Docsconz- The Blog

TGRWT#21 Sage and Roasted Peanuts - My Dish

The blog Humbling Attempts at Creativity is hosting the current round of TGRWT, a cooking exercise devised by Martin Lersch through his blog: Khymos, designed to pair possibly disparate-seeming ingredients using a pairing profile that predicts compatibility between ingredients. Greg chose to pair sage and roasted peanuts, not really an intuitive combination - at least to me. Upon further reflection, I thought, why not? What are some things that sage goes with and that roasted peanuts go with also. One protein that popped immediately to mind was "chicken." Guess what? Yes, that's right, I decided to do a dish with sage, roasted peanuts and chicken. Very clever, no?

I skinned a whole chicken, reserving the skin (you didn't think that I would waste something so potentially delicious, did you?) and deboned the breasts and removed the femurs from the thighs, leaving the leg bones. Pounding the breasts to flatten them, I then applied salt, pepper, sage leaves and ground peanuts before rolling up the breasts and wrapping the,m in plastic wrap. For the thighs, I stuffed them with the same ingredients before rolling them in plastic wrap as well. The chicken was then cooked in my CVap for three hours at 150ºF and browned in ghee on my cooktop.

I served it with asparagus, celeriac puree, baked (325ºF convection for 45 minutes) chicken skin seasoned with peanut oil, soy sauce, powdered sage, salt and pepper and a satay like sauce that I concocted using chicken stock, smooth peanut butter, sesame oil, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and sage. Chopped peanuts were scattered on top of the chicken and asparagus. The plate was garnished with fresh pea shoots.

Overall the dish was pretty tasty and the ingredients did work well together. Both of my sons who had it enjoyed it. The sauce went very well with the asparagus as well. As might be expected, the thigh/leg preparation was moister and more satisfying than the rolled breasts, which though moist and adequately cooked out of the CVap,  had dried out in the browning process. The most satisfying element of the dish was the crisp chicken skin. All the ingredients came together amongst a very pleasurable crisp bite. It was amazing to see how much the skin had shrunk in the oven (sorry, no photo!). If I were to do this again (I might), I would think about not cooking the breasts further or  not using the CVap for them.

TGRWT#20 Sage and Roasted Peanuts

TGRWT #21 is up over at the blog Humbling Attempts at Creativity. The intriguing combo is sage and roasted peanuts. Click the link for more details and put your culinary thinking caps on!

TGRWT#20 Pumpkin & Cooked Chicken Round-Up

“Pues me dio calabazas” is an idiomatic expression that I learned in high school Spanish. It literally translates into “she gave me pumpkins,” which really means that she blew me off. Despite that rather negative association, I have always been fond of pumpkins either as ornaments or as food. Since I was very young, pumpkin pie has always been a favorite. It has only been relatively recently, however, that my interest in and experience with pumpkin as a savory component has blossomed. It is because of that interest and the association of pumpkin with autumn and holidays such as Halloween and Thanksgiving, that I thought it would make an interesting essential ingredient for TGRWT#20, the latest cooking challenge in the series originated and administered by Martin Lersch of blog.Khymos. I added cooked chicken as it's partner to push the use of pumpkin in savory ways or to make particularly interesting pumpkin and chicken desserts.

Perhaps it is the business of the season or perhaps the ingredients were not inspirational enough, but the submissions were fewer than for some other couplings. I have, however, always been one to take quality over quantity. I appreciate the quality of the submissions that came in.

TGRWT#20 Last Day For Submissions

This Long Island Cheese Pumpkin photo serves as a reminder that today is the deadline for submissions for TGRWT#20 - Pumpkin and Cooked Chicken. The chart separates "cooked" chicken" from "roasted" chicken. While I specified "cooked" chicken for the pairing, all manner of cooked chicken including "roasted" will be accepted since both are on the compatibility chart with pumpkin. We have a number of good submissions so far, but I'm still expecting a few more.

Taste of the Week - November 15th-21st

For a number of reasons, I have been on a pumpkin kick of late. While there appears to be a national shortage of canned pumpkin, fortunately there has been no shortage of quality heirloom pumpkins in my neighborhood.Thanks to the work of Sheldon Farms in Salem, N.Y. I have been able to sample a number of different heirloom pumpkin varieties. While working on a dish for TGRWT#20, I made a pumpkin/chicken soup with cardamom and parmigiano-reggiano. The soup was a byproduct of a larger endeavor, most of which, unfortunately, did not work out quite as well as planned. Fortunately, the soup was a nice consolation. I made it by cooking a chicken and pumpkin along with cardamom, Parmigiano (I had been planning on using cheddar, but had unexpectedly run out) and parsley along with a little yogurt in a pressure cooker, Removing the chicken, I took the remaining ingredients and pureed them in the Vita-Mix. While my goal was to make a sauce, at this point, the consistency was decidedly soupy. I took some of the liquid and reduced it to a sauce. The sauce was quite concentrated in flavor. It wasn't bad, but it overwhelmed the food I paired it with - chicken and pumpkin nuggets. I was glad that I kept the remainder of the soup. I re-heated it a few days later and it was delicious! This soup is my Taste of the Week, because it shows that even the biggest disappointments can have their elements of serendipity.

 

The ill-fated dish consisted of chicken nuggets, pumpkin nuggets with a chicken/pumpkin/parmigiano/cardamom sauce and shredded brussels sprouts with chicken and sriracha...mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa! The conception of this dish actually had some merit. It was my execution that fell woefully short other than for the serendipitous pumpkin/chicken soup and the crisped chicken skin with lemongrass and salt. Back to the drawing board...