A quick search through my blog yielded at least six posts on chicken cacciatore; however, after making a new version of this Italian classic last night, I decided to add one more, simply because it was so good. The recipe comes from Lidia Bastianich’s relatively recent cookbook A Pot, a Pan, and a Bowl. And although the dish uses the same ingredients as many of my other cacciatore recipes, its flavors and textures differed from their predecessors, leading me to believe that this may be the best one I’ve made so far.
After hearing so much about “Marry Me Chicken” both from friends and on the internet, I decided to join the crowd of its admirers and take a stab at it. After reviewing several recipes on line, I opted for the New York Times version, which had been the first one I encountered. Like Ina Garten’s famed “Engagement Chicken,” the dish has garnered a reputation for ensuring a marriage proposal for those who share it. So, if you’re one of those thinking of preparing it to ensure a walk up the aisle, go ahead and give it a whirl. Even if your dinner companion doesn’t pop the question, you’ll nonetheless wind up enjoying a delicious dinner.
Wow! That’s what I said after taking the first bite of the roast chicken I prepared last night. It was truly that good. The recipe I used, “Slow-Roasted Oregano Chicken with Buttered Tomatoes” comes from Alison Roman’s 2019 cookbook Nothing Fancy, the cover of which features a picture of the dish. Like so many of her recipes, it foregoes fanfare for flavor, fancy for footloose, and frustration for fun.
Because of the heat wave that’s been gripping most of the country, along with the frequent extreme temperature warnings, we had planned to make some barbecued chicken leg quarters on our outdoor grill. It had been a sunny day with temps hovering around 85 degrees; but then an hour before we were planning to grill, Mother Nature intervened with a torrential rain storm that our weather app said would continue for most of the evening.
A slew of hot and sticky summer days, as well as nights, elicited the subject of this post: a coronation chicken salad. On one of those sultry evenings, our neighbors surprised us with a huge rotisserie chicken: “It’s too hot to cook” they said, “take the night off.” The bird was so big that its legs and wings were enough to sate our appetites, leaving us with more than enough meat for another meal. The following day was another scorcher, which made that leftover chicken sitting in the fridge even more appealing.
I’ve always been a fan of Jamie Oliver. Perhaps it’s his relaxed, almost reckless, approach to cooking or the relative simplicity of his recipes that I find appealing. So, when I came across his recipe for “Chicken in Milk” adapted by Sam Sifton, on the New York Times “Cooking” website a few weeks ago, I thought I’d make it the subject of a post on my blog.
Sometimes I just want or even have to cook something simple yet tasty. Such was the case yesterday, when I realized all the work my initial recipe for this post required and that I didn’t have the time to make it. Consequently, I opted for a far less complicated dish that despite its simplicity yielded loads of flavor: Crispy Baked Chicken.
A wicked nor’easter and a plethora of sagging leeks pretty much determined the choice of recipe for this week’s post. Originally, I had planned to prepare Marcella Hazan’s Pan Roasted Pork Loin with Leeks after the grocery store delivered two bunches of the leafy alliums rather that the two individual ones I had ordered. However, when Mother Nature graced us with the worst snow storm of the season, getting to the market to procure the loin was no longer an option.
Housebound by the weather, I looked through my cookbooks for other leek recipes but most that I found used a single leek and I had five on hand. I then turned to the web, where I found a recipe that called for three and for which I had almost all the other ingredients on hand except for drumsticks and half-and half, for which I respectively substituted thighs and heavy cream: Pan Roasted Chicken with Leeks.
After preparing this dish, from Carol Fields’ In Nonna’s Kitchen, I am forced to question its attribution to a contadina, the Italian word for a farmer’s wife. Indeed, given some of the recipe’s ingredients like nutmeg and lemon zest as well as some of its directions like using a separate skillet to sweat the aromatics and a fine-mesh sieve or a food processor to puree the sauce, the only farmer’s wife I could imagine making the dish is Lisa Douglas, played by Eva Gabor in the ‘60s television show, “Green Acres.”
Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor in Green AcresRead more
For my second post of the year, my husband suggested a New York Times recipe that had caught his eye and was made more appealing since we had all of the ingredients on hand: James Beard’s Farmer’s Chicken. The recipe first appeared in a feature story on James Beard by Julia Moskin that was occasioned by the publication in 2020 of a Beard biography The Man Who Ate Too Much, by John Birdsall.
Moskin attributes the recipe to a son of a member of Beard’s circle, chef Andrew Zimmern, who told her about his childhood experiences in Beard’s kitchen and “encountering tastes there for the first time, like a braise of chicken with olives, almonds and raisins, a dish with roots in Spain and California that Beard made often.” Beard claimed to have “adapted the recipe from Spanish immigrants who worked on ranches in California.”
However, having gleaned from Birdsall’s book a better understanding of Beard’s showmanship, I have to question the chef’s attribution of his dish to migrant farmers. The recipe’s bend of ingredients, currants, almonds, olives, paprika, seem more Moroccan to me; and after preparing the dish, I found the flavors quite similar to those of a tajin.
Cooking from Books 