Dinner Lovesong

Tonight, as every night, Karen and I will share a home-cooked dinner.

Tonight, I will eat chicken. Of 365 dinners a year, I eat chicken about 350 times. Roast whole chicken. Grilled chicken legs. Roast chicken breast. Tonight, I eat roast half chicken.

On any given night, Karen might eat chicken for dinner, yet she might eat something else. Macadamia-crusted tilapia. White beans simmered with a Parmigiana rind. Pan-seared Chilean sea bass. Spaghetti. The "Florence" pizza from Arpeggios. Tonight, though, Karen will eat braised chickpeas.

Tonight, we will share mashed potatoes. Of 365 dinners, I eat potatoes about 180 times. Roasted red potatoes. Boiled fingerlings with herbs and olive oil. Mashed potatoes. Karen shares the potato habit, adding her own flourishes: she adorns roasted potatoes with thin slices of butter; to mashed potatoes, she adds a pat of butter.

On alternate nights, we eat sweet potatoes. Baked sweets. Mashed sweets. Roasted sweets.

Karen might eat rice. As I said, she might eat pasta, or pizza.

But for me, that's it--potatoes or sweet potatoes, every single night of my life. I enjoy eating the same things day after day, with small variances, and that's what vegetables and wine are for.

Tonight, we share coconut braised greens. Living seasonally, we experience variety in vegetables. Still, we eat coconut braised greens about 3 times a week. We eat steamed broccoli 3 times a week. Of course, I feel obliged to hand toss the warm broccoli with salt, fresh ground pepper, and olive oil. This is how you treat broccoli--with love. Summertime, I might pan-sear zucchini. Springtime, I might steam peas or asparagus. Autumn, I might split one acorn squash in half, dab the flesh with oil, and roast. Perhaps, feeling nostalgic for July, I'll pan-sear zucchini.

Most nights, we drink wine. Of 365 dinners, we drink wine 335 times. Weekdays call for something like Coppola Rosso. Weekends call for Coppola Claret or Rosenblum Syrah.

I'm finicky about food, refusing to eat what I deem to be lowly ingredients, but I remain a willfully oblivious wine-drinker. I simply cannot afford a refined wine palate.

As it is, I find most cheap red wines benefit from a jaunt in the fridge. I like wine nearly chilled. Karen likes wine room temperature. Nightly, we play the same game: I put the wine in the fridge, she takes it out. I put it in, she takes it out.

Each week, once a week, my wife jubilantly orders a small Florence pizza from Arpeggios. Sharing the festive mood, I'll make myself something special: chicken, maybe, and potatoes.

We've shared this small, strange life for 15 years. To me, marriage is not about growing old together. Marriage is about growing weird together.

The view from my seat: Karen and her pizza.

We invite others to share our weirdness. Friends and family come over all the time. Cogan, fresh from traffic, full of anxiety on a Tuesday. Charlie, cool and early, with a bottle, on a Friday. JJ, stoned and feast-ready, on a Saturday. My mom, decked in one of her immaculate coats, inquisitive and calm on a Sunday.

I place the wine, red or white in the fridge. I assign small tasks. I toss what seems like an excessive plume of salt into the greens. Then I'll throw open the oven, squint into the bellowing smoke, and jab a thermometer into the chicken. Friends have just come to accept: an invitation to my place means chicken.

I eat the same thing every night, and yet I look forward to dinner all day. To me, dinner is the point. Dinner absolves the day's hassles. Dinner redeems the day's failures. Without dinner, the day has no structure, no purpose. Dinner is not only food--it is communion, with others, with ourselves. Immersed in our daytime ambitions and jobs and twitter accounts, we might lose sight of those we love; we might lose sight of ourselves. Dinner saves us. When we sit down to dinner, we settle back into ourselves; we become human again.

Roast Half Chicken for One

My wife refuses to eat chicken every night, so often I enjoy roasting a half chicken for myself. This recipe accounts for two successive nights of half roast chicken.

