Kids Make Guatemalan Chicken Pepian

Just when I thought our "food appreciation" classes would be leaving Guatemala to continue our virtual world food tour our friend Grace, who works at the local library, e-mailed that she had located a Guatemalan cookbook. After paging through many intriguing recipes, I decided we must extend our stay another week so we could make this traditional Mayan-influenced dish of chicken in a spicy red sauce: chicken pepian.

The high point of this dish is the sauce, made very simply by processing (in our case grinding in the molcajete) toasted seeds, cooked tomatoes, tomatillos, red peppers, all seasoned with a bit of cinnamon. Like other Mayan dishes we love, there is no cooking oil or added fat involved, yet the flavors are a revelation.

Start by cooking a whole chicken cut into pieces (we used only wing pieces--you could use just legs or thighs as well), in three cups of water seasoned with 1 teaspoon salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and cook for about 30 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through. Remove the chicken and set aside, reserving the broth.


While the chicken is cooking, chop two ripe tomatoes and one large tomatillo. Stem and seed two large, dried red peppers (such as California pepper, guajillo, New Mexico, cascabel, ancho--anything of that sort). Place the tomatoes, tomatillos and peppers in a saucepan with 1 cup water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cook about 15 minutes, or until everything is very tender.

Meanwhile, in the molcajete (or food processor) grind 1/2 cup toasted sesame seeds and 1 tablespoon toasted hulled pumpkin seeds into a fine powder. Add 1/4 teaspoon annatto paste (available in Latin groceries) and continue grinding until the paste is fully incorporated.


When the tomatoes, tomatillos and peppers are cooked, remove them from the saucepan with a slotted spoon and add to the ground seeds along with 2/3 cup French bread (or other white bread, crust removed) moistened with chicken broth and 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour. Continue grinding until everything is fully incorporated and you barely recognize any pieces of food, except perhaps some pepper skin, as shown here. (If you like a spicier sauce, you may add hot red pepper flakes to taste at this point.)

Scrape the mix into a pan, add 2 cups of the broth from cooking your chicken and 1 stick cinnamon broken in half. Cook over moderate heat until it is reduced to a thick sauce.

Next, strain the sauce either by pushing it with a spatula through a sieve or using a commercial strainer as shown here. The kids loved this part, turning the big wooden pestle round and round until the liquid had been pressed into the pot and all that remained in the strainer was a dry mass of seed and pepper skins. The finished sauce is velvety smooth, yet very rustic and exotic tasting with flavors quite foreign to our American palate. I can't think of any better way to describe it than very Mayan.

Place the chicken pieces in the pan with the sauce, toss to coat thoroughly and cook slowly for about 15 minutes, or until the chicken is heated through and almost falling off the bone. As you can see, it almost looks like barbecued chicken, but without any of the cloying sweetness.

We served this to the kids just like this as their reward for all the grinding they did, saving the leftover sauce. That constituted a snack. Chicken pepian would make a cracking good dinner with brown rice and perhaps some steamed chayote squash. Ladle extra sauce over the chicken so that it oozes into the rice.

The kids begged for seconds. We've rarely tasted chicken this good.

Note: anatto is the very tough, brick red seed from the achiote tree used in cuisines around the Caribbean and also as a dye. Its smell is pungent, but the flavor fairly benign. Annatto can also be found as a commercial food coloring in processed foods such as cheese and margerine.

Kids Make Chicken Tacos

Here's an excellent use for the leftover chicken in your refrigerator: Roll it up in a taco with fresh salsa, cheese and lettuce for a snack or an easy, healthful meal.

After many months of practice, it is astounding to see the cutting skills the kids in our "food appreciation" classes have learned as they prepped the vegetables for this lesson. They made quick work of the tomatoes and onions in the salsa and were soon on to the chicken.

Originally I had proposed this dish a "Guatemalan burrito" as we continue our way south on our virtual world food tour. But when someone asked "What makes it Guatemalan?" I didn't have a very good explanation. In fact, for the life of me I couldn't find a standout Gautemalan food. Perhaps a reader will point me to one.

More than anything, this taco is typical of what you might see in any fonda or food stall in Mexico, or throughout Central America, for that matter. We used corn tortillas, not flour. The tortillas labeled as "Salvadoran" in our markets here in the District of Columbia seem to be much thicker and would probably hold together better in the eating.

Yet simple and convenient it is. If you don't have leftover chicken, simply bake two chicken breasts or thighs in the oven and set them aside to cool. Meanwhile, make a fresh salsa by cutting two or three ripe plum tomatoes into small dice. Toss in a bowl with 1/4 cup diced onion and a small fistful of cilantro leaves. Stir in a squeeze of lime and season with salt.

Tear the chicken into small pieces or cut it into small strips. Next, shred about 1 cup lettuce. Crumble about 2 ounces queso fresco, or fresh cheese. Present the chicken the fresh vegetables and the cheese at the table along with a plate of warm tortillas. Let everyone build their own taco. You might also have some crema, or sour cream, on the side as a further garnish.

I'll bet you can't eat just one.

Change of Venue

We've been in Michigan this week, specifically Pentwater, a small town northwest of Grand Rapids where my family has been vacationing for years. There's lots of boating, swimming and dune climbing. But finding our kind of food has been more of a challenge. The nearest supermarket is in Ludington, 15 miles away. I hate to come off like a snob, but I did not warm to processed turkey, processed ham, processed cheese and potato chips. Very quickly I was missing my garden-fresh vegetables and homemade pickles.

