Curried Chicken Breast Salad

Curried Chicken Breast Salad

Chicken breast is not really my thing, but Ann really likes it a lot. Because of this, recently, rather than buying just thighs, I've taken to buying a whole chicken each week to ten days and using it for at least three meals. I'll start by using the breasts for a dish, then poach the carcass. I'll then pick the meat from the carcass and use it for one dish (such as chicken tinga or chicken and black bean tacos) while the stock contributes to a soup of some sort. 

Ann really likes chicken breast on salad, so I made this one for her, a super quick and easy meal if ever there were one. I start by taking the breasts off the chicken and while they cook over medium heat in a skillet, I assemble the salad.

For this particular salad, I coated the slightly flattened chicken breasts in Madras curry powder. For Indian dishes, I always put together specific masalas from individual spices just for the dish. But for American dishes, I like the convenience of a decent pre-mixed curry powder. After the spice-rubbed breasts sat for a few minutes, I filmed a large skillet with the barest amount of oil and cooked them slowly over moderate heat until just done. These big breasts (off a 5-pound bird) took every bit of ten minutes to cook, with a turn about seven minutes in. The moderate heat keeps my smoke detector from going off and keeps the breasts moist.

I made a quick dressing of a spoonful of unflavored yogurt, a squeeze of agave nectar, a dribble of rice vinegar, a pinch of salt, and a half a teaspoon of curry powder. After mixing it well, I thinned it with water to the consistency I wanted and rechecked the seasonings.

This salad is a mix of whatever greens I had on hand (spinach, arugula, and romaine, I think), diced Granny Smith apple, Marcona almonds, and golden raisins (only in my salad; Ann doesn't do raisins). Good, easy, relatively low fat, low carb, and plenty of fiber. Hard to beat a dish like this for a quick weeknight dinner.

I feel quite fortunate that our local grocery sells bulk Marcona almonds at about $15 per pound. I can get a quarter cup for about a dollar or so and not have to commit serious coin to buy this extravagance. If you've never had Marconas, the Cadillacs of almonds, you should give them a try. But don't blame me if you don't ever want to eat any other kind of almond again.

Spring!

As soon as the calendar flipped over from February to March, it seems like we changed overnight from winter to spring. The rain stopped (temporarily), the sun came out, and flowers started blooming, seemingly overnight.

The Honey Bees Love Our Crocuses

To take advantage of the gorgeous weather on the first Monday in March after unending weeks of rain, Ann and I decided to change up our walk routine and go over to Miller Woods, a local park, to do the 5-mile loop hike there, rather than continue to pound the sidewalks near our house. Given the incessant rain (we got soaked on four of five walks prior), the ground was terribly soggy and muddy, but still, our moods were high because of the bright sun.

Usually, we see a lot more wildlife on our hikes at Miller Woods, but then, we're usually there early in the day. This time, it was high noon when we arrived. Great for the sun, but nap time for most animals. In stepping off the trail for a second, Ann got a real scolding from a Douglas' Squirrel about 6 feet above her head. We also saw a Black Tail doe and her fawn grazing on the high ground at the north of the park. Generally, we see a lot of birds at Miller Woods, but at noon, not much was moving except for hundreds of robins working the edges of the woods and pastures.

Small Black Tail Doe

Shiny Geranium, Geranium lucidum 

Plants are just starting to sprout, including thousands and thousands of the highly invasive Shiny Geraniums that have really taken over our part of the valley (these tap-rooted beastlets are the single largest pain-in-the-ass weed that I have at home). Despite that, we thought this hollow log rimmed in shelf lichens with geraniums sprouting in the hollow was pretty neat. Indian plums are not yet in bloom but the skunk cabbage is up and just starting to show off its large yellow blooms.

Two Dogs Taphouse

After our invigorating walk and it being a low-traffic time of day and day of week, we decided to go grab a beer, now that inside seating is allowed in restaurants and it being just a wee bit chilly to sit outside. We drove right downtown to check out the new Two Dogs Taphouse. They've done a marvelous job in restoring the old hardware store. We felt safe enough being seated a long way from the nearest other table.

A Pair of Hazies

Burger and Fries

This was a pretty momentous occasion: our first outing for food and beverage since the late summer. We've been salivating for an opportunity to get out and get back to some semblance of normal. I can't really express how badly we've been itching for a burger and a beer, but I imagine that most people reading this who have gone through COVID can relate.