6 tablespoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons pure cane sugar
One 3-4 pound organic or free-range chicken
2 teaspoons olive oil
Fresh ground pepper
1 teaspoon dried thyme

To make the brine: dissolve the kosher salt, sugar, and 4 cups water in a gallon bag. Place the chicken in the bag and brine for 2 hours (can be brined up to 8 hours).

Take the bird out of the brine, rinse, and pat dry. For crispier skin, allow the bird to air-dry after brining for at least 4-8 hours and up to two days.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Place one of your oven racks one the bottom rung.

Working with kitchen shears, split the chicken in half. (Here's a nice tutorial). Save the other half for a successive dinner.

Rub the chicken skin with the olive oil. Sprinkle fresh ground pepper and dried thyme over the skin.

Place the chicken skin-side down in a grill pan and roast on the bottom rack of the oven for 20 minutes. Flip the chicken and continue roasting, skin-side up for 8-10 minutes, until a thermometer inserted in the breast registers 160 degrees.

Let the chicken rest for 5-10 minutes on a cutting board.

Cut it up, into pieces: legs, wings, breasts.

Serves 1.


Pan-Seared Summer Squash with Basil and Lemon Vinaigrette

I originally developed this recipe for Whole Foods Market. Thick rounds of summer squash seared in a piping hot pan — cast iron is best — until just blackened, then tossed with a fragrant fresh basil and lemon vinaigrette. This is a summer recipe that adapts easily to most seasons. In Philly, we get local zukes (hothouse) throughout the fall, even into the winter. 

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon lemon zest
2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
2 large green zucchini

For the vinaigrette, in a small bowl, mix together olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, fresh basil and salt.

For the zucchini, slice zucchini into large rounds. Warm a 10-inch skillet (cast iron is best) until very hot. Place zucchini in pan and sear over high heat, until blackened, 2 to 3 minutes. Flip onto other side and sear additional 2 to 3 minutes, until both sides are blackened.

Place zucchini on a large platter. Spoon vinaigrette over zucchini. Serve warm.

Serves 4.

God is a Big Happy Chicken

In Shalom Auslander's story "God Is a Big Happy Chicken" God shows up as a chicken. A big happy one. A character protests: "But the bible..."

The Archangel Gabriel (Gabe) answers: "Don't worry about the bible. We've got the joker who wrote that thing down in hell."

Auslander's story makes perfect sense to me. It also feels perfectly Jewish to me, not because Auslander was raised as an Orthodox Jew, but because god shows up as a chicken. To me, being Jewish is loving chicken.

I think about my Jewish family. I think about my father's mother, Francis, gnawing on a chicken bone. I think about the chicken schmaltz she used to flavor her white rice. I recall only a few meals from my childhood and my favorite is this: roasted chicken and white rice with schmaltz.

I ate this meal about once a year, every year, on the very first night of my visit to my grandparent's house in Sherman Oaks, CA. I'd sit down, eat, gnaw on the bones, and for a very, very brief moment feel utterly Jewish.

My Jewish ancestry did not bequeath me religion. Instead, it gave me chicken.

When I gnaw on a chicken bone, when I revel in the darker parts of the bird, the skin, the wings, the weird little bits of spectacularly flavorful meat surrounding the back bone, I feel my Jewish heritage. I gnaw and I'm with my grandmother, in Sherman Oaks, and then something weird happens--this Jewish thing, this blood I have coursing through me: it speaks to me, in chicken. Suddenly, I'm an immigrant, I'm my Aunt Pauline (she lived to 103) walking with her mother and older brother, from Novgorod through Moscow to Odessa and the Black Sea and, ultimately, to Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

This excursion, undertaken on foot before the first World War, during the summer of 1913, brought the Polansky's to America. My grandfather, the first Polansky born in America, was called Moisha. Later, he changed his name to Maury Pollins.