Was there any food for us here in Pentwater?

In the local wine store I noticed a sign advertising a farmers market in the village square. On Monday afternoon we paid a visit and found one vendor with a few eggs and a truckload of hand-dyed yarn. The woman running the stand was Dennise Wright, who owns a farm a few miles away outside Hart with her husband Andy and their nine children (soon to be 10).

The Wrights have 40 acres where they raise mostly chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats and a few Guernsey cows. They have a few cow shareholders for the raw milk and in high season drive 220 miles each way to sell their meats at a market in Chicago. Dennise invited us for a visit. Yesterday we stopped by to tour Liberty Family Farm where the Wrights are trying to duplicate some of the "grass farming" techniques of Joel Salatin. The pigs and chicken forage behind movable fencing, rotating through clover and weeds and leaving fertilizer behind.

The Guernsey cows are improbably friendly and docile with their huge brown eyes. One bull calf is growing horns but still nursing. He will eventually end up as steaks and hamburger. This time of year, the meat larder is running low at the Wrights'. The pigs are still growing; a few were scheduled to be slaughtered on Friday. Too late for us. We purchased a roasting chicken broken down into parts as well as a partial leg of lamb and a 4-lb pork shoulder roast. Pentwater has a full-service produce stand on the outskirts of town. We stopped there for some local vegetables and fruits and came up with the following menu:

Grilled chicken and lamb fajitas with quacamole
Black bean salad with corn and summer squash
Peach cobbler with local peaches

There's a larger farmers market here on Thursday mornings as well. We'll pay a visit to see what some of the other local farmers are growing. I bought a dozen of the Wrights' eggs ($3.50 a dozen here, compared to $5 in Chicago) and have been eating them daily for breakfast. We could also make egg salad. Today I've got our pork butt smoking with some mesquite chips on the grill. We'll have pulled pork sandwiches and homemade cole slaw for dinner.

Suddenly, those trips to the supermarket in Ludington aren't looking so necessary after all. The local food movement is having an impact even here in Pentwater, Michigan, if you make the effort to find it.

Breakfast

Whole wheat couscous with grilled chicken and green grapes, left over from making client meals.

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Shopping: none

There are more traditional and elaborate ways of making couscous but we just let it make itself. Pour boiling water to cover the couscous in a mixing bowl, then cover with a tight-fitting lid. Wait till the couscous absorbs all the water.

This dish would be a perfect way to use leftovers from a roasted chicken. Just tear up the meat and stir it into the couscous. Add halved green grapes and just about anything else you like. Here you see sauteed red bell pepper and red onions. I could easily see chopped parsley or mint in this dish. You could also add nuts: almonds, walnuts, etc. Season with extra-virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar or lemon juice, salt to taste.

Our local health food store sells whole wheat couscous (Whole Foods used to as well, until they got more corporate). But if you can't find whole wheat, conventional couscous, quinoa or millet would work just as easily.

We love our whole grains.

Heat Wave Breakfast

Leftover quinoa pilaf with peas, fava beans and edamame, plus leftover chicken casserole with carrots in peas.

It's peas squared!

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Shopping: None

Just the thing to heat in the microwave after spending the very early part of the morning harvesting the rest of our peas, removing the pea plants and getting the vegetable bed ready for bush beans and climbing lima beans. It's forecast to be near 100 degrees here in the District of Columbia for the next several days. But with the humidity it will feel like 110.

Oh, we are pining for those cool, wet days of April and May. Seems like we have skipped right into August.

Stay cool, everyone. Be sure to wear a hat and sunblock if you must be outside. Otherwise, do your gardening at first light, before things heat up.

Dark Days: Sorrel Sauce from the Garden

In the course of researching an article on rhubarb recently I discovered that a close relation is sorrel. Oxalic acid makes rhubarb leaves toxic. It gives sorrel leaves a distinct and almost addictive tartness, although sorrel should not be eaten to excess either.

We planted sorrel from seed in the garden at my daughter's school. The plants thrived for a while, but now there's no sign of them. The kids liked the citrusy flavor so much they ate the sorrel down to the nub.

In our own garden we have two sorrel plants. They seem to be perfectly content in average soil amended with compost and fin ull sun with some shade in the afternoon. Sorrel is perenniel and holds up well to our winters here in the District of Columbia. That makes it one of the first greens available in spring when we are still waiting for the rest of the garden to germinate.

Sorrel grows wild as "sheep sorrel" (Rumex acetosella). The garden varieties, (Rumex acetosa), with long, narrow leaves growing in clumps, and "French sorrel" (Rumex scatacus), with smaller, rounder leaves growing in mats, are perhaps best known for their role in sorrel soup. Sorrel will also brighten a salad or omelet and makes a piquant sauce for fish or foul.

The sauce is a fairly simple matter of sweating shallots in butter, "melting" a couple of big handfuls of sorrel leaves, incorporating a bit of white wine and then finishing with a large dose of heavy cream.

I rarely see sorrel in stores. Perhaps one of the vendors at your farmers market will have some for sale. Otherwise, sorrel is so easy to grow, there's no reason not to have some in your herb garden or even in a pot on the deck.

Note: to use the sorrel leaves, remove the stem and tough portion of the vein by grasping the leafing part with one hand and pulling the stem backwards with the other.

Sorrel sauce:

2 medium shallots, minced
1 tablespoon butter
2 bunches sorrel, about 20 leaves each, stem and tough vein removed, leaves finely chopped
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 2/3 cup heavy cream

In a medium sauce pan over moderately-low heat, melt the butter and sweat the shallots until soft, about 8 minutes. Add chopped sorrel leaves and "melt" (the leaves will quickly cook down and become extremely tender). Add white wine, bring to a simmer and cook until reduced by about 1/4. Add cream, bring to a simmer and cook until thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

The sauce can be made ahead and reheated. Here it's used to give the star treatment to a free-range chicken breast from Pennsylvania.

Dark Days: Chicken And Sweet Potato Tagine

Each year around this time I give our farmer friend Mike a call to order potato sets and onion sets for planting. This year I was surprised to hear Mike offer to deliver the goods (we usually drive the 30 miles to the farm). And he had other tantalizing items for us to consider. How about some eggs? Butter? A nice, big roasting chicken?

Mike's a small-scale farmer. He's always looking to sell something. And we are happy to purchase food fresh off the farm. This time of year, his produce is still in the seedling stage, lined up in rows in the greenhouse waiting to be transof planted. There's not much for Mike to sell except chickens and eggs.

The chicken far exceeded our expectations--size-wise, at least. I did not put it on the scale, but it was nearly twice the size of the roasters we typically see at the grocery, somewhere near 7 pounds, I would guess. This one came frozen. I defrosted it, originally intending to make it our first spit-roasted bird of the year. But the dinner party we'd arranged around the spit-roasting fell through and temperatures were in the 40s. I switched gears and found this recipe for a chicken tagine in an old issue of Food & Wine magazine.

Tagine is a traditional North African dish cooked in a ceramic pot with a distinctive conical lid. Tagines are robust, one-pot stews where meat and vegetables cook for a long time together with strong spices such as cumin, cinnamon, paprika until everything is buttery soft. I don't own a tagine, but the results I get from my enameled-iron Le Crueset pan are adequate for our tastes.

I especially like this tagine--or magazine version of a tagine--because the vegetable that cooks along with the chicken is sweet potato, which is arriving in quantity lately in our CSA box. Sweet potato and chicken, it turns out, go quite well together, especially when you season them with plenty of cinnamon and ginger as in this dish.

There's nothing complicated about this. First heat about 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil in the bottom of a heavy pot and brown a whole chicken cut into pieces. Separate the legs from the thighs. Divide the breast into quarters. Season the pieces well with salt and black pepper. You'll probably need to do the browing in two batches.

Set the chicken aside and pour a whole onion, cut into medium dice, into the pot. Season with 1 teaspoon coarse salt, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon and 1 teaspoon ground ginger. Stir, scraping up any brown bits from the bottom of the pot. Cook until the onion is soft, about 8 minutes, then put the chicken back in the pot layering the pieces as necessary.

Cover the chicken with a 1-pound sweet potato, peeled and cut into fairly thin slices. Toss 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped, over the sweet potatoes and on top of that 1 14-ounce can of diced tomatoes, drained. Season with salt and pepper. Add 1 cup chicken stock to the pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and cover tightly. Cook until the sweet potato is tender and the chicken cooked through, about 50 minutes.

To serve family-style, lift the sweet potato-tomato-garlic layer off the chicken and pile at one end of a platter. Arrange the chicken pieces to cover the rest of the platter. Garnish the platter with chopped parsley and sliced lemon and serve with a big bowl of couscous, or, in our case, a winter tabbouleh of sorts made of bulgar with lots of parsley, mint, endive, radicchio, dried cranberries.

Suddenly, you have a lovely, almost-spring feast. The pasture-raised chicken will blow your hair back. The flavor is exquisitely fresh and intensely chicken. Not gamy, mind you, but meatier and more distinctly chicken than what you are used to from store-bought birds. The local sweet potatoes could not have been a more perfect partner. Each bite called for another spoonful of the delicious pot liquor, spiked with onions and cinnamon and ginger.

Gotta Have More Giblets

Among the responses to yesterday's item on chicken giblets was an e-mail from my aunt Barb upbraiding me for my lack of backbone where giblets are concerned. But let's not put too fine a point on it. She called me a "woos." Furthermore, she passed along a treatment for chicken parts that I thought was good enough to print for other readers. To wit:

Chicken parts are WONDERFUL! The cook that served (uncle) Bill's family when he was growing up had a fabulous recipe that we all love. She wouldn't give me the recipe, but her husband, Alex, gave it to me - leaving out a few things that I figured out after trying it. It's a dish for "poor folks", Alex told me, but we all loved it.

This is for 4-6 servings:

12 gizzards

12 wings

1 lb chicken livers

12 necks and hearts, as available

In soup pot, put gizzards and wing tips with onion and celery tops and peppercorns. Cook until gizzards are soft. (About 1 hour) Save broth, put gizzards aside, toss the wing tips and recycle the veggies.

In very large frypan (I use my electric one) heat 4 T oil or butter. Coat wings and necks with flour and fry them, turning them once. Season as you wish. I use Lawrys and garlic powder. Chop 2 large onions and add to pan. You shouldn't need any more oil/butter, as you should have sufficient chicken fat. Turn heat down so onions brown, but do not burn. Add chicken livers (no flour) and cook until they are cooked through. Add gizzards and enough broth to make a slurry gravy.

Cover and heat for 15 minutes on very low heat. Add more broth as necessary. Serve over brown rice.

Now, Ed, I have a feeling you will never try this, but you're missing a fabulous bet. Even though it is not heart healthy, it is so delicious, you will groan with mad pleasure while eating it.

Maybe you can get friends to donate their liver, neck. wings and giblets to you and then come over for dinner.

So, readers, how do you fix your giblets?

Chicken Giblets for Breakfast

High on my list of personal foibles is my lack of fortitude when it comes to dealing with chicken organs.

You know what I'm talking about--the little bag of body parts--neck, heart, gizzard, liver--that comes with the chicken, usually stuffed inside the cavity. Our farmer friend Brett takes great pains to include a Ziploc bag with chicken parts when he sends one of his chickens with our weekly CSA box. I carefully remove the bag, place it in a small bowl and put it in the refrigerator with a promise to myself that I will--this time--find a use for my chicken offal very soon, to make good on all the work that went into harvesting them.

Days pass. I glance at the bowl of chicken parts each time I open the refrigerator. The promise to myself turns into guilt. I try to put giblets out of my mind, pretend they're not there. But soon they take on a metaphysical weight--a real presence in my thoughts--like something out of an Egar Allen Poe story. The beating chicken heart...

Eventually, my wife will complain of an odor eminating from the refrigerator. I pretend to not know what it is, and bury the chicken parts in the trash at the first opportunity when no one is looking. At this point, the guilt has become HUGE.

Well, I just hate to waste food and I keep telling myself that I will never collect enough chicken necks to make a stock. By now, if I had saved all those necks, I would have enough a couple times over. So this week after receiving another chicken from Brett, and the bag of organs, I was more determined than ever to make good use of them. Since I know no one else in the family will have anything to do with chicken offal, I decided to have giblets for breakfast with some of Brett's pastured eggs.

Here's what I did: First, place the neck in a freezer bag to finally start your collection. Put the bag in the freezer. Nex, cut the gizzard and heart into small pieces and sautee them in a hot skillet with extra-virgin olive oil. Season with salt and black pepper. When they are cooked through, spoon them onto a plate and set aside. Now cook the liver in the same skillet, either whole or cut into two pieces. Be sure to brown it on all sides. When that is cooked through, remove it to a cutting board and when it is cool enough to handle, cut it into small pieces.

Let the skillet cool a bit off the heat, then return it to the burner set to moderately-low and pour two farm-fresh eggs, beaten, into the skillet where the eggs can pick up all the brown bits off the bottom. Scramble the eggs as you normally would, mixing them around with your favorite usensil, and when they're about half-way cooked add the chopped giblets and mix them well with the eggs. Season with salt and pepper as needed.

Serve this immediately on a warm plate, perhaps with a piece of toasted, rustic bread. If you have any leftover giblet gravy in the fridge, now would be a good time to use that as well. We had some fresh chervil in our CSA box this week, so I chopped some of that to garnish the eggs.

I happen to like strong, gamey flavors, so this is a dish I could easily wake up to on a more regular basis. But my advise is, do this early in the morning before the rest of the house wakes up, so you don't have to listen to all those disapproving voices telling you how much they can't stand chicken giblets.

Dark Days: Roasting Chicken and More

A roasting chicken arrived in our weekly CSA box which happily answers the question, What are we making for our Dark Days Local Challenge meal this week?

Concidentally, our friend Marty from California, who we haven't seen in a lifetime, came to visit. Isn't it nice to have a friend who exclaims over a simple roasted chicken, turnips and potatoes?

Since we share our CSA box with friends Helen and Jeff, we had half a chicken to split three ways. I used diced carrots and onions and some thyme leaves as a bed for the chicken on a baking sheet and surrounded it with baby turnips, also from the CSA box, and purple potatoes from our garden, tossed with extra-virgin olive oil and salt. Yes, we still have potatoes. Some are still in the ground. These have been languishing in our pantry.

Prior to baking the chicken, I had harvested some chard from the garden. The weather has been fluky: heat waves followed by extreme cold. When it's very cold, the chard falls to the ground. When the air warms, the chard springs back to life. I harvested enough--stems and leaves, roughly chopped--to fill my cast-iron skillet, along with some sauteed red onion. Season with salt and orange juice, then braise on the stove top, covered, until the chard stems are tender.

This made a nice plate with a diversity of flavors--a little bite from the turnips, fruitiness from the chard, the smooth mouthfeel of the potatoes and the aromatic carrots and onions. The pastured chicken is a bit chewier than what you get from a store-bought bird, but that just adds to the excitement.

Dark Days: One-Pot Chicken

This meal starts with the roasting chicken we received in our weekly CSA package from farmer friend Brett.

This is not to be confused with the stewing hen I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Brett, being a man of many facets, deals in two kinds of chicken. One, the laying hen, needs to be cooked forever. The roaster cooks more like a conventional bird. Brett advises that it may be a bit chewier than the chicken you buy at the store. It does spend most of its time running around the farmyard pecking at things, after all.

