Unlike Armando, I commend your choice on the superlative chicken cut choice, dark meat. It is jucier and, ahem #soapbox: better in nutrients.
A small tip though, which you may have already tried. I see your additional browned chicken waiting in that skillet on the side. Next time, prepare that ahead of time, but IN your enameled dutch oven/soup pot. Take out the chicken afterward, then make your soup and enjoy just one more flavor layer, that of delicious browned chicken fond, in your soup. It will be slightly darker, but more savory and a more complex flavor.
That is an excellent suggestion, Skipper. Thank you!
I haven’t done that heretofore just to save time, but it really only shaves off about twenty minutes. I think the benefit you describe would be worth the time.
That’s not a tip from me, but from a half dozen cooking shows where I’ve seen it, Jacques Pepin talked about it several times. It’s also very desirable in chili or any base where you’re going to add in meat at some point. Brown it in the same vessel, take it out, continue with the rest, add the meat back in. You gain the flavor of the fond.
Yes, that’s really a foundational cooking technique.
If it’s quicker you can brown the chicken in a frying pan then deglaze with water or stock, dissolving the fond, and pour that into your soup/stew. Saves some time but dirties up another pan. Or just brown it in a nonstick pan so all the maillardy stuff stays on the meat and toss that in by itself, for that matter.
Oh I’ve done it many times in other applications, most successfully with my slow cooker beef stroganoff, one of my absolute favorite dishes to cook. But I didn’t think about the benefits of doing it here until you said it. So you get credit for that. Take it!
Wow, those fingers are fantastic! Never seen them before. Almond sugar cookies, shaped and decorated? That’s really great work—nice mix of kid and adult appeal :)
Also, I kind of want to just dive into the cake with a spoon…
Again, all her. She is so good at catering. She should do it professionally, except that she really stresses about it. A lot. She’s a perfectionist. I particularly like it when she’s finished. :) I will pass on your kudos.
Tonight’s dinner was: Black Beans with Crisp Pork and Orange
from How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman (not the Fast spinoff, for once)
In the big pot, you put 3 cups worth of cooked black beans and a cup worth of their juice. I used 2 cans of canned and just emptied the whole can in, Bittman recommends cooking from dried, and perhaps I will someday when I’m less lazy. But not now. Add some cumin, salt and pepper, bring to a boil, then adjust to a simmer. Start a pot of rice on the side. Halve an orange, peel one half, and put the peel in with the beans. Squeeze the juice out of the other half and set aside. Bittman has you hang on to the peeled half for garnishes, but I skipped that as I don’t care for the texture of orange flesh, just the flavor of orange juice.
In a skillet, brown some sausage. Remove it from the skillet with a slotted spoon and add to the beans. Brown some cubed pork shoulder in the sausage fat. Remove and add to the beans. Chop up an onion, a red pepper, and a couple of fresh or dried hot chiles (optional) and saute in the pork/sausage fat. Add garlic and saute for another minute, then add to the beans. Reduce a half-cup of red wine by about half in the skillet and then add that and the reserved orange juice to the beans. Garnish with chopped cilantro. Serve with rice. (Which I did by mixing it in.) I used about twice as much sausage and pork as called for because a) yay meat, and b) fuck having half-packages of meat lying around. It ends up being more Pork with Black Beans than vice versa that way but hey. S’all good.
Rich, those cookies are creepily fantastic. I love them! Your wife sounds like my GF, she is a perfectionist about decorating and things like that and gets pretty severe anxiety over events like that.
What would be a good UK equivalent for “sausage” (@Chappers may be able to bridge the Atlantic divide)? I really fancy that recipe but I’m not sure what to substitute. We don’t really have anything directly comparable. We have ground pork. And we have sausages in casing (which as I understand it would have more filler than US sausage), but not pre-seasoned sausage meat. Would I be better off using, say, uncured chorizo, or just mixing in certain herbs/spices with ground pork? I could try to locate some 'nduja, but that might be too spicy.
Since the dish does seem to incorporate some other Central American influences, chorizo might not be a bad choice, actually, @Ginger_Yellow. Ground pork would be a less flavorful version, but you could zing it up with some black pepper, a lot of salt, and maybe some herbs like sage (common in a lot of US breakfast sausage blends).
Chorizo would probably be fine. The recipe actually assumes tube sausage, though. I just used loose because it was more available at that particular grocery