Around the time I got married, I called my grandfather up and told him I wanted to change my name back to Polansky.

"No, please no," he said.

He assumed, with a name like that, that I would be barred from jobs, from opportunities. Polansky, I suppose, is too ethnic.

So I'm still Seth Pollins, feeling remotely weird about my name, feeling a little lost. And it's weird to say, even ridiculous, but I actually find a bit of myself in chicken.

Perhaps this is why I love sharing chicken so much, why I love cooking it for my Jewish father, and why I love watching him attack it like a madman. I take after him: we do not eat chicken, we brutalize it. This brutality is not an act of violence; it's an act of love: for flavor, for our blood.

With my grandmother I share this: a taste for dangerous, undercooked chicken; we know that chicken is most tasty when it perilously close to killing you.

(Actually, I probably just picked this up from eating my grandmother's unintentionally undercooked chicken. She probably prefers fully-cooked chicken. Whatever, I shape my own memory.)

Recently, I've been sharing whole roasted chickens with my wife. It's become our Sunday thing. I buy a whole chicken, brine it, brush the skin with olive oil, and roast it. I'm so happy too: Karen's moved from a zone of boneless, skinless breast to chicken wing. She doesn't attack it, just yet, but she does eat it, with gusto. That's good, because she's married to a Jew.

I was never bar-mitzvahed. I don't fast on Yom Kippur. I'm hardly religious. Most importantly, for some I suppose, my mother's not a Jew.

I do have this part of me though, this blood.

Being a Jew, of course, is not just about your relationship with god. Admittedly, I have no relationship with god. I could care less if god is a chicken. In fact, I just might start believing he is. Why not? I appreciate the blasphemous sensibility behind that belief.

To me, and perhaps only to me, being Jewish is eating like a Jew.

I love the famous, almost offensive Jewish eating culture: the loud, hand-waving, argumentative meal, foods flying here and there, across the table and out of our mouths. There's groaning, eye-rolling, and plenty of laughter. There's hot tears, shouts.

Stick a bottle of wine on a table. Stick a whole roasted chicken on a table.

That's it: no cups, no silverware, no plates.

Me and my dad would handle this situation quite easily. We'd sit down and tear that bird apart. We'd eat out of our hands. We'd sip from the bottle. We'd talk, raise our voices, and laugh.

And that's when I'm Jewish.

This is weird, idiosyncratic, but to me it's Jewish.

Seth's Brined & Roasted Chicken

Don't make this recipe unless you're going to brine the bird. Don't come to me and say, "I made that recipe, I didn't brine it, but it was good!" Bullshit. You don't need a recipe to roast a chicken. The brine is the key...There's nothing especially Jewish about this recipe except for the fact that a man with about 50% Jewish blood is writing it.

6 tablespoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons pure cane sugar
One 3-4 pound organic or free-range chicken
1 carrot, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 tablespoon plus two teaspoons olive oil
2 teaspoons dried thyme
fresh ground black pepper

To make the brine: dissolve the kosher salt, sugar, and 4 cups water in a gallon bag. Place the chicken in the bag and brine for 2 hours (can be brined up to 8 hours; for crispier skin, allow the bird to air-dry after brining for at least 4-8 hours and up to two days.)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Take the bird out of the brine, rinse, and pat dry. In a small bowl mix 1 tablespoon olive oil and thyme. Brush the olive oil mixture over the chicken and then season with fresh ground pepper.

Toss the carrots, celery, and onion with remaining olive oil. Place half of this mixture in the cavity of the bird. Scatter the remaining vegetables over a roasting pan.

Place the chicken, wing side up, on a rack over the roasting pan and put the chicken in the oven. Roast for 20 minutes. Take the roasting pan out of the oven and carefully flip the chicken so the other wing side is up. Roast for 20 minutes.

Turn the oven temperature up to 450 degrees. Take the roasting pan out of the oven and carefully place the chicken breast side up. Roast for 25 minutes, until a thermometer inserted in the breast registers 160 degrees.