We share our CSA subscription with friends Helen and Jeff so what we were dealing with in fact was half a bird. My visit to the farmers market over the weekend was intended to find some companion vegetables for the chicken. The dish that took shape--improvisational in the truest sense--was a one-pot affair with rice and squash on the side.

Divide the chicken into pieces and brown it in batches with extra-virgin olive oil at the bottom of a heavy pot or Dutch oven. Set the chicken aside and toss an onion, diced large, into the pot, scraping any brown bit off the bottom of the pot. When the onion has softened and browned a little, add about three cloves garlic, thinly sliced, to the pot and cook for a minute or two. Then add a large carrot and a large parsnip, peeled and sliced on an angle. Also add a large white potato and a sweet potato cut into 1-inch pieces. Place several sprigs thyme and a bay leaf or two amongst the vegetables and add two cups chicken stock and one can diced tomatoes with the juices.

Note: this dish cooks for about 1 1/2 hours on the stove top. If you like your potatoes and sweet potatoes more on the firm side, wait until 45 minutes or so into the cooking before adding them.

Bring the pot to a boil, then reduce the heat to very low and simmer until the chicken is extremely tender and ready to fall off the bone. Originally I had thought of serving this in a bowl with the broth, like a pot au feu, but changed my mind and decided to present it more in the Hispanic manner with rice.. I drained off the cooking liquid and used it to make brown rice, making the plate a bit monochromatic and bit redundant in the starch department. A squash I had intended to cook with the chicken was impossible to peel, so I baked it in the oven and served it--mashed--on the side, mixed with some brown sugar.

This simple, rustic dinner could have come out of your grandmother's root cellar, but of course you have the satisfaction of knowing you made it yourself from the best ingredients around.

Dark Days: Coq au Vin

Throughout the winter CSA season, our farmer friend Brett will occasionally include a chicken with our weekly produce delivery.

This is one of his laying hens. People sometimes tell Brett the chicken is tough. Brett says, cook the chicken longer. By that he does not mean an hour or two. He means three or four hours.

This particular chicken, cooked with red wine, bacon, garlic and beef broth, braised four hours in the pot. Still, it was on the chewy side. But oh, the flavor. Dark and gamey, that's how I like it.

I had also been watching carefully the progress of the turnips in my garden. I had a hard time getting the turnips to germinate this summer. Rutabagas, too. Was it too hot? Did I not water the seeds enough? I don't know the answer. I planted seeds twice and still did not get a full crop. But the turnips that did finally take hold are beauties. I can see their white flesh rising out of the ground all the way from the front stoop.

The two I pulled yesterday were baseball size, perfectly round with rich soil clinging to the roots. These are not the turnips I would normally plant for greens. But I tasted the leaves anyway and they were delicious--sweet. I decided to include them in a braise with the other greens from our weekly package.

So there you have our totally local meal for the week: coq au vin, turnips mashed with blue cheese and braised greens seasoned with apple cider. Homely, yes, but very satisfying. Just the thing for a winter's night.

The turnips came out so well--sweet, with just a hint of horseradish--that I am convinced to plant more and pay better attention to them in the coming year.

Dark Days: Poor Man's Chicken Stew

I find myself constructing these winter meals in my head days in advance.

Where will the calories come from? I ask myself. What can I do that doesn't repeat what I did last week? Which of my two farmer's market options to employ?

Obviously, I have too much time on my hands. But soon after joining this challenge I realized how little planning I had done for the winter. Go back a hundred years or two and that would have been my preoccupation in July, August, September: planting then preserving enough various foods to get me through the dark days.

Alas, it is so hard to extricate one's self from the convenience-oriented mindset. Kicking blueberries flown in from Chile in the middle of December turns out to be not such a hard thing after all. But then make a list of all your other favorite fresh foods--lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, leeks, potatoes, apples, chicken--and see how well you do without those. That's precisely the point of this Dark Days challenge, to start poking around for local sources of all these staples. You learn very quickly that the sources are few and far between and that the available ingredients soon start to repeat themselves.

We are fortunate to have two farmer's markets still going strong. How strong for how long is the question. This week I opted for a package of two very large chicken quarters from Eco-Friendly Foods in Virginia. They are regulars at the Dupont Circle market on Sundays here in the District of Columbia.

I had in mind turning the chicken into a simple, rustic stew--the kind of stew some of our immigrant Salvadorn neighbors might recognize--using potatoes that we are still harvesting from our garden, in this case big Peruvian purple potatoes. This stew is a bit of a train wreck, because I also used the better part of a sweeet potato from the farmers market as well some cranberry beans from the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa. I mail-ordered the beans in spring intending to plant them, but they germinated none too well and from the size of the package I finally decided that these beans were meant for eating, not replicating.

I soaked them overnight and cooked them with some Henderson smoked bacon.

To make the stew, divide the chicken quarters into legs and thighs and brown them well with extra-virgin olive oil over high heat in a heavy pot. Remove them to the side, and add an onion, cut into medium dice, to the pot along with a couple of carrots, peeled and cut on an angle. Let the onion brown a little, stirring the vegetables to deglaze the pot, then reduce the heat, season with salt and black pepper and add two or three cloves of garlic, thinly sliced and continue cooking until the onion is soft, about 8 minutes.

Return the chicken to the pot, add 2 cups chicken broth and several sprigs thyme tied in a bundle. Cover and bring to a boil, then place in a 250-degree oven. Bake for about two hours, then add potatoes and sweet potatoes, about 2 cups worth cut into 1-inch pieces, along with a cup or two of beans that have been previously cooked but are still firm. You could also add some crisped bacon at this point if you like.

