When I was in Ajijic most recently, I bought two chickens at the local tienguis and cooked one that day and another the day of David's dinner party. We invited only Elliott for the "sneak preview," which was beer can chicken made in the oven rather than on the grill (David didn't have the heart to evict the spiders and lizards inhabiting his outdoor grill since he moved in in July). I'm happy to share the recipe with anyone who asks, but I got it from www.cooksillustrated.com, which you need to subscribe to (plus there are variations all over the Internet; it's a simple dish), and in any event I tweaked it beyond recognition because of not being able to find ingredients, or not being willing to pay $8 for a small jar of celery seed, or other shopping difficulties occasioned by the fact that in Spanish the words for Cayenne pepper, allspice, and pepper are apparently more or less the same. :-(
It came out well, though, as did the rosemary garlic roasted chicken and potatoes I made (after brining) Saturday night.
However, Elliott raised a point on one of these nights that was a good one: she said she would never roast a chicken because she knows that on Tuesday night [fill in name of chicken guy here] has a 2-for-one special that will taste as good as anything she could make and it won't cost her appreciably more than making them from scratch.
Which brings me to the whole question: why cook? and especially: why cook for yourself, without an audience?
As fate would have it, I happened to run across a relevant passage this morning when re-reading my favorite clay pot cookbook (don't get me started, that will be a whole nother post, as they say):
[author Grover Sales rants about all the bad food he'd had to eat, first in his home town of Louisville, then at college, then in the military]...
So dining out stayed a dream deferred until I moved to San Francisco in the late Forties, when the City still boasted of countless nontourist down-home eateries--Chinese, German, French, Greek, and mainly Italian family-style, with groaning seven-course spreads including a carafe of gusty Grignolino and dark, pungent espresso with a twist of lemon peel--all for little more than the price of a first-run movie, in those days about $1.25. With this kind of dining out, who needed to cook?
There are reasons to cook for yourself, though, and they are as individual as people themselves. One good reason is you've got a hankering for something you can't just run around the corner and buy, whether it's corned beef and cabbage or a BLT. Another reason for me is that often I don't feel a restaurant does as good a job as I would do myself with a particular dish. I happened to grow up in the Arizona-Sonora desert with a certain kind of guacamole accepted as the standard, and if you try to serve me one with no discernable tomatoes, for instance, I'm not going to be happy. (By the same token, I'll often order grilled halibut or sea bass at a restaurant, rather than, say, steak, because it's hard to grill fish properly at home without drying it out.) Or what if somebody brings you 5-10 pounds of freshly caught salmon or trout or something? You can't just let it moulder away in the fridge. There is also--and I'm trying to entice David with this argument as well as with the frugality aspect--a sense of almost artistic accomplishment in having taken a bunch of unrelated raw ingredients and, with a little magic, turned them into a scrumptuous dish. We are shorthanding it for now as "the zen of chopping."
Anyhow, regardless of whether you roasted it yourself or bought it two-for-one at Tony's Grill, that chicken is good for a lot more than one meal. Sure, the night you get it, you cut yourself off a nice quarter (for me it would be the wing and breast bit) and serve it to yourself with a little pile of fluffy jasmine rice (the fluffiness of which you've ensured by tying a kitchen towel over its lid like a little white turban), or a potato you've roasted along with it, and the veg of your choice. A very respectable meal for a bachelor, after all.
Once you've got the remains snugly encased in their plastic wrap in the fridge, though, they can still be eaten more or less as is--nothing wrong with cold chicken for lunch or even dinner--or, they become the slices or bite-sized pieces of chicken that form the prime ingredient of many other recipes, such as:
a sandwich;
an open-faced toasted sandwich (with cheese, maybe even a slice of ham);
(suitably jazzed up) a taco or burrito or enchilada or quesadilla;
a chicken pot pie (using the faux Bisquick mix we didn't get around to making);
a creamy or pesto-y pasta dish (either stove-top or baked with a crumb-cheese-type crust);
a salad (maybe even made with some of that left-over rice, or see magical oriental salad posted earlier)
See, I think when people aren't used to doing much cooking for themselves, the idea of a whole chicken or roast or loin of pork intimidates them. But truly, from both an economical and a time-expenditure point of view, a big cut of meat can be a lot more useful than single boneless, skinless breast or chop. It's one or two meals that are really fit for a king, and then it's a stockpile of--not leftovers--but ingredients for further meals. I mean, you pay Louis Rich and Oscar Mayer a lot of money for those tiny packets of carefully sliced and overly salted and processed sandwich meats. Why not just use the good stuff? Don't want to eat pork or chicken all week? That's why god gave you a freezer, honey chile! And that's why she invented ziploc bags.
When you really get into cooking, you will also pop the chicken bones into another ziploc bag so you can use them to make soup. But we're not aiming for the moon here yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment