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.