Bake the stew another hour, or until the potatoes are perfectly tender, the chicken is falling off the bone and the pot is redolent of garlic and thyme. Serve with a mess of hearty greens and a sturdy red wine.

Dark Days: Meal 2

There is always this chicken-and-egg question when shopping for the family dinner: do we approach our provisioning with a preconceived menu in mind, or do we see what the market has to offer and make our meal around that?

I went to the Dupont Circle farmers market on Sunday knowing exactly what I wanted: a big, ripe chicken to roast on my charcoal spit. The sides for this meal were still a bit vague, but I was sure I would find something in the teeming morass of vegetable vendors.

Sure enough, at one of the vegetable stands I noticed cartons of okra, still fresh and alert. This has to be the last okra of the season. And though I think this is cheating a bit (okra hardly being "dark days" food--more like August), I thought, Why don't we just save the turnips for later?

Then I spied these big, glorious sweet potatoes and a summery menu began to take shape: fried okra and sweet potato salad. Now all I needed was that chicken, down at the Eco-Friendly food stall at the other end of the market. I made a beeline for the poultry coolers, but all I saw were breasts and miscellaneous pieces. A dark cloud of dread began to form over my well-laid plans.

"We didn't have any whole chickens to bring this week," said one of the salesmen, apparently reading my mind. "But we do have these poussins," and he directed my gaze to a display of little immature chickens--les poussins. Too small for the charcoal spit. But fine for roasting in the oven. My plans would not be completely thwarted.

So here you see my take on Meal 2, Halloween Week. Call it the last of the summer menus: Oven-roasted poussin with a sage-garlic rub, fried okra and sweet potato salad with toasted pecans and a orange-maple syrup dressing.

In other words, I will continue with whatever summer leavings the farmers market has to offer, until the November winds blow us right into fall.

Where's the Garlic?

This morning saw a happy convergence of food activities.

The garlic we picked yesterday is still sitting on the front stoop. I have no idea whether to wash it or find some other way to remove the dirt. I am just that stupid about garlic. I asked my wife and was surprised to learn she didn't know either.

But I was determined to taste some of the garlic and it just so happened I was preparing to grill four chickens. I had removed the innards and divided the birds into pieces with my poultry shears, removing the backs. I had the good sense to put the backs in a pot to cook for chicken stock. I don't normally save the innards. It suddenly occurred to me, Why not eat them?

My breakfast therefore consisted of sauteeing the hearts and gizzards first, seasoned just with salt and pepper. I then added the livers and when they were lightly browned added a clove of my fresh garlic, finely chopped, and put a lid on the pan just until the garlic had cooked through. Finally I ramped up the heat, poured in a splash of Bordeaux (2004 St. Emilion) and let it rip until the wine was a sauce.

Into a bowl, with a shot of the Bordeaux. While the chicken grilled, I dug into the innards. Very fine. I suppose there are better forms of liver (calves liver, for instance) but for an improntu meal, the chicken livers did the job. The garlic--fresh and strong--was just the right touch. The only thing missing: a baguette to mop up the sauce.

Braised Chicken: Tale of Two Titties

I swear, there should be a warning label on chicken breasts. First, they don't have any flavor. Secondly, they don't cook the same as the rest of the bird. But nobody wants to talk about it. The truth about chicken breasts constitutes one of the ugly secrets of the culinary world.

First, as to flavor: I defy anyone to show me where it is in the breast. Even on a free range bird (well, maybe a little flavor) the breast is not where it's at. The flavor is in what you put on the breast. So the breast really should be described as a flavorless vehicle for sauces. In the catering business, I stared into many a buffet platter looking at bland, flavorless chicken breast, wondering how many hours the chef spent trying to invent new things to put on it. Of course you can't serve anything but the breast at a large function. Someone might be offended by, say, a flavorful thigh. Too gamy, they might say. So, to play it safe, you serve chicken breast, neatly sliced and covered with a caper sauce, or a tomato salsa, or sauteed mushrooms.

Now think about it. In that last sentence, what made your mouth water? The chicken breast, or the caper sauce, the tomato salsa, the sauteed mushrooms?

Me, I am a thigh man. Legs don't appeal to me, primarily because of all that gristle and those tendons you have to chew around. Thighs are rich dark meat, full of juicy succulence. Sure, they have a few more calories than the breast. But if it's a choice between lots of flavor with a few extra calories, or no flavor and fewer calories, guess which way I'm headed?

Still, there are people who will eat nothing but breast meat. I pity them. I have one client for whom I made only thighs when I cooked chicken. Finally, he became so exasperated that he just blurted out one day that he DID NOT LIKE THIGHS! When I pointed out to him that breast meat has no flavor, he insisted, "Yes they do. If you cook them on the bone!"

Sorry. Bones do not add that much flavor to chicken breasts. Chicken breasts can only pray they have flavor in another life.

Now to the other matter of cooking times. I'm curious: If you turn to the duck cooking literature, the first thing out of the author's mouth is likely to be, Do not cook the breast meat and leg/thighs together. These different parts of the duck do not cook at the same rate. Breasts cook faster than dark meat. So, the thinking goes, if you try to cook a whole duck, the breasts will be dried out and inedible by the time the dark meat is cooked. Cook them separately, is the recommendation. Same thing with turkey. Anyone who's cooked more than one turkey knows the lengths you have to go to get the dark meat cooked without destroying the breasts. Some chefs do the same thing with turkeys they do with ducks: cook the breasts and the dark meat separately.

So why is this not the mantra with chickens? Why do we pay such scant attention to the different parts of this bird?

In fact, I have paid some attention. And like I said, I am now a thigh man. And I notice more and more recipes for thighs-only are popping up. One in particular I like is the recipe for thighs roasted with lemon, thyme and honey in the Zuni Cafe Cookbook. Another I'm especially fond of is my own interpretation of the "chicken Marbella" recipe that appeared years ago in The Silver Palate Cookbook. (Does anyone remember the Silver Palate series? It was all the rage back in the 80s.)

The original "chicken Marbella" called for four chickens to make 10 or more portions. But I use strictly thighs. Then I beef up the finished chicken by reducing the marinade until it is flavorful as all get out. You'll notice a North African influence in the sweet and sour mix of red wine vinegar and brown sugar (okay, maybe and Anglicized North African influence). The dried fruits and green olives may place this more in the fall/winter season. So quick! Make it before all the snow melts.

This recipe can be expanded to fit an even bigger crowd. In fact, I typically "roast/braise" the chicken on baking sheets for 30 or more people. After roasting in the oven, allow the thighs to cool, then pick the meat off the bones. Note: Start this dish two or three days in advance.

For 10 Servings

5 pounds chicken thighs

1 head garlic, peeled

1/2 cup red wine vinegar

1/2 cup olive oil

1/4 cup dried oregano

kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 cup pitted prunes

1/2 cup dried apricots

1/2 cup pitted green olives (choose Spanish or Moroccan olives)

1/2 cup capers with some juice

6 bay leaves

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup white wine

1/4 cup coarsely chopped parsley or cilantro

Place chicken thighs in large mixing bowl. In a blender, mix garlic, vinegar and olive oil until smooth. Pour over chicken thighs. Season with oregano, salt and pepper. Mix in prunes, apricots, olives, capers and bay leaves. Cover with plastic and marinate overnight.

The following day, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread chicken thighs and marinade on baking sheet. Sprinkle with brown sugar. Pour white wine around chicken thighs. Place in oven and bake until chicken is golden and cooked through, about 45 minutes. Set aside to cool.

When chicken is cool enough to handle, remove meat from thighs and discard bones and bay leaves. Set olives, prunes and apricots aside. Meanwhile, separate fat from pan liquids. Either pour liquid into sauce pan and skim fat away using a spoon or turkey baster. If using a grease separator, strain liquid into separator saving solids for later. Discard fat. Place remaining liquid in small sauce pan. Bring to boil and cook until liquid is reduced by about 1/3. Return solids to pan.

To serve, ladle finished sauce along with olives, prunes and apricots over chicken. I like to accompany this dish with a brown basmati rice pilaf tossed with toasted almonds and parsley. Since there are no onions in the chicken, you can dice some red onion and put it in the pilaf.

Now tell me you can do anything with a chicken breast that tastes this good.

The Accidental Coq au Vin

I did not begin the week intending to make a coq au vin. But as so often happens, things kept pointing me in that direction. First, it was our turn to receive the chicken from the farm subscription we share with my sister and her husband. So there sat the bird the last several days, chilling in a bowl in our refrigerator, demanding some kind of attention. Then I noticed my wife, for no particular reason, had purchased some cipollini onions at the grocery store. ("I just thought they looked good," she shrugged). Then there was the half-used slab of bacon, not particularly well wrapped, just laying there in the fridge on top of some jars of Thai curry and such. Before you can say "Le Creuset" I was pulling one of my favorite books off the shelf in search of an "authentic" coq au vin recipe.

Why do I use quotes around the word authentic? The word seems to have come under a cloud. Or is it that we just question the true origins of everything these days, as if good food can't merely be good on its own terms, it must also have a certifiable pedigree? The fights are endless. For instance, how can a tomato pizza really be authentically Italian, when the Italians didn't even have tomatoes until they were brought from the Americas in the 16th Century? So I suppose you could question whether a French coq au vin is truly "authentic" if you consider the possibility that the original chicken came from, say, Armenia, and was first cooked in wine there. So, to be more precise, I guess I should say I was looking for a method of cooking coq au vin as we know it, namely, from somewhere where the cooking of coq au vin is not merely sport, not something people do occasionally to get their picture on the cover of a food magazine, but serious business going back a long, long time. That's why I reached for my copy of Mourjou.

If you love cooking in the fashion of people who really care about what they eat, who obsess over the freshness of the products they cook with, who cook in a manner that has been passed down for generations--if you care, in other words, about preparing food to be enjoyed for its fullness of flavor and in its own good time, then this is a book you should own. The complete title is, Mourjou: The Life and Food of an Auvergne Village, and it was written by a Brit expatriot named Peter Graham, who, besides writing books, also directs small films and writes about travel and art and psychoanalysis and a number of other things that make his life seem perfectly pleasant and sane. At some point more than 20 years ago he picked up and moved to this tiny village, Mourjou, in the province of Auvergne in south-central France, a sometimes mysterious place where lush valleys co-exist with dormant volcanoes, where a verdant landscape dotted with small herds of lazy cattle is cross-hatched with deep canyons and snaggle-toothed mountain peaks. There are also small villages such as Mourjou where ancient customs are still kept, where neigbhors nose around each other's kitchen gardens and where family recipes are guarded like state secrets. In particular, I treasure books like Graham's because books like Mourjou just aren't being written much anymore. Remember? We're all too busy to read well-written prose about food. We're just here for the recipes, or so they say...

