When Good Foods Go Bad – Part 2

Catherine — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:06:24 +0000

You know how sometimes you plan ahead and think you’ve got all your ducks in a row and all that but things still go south, way south? It was an experience like that for me on a Friday evening a couple of weeks ago. My daughter was having friends over (well, it turned out to be “friends;” it was advertised as just “friend,” but that’s another rant entirely). I was going to make this Thai chicken thing that sounded wonderful – peanut-crusted chicken with dipping sauce – and thought I was going to be so clever by chopping everything up for the breading the night before. Big mistake. Nightmarishly big mistake. The breading somehow transmogrified into – I don’t know – peanut cilantro mud (quite tasty, but not so good for using as breading) and refused to stick to the chicken at all. Undeterred, I grabbed clumps of breading and did my best to smoosh it onto the chicken. Imagine trying to cover chicken in a thin layer of sculpey clay. It adhered in places, leaving others bald and looking really, really hideous. Still, I had to feed five kids, so I slammed it in the oven and hoped for the best. When I had to turn the chicken after fifteen minutes, whatever scant amount of breading had managed to cling to it feebly fell onto the baking sheet. I decided to cut my losses and take them to the food court where they bought Chinese food and snuck it into the movies under the coats. Clever girls!

So I failed at this recipe completely, but I think it’s worth another try. If you’d like to give it a shot, here it is:

Peanut-crusted chicken with dipping sauce

Chicken breading:

2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 inch piece fresh gingerroot, peeled and finely grated
1 lemongrass stalk, outer leaves removed, finely chopped
2 Tbsp chopped, fresh cilantro leaves
scant 1 ⅓ cups salted peanuts
¾ cups flour
2 eggs
4 Tbsp milk

12 chicken drumsticks, skin removed

Dipping sauce:

1 fresh red chili, seeded and finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
½ cup white wine vinegar
2 Tbsp dark brown sugar

Chicken prep:

Preheat the oven to 350˚
Place the garlic, gingerroot, lemongrass, cilantro leaves, peanuts and 2 Tbsp of the flour in a food processor; blend until finely ground; transfer to a shallow dish
In a bowl, beat together the eggs and milk
Spread the remaining flour on a plate
Dip the drumsticks into the flour, then the egg mixture and finally the peanut mixture; arrange them in an oiled roasting pan
Bake for 30 minutes, then turn and cook for another 30 minutes; pour off any excess oil and bake for another 5 minutes or until very crisp

Sauce prep:

Grind the chili and garlic to a paste using a mortar and pestle
Put the vinegar and sugar in a pan; heat gently until the sugar dissolves; bring to a boil and simmer for 2 minutes
Stir in the chili-garlic paste and transfer to a bowl
Drain the drumsticks on paper towels and serve with the sauce.

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Notes:

The amounts of garlic suggested are, of course, ridiculously scanty.
I don’t know what lemongrass looks like or where to find it, so I ignored that bit.
The cooking time and temperature may not be spot-on; the temp is reduced and the time is increased from the original (since the original resulted in chicken which was burnt on the outside and a health hazard on the inside).

When Good Foods Go Bad – Part 1

Catherine — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:34:13 +0000

The Mexican Marshmallow Mire

A little bit of backstory is necessary here: I live in a dumpy apartment with a pathetic kitchen and insufficient cooking implements. How bad, you ask? Let me see: I don’t have a wooden spoon, I have this thing that looks like a paint stirrer, and my stove has two temperatures: “boiling over” and “is that on?” You get the picture. This set-up leads to a lot of improvisation on the occasions when I do attempt to cook there and, more often than not, culinary disasters of an amusing, if inedible nature.

Last week I decided to win points with my daughter by making her rice crispy treats. My son, the same child who won’t eat any cereal that does not have the word “cocoa” in the name and who argues for the existence of “breakfast dessert,” doesn’t like rice crispy treats. Go figure. So I opened up the cupboard and pulled out the package of pink and white marshmallows (be sure to read the description) I had recently bought at Los Lagos, which is the Mexican grocery at Fairfield and Creighton, and got busy. Unfortunately, my one and only pot had dinner in it, so I cast about for a way to melt the butter and marshmallows. Of course, my 200 year old microwave should be just the thing!

Okay, if you’ve ever put a marshmallow in the microwave, you know that they puff up to ten times their normal size. I knew that; everyone knows that. But I figured that if I just kept a close eye on them and beat them down with the paint stirrer every 30 seconds or so, we’d be in business. How wrong I was. After cheerfully watching the marshmallows balloon up – it was really cool – and squashing them down for a couple of minutes, my enthusiasm began fade and I started to realize that this just wasn’t going to work. Plus they were sticky, really sticky; they were threatening to suck the paint stirrer in and never give it up. I quickly switched tacks. Since I didn’t have another pot, I decided to give a metal mixing bowl a try. Seemed reasonable. No, no it was not reasonable. Those things are not meant for stovetop use. As the pinkish lump of marshmallow began to brown on the bottom, I knew I had to cut my losses and compost the entire mess. (The dog couldn’t believe that I wasn’t slopping the whole sticky lump into his bowl.) I bought my daughter off with candy and ended the evening a wiser, if sadder person.