People love chicken. The average per capita consumption of chicken in the U.S. is somewhere between 60 and 90 lbs per year depending on which graph you are looking at. If you entertain, you probably have to serve chicken at some point.

Kids also like chicken. They eat pounds of chicken nuggets per year (which I assume counts on “consumption of chicken” graphs, although by the looks of a lot of these “chicken” nuggets, there is very little chicken involved; I believe what they call chicken “tenders” are actual chicken, not ground up bits with other ground up stuff).

I have a kid and like all kids whose parents let them watch T.V., he is subject to the relentless McNugget marketing assault . But before I surrender the chicken nugget thing to BK and Mickie D’s, I am trying to romance my son’s texture and flavor palate with something that actually resembles food.

I have two things on my side:

1) that same Dominican 4 Restaurant in Farmingdale and their chicharrones de pollo (fried chicken strips) that are so awesome and delicious that my English-dominant son will say whole paragraphs in Spanish to waitresses he has never met before to make sure he gets them.

And 2) when I make the following oven-baked chicken fingers at home, Leandro gets to hammer the hell out of the chicken breasts before I bread them!

I freeze most of them for good packed lunches (if your daycare or school will re-heat). And to help my chicken aversion, I buy the organic chicken three 1-lb packs at Costco.

Oven-baked Chicken Tenders

2 cups nonfat plain yogurt (you can use buttermilk, but since you can’t buy buttermilk in small containers and I don’t drink it or use it for much else, I substitute yogurt)

2 Tbs mustard

1 tsp salt

2 Tbs dried oregano

2 Tbs dried parsley

2 tsp cumin

3 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breast, pounded (under wax paper) to even thickness and cut into strips (I actually have a meat tenderizer/pounder hammer, but I have used a rolling pin and other creative methods)

2 cups breadcrumbs in a flat plate for coating

Olive oil for drizzling

Heat oven to 400°. Line a baking sheet with a wire rack or lightly grease a baking sheet/al-foil. Mix yogurt and spices in a nonreactive dish. Dip chicken in wet mixture, then coat in breadcrumbs.

Transfer to baking sheet. Drizzle with oil then bake in oven until cooked – 20 minutes (less if you really pounded the chicken). If you use a rack, you don’t have to turn. If you are cooking directly on a baking sheet, turn halfway through. If it hasn’t crisped up, you may want to give it a few minutes crisping on the broiler. If you are planning to freeze and/or reheat (which you probably are, if you are doing 3 lbs!), don’t bother crisping. Serve with whatever dipping sauce you like (we do ketchup!)

Later, you can heat in the oven with tomato sauce and cheese and call it chicken parmesan!

If you are freezing, layer with wax paper.

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Abuelita’s Chicken Stew comes through: ¡Pollo Guisado!

17 Dec

(pronounced poh-yo gheesadoh)

We kind of stayed longer than expected at my neighbor’s across the street; it’s what happens when the kids are playing nicely together (meaning: not killing each other yet) and the cup of tea morphs into a glass of wine and the conversation gets spicy and grown-up. Then their pizza delivery arrives and my son of course wants and gets a slice too and her husband is about to get home for dinner and the pizza he is expecting is rapidly disappearing…

Fortunately, I had just made pollo guisado (chicken stew), so I grabbed a plastic thingy from my neighbor and ran across the street to my refrigerator and packed up enough for the two grown-ups, thus alleviating my mortification when the little man demanded – and got – a second slice. This is a no-brainer dish and uses chicken thighs – tasty and cheap! My neighbor specifically requested that I blog the recipe, so here it is.

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