Anyway, I thought Mourjou might be a good place to look for a coq au vin recipe and--Bingo!--I was right. In fact, Mr. Graham writes a nice little takeout on the means and methods of coq au vin, including an amusing explanation for why, throughout the text, he chooses to use the French word--coq--rather than the literal English translation. "I use the word coq because it is a way of avoiding the problem, in English, of the word 'cock', "Graham explains paranthetically. So I will follow Mr. Graham's lead.

The first issue to be surmounted, as usual, is which version of coq au vin to adopt. This is no less a problem for Mr. Graham. "Coq au vin is a dish, like potee, which is found in slightly differing versions all over France," he writes. (There we go again, the authenticity thing.) "There is even a slender tome called Coq au Vin, which contains sixty-one slightly differing recipes for the dish." Several regions of France lay claim to the "original" coq au vin. And even in the province of Auverge, there are disputes over which ingredients should go into a proper coq au vin and how it should be cooked. "Should it include the fowl's blood as well as wine? Should the lardons be smoked or unsmoked? Should the sauce be thickened with beurre manie and/or the mashed-up liver?" There are even questions about whether the bird should first be marinated in wine and--perhaps the most troubling question of all--must the fowl in question be an actual coq (meaning an older male), or can we use--perish the thought--a plain old ordinary chicken?

Graham doesn't say, exactly, how he resolves these dilemmas. He really ducks the question entirely (no pun intended). Perhaps he is guarding someone else's family's recipe secret. He does acknowledge some trouble finding an actual coq, even in his adopted village. He sometimes succedes by visiting a local farm. The wine, he says, should be "a dark earthy wine made on the hills overlooking Clermon-Ferrand." Then, after describing how the farmer's wife, Nicole, must be persuaded to charge for her time plucking and preparing the bird, Graham simply launches into a recipe. I just have to assume that Graham has resolved all the aforementioned issues to his personal satisfaction. So his is the recipe I've followed, more or less. Note: This dish needs to marinate 24 hours before cooking, and is even better if you give it another day to rest in the refrigerator after it has been cooked. You do the math.

Serves 6 persons

Graham calls for a coq "at least two years old." But if you can't find one of those, he will allow "a very large free-range chicken of the highest quality," about 4 1/2 pounds.

2 ounces lard, or, in my case, the grease from several slices of fried bacon (I didn't want to buy a whole tub of lard).

15 pickling onions (I used about a dozen cipollini onions of various sizes)

3 1/2 ounces salt pork, diced large

6 ounces button mushroom (I substituted cremini mushrooms)

For the marinade:

1 bottle dark, full-bodied red wine (I used a French Syrah from the Camargue area near Nimes)

bouquet garni: two sprigs thyme, 2 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, 2 sprigs winter savory (I omitted the savory--couldn't find any), 1 bay leaf

2 carrots, quartered

2 large cloves garlic

large pinch salt

freshly ground pepper to taste

As in most braises of this type, the meat is first marinated, then dried and browned in oil before all of the ingredients are assembled in the pot and placed in the oven.

Cut the coq (or chicken) into pieces: legs, thighs, breasts. Cut the breasts in half. Remove as much fat as possible and remove the skin from the breasts and thighs. Place the pieces of bird in a non-reactive bowl or pot, pour the marinade over it. Cover and refrigerate 24 hours.

The next day: Preheat oven to 250 degrees

Drain the poultry well, blotting any leftover moisture with paper towels. Save the marinade with its solids. Meanwhile, in a heavy pot, heat the lard (or bacon grease) over moderately high heat. Brown the poultry pieces well on all sides, in batches if necessary. Remove and set aside. Place the salt pork and onions in the hot grease, turning occasionally until the onions are golden. (If using cipollinis, they must be blanched in boiling water first, the skins removed.)

Remove the pot from the stove. Pack the poultry pieces, onions, salt pork and mushrooms into the pot. Pour the marinade with its solids into the pot. Place pot in oven and cook 2 1/2 hours, or until chicken is very tender but not falling off the bone. (Note: Graham calls for 2 hours cooking in a 350 oven, but I think 250 degrees is amore appropriate braising temperature to avoid overcooking.)

Allow the pot to cool. Remove all the poultry, onions and mushrooms and place on a baking sheet, separating and discarding the carrots, herbs and other solids from the marinade. Strain the cooking liquid into a separate container (you could use a grease separator at this point to remove most of the grease). Cover the cooked coq au vin and refrigerate it and the cooking liquid overnight.

The following day, skim fat off the surface of the cooking liquid. To serve: Reheat coq au vin in 250-degree oven. While this is reheating, chop the fowl's liver finely, removing any gristle. Just before serving, drain the cooking liquid through a strainer into a blender and blend it with the liver until smooth. Place the liquid in a small pot over medium-high heat on the stove and cook until somewhat thickened. Pour the hot liquid over the coq au vin as it is going to the table.