Let the chicken rest for 5-10 minutes on a cutting board.

Cut it up, into pieces: legs, wings, breasts. Or just put it on the table and rip it apart.

More on Coconut Milk and Sex

I condition my hair with extra virgin coconut oil. At the end of summer, I buy coconut Surf Wax and smell it all winter. I eat coconut milk in one form or another with almost every lunch and dinner. It's in my lunchtime butternut squash soup (recipe pending). It's in my dinnertime mashed potatoes and mashed sweet potatoes. Lately, me and my wife eat the exact same vegetable side-dish every single night: Coconut Braised Greens. In this way we go through five or six cans of coconut milk every week.

That's a lot of fat.

For years coconut has been derided as unhealthy because of its high saturated fat content. My coconut milk has 10 grams of saturated fat per serving; that's 50% of the daily fat intake. I probably eat 20 grams of fat from coconut milk every day. Anyway. The coconut: unhealthy theory is bunk. Current research shows the fatty acids in coconut, the medium chain triglycerides, do not raise serum cholesterol or contribute to heart disease. Also, coconut is easily digested; it's not deposited as fat in arteries because it is easily metabolized. If you're skeptical or thinking of becoming a fanatic yourself, I suggest reading this thoroughly documented, well-presented article from Dr. Mercola's site. I offer this instead of boring links to studies.

Lately, as the winter enters its most hateful phase (football is over; baseball is yet to begin) I'm relying on visions of summer. The smell of coconut conjures lotion; skimpy bathing suits; an outdoor shower at a crowded beach house: the perfect little spot to steal away for a quickie.

No doubt, coconut is sexy.

Lately, on Saturday evenings, me and my wife make coconut-infused dishes.

Then, sometime after eating, we flop on the couch. We do not watch television. We do not fall asleep. Our place becomes crowded with all the things we do not do. The dishes in the sink. The laundry on the floor. The cellphones, unanswered. We just stay on the couch and pretend it's summer: We're staying in a crowded beach house; the couch is our outdoor shower.


Chicken and Mushrooms in a Lemon Coconut Broth

I've spent all week developing this recipe at home and at work. Then I made it last night for my brother's 40 birthday party. It's freakin' delicious. Serve it over a Perfect Pot of Rice.

6 tablespoons kosher salt
4 boneless skinless chicken breasts, tenderloins removed, fat trimmed
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
16 ounces assorted fresh mushrooms--cremini, shitake, or white button--sliced thin
1 15 ounce can full fat coconut milk
1 teaspoon juice and zest from one fresh lemon
1 garlic clove minced
2 tablespoons fresh chopped parsley
Sea salt
Fresh ground pepper

Dissolve the salt with four cups water in a gallon-size zipper lock bag. Add the chicken breasts and seal the bag, pressing out the extra air. Brine in the refrigerator for one hour.

Remove the chicken breasts from the brine and pat dry with a paper towel. Season with fresh ground pepper.

In a large skillet over medium-high heat, warm one tablespoon olive oil. Add chicken to skillet and sauté until almost cooked through, about 5 minutes per side. Transfer chicken to a cutting board. When cool, slice into thin strips.

Add remaining two tablespoons olive oil to skillet. Add mushrooms and saute. Season lightly with sea salt and fresh ground pepper. Saute, stirring frequently, until mushrooms have released and absorbed excess moisture, about 8 minutes. Add coconut milk, lemon juice, lemon zest, garlic, and reserved chicken. Simmer until chicken is cooked through. Stir in parsley. Season to taste with sea salt and fresh ground pepper.

Serve hot.

Risky Behavior

My home kitchen is tight. There's barely enough room for me, let another another cook. Still, I love cooking with others in my tight kitchen. At my best, I groove around others, slinking my way to the sink and back to the stove in a swift, graceful dance. On the actual dance floor, I'm a disaster. In the kitchen, I'm an evil Baryshnikov.

