Korean Sticky Chicken

Last night, I decided I was going to make Korean Sticky Chicken. The recipe had come to me via Yummly, and I had printed it out. While I was working on it, I found a recipe on-line that looked, as far as I could tell, like the one Yummly had parasitized, so I started working off it. Then my wife, Omaha, found the recipe that I had printed and brought it to me, and they were in no way the same recipe. For one major thing, the one on the phone called for a marinade; the Yummly one did not. The Yummly recipe called for chicken breasts, the one I was working with used chicken thighs. For some reason, I had thought the Yummly one was thighs, as thighs was what we had in the refrigerator. Besides, I had already started making the marinade.

The other detail is that my family is not very fond of spicy foods, and this recipe called for a lot of Gochujang, one of my favorite spices to work with bland meats like chicken.

The solution, naturally, was to just say screw it all and invent my own hybrid recipe. So:

Equipment:

This is a “no special gadgets” meal: no pressure cooker, no sous vide, no KitchenAid, no food processor. Just the basics: pots and pans, knives and cutting boards, measuring spoons and cups. You will need a grater for the ginger, and a garlic crusher is a convenience.

Marinade

• 2 tablespoons honey


• 1-3 tablespoons Gochujang (Korean chili paste with a distinct, smoky flavor)


• 3-1 tablespoons ketchup (yes, ketchup). Use with the Gochujang in whatever proportion your family will tolerate.


• 3 tablespoons soy sauce


• 1/2 inch knob of fresh ginger, grated


• 2 gloves of garlic, minced or crushed


• 1 tablespoon olive oil

Meat:

• 4 chicken thighs, boneless


• 2 tablespoons mirin


• olive oil for sautee’

Topping:

• Toasted sesame seeds


• One green onion, very thinly sliced

Mix everything in the marinade together. The Gochujang and ketchup should total 3 tablespoons. (Hint: a shotglass is exactly three tablespoons to the top; I tend to use several shotglasses when cooking. This isn’t an exact science, it’s okay to go over by small amounts.) Put the marinade and the chicken into a plastic bag, shake well to coat, and leave, flat, in your ’fridge for 20 minutes. Take out, shake, turn over, and let marinate for another 20 minutes.

Make the rice and your sides while all this marination is going on; the sides are meant to be room temperature when served.

Put a heavy pan on your stove, turn it up to medium-high, and when it’s hot enough put in a little olive oil, just enough to coat the bottom. With tongs, pull the chicken out of the bag and put into the pan. Save the marinade! Letting the chicken cook for 4 minutes, possibly 5 minutes. Turn the chicken over, cooking the other side.

The real test of done-ness for chicken is whether or not it feels spongy and soft when you press on it. If it’s firmed up, it’s cooked through. It takes practice, but it can be mastered.

Take the chicken out and put onto a plate. Add the mirin and scrape all the glaze off the bottom of the pan, letting it boil away until about half gone. Add the rest of the marinade from the bag, let bubble for 30 seconds, turn the heat down to low and add the chicken back in, spooning the sauce over it, and let it sit for another two minutes.

Remove the chicken and serve, sprinkling with the toasted sesame seeds and green onions.

---

Thai Basmati Rice

• 1 cup Basmati rice


• 1 1/4 cup water


• 1/2 cup whole coconut milk, well-shaken

Put the water in a pot on the stove and set to high. Rinse the rice well in a mesh colander. When the water starts to boil, add the rice. Let the water start to boil again, drop immediately to low, toss in the coconut milk, cover and let simmer gently for 16 minutes.

Take off the heat and let it sit in a cool place for a few minutes. Fluff with a fork and serve.

---

Blanched or Sautee’d Kale With Soy-Sesame Dressing

We had a lot of kale left over the winter. That stuff is damnably hard to kill, and I kinda like it, so I decided to cook with it. This recipe works with just about any green: spinach, watercress, whatever, just adjust to the delicacy of the leaves. Kale is a hardy leaf and puts up with sauteing pretty well. Here’s what I did:

• 1 bunch kale


• 1 scallion, sliced thin


• 2 teaspoons soy sauce^*


• 1 large clove garlic, minced fine


• 1/2 teaspoon honey


• 1 teaspoon sesame oil


• 1 teaspoon sesame seeds
  


• (Optional) Like it spicy? Add anywhere from 1/2 to 2 teaspoons of Gochujang. This is not a subsitution; you don’t have to take anything out.
  

^* For the chicken marinade above, you can get away with just any soy sauce, but for this, the soy sauce is such a strong note that I recommend buying and using tamari-grade soy sauce. It’s more expensive, but it’s also worth it.

Put on a large pot of water, salt it well, and put it on high heat to bring it to a boil. Trim the kale, removing the heavy spines. Rinse it thoroughly. Prepare a large bowl of ice water. Drop the kale into the boiling water for about 45 seconds, until it’s wilted, then scoop out the leaves and drop them into the ice water to stop the cooking.

Alternatively, heat a large pan to medium-high, add a healthy amount of olive oil, give that a minute to heat up, then add the kale, stir-frying it gently but continuously, about 3 to 5 minutes. Immediately remove with tongs and shock with the cold water.

Drain the kale and squeeze it gently over the sink to get out excess water. Cut or tear into clumps.

In a separate bowl, prepare the dressing, adding everything except the sesame seeds. Gently stir the dressing into the kale and then let it sit for ten minutes (hey, you’ve now got time to cook chicken!) to come to room temperature and to let all the flavors mix well.

Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve.

---

Cucumber Salad With Honey-Sesame Dressing

• 1 English cucumber or 2 slicing cucumbers


• 1 teaspoon coarse salt, like Diamond kosher.


• 2 scallions, minced


• 1 small clove garlic, minced


• 1 teaspoon rice vinegar


• 1/2 teaspoon honey


• 1 teaspoon sesame oil


• 1 teaspoon sesame seeds

Depending on your family, you may or may not want to peel the outside of the cucumbers. Slice them into discs, no more than 1/4" thick. Toss them with the salt and put into a bowl for 15 minutes; the salt will pull the moisture out of the cucumbers, making them crispy.

Drain the liquid that has dripped out of the cucumbers. Make the dressing, again holding back the sesame seeds, in another bowl (confession: I was running out of bowls at this point and used a clean coffee cup), then stir into the bowl of cucumber slices, stirring gently. Sprinkle with the sesame seeds and serve.

Some recipes use gochugaru, the red pepper flakes that give gochujang its heat, to make this a spicy salad. Personally, I think my family would have rebelled at the idea of a spicy salad, and I didn’t have any gochugaru on hand anyway.

---

One thing about the sesame seeds throughout these recipes? I like to toast them: put a pan on the stove on medium heat, dry. Add all the sesame seeds you’re going to use this evening into the pan, and just stir rapidly for two or three minutes, or until they start to turn brown. Quickly spread them out on a large, cool plate to prevent them from burning.

---

And that was our Saturday night dinner. The family pronounced the chicken “far too amazing,” the cucumbers “wonderful,” and the kale “tolerable.” I loved the kale, but I’m pretty much the only person in my house who really likes kale. We did it blanched; Omaha says she would have preferred it sautee’d. Even the kid, who we cannot convince to eat vegetables, made the cucumbers go away.

My last post was my recipe for Chicken with Balsamic Fig Sauce, Wild Rice, and a Vegetable, and there's something a little odd about it: the only measuring device you use is a shot glass.

A shot glass is three tablespoons. Because it's angled a bit like a funnel, the first tablespoon fills it almost halfway, the second higher, and the third tablespoon is just the last quarter-inch or so.

The recipes you get from the box stores are ridiculous: "exactly a quarter ounce of this, exactly two ounces of that." When you're reading a cookbook, oftentimes it'll be "two teaspoons of this." I even have one measuring spoon that reads "a pinch." Unless you're making candy or baking (and not even with baking sometimes!), that kind of precision is completely unnecessary.

You're supposed to play with the flavors. This recipe is a dream for playing: it has sweet (the jam), it has acid (the balsamic vinegar), it has salt and bitter (the dijon mustard, plus the salt & pepper you added), it has heat from the stove, and it has fat from the butter, oil, and chicken. You can shift these a little bit in any direction and see what happens: skip the butter in the rice, add more vinegar, use apple cider vinegar and apple butter. Skip the salt in the rice but try soy sauce afterward.

Using shot glasses and asking you to eyeball the "a little more than half-high" for the balmasic vinegar is meant to make you feel confident: it doesn't really matter how exact you are, you can't screw that recipe up unless you burn something, and that's what all the timers are for.

I have all the bells and whistles, it's true: I have both a sous-vide cooker and a pressure cooker, and I love using them. But you don't need them to cook a good meal. You just need to learn that some things mix together just fine and get used to mixing them in ratios that you and your loved ones enjoy. This recipe is unusual in that you really can go from walk-in-the-door to sit-at-the-table in 30 minutes, and clean up is fairly minimal. But it's a fantastic starter recipe, and you should feel safe branching out from here.

A while ago I tried one of those "Make At Home" meals you see popping up in grocery stores. I said it was quite tasty, and that an experienced cook such as myself could make it in the 20 minutes allotted; on the other hand, if you aren't comfortable in the kitchen it would take more than 20 minutes, there are risks to handling uncooked chicken, and $18 is overpriced.

Last night I made it myself and I now have good numbers on just how overpriced, and how environmentally unfriendly, those box meals are. I made the meal myself, picking up the fresh ingredients on the way home. I used a wild rice blend and broccoli instead of peas.

It was delightful. Even the boy liked it, and he protests constantly that he's always hated chicken, and he cleaned his plate. I used a thick, aged Balsamic (provenance sketchy, though), a good French Fig jam, Grey Poupon mustard, Trader Joe's California olive oil, and Dixie kosher salt (soooo much better than Morton's, trust me on this). The broccoli is just broccoli, the rice was bulk P.C.C. Wild Rice Blend (Puget Consumer Co-op, a local chain of "organic" grocers going upscale recently), and the chicken was, well, whatever the Kroger butcher's counter had. I again used a white wine for deglazing, the Bota Pinot Grigio (a cheap box wine).

It took me 25 minutes going from "the ingredients are here" to "dinner is ready," but that's only because I had to trim the broccoli and rinse the rice first (the boxed version comes with blanched, pre-cooked rice; where's the fun in that?). Cleanup was fairly trivial, but then I have a very nice cast iron pan for the meat, a non-stick pot for the rice, and a casserole dish to steam the broccoli and garlic slivers in the microwave.

Total cost for a meal for four: $9.25. Note that the $18 price tag is for a meal for two, which means that the effective price is one-quarter what the boxed sets are selling you.

The rice and broccoli came in decomposable bioplastic, the chicken in butcher's paper. The wine box says its recyclable, and the glass around all the other ingredients is certainly supposed to be. I can make this recipe 13 times before I have to throw any of the seasoning containers away unless I use them up cooking anything else. The boxed set comes with the box (only recyclable if you tear out the plastic window showing you the "fresh" ingredients), tiny (glass, I'll be fair) bottles of mustard, balsmamic vinegar, and fig paste, heavy petroplastic-wrapped, vacuum-sealed container of blanched rice, and more plastic for the vegetables and the chicken.

When you make this recipe once a month from the box, you spend $216 per year, your environmental footprint is rather large, and you don't learn a whole lot. On the other hand, if you commit to making it once out of the box and then using that experience to make it yourself, you'll spend only $61, have the freedom to modify the recipe (sprinkle feta or gorganzola on the chicken to finish it! Add herbs like rosemary or parsley! Try it with different mustards, or different jams! Add a goddamn salad!), and have a much smaller environmental footprint.

I encourage you to learn how to do this. Learn how to set the world within your reach to right. Don't be lazy about it; you can learn to care about what you put into your mouth, care about the environment around you, and give the middle finger to companies trying to sell you on your own incompetence.

Last night I took a couple of beef stew (or beef soup) recipes, slammed them together, and came up with a fairly effortless comfort stew that my family liked. This recipe uses an Instant Pot.

• 1lb round steak, cut into cubes


• 1 large shallot, diced


• 3 medium carrots, sliced


• 2 cloves garlic, minced


• 1 large or 2 medium potatoes, cut into cubes


• 3 cups beef broth


• 1 cup water


• 2 tbs Worchestershire sauce


• Olive oil, or other oil suitable to sauté


• Salt, pepper, ajinomoto (always optional) to taste


• 4 oz egg noodles

Turn the pressure cooker to "sauté." While it's heating, cut up the ingredients. The beef and potatoes should be bite-sized; the shallot diced small, the carrots sliced to about 1/4 inch thickness, the garlic minced.

When the pressure cooker is hot, add oil to coat the bottom of the pot (I used bacon grease, because, you know…) and add the beef, stir-frying until browned on all sides, about 5 minutes. Add the shallot and carrots, sauté another two minutes until slightly soft. Add the garlic, sautee one more minute. Turn off the heat.

Add the potatoes, broth, water, Worchestershire sauce, and "not enough" salt, pepper, and ajinomoto if you're using it. Close the pressure cooker lid, set to "Soup: 20 minutes," and start.

When the timer goes off, do a quick release of the pressure. Taste the broth and add salt, pepper, or other spices as desired. Turn the cooker back to "sauté" and when the soup begins to bubble add the egg noodles. Cook another 7 to 9 minutes, until the noodles are soft. Tasting— spooning out a noodle and biting into it to see if it's done— is always better than timing.

Serve immediately with crusty bread and a vinagrette salad.

Daniel Akst's article in The American, Science and the Chattering Classes, falls into that commonplace journalistic sin, handwringing over the stupidity of the masses without offering anything but a pablum response to a given problem.

The problem is scientific illiteracy. Akst writes,

With its great stress on specialization, capitalism has eroded the kind of homely technological skills Americans typically possessed a generation ago. Most of us no longer work on our own cars, for instance, and given electronic fuel injection and other newfangled features, we probably couldn’t even if we wanted to. Heck, a lot of us can’t even cook our own food.

That last part is what made steam come out of my ears, as you can imagine. Most people can't cook their own food? Most people can't apply heat to meat and vegetables and see what happens?

Akst ends his piece with this:

The challenge for business, whose products will contain more and more technology as time goes on, is to increase the general level of comfort in science without making people feel they’re being taken for a ride. More and better science in the schools would be a great start.

This, too, is outrageous: it is not in the best interests of most businesses for the common people to understand the science behind their products. If the average man did, he might not be so worried, as Akst points out, about the surfactants is vaccines, or the use of gamma radiation to pasteurize food, but he also wouldn't be taken for a ride by the billion and one forms of woo out there, and wouldn't spend a billion and one dollars on cures for "subluxation" and "toxification," wouldn't spend money on Big Placebo, and would actually realize that the best cure for half of our population's medical issues is a half-hour walk every day in the park. Near trees and birds and water. (Yeah, I know, Weil's guilty of massive amounts of woo, but the whole "being out in nature daily reduces depression" thing is pretty well backed up.)

Schooling and business are at odds with each other. Businesses exist to propogate beliefs in the quality of their products. Education exists to replace belief with facts. To put the two hand-in-hand like that is, I guess, the educational equivalent of homeotherapy: the idea that tiny droplets of knowledge in an ocean of bullshit will somehow multiply, magically, turning indoctrinated children into self-willed Jeffersonian citizens.

But really, "Most people can't cook their own food?" How sad is that? It doesn't take science to learn how to cook your own food: it takes curiosity and a willingness to ocassionally burn a dish. You can order take-out only if you fail. This isn't a failure of science; it's a failure of culture.

"I brought this for dinner," said one of the guests to our bi-weekly Sunday D&D game. "This" turned out to be a 30oz salmon fillet that he had caught himself earlier that week.

There was a moment of scrambling. Omaha and I hadn't done the weekly grocery shopping yet, for one thing. We looked at each other and wondered aloud about how we could cook it. We hadn't planned on this.

I cast about the kitchen. I thought. "There are peaches there," I said, pointing to the fruit basket. "And two Mexican zucchini." Big ones. "We have tomatoes in the back yard. Do we have any red onion?"

"There are two halves in the fridge. Somebody keeps slicing new onions without checking to see if there's already one in there."

Oops.

Dinner was salmon roasted in butter, a peach-tomato-red onion salsa topping tempered with lime juice, and broiled zucchini coins with sweated onions and Parmesan. It took all of 20 minutes to put together. I had a lovely white wine. I am the Iron Chef!

Really, D&D games shouldn't be this well-fed. Where are the Cheetos, the overdoses of soda pop, the bad pizza?

So, following the hot new trend of putting a pinch of salt into your coffee to cancel the bitter taste, I have to say that I'm disappointed with the experiment. Either I tasted no difference, or the salt was sufficient that it distracted from the coffee taste, and I was unhappy with it either way.

Which is kind-of sad. When you blog, you want to be able to teach about something great, and I have nothing great to report. Salting coffee doesn't seem to do much for me. Then again, I may have a reason for that. See the next post.

Getting more vegetables into yourself while also cutting back on the food budget can be a challenge, so my challenge for the weekend was to make home-made pico de gallo.

I used 1/2 white onion, 1 large tomato, and one seeded jalapeno, all diced very small. To that I added handfuls each of cilantro, parsley, and basil (because they were in the 'fridge and I had to use them up), juice of one lime, and salt and pepper.

There wasn't enough tomato to overcome the onions, but I kinda liked it that way. The basil and parsley added a wonderful smell to recipe, and it made just about the best relish I could imagine for a cooked sweet italian sausage lunch.

So, without having much around the house, I decided to make polenta casserole. This is basically three layers: one layer of polenta, about 3/4" deep, one layer of my home made meat sauce, and a thin crust of mozzarella and Parmesan. Bake for fifteen minutes, until the crust is melty and a little browned.

Well, I thought it was delicious. The rest of the family, not so much. My Italianness must have been showing through. I was very disappointed, though, because I was hoping they'd like it more than that.

Ah well, more leftovers for me.

Last night as an experiment I decided to make Chinese hot-pot, creating a large spread of briefly seared but otherwise raw steak and chicken sliced very thinly, along with another of zucchini, mushrooms, carrots, broccoli and cauliflower heads, and a couple of sesame-based sauces, one sweet, one salty. For Kouryou-chan's sake, I also threw in a traditional honey mustard-- although not as good as usual; I didn't decrystallize the honey beforehand, and I used mayonnaise instead of sour cream. She didn't seem to mind. The broth I used was a quart of my home-made chicken stock, lightly salted with Thai fish sauce.

It took forever to eat, and everyone got to dip their spears into the hot pot. We were at the table for an hour, with plenty of time to talk about school, or work, or whatever. Which makes for a very nice family ritual. I may try for something more esoteric next time, and a better selection of sauces. I'm big on making sauces and dressings myself these days, especially since I have mastered the fine art of emulsification.