Xan: Chicken piccata

If you browse the Vongsafood history, you will find many roast chickens. Lately I don't roast as many whole chickens as I used to. I got bored of it, to be honest. Now I often prefer to separate the chicken into parts, and use the dark and white meat for different purposes. In the most recent case, I used the dark meat for a pressure-cooked lentil stew (no photograph sadly, but I will share when I make it again). I saved the breasts for chicken piccata.

Boneless yet skin-on, the best of both worlds. Why do we see either boneless skinless or bone-in skin-on, even though it's hard for consumers to remove bones but easy to remove skin? Why not just leave the skin on in both cases and let us decide for ourselves if we want to remove it? I imagine the blame lies not with Tyson but with consumers who ignore this fact - that skin is easily removed - and that boneless skinless therefore sells much better. PSA: There's recent research that chicken skin is much more healthy than previously believed, being high in "good fats." I'm not sure our definition of "good fats" is done evolving, but that's what I hear lately. In any case, crispy chicken skin is delicious.

Rant aside, it makes little difference to me personally. Breaking down chickens is one of my more favorite kitchen tasks, and by your 100th chicken it's pretty quick, too. I mean, I will never be Jacques Pepin fast even after watching his chicken deboning video dozens of times on Youtube, but...either I don't have time to cook, or I have time to break down a chicken to my preference. Moreover, industrial chicken processing often does a poor job of leaving enough skin on the chicken breast, so your own results will be better.

Anyway, here is my latest chicken piccata:

Generally for any pan sauce lately I will use ghee instead of butter, and thank you mr. liquid soy lecithin for your smooth emulsifying ability.

I have two more chickens in my freezer and am seriously considering doing this again for both of them.

Not pictured above, Pacific Coast Harvest sent me celery root, so I cooked that up too.

I hate the taste of celery, and I guess I was hoping that celery root would taste different. Like you know how cilantro and coriander are from the same plant, but those people who hate cilantro (the leaves) are fine with coriander (the seeds)?  Well, celery root did taste different. It tasted a thousand times WORSE. It was like the unique celery flavor component that I hate but so intense that I couldn't eat it. Broccoli instead to go with my chicken.

Xan: Vongsafood in the time of coronavirus

After a long hiatus, Vongsafood is back due to popular request! As I write this post on March 14, 2020, Seattle hospitals are down to a 3-day supply of gloves. The coronavirus on our doorstep is keeping us away from restaurants, so we must busy ourselves in the kitchen more than usual. We have a well-stocked pantry, freezer full of meat, and a weekly vegetable delivery.

A note on coronavirus and food safety: See this great article - https://www.seriouseats.com/2020/03/food-safety-and-coronavirus-a-comprehensive-guide.html

Anyway, on to food pictures. I will go back about a month and hit the meals I managed to photograph even though I wasn't expecting to start food blogging again.

We recently signed up for a weekly vegetable delivery from Pacific Coast Harvest (PCH), which is not a CSA exactly. Each delivery is fully customizable, and they make it easy to see how far your food is coming from (so you could eat "local" if that's your thing), but you can also get stuff from CA/Mex if you want.

Pressure-cooked those carrots to make them fudge-like:

They were pretty good. But. Most people who are like, "These local organic fresh vegetables taste so much better than supermarket veg"...it's like 50% in their heads, right? They often can't tell them apart in blind taste tests, or the difference is much smaller than they had perceived, right? Well, I wish I could be one of those fully bought-in people so I could experience these more expensive vegetables as truly revelatory. They are good. But the first-order thing is buy vegetables you like, don't let them sit around too long, and prepare them well. Cut out the bitter cores out of carrots if you care so much about flavor. You will notice I did not do that here. (Doesn't mean much since they are small carrots, but one time PCH also sent me these monster fat carrots and I also didn't do it then, so what does that tell you).

PCH also has some other items besides produce, like fresh pasta, which has resulted in us eating more pasta than normal. Now that I know from Mom that al dente noodles and pasta have a relatively low glycemic index due to some side-effect of the noodle-making process lengthening the gluten chains (Mom, can you provide a link? not sure I got the details right), we have also been happy to eat more of them.

With pasta in hand, I made this Caramelized Shallot Pasta from NYT Cooking that everyone has been raving about. I thought it was good, although not raveworthy. Caramelized shallots and anchovies are great, but I already add them (and many other "flavor bombs") to food on the regular. So how much of the hype is "This is a truly great combination of flavors!" vs "This is great compared to my normal cooking that doesn't make gratuitous use of flavor bombs." Personally, I have been logging and rating everything I cooked in the past month, and this pasta got the lowest rating so far ("ok"), which seems a bit unfair in retrospect, but still not exactly a ringing endorsement. You probably shouldn't listen to me, though, when so many other people love this dish. Actually, I would love some of you to try it and report back to Vongsafood!

My ratings have so far ranged from "ok" to "good" to "good!" to "great" to "great!" (Only a matter of time before variations on "bad" show up; we have been lucky this month). What I'm more excited about is this next pasta sauce, which received a "great!" rating. I'm actually using the same fresh pasta in both cases. But the sauce is quite different. OK so there's Italian sausage, which is a big unfair advantage. But the "secret ingredient" that really gets me excited is a pressure-caramelized globe eggplant. The eggplant came out a deep brown, and I lightly pureed it and added it to a fairly standard tomato sauce which was left over from another purpose (pizza).

It's very easy to pressure-caramelize eggplant: 500g eggplant, 30g water, 2.5g baking soda for 20 minutes at high pressure. This will caramelize the eggplant straight through by lowering the caramelization point (via baking soda increasing pH) and increasing the boiling point (via pressure). We have talked about pressure caramelizing vegetables on this blog before. But I never thought to try it on eggplant before, nor can I find any evidence of other people pressure-caramelizing eggplant. This is my new solution to the problem of eggplant: full of water, sucks up oil, generally annoying to get any browning -- and the most common variety in American supermarkets (globe eggplant) is the worst performer in all these categories! So instead of dealing with these issues, we rig it so the eggplant will caramelize in a wet environment, even though browning normally doesn't occur until well above the boiling point.

There's another problem I have with eggplant, which is that certain menbers in my household will eat it. This preparation solved that problem!

What I want to try next: Caramelize other parts of the sauce at the same time as the eggplant. Onions, that's a given. They aren't great out of the pressure cooker if your goal is stand-alone caramelized onions (inferior flavor and you will be left with a lot of liquid to strain or boil off), but as a sauce component it might work well and save enough time to justify the tradeoff. And what about the tomatoes themselves? An issue here is that tomatoes are acidic, which fights against the baking soda for attaining a minimal pH to caramelize at 240 degrees. And you generally don't want to add too much baking soda to things; you will start to taste it. But on the other hand, I know Modernist Cuisine has a recipe for caramelized ketchup, so I'll look into that. The solution may involve tomato paste.

UPDATE: I tried it! It earned my first "Bad!" rating! Vongsafooders, I went too far. I probably should have anticipated this. Just as pressure-caramelized butternut squash puree is too rich to eat on its own, you don't want to caramelize your entire pasta sauce. So now I have two pounds of a new flavor bomb in my freezer...

Anyway, I guess this turned into a pasta essay. So against my better judgment, I will share one other slapped-together lunch which tasted surprisingly good. Mind, it does not look good. But, I had leftover angel hair (Owen likes pasta), leftover guacamole (Owen likes guac). And did you know you can poach an egg in a coffee mug in the microwave? So I just combined these things for a quick lunch and it was pretty satisfying.

Don't get me wrong. The Caramelized Shallot Pasta was better. But points for novelty and simplicity, and look at that egg!

PCH has also been sending me eggs, by the way. The above is not one of them. The PCH eggs have a deep orange yolk, which people strongly prefer in taste tests. By this I mean that they prefer the deep orangeness, not the flavor. When regular eggs are dyed orange, no one can tell them apart any more. I am cursed to know this, but I still do like the experience of orange eggs. Hey, you know what else turns them orange AND improves the actual outcome? Salting the beaten eggs 15 minutes before cooking!

It's good to be back, but I'd better stop here. I will get to non-pastas in a follow-up post.