4.21.12: El Clásico, feast-day chicken and a crazy coca.

Xavi demonstrates my mood during much of the match.

It’s been a tough week for FC Barcelona and its cules: an unexpected loss earlier in the week to Chelsea in the Champion’s League finals was bad enough, and then on Saturday we had to suffer the indignity of Real Madrid coming to Camp Nou and do the unthinkable–win. While RM has likely taken La Liga this season, it’s not over yet for my Catalans as there’s the second leg of Champion’s League yet to play this week, and in a month they’ll be fighting for the Copa del Rey and won’t have to beat Real Madrid to do so.

In other words: I have plenty of opportunities to whip up more Catalan food in support of the blaugranas.

07.11.11: Cobb Salad (Bachelor Chow 1)

Deluxe Cobb Salad

Last week the Mrs. was outta town for work,  leaving me to my own devices. Said devices were less than thrilling, as E left me for the beginning of the work week only and save for some serendipitous short-notice primo sport seats, not much can go down without the wife in town on a Tuesday. Maybe it’s a lack of imagination on my part.

6.26.11: appetizer (top secret smoked chicken wings)

Smoked Chicken Wings

Okay. I’ll admit that I may have been a bit too forcefully tight-lipped about the small device taking shape from bits of hardware store fodder on my balcony. I think having worked in an operational chemistry lab for so many years makes me skittish about revealing that I have a off-spec MacGyver-style contraption running in my purview of operation. Believe me, I knocked together some humdingers during grad school, stuff that I think if the New Haven fire chief ever saw he’d make me turn over my clamps and duct tape once and for all. For legal purposes, I am obligated to write at this point that I am entirely joking…

06.05.11: dinner (pasta and chicken)

Mustard-marinated roasted chicken

I can’t say I’m the most organized person, but one area in my life where I do crave order and lists is grocery shopping. My mom is a freaking ninja when it comes to it–not only does she write lists weekly, kept in a little stenography notebook, but she lists everything in the exact order she’ll find them in the store. By aisle. It’s hardcore–and she started doing it back when I was little and she needed to get through the store as quickly as possible before I started getting fussy.

I am nowhere nearly this organized with lists, but I am pretty good about whipping out a Post-It or one of our restaurant waitstaff notebooks (you know, those guest check pads you can buy at Staples) and a Sharpie and meticulously* noting down everything we need for a meal.

*or not-s0-meticulously

04.16.11: dinner (Rostit de Festa Mayor and the first of many Clásicos in the next two weeks)

Rostit de Festa Mayor (Holiday Roasted Chicken)

Four FC Barcelona/Real Madrid matches in eighteen days: it’s enough to make the most ardent Spanish football fan both excited  and terrified at the same time, because so much can happen in one game, much less four. It’s hard in America to find something to relate this phenomenon to, and the best I can offer is to imagine the Yankees and the Red Sox competing for three separate titles over the course of two weeks–it would be crazy and as a fan you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself so you’d likely sink into a banquette of a sports bar either in Manhattan or near Fenway, drinking beers and rapidly losing your grip on sanity as the games proceeded.

I’d use the Subway Series as another example, but that would be too low a blow to Mets fans right now.

I’m channeling much of that nervous energy into cooking (or at least planning meals), to the point that I peeled an entire head of garlic in 45 minutes thanks to a whole lot of antsiness during the hour leading up to the first game–a rematch of the Liga clásico that saw Barça destroy Real Madrid 5-0. Given how the teams have played since then this wasn’t considered the most important of the four, but being the first the anticipation was very high nonetheless.

02.21.11: dinner (salsa de muchos chiles y enchiladas de fresnillo, or: hello, Diana Kennedy, how nice to meet you.)

Salsa de Muchos Chiles

It’s always a sobering moment to realize that a relatively significant period of time has passed, but there are always interesting ways to measure it. For some it’s coffee spoons, for others birthdays, and for others still it’s some other milestone or series of milestones.

It occurred to me on President’s Day as we were making dinner that for us, measurement could be in enchiladas.

