Three chickens, three dinners
We have been ordering some of our groceries from Baldor, a restaurant supplier that has moved into home delivery, and I’m really pleased with the quality of the food we get. The quantity is a bit of a gamble, though — though they’ve been trying to divide up some of their huge orders that normally go to busy New York City restaurants into portions that are good for home cooks, sometimes those smaller quantities are sold out and you have to get slightly more than you bargained for.
Which is how I ended up with three (very) fresh whole chickens on Monday.
Our freezer is certainly not large enough to hold even one whole chicken right now, so when they arrived mid-afternoon (accompanied by some vegetables, a flat of lemons, and a 25lb box of chocolate chips I ordered on purpose, because there’s a pandemic on) I got to work. Three chickens. Three dinners.
And three very different ones. The first argument Tom and I ever had was over chicken, and in the intervening 15 years I’ve come to recognize that if we’re going to have chicken a couple of times in a week, we should try to have them very differently flavored/prepared. Which is a good idea anyhow.
So I picked out three recipes. Here they are.
Monday’s chicken: Chicken Paprika with Dumplings
I wanted dumplings! But regular chicken and dumplings, while delicious, required more time and labor than I had available on Monday. So instead I made these, which I found on the New York Times cooking website (one of my main squeezes these days).
This is not like other chicken and dumplings, and the ingredients are quite simple. However it does require having two kinds of paprika on hand — though you could probably fudge it with one.
First, I cut the chicken apart, not skillfully but effectively, into pieces. Obviously you could do this with just chicken pieces, too. (Thighs and drumsticks in particular would be good.)
Preheat the oven to 400, and while it’s heating up, put a big heavy pot or oven-safe skillet on the stovetop and heat 1/4 c olive oil in it. (I used my beloved Le Creuset Dutch oven.) When the oil is shimmery, add the chicken pieces. Saute them (which just means cook briefly in hot fat) for about 10 minutes, till they’re getting golden brown, then remove them and put them on a plate. Sprinkle with salt and set aside.
Next, put a chopped onion into the pan with the oil and saute for about 2 minutes. It’ll get soft. Take the pot off the heat entirely, let it sit for 2 more minutes, and then stir in the paprika. The recipe calls for 1 T of mild paprika and 1/4 t of hot paprika. I have smoked paprika and hot paprika, no mild paprika, so I swapped out the smoked for mild and it was great. Put the chicken back in the pan on top of the onion.
The recipe then tells you to put 1 cup of chicken stock in a small pan, stir in 1T of tomato paste, bring it to a boil, and pour it on top of the chicken. What I did was heat 1 cup of water in my kettle, add the tomato paste and a bouillon cube (that’s where we’re at), and whisk them together as best I could. Then I poured that on top. It worked out fine.
By now the oven is hot and you can put the pot into the oven, where you cook for 30 minutes, but stir it around and flip the pieces every 10 minutes. Meanwhile you have to make dumplings, a thing I hadn’t really ever done, though I knew the ropes.
A dumpling is essentially a biscuit cooked in water. These ones were very simple. First I got a pot of water/broth started on the stove so it could be boiling by the time the dough was ready. Then in a bowl, I mixed about 6T of flour and 1/4 t salt, then added 2 eggs and mixed it all together. (It’s not totally unlike homemade pasta, which, when you think about it, makes a lot of sense.)
Once the pot on the stove was boiling, I dropped half-teaspoons (or, like, approximately) of the dough into the boiling water. Important: they puff WAY UP, so don’t be scared if half teaspoons looks small. After four minutes, drain them into a colander, then dump them into the chicken in the oven and when there’s five minutes left on the clock for the chicken, stir them in.
This was very, very good.
Tuesday’s chicken: Indian-ish spiced chicken
If Monday’s chicken was great, Tuesday’s was possibly greater. I’m not going to reiterate the entire recipe because there are a lot of different spices in it. But I did want to say that other than garam masala and probably, like, salt, you aren’t totally sunk if you don’t have one or two of the spices, and substituting one spice for another is allowed. (As long they have roughly the same flavor profile. Don’t swap cayenne for cinnamon, or whatever.)
One thing I’ll say is to make sure you make a pot of rice to go with it.
And the other is that this makes a surprising amount of sauce, more than you can reasonably brush onto a chicken. That’s fine. Just dump it over the chicken. The sauce is the best part, and whatever’s left will be extremely tasty when poured over rice.
Finally, I had to roast it at least a half hour longer than it called for, so I don’t know what’s up with that. Cut into the joint between the drumstick and the body and make sure it’s not pink or red before you take it out of the oven.
Wednesday’s chicken: Anchovy-butter chicken that went a little awry
I have sung the praises of Alison Roman’s anchovy-butter chicken with croutons before; here it is at Nigella Lawson’s website. It is very good.
However. I didn’t have bread, so croutons were off the menu. No matter; I had salted some water and boiled potatoes for about 20 minutes earlier in the day, then drained them and set them aside, intending to smash them and fry them in the chicken fat. (This part went well. I don’t know why I spent so much of my life avoiding boiled potatoes? They are WONDERFUL.)
The bigger issue was that I opened my tin of anchovies and realized they weren’t fillets; they were whole white anchovies. I have both! I don’t know why I didn’t go get a tin of fillets, except that I was very busy and trying to do too many things at once. I just chopped the whole anchovies and mashed them into the butter.
This was not … well it wasn’t a mistake, exactly. It was still tasty. But what came out of the oven was more like a chicken slathered with some fish (which is good!) than what the recipe intends to give you, which is a fatty, salty chicken, since the fillets melt when heated.
Anyhow, I took it out and added a few tablespoons of butter to the pan and fried the potatoes anyhow (five minutes on each side, till they start to crisp), and it was all quite tasty. But next time, I will use fillets, and in the meantime, those whole anchovies are for salads.
All that to say, most mistakes are fine, as long as you own them and don’t burn or over-salt anything too badly, or willingly mess up anyone’s night. Wise words for our times.