(I’m cooking once a week from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home cookbook. For more info, read my intro post on the Thomas Keller Challenge.)
This is a Thomas Keller recipe I’d classify as legitimately easy to make! And it’s really good. This one’s a keeper.
Braising’s a method home cooks often overlook. The principle is simple: You cook meat partially submerged in liquid, so it ends up nice and tender but still nicely browned on the part that isn’t submerged. The only thing you need is an oven-safe frying pan; you usually start braises on the stove and finish them in the oven. (Actually, you can transfer from a frying pan to a baking dish if need be, but you should own at least one oven-safe frying pan anyway.)
And chicken thighs are the best part of the chicken: Flavorful because they’re dark meat, moist because they come with plenty of fat attached, and cheap because America for some reason loves the dry, tasteless boneless skinless chicken breast more than the better cuts.
Chef Keller’s recipe is pretty basic. You salt the thighs, then sear on both sides, and remove to a plate while you prepare the braising liquid.
Next, you saute onion, garlic, and fennel until soft, deglaze with white wine, and add chicken broth, green olives, and seasonings (he calls for lemon zest, thyme, red pepper, and bay leaf, but you could use whatever). That’s the liquid at left. Just pop the chicken on top, bake at 375° for 20 minutes or so, run it under the broiler for a minute (that’s where the crispy comes from), and you’re done.
The fennel and olives are both bold flavors, but the long-ish cooking mellows both and combines all the flavors into something coherent. Wonderful, wonderful recipe.
On the side, we roasted some beets. Real simple: Chop, toss with olive oil, salt and pepper, roast at 375° for an hour or so. Contrary to most recipes’ instructions, we left the skin on. Didn’t make a difference. Never peeling beets again.
Last week’s CSA featured the gorgeous Chioggia beets above, with red and white candy stripes. They don’t taste any different than any other beet, and after roasting they kinda turn a more uniform pink, but they sure look cool raw.
For dessert (yeah, this was Sunday dinner: three courses!), we made a variation on an old favorite recipe of mine, Easy Peach Cobbler. This recipe’s from Sara Moulton, one of the Food Network’s original hosts, from back when they hadn’t yet discovered reality shows and their channel showed, y’know, people cooking food. It’s my go-to cobbler; I’ve probably made it 30 or 40 times. And if you can stop yourself from eating it all, it’s even better cold out of the fridge the next day.
It’s an interesting recipe: You melt butter in the baking dish, pour the batter over that, and then drop the fruit on top and bake. The batter rises up around the fruit to make a fluffy, rich, bready cobbler. I used a jar of Chilton County peaches I made last summer (look for a post on canning peaches in a month or so), along with some cherries from the fridge. Peach + cherry = summer heaven. Check it out:
from what I’ve gathered, depending on where you’re from, it’s a bunch of different things, a slump, dump, grunt or cobbler. Whatever, fruit and dough is always yum.