Oddly enough, even though the beers were great and the burger and fries were really well done, it didn't do it for us. Two things are at play, I believe. First, even though we were not at home, we were not really able to socialize and that diminished the occasion for us. Second, as we near 65 pounds lost since the late fall, our palates have been accustomed to really good food and as much as we thought we wanted a burger and fries, they did not resonate with our palates. By contrast, the vegetable tacos that I made at home the following night were awesome and fulfilled us in a way that the burger did not. How odd. Go figure.

Excited for our First Beer Outing in 7 Months!

Annie Mugging!

It's been a long winter and while we have many weeks of rain left before the dry season kicks in, it sure has been nice to feel the season start to turn to spring!

Boeuf Bourguignon

Ann has been asking me recently to make dishes for her that she has never had before. It's great for me in that I don't have to come up with an idea about what to make for dinner and I get to revisit some dishes that I haven't cooked in a while, a while extending to decades in some cases.

A couple weeks back, she asked me to make her the classic boeuf bourguignon, braised beef with bacon, mushrooms, and onions. It's a dish I know well, but not a dish that I have cooked very often (or eaten in restaurants) because it is quintessential French home cooking and not something that one eats out at restaurant.

At my own restaurant, we couldn't sell beef bourguignon because customers considered it too familiar and not soigné enough for a high-end fine dining restaurant. So we often made rabbit bourguignon rather than beef. Even so, we couldn't serve the rabbit bourguignon as the braise that it was. We had pull the meat off the bones and use that as a sauce for pasta, a filling for puff pastry or ravioli, or some other creative take on the dish. 

That's a long-winded way of saying that I love beef bourguignon and haven't cooked it all that much (and not at all in recent decades) because I couldn't sell it. And an even longer way of saying that I was very much looking forward to making it for Ann.

Boeuf Bourguignon avec Spätzle

Boeuf bourguignon is a classic slow-cooked braise of beef, a method of cooking meat that breaks down tough and less expensive cuts. That said, the point of braising beef is not so much for the resulting unctuously tender meat, but for the thick, glossy sauce. The long, slow cooking in a moderate oven breaks down the collagen in the meat and gristle, thickening the sauce, and at the same time giving it both a delightful mouthfeel and a velvety sheen. It is that sauce that makes braises so delicious and comforting.

In France, boeuf bourguignon is not served by itself, but with a starch designed to trap and intermingle with the silky sauce. Most commonly, it is served with potatoes of some fashion, often mashed, at times steamed or boiled, or prepared in other ways. Rather than potatoes, I prefer a more Alsatian approach and so I decided to serve my boeuf bourguignon on spätzle, which come to find out, Ann had not had before either.

You see the dish above, chunks of beef and pearl onions sitting atop spätzle, all napped with an unctuous sauce laden with porcini mushrooms, bacon, onions, and carrots. My only regret about making this dish now in the middle of winter is that I had no baby carrots with which to garnish the dish. For a primer on prepping pearl onions, see this post. For making spätzle, see here.

While the movie Julie & Julia did a lot in this country to popularize Julia Child's specific version of boeuf bourguignon, there are other versions out there, and I have developed my own method over the past 40 years that I'll outline below.

Browning Beef Chuck in Bacon Grease

Step one in almost any braise is to brown the meat well on all sides. In this case, I am browning a pound and a third of really nice looking beef chuck (shoulder) in bacon grease left from rendering bacon lardons. I chose this particular chuck because it is really well marbled.

Traditionally in France, the dish incorporates lardons, little bits of pork belly akin to bacon. It is often found plain and less commonly salted or smoked as is American bacon. Consequently, American bacon is often parboiled to help rid it of smoke, but I use a lightly smoked bacon and I don't mind the tiny bit of smoke that it introduces to the dish. It is hardly noticeable in the heady mix of flavors from the beef, mushrooms, and copious red wine in the dish.

I started by cooking in my cocotte three large thick slices of bacon, cut into lardons, to try out some grease in which to sear the cubes of beef. It took a good 15 minutes or more to brown the beef. You want to take your time when searing the beef, because this is what starts to develop really great flavor. Also at my house, browning more slowly on medium flame keeps the damned smoke detector from going off.

Brown the Beef Well on all Sides

You Want this Buildup ("Fond") on the Pan Bottom

Mise en Place

On the cutting board above, you see most of the other ingredients that are going into the braise: porcini mushrooms that are rehydrating, rendered bacon lardons, pearl onions, tomato paste, two carrots, and an onion. Once the porcini rehydrated, I chopped them into bite-sized pieces and saved the mushroom stock for the braise.