This is how Anthony Bourdain describes the kitchen dance: "If you're a saute man, your grill man is your dance partner, and chances are, you're spending the majority of your time working in a hot, uncomfortable confined, submarine-like space with him. You're both working around open-flame, boiling liquids, and plenty of blunt objects at close hand--and you both carry knives, lots of knives. So you had better get along."

I've pretty much loved every bastard I've worked with in the kitchen. I'd better, because I'm no fighter. I don't stab. A lot of guys I've worked with in professional kitchens were stabbers. I'm talking about the kind of guys who actually like to stab things and people. I remember John, a saute man, who stabbed his own pinkie clean off in the middle of a busy, Friday afternoon lunch shift. He bled profusely. He was pale, clearly freaked. I scooped up the bit of pinkie and rushed him to the hospital. On the way into the hospital, he stopped.

Do you think I have time to bust a smoke? he said.

So we stood there as John, losing blood, smoked.

I love that guy. I love the sense of chaos and criminality he brought to the kitchen. He was back at work that night, his pinkie bandaged, working the line.

The home kitchen, of course, is more calm. That's why I do everything I can to increase the sense of chaos. Perhaps this is why I don't get along with my wife in the kitchen. She's a measured cook, precise and willing. She creates beautiful, loving dishes, full of tenderness. When I'm not involved at all, she creates transcendent risotto, immaculate roast chicken, the best beef burgundy. I, however, mess with her mojo. If I'm around, things fall apart. I'm her terror.

I'm the type of cook who likes to fuck with people and food. Sure, I put love into my cooking; it's just that my love expresses itself in risk. I like smoke. I love fire. Blood turns me on. I love cranking the music up really high, darting back and forth, sweating, cursing, spitting, and getting naked, if it's hot enough. Mostly, I love when I take a piece of food, compare it to a body part, and then do offensive things with it.

And still, it all ends up tasty.

This past Friday, my kitchen buddy Mikey came over.

Mikey also revels in chaos. Mikey brought over Rodrigo y Gabriela: we pumped it up and danced. We were cooking for my wife and my buddy, JJ. It was a festive night. The celebration was simple: we celebrated food and each other. Mikey made quinoa chowder, slow-cooked baked beans, and Cajun cat-fish. I made an epic sweeta potato mash and BBQ chicken on the grill (with homemade BBQ sauce.)

The entire night I was evilly waiting to cook the catfish. I knew the catfish would destroy us. And it did. Mikey threw it in a cast-iron pan and the kitchen, the apartment, hell, the entire town, filled with noxious smoke. We coughed and sneezed and complained. Mikey just stood right over the pan, as if his own dying demanded his full attention.

Within minutes, he was utterly destroyed.

The meal was outstanding. Everyone loved everything, except the chicken. I willfully undercooked it. The others refused to eat the chicken, but I ate it, with absolute braggadocio, as if I were tempting the gods to obliterate me.

I ate two chicken legs--the center of both, a bit pale, teasing opulent rawness. To me, chicken legs tastes best just at 160 degrees--the center might be a bit undercooked, but the rest is a sort of divine specialty. It's the best chicken will ever taste. Also, it does strange things to you. I ate it and felt virile, alive, vampiric.

Epic Sweeta Potato Mash with Coconut Milk

Mikey uses the word "epic" a lot. If something defies expectation it is epic. He also uses the word "ridick" (as in ridiculous.) These sweet potatoes could also be considered ridick.

And oh, by the way, "Sweeta" is how my acupuncturist refers to sweet potatoes. She's a brilliant, caring lady from China. She tells me, "No more sweeta potato!" I'm not sure why.


4 medium sweeta potatoes, washed
1/4 cup coconut milk (full fat is best)
1 teaspoon sea salt
Fresh ground black pepper

Adjust an oven rack to the center position. Preheat oven to 4oo degrees. Arrange sweet potatoes on a foil-lined baking sheet.

Bake until a knife tip slides easily into the flesh, 60-70 minutes. (Sometimes, sweet potatoes can take up to 90 minutes or more to cook, depending on the size.)

Meanwhile, warm the coconut milk in a medium saucepan over low heat. Season the coconut milk with sea salt and black pepper to taste.

When sweet potatoes are cool, slip the skins off and place into saucepan with coconut milk. Mash the sweet potatoes in the saucepan. Season with extra salt and pepper.

Alternately, for an exquisitely creamy texture, pass the sweet potatoes through the holes of a food mill directly into the coconut milk and mash.

Serves 4-6

Big Bunches of Beautiful Grapes

As the summer yields to fall, grapes abound here in Barcelona.

Big bunches of beautiful grapes abound! Ha!

Nothing represents the end of summer quite like a grape. Augusts in Sea Isle City, my grandfather would freeze grapes. Each morning we would trek down to the beach, laden with beach chairs, paddleball, books, towels and coolers full of enough food to see us through till twilight. We were the typical shoobie family, hitting the sand before 10 am, staying until well into the evening. Dinners down the shore were always served later than usual. There was always a last walk on the beach, a few more pages to read, a final paddleball game. The cooler, therefore, had to not only keep us nourished, but also keep us happy. It held such treasures as Twizzlers, Tootsie pops and, of course, frozen grapes.

Each grape was a little frozen water ice wrapped in an edible red or green skin. They must be chewed quickly, passed from side to side with your tongue to keep your teeth from freezing and to keep brain freeze at bay. Sometimes they mix with the sand and salt on your fingers and taste even better.

That was a trick I taught Andres when we first met in the August of Argentina, the month of February. It was hot. He would stick the bed sheet in the cold shower and run back to the mattress on the floor we called a bed. I would freeze grapes. For weeks we lived on chilled wine, liter bottles of cold Quilmes and frozen grapes. When Karen visited she put on my overalls and we served her frozen grapes in a red Tupperware bowl.

For the years we shared a home in Buenos Aires, frozen grapes were our staple dessert. Fast-forward to Spain and grapes have taken on a different meaning. No longer just a dessert, they have become a symbol of wishful thinking. On New Year’s Eve the tradition here is to make twelve wishes. Each wish is symbolized by a single grape. When the bell tolls twelve, you must eat one grape for every stroke of the clapper. It is no easy task, especially if, like me, you make insist on buying grapes with seeds! At the first stroke of midnight, Spaniards (all 40 million of them!) begin frantically shoving the grapes into their mouths, swallowing wishes as fast they can. Only the truly dexterous are able to finish all twelve in that first second of the New Year. Still, as most things, the fun of it lies not in the accomplishment of the feat, but in the intent. Though the truly clever eat their big wishes first.

Autumn begins in a week’s time. And so grapes fill the fruit stalls in quantities not to be seen again till the end of December. Just last week Andrés and I found the most perfect bunch of grapes either of us has ever seen. It weighed about three kilos (almost seven pounds!), was beautifully shaped and we didn’t have the heart to pick it apart. Nor did we want to leave it for someone else to pick apart. So we took the whole thing home. Faced with three kilos of grapes, we pondered what to do with them.

We had them for dessert. We froze some. We ate them with wine and cheese (don’t tell Isaac Davis that!). And we still had so many!

What else to do with grapes?

Experiment with recipes. Savory ones.

Grapes to top Steve’s roasted garlic. Grape relish with tortilla chips. Warm grape salsa served with chicken and goat cheese.

Most recipes call for seedless grapes. Just as I ignore many details of the recipes themselves, I also ignore instructions to find seedless grapes. In part because we had already found a gorgeous bunch of grapes that happened to be seeded. Nor is it so easy to find seedless grapes here, even at New Year. And as I stood at my kitchen counter and de-seeded pound upon pound of juicy grapes I realized that I never again wanted to buy anything seedless. At least not while on holiday. What better meditation is there than the muted meeting of the knife with the wooden cutting block; digging thumbs and fingers into the sticky flesh; observing the delicate symmetry of the inner-grape; the sound of a child playing a toy xylophone floating down from a neighboring apartment.

Prepare all recipes to a child’s xylophone or to John Cage’s 4’33’’.

Ruby Port Glazed Grapes for Steve’s Roasted Head of Garlic

1 ½ cup red grapes
¼ cup ruby port or 2 tablespoons olive oil
Fresh rosemary or thyme
1 baguette, cut diagonally and toasted
8 oz. Brie, rind removed, room temperature

Prepare Steve’s roasted garlic.

Remove seeds from grapes (if necessary) and halve lengthwise. Mix grapes, Port or oil and herb of choice in a bowl. Let stand 30 min to 24 hours.

Spread each toast slice with Steve’s roasted garlic. Spread Brie over. Top with grapes.


Grape Relish

1 lb seeded red grapes
salt and fresh black pepper to taste
1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
¼ cup finely chopped celery
¼ cup finely chopped red onion
½ teaspoon finely chopped fresh jalapeño chile
½ teaspoon minced garlic
½ teaspoon finely grated fresh orange zest
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
¼ cup pine nuts, toasted

Remove seeds from grapes and halve lenghwise. Toss grapes with salt, pepper, and 1 teaspoon olive oil in a bowl. Place mixture on a baking sheet and roast until shriveled, about 25 minutes.

Cool to room temperature on sheet on a rack.

Toss grapes with celery, onion, jalapeño, garlic, zest, vinegar, pine nuts, and 2 tablespoons additional olive oil. Serve with quesadillas (below).


Grape & Goat Cheese Quesadilla with Chicken

For Grapes:

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 small red onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
1 small red pepper, finely chopped
1 cup red grapes
1 handful fresh cilantro, chopped
Sea salt and fresh ground pepper


4 chicken breasts, grilled and cut into thin strips
½ lb soft goat cheese
8 corn or wheat tortillas

Remove seeds from grapes. Heat olive oil in a medium sauce pan over medium heat. Add onion and a pinch of salt and cook, stirring, until the onion is translucent, 6 minutes. Add garlic and red pepper and saute for an additional 5 minutes. Add grapes. Cook over medium heat, until peppers are soft and grapes are wilted, 6-8 minutes. Remove from heat and add fresh cilantro, and salt and pepper to tastes.

Place strips of chicken breast on tortilla. Top with goat cheese and grape mixture, adding more fresh herbs if desired. Serve with grape relish (above).

Poached Chicken with Lavender Rub

In a recent post, Seth recommended coconut lavender sauce; as chance would have it, Andres and I had lunch this afternoon in a new plaza here on Sepúlveda that has an enormous flowerbed full of lavender and rosemary plants! Of course, this is the Mediterranean. I have often found rosemary, lavender and thyme when walking around Montserrat or when hiking in Garraf Nature Park just outside Sitges. Occasionally I am lucky enough to find rosemary up on Collserola. But here in the city! I snagged a handful or so of fresh lavender and am now looking for a good recipe. Luckily, most Catalans wouldn't know a fresh herb if it jumped up and bit them on the lip, so my new secret stash is safe. And just in time for autumn. I love fresh rosemary in fall.

Lavender

Some days later:

So I poached chicken in my own lavender rub for Saturday night's dinner. Our oven is on the fritz. And we have no grill. Still, I did as Seth suggested and brined the chicken, which I had never done before. It was fun. In a large frying pan, I browned the chicken breasts on both sides before slopping the lavender rub on the rounded top of each one. I then filled the pan with white wine, submerging the breasts halfway. I added a sprig or two of lavender to the wine, covered the pan and poached the chicken. When the breasts were cooked through, I brunt off most of the wine. What liquid was left was impregnated with the flavor of the lavender and so drizzled over the breasts before serving.