You see, when I first moved to New Haven five years ago, Michael and I got into a routine where he’d walk over to my apartment a few times a week and he’d make dinner for us. I had a long trek up I-95 from Westport that was often made longer by traffic, and coming home to delicious smells quickly became the highlight of my day. There would be a few times when I’d make it home before dinner was completely finished and I could help out, and one of the first times I can remember getting into the kitchen with him was to make enchiladas. He whipped together his own enchilada sauce and cook some chicken thighs, I grated cheese and then snuck bites of cheese, and we assembled them in the casserole, poured the mess of sauce and cheddar over them and thew them in the oven to get piping hot and delicious.

It was, of course, completely inauthentic in preparation but it was delicious all the same, and over the years I always held a fondness for that dish but we stopped making it regularly because it’s not terribly healthy and I think Michael got bored with it. We only had a fraction of the cookbooks then that we do now–most of them Italian in theme–so our knowledge of homemade Mexican food was scant at best.

02.19.11: dinner (roast chicken, Greek-style)

I guess we have several running jokes around here, but my favorite is probably my love of chicken roasting. As in,

Elizabeth: What do you want to make tonight?

Michael: I could roast a chicken…

Sometimes I just say it because I don’t want to think of what we’re having and if she says yes then so much the better, win-win-win. Lately I’d been rubbing the bird with some kind of chili or chipotle and shredding it into tortillas, so this time we looked for something still simple but decidedly different. Enter The Silver Spoon which is a tome of no (too) intensive variations on a common theme.

09.23.10: dinner (Catalan lemon and garlic sauce over Cornish game hens)

 

Cornish Game Hen in Lemon and Garlic Sauce

 

Thank you for linking in, readers! Elizabeth found this recipe inside of a Catalan cookbook she’d found recently and after going my own way on the Spanish chicken wings, I promised to make it according to factory specifications later in the week. We have a good deal of Spanish cookbooks in the house, probably more than of any other national cuisine save perhaps Italian, so I can say that this dish was very emblematic of its nation. [Ed. - SIX SEVEN Spanish cookbooks to TWELVE Italian books, thank you very much!] I know we’ve been hitting España pretty hard lately, so we’ll be posting one last solidly Spanish plate then moving East.

12.14.09: dinner (celebrating the contents of a burrito).

Chicken-Bean Burrito with Green Cabbage Slaw

When I used to live in the Have (rhymes with cave and rave, not with Cav or Mav), there was a great burrito guy that would sell to us Yalies who scampered about on science hill during the luncheon hour.  He owned a little restaurant near Water Street and despite trying to train others to serve in his stead, 9 out of 10 times, he’d be manning his food truck every afternoon, maybe because he was a perfectionist, maybe because there were two other Mexican trucks at the intersection and he needed to hold the line.

12.12.09: dinner (roast chicken and chayote are both quite delicious together).

Roasted Chicken with Cara-Cara/Chayote Salad

Sometimes, I get this feeling.  I just get this yearning, this urge.  Insane vegan women handling out pamphlets on the subway notwithstanding,  I get an inescapable urge to roast a chicken.  Roasting a chicken is a simple,  straightforward and rewarding exercise, absolutely perfect for a chilly Saturday.  It only takes about 90 minutes from truss to table and the bird comes out delightful.

Roasting a chicken is simple and best set forth in Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook.  To me, the most important decision is what to coat the birdie with before he goes for his trip down the high-heat highway.  My favorite is still a mixture of dijon mustard, salt, red pepper and cracked grains of paradise.  This time I tried for dried chipotle and Fox Point found at Penzey’s in Grand Central Market.  It was good, but in order for the coating to really take charge, it needs to be sterner stuff.

I found a few chayotes at Whole Foods on 97th street and after a few Top Chef flashbacks, I decided to give a simple salad a whirl.  It’s special citrus season, and instead of making my standard fennel/grapefruit salad, I mixed the chayote, shaved very thin with some Cara Cara oranges, their juice and some olive oil.  I let the whole affair sit in the fridge for a few hours before dinner and the result was a crisp salad that paid well with the sumptuous poultry.    One great thing about all the food on TV these days is that it can turn us on to ingredients we’d never even had heard of otherwise.  So fear not the unknown, readers, and until next time, cook on!