Deglazing with Aromatics

Once the beef is browned, remove it from the pan. You'll see a dark buildup on the bottom of the pan, which we call the fond, literally "bottom" in French. This is the point at which you add your aromatic vegetables to the pan. In this case, you can see that I have diced an onion and two carrots, the traditional vegetables for boeuf bourguignon. These go into the cocotte along with a few sprigs of parsley, a bay leaf, a little thyme, a tablespoon or so of thyme, three minced cloves of garlic, a tablespoon or so of tomato paste, and a bay leaf.

The steam generated from searing the vegetables should loosen the fond, all the good bits on the bottom of the pan. Scrape well to help loosen these flavor builders. Once the vegetables are cooked to the point where the onions are translucent, sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of flour on the vegetables and cook another couple of minutes, stirring well and frequently. This flour will help give the sauce its unctuousness.

At this point, I added the bacon lardons, the chopped porcini, and the porcini broth (making sure not to include any sand or dirt from the bottom of the bowl). Next, in went the better part of a bottle of red wine, local Petit Verdot if you must know, enough to come about 2/3 of the way up the sides of the beef cubes. When braising, you don't want to totally submerge the meat; that would be more technically a stew than a braise.

It is traditional to use Pinot Noir in this braise, but as I'll get into at the bottom of this post, my palate says that beef wants a more substantial wine than Pinot Noir. And I happen to have some inexpensive local Petit Verdot that will fill the bill admirably. I'll save the expensive Pinot to drink at some other time. I would never cook with a great wine. At the end of the day, you'll end up with a dish that tastes identical to that cooked with a passable wine and will have wasted an opportunity to drink a great wine.

Ready for the Oven

Out of the Oven at Three Hours

After adding the porcini stock and the wine, bring the braise up to a boil, cover it, and put it in a moderate (350F) oven. After 90 minutes, I pulled it out to check the liquid level which had evaporated to just about the level that you see in the photo above, about halfway, just where I wanted the finished dish to be. But I wanted to cook it about another 90 minutes to really bring out the best in the beef, so I added water to the cocotte to bring it back to the original level.

After another 90 minutes, I pulled the cocotte out of the oven. The beef cubes, as you see in the photo above, were really caramelized on the top. I flipped them over so that the tops could rehydrate just a bit as they cooled.

Browning the Pearl Onions

At dinner time, I put a bunch of prepped pearl onions in a skillet with a teaspoon of butter and cooked them slowly for 8 minutes, rotating them every couple of minutes. It is traditional when cooking pearl onions to add a touch of sugar to caramelize them, but adding sweetness is not my thing. If I had baby carrots, I would have done the same thing with them as with the onions.

In another pan, I reheated the spätzle with another tiny bit of butter, stirring now and again to prevent as much sticking as possible. While the onions and spätzle were cooking, I rewarmed the beef cubes in the sauce, then removed the beef and held it warm while thinning and seasoning the sauce to my liking.

All that was left was to put the beef cubes and onions on top of a mound of spätzle, then nap it all with the sauce. It was incredible eating!

It's Not Burgundy, But....

For wine with our boeuf bourguignon, Ann requested an older Bordeaux. The traditional wine for boeuf bourguignon is Burgundy, but we live in the Burgundy of the United States and we drink the local Pinot Noir all the time. Burgundy is therefore pretty much our day-to-day wine. I know: poor us! I also believe that in general, beef pairs just a little better with Bordeaux grapes than it does with Pinot Noir.

So I selected a bottle of Léoville Barton from 1990, one of the very best vintages of the last century. This is a bottle that was part of a case that I got on release in 1993 or 1994 for $240, less than the price of a bottle today! This wine never ceases to amaze me. Even though it was probably bottled sometime in 1992, it appears to be a much younger wine. Visually, it looks to be about 10 years old.

On the nose, the aromas of cassis and black fruits are still vivid, but they have a really pretty and funky (in the best sense of the word) background of secondary bottle bouquet, that unmistakable aroma that we all look for in an aged wine. On the palate, it is still going very strong, leading with black Cabernet Sauvignon fruit combined with still vibrant acidity. Further along in the palate, the older wine flavors of tobacco and leather come in, framed with extremely pleasant fine-grained tannins. It is by all measures a gorgeous wine.

This is a wine that, as good as it is today, is still improving. At thirty years old, it tastes like a wine of a mere ten years. I would love to be able to taste this wine in another thirty years. Given that another thirty years is not guaranteed, I think I will drink the last of it long before then. I don't want to leave this gorgeous wine behind.

It was great to revisit one of the classic dishes of French home cooking. Although I am well schooled in classic French cuisine, I don't cook it all that often and so this was good fun. More than that, I was really happy to introduce Annie to both boeuf bourguignon and spätzle, two dishes that she never had the chance to eat, growing up in a full Italian family. And that Léoville Barton really made the experience for us!