They were accompanied by sautéed zucchini and cherry tomatoes tossed with lemon, olive oil, fresh black pepper and feta cheese (!) on a bed of couscous.

The meal was a huge hit. Lavender chicken!?!? So was the dessert: homemade brownies (super-fudgey thanks to the fritzing oven) with slices of mango and vanilla ice cream.

To start we had peach salsa with corn tortillas. As it was an end-of-summer do, I drank a lovely Raimat Chardonnay. Everyone else drank red. They give in too easily to fall.

Poached Chicken with Lavender

1/4 cup sea salt
4 cups cold water water
4 large skinless boneless chicken breast halves
1/2 cup fresh chopped lavender
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus 2 tablespoons for browning
2 tablespoon French mustard
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
1 cup white wine
a few sprigs fresh lavender

Combine salt and water in a medium bowl. Dissolve. Submerge chicken breasts in salt-water solution and brine for 45 minutes. Rinse chicken, pat dry, and set aside.

Combine lavender, olive oil, French mustard, and black pepper in a small bowl.

Warm olive oil in a large saute pan over medium-high heat. Cook breasts until browned, 2-3 minutes per side. Slather the top half of the breasts with lavender mixture.

Add wine to submerge the breasts halfway. Add lavender sprigs, cover pan, and poach chicken until cooked through, 8-10 minutes.

Remove the breasts to a platter, raise heat to high and simmer until all but 1/4 cup wine is dissolved. Remove lavender sprigs and drizzle reduced wine over breasts. Serve.

Karen's Chicken Potato Paradigm

My wife recently started eating meat after a ten year hiatus. I took a portion of the hiatus with her, but I jumped back into the meat world three years ago. My first meal: leg of lab, medium rare.

Needless to say, my wife's a bit more tentative. So far, she's tried chicken breast. Even then, she's iffy. She has rules:

1. The chicken must be skinless and cut away from the bone.
2. The chicken must be slathered with BBQ sauce.
3. The chicken must be served with potatoes.

The chicken-potato thing drives me crazy. She simply will not eat chicken unless it is served with potatoes. I call this Karen's Chicken Potato Paradigm (KCPP) and, to be honest, it terrifies me: Clearly, I am the normal person in this marriage. This is not necessarily a calming thought.

Anyway, lately I've been thinking about how I might disrupt KCPP. One thing my wife is swayed by is deliciousness. For example, a few weeks ago, she happily ate a chicken breast with a delicious corn risotto. (We bought fresh Silver King corn from Lancaster.)

Friday night I had soaked a pot of rice. So I went out on a limb and brined some chicken. Then I went on a run and thought about how to sway my wife. Simply slathering the chicken with BBQ sauce wouldn't work because she would then demand potatoes. So I tried to think of an ingredient that was definitively anti-potato, but also pro-chicken, a sauce that might induce her to eat chicken with a simple pot of rice. Somewhere around mile two, I alighted upon my key ingredient: Coconut. Since my mom, a lavender addict, was coming over for dinner I added a bit of lavender to the mix...

Lavender Coconut Sauce

1 tablespoons extra virgin coconut oil
1 onion, thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon fresh ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon sweet paprika
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 14 oz. can full-fat coconut milk
2 teaspoons grade b maple syrup
2 tablespoons fresh lavender, chopped
1 tablespoon fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest
Sea salt and fresh ground pepper

Warm oil in a medium saute pan over medium heat. Add the onion and saute gently for 5-7 minutes until soft and translucent. Add the turmeric, cumin, and paprika, increase the heat to medium-high, and saute 1-2 minutes. Add the white wine. Simmer for two minutes Add the coconut milk, maple syrup, lavender, lemon juice, lemon zest, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and fresh ground pepper to taste.

Simmer for ten minutes. Let cool. Puree in a blender until smooth. Pour back into pan and simmer until thick. Adjust seasonings to taste.

Serve as a dipping sauce for roasted chicken to suspicious wife.