Comfort food

There has been so much in the news this week about the earthquake in Haiti. It's hard to know what to say in response to such a horrible suffering. It's been a dark week and my response to this sadness has been mostly to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Food as comfort is something we're all familiar with so I offer this post and recipe as my best shot at comfort. I wish I had more to offer.

That time in the kitchen has meant more of Orangette's caramel corn, a lemon poppy seed cake that I may make again tonight, gratin dauphinois from the Joy of Cooking (thinly sliced potatoes baked in cream or milk, akin to scalloped potatoes), and chicken Marbella. It's the chicken Marbella that I want to tell you about. It's warming, homey, a nice balance of sweet and salty and sour, and easy to make. We almost always have the ingredients for this, or at least enough of them, and I think it's hubby's favorite way to eat chicken.

I've adapted the recipe from a faded photocopied page from the Silver Palatte cookbook, sent to me by my sister-in-law. She once sent an overnight package to us with a vacuumed sealed bag of the marinade, with instructions, and vacuumed sealed bread to accompany the chicken. All we had to do was add the chicken and bake. It was a very welcomed gift.

Lots of people seem to make a version of this recipe; this is mine.

Chicken Marbella (loosely adapted from the Silver Palate Cookbook)
I have completely changed the seasonings in this recipe and omitted the cup of sugar it calls for sprinkling over the top just before baking. I think that the dried fruit offers plenty of sweetness.

8# of bone-in chicken, cut into parts
1 head of garlic, peeled and chopped
3T dried sage
pinch dried, ground rosemary
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/3 cup olive oil
1 cup pitted prunes (we didn't have quite enough, so I added a handful of raisins)
1/2 cup pitted olives
1/2 cup capers
6 bay leaves
1 cup white wine

In a large bowl, combine the chicken parts with garlic, sage, rosemary, salt and pepper, vinegar, oil, prunes, olives, capers and bay leaves. Marinate up to 24 hours, refrigerated. (Though I only let it sit for 20 minutes or so and it was just fine).

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Place chicken in a large baking dish - you may need to use two - keeping in a single layer. Distribute marinade between two pans and pour the wine over the chicken. Bake for 50 minutes to an hour, until the juice from the thighs run clear when poked with a knife.

Serve over rice.

Smoke tales and chicken soup

Well, it's a Monday night after the holiday and I am listening to the (not-so) lovely sound of our shop vac. See, we're having wood stove problems. The kind that leads to a big belch of smoke that suspiciously does not make our smoke alarm go off but does irritate my eyes and dry out my throat. Should we open it up? Are we not burning it hot enough? It it getting enough air? Why does it smell like creosote? Shit.  We have a lot of conversations like this these days. We're no strangers to operating a wood stove and we've never had problems before. This is very frustrating. So Hubby armed himself with brushes, the aforementioned shop vac, a fan in the window, and some gloves to show the stove who is boss. And I am sitting at the kitchen table, trying to be quiet and not comment on the nasty smell of creosote, and the roar of the vacuum, and the chill breeze from the window. I have high hopes if only because I can't bear another night of smoke-irritated eyes. Triumph, Hubby, triumph!

Isn't the stove pretty inside? I've never seen this before.

And so this feeling of irritated mucus membranes made me think of chicken soup for dinner. I'd show you a picture except that we ate it pretty fast and I didn't think to take out the camera. It came from a whole batch of chickens that we bought from a colleague of mine at work. He raised 50 birds this fall and we bought 20 of them for the freezer. When we brought them home, it was a two-day butchering process with freezing cold fingers and more chicken parts that I particularly wanted to see. But we ended up with bags of chicken legs, chicken breasts, halved chickens, whole chickens, all stowed in our freezer; and here's to hoping we don't have a power outage, right?

This is part of that two-day process. Can you hear the crunch?

And worth noting is this: while I grew up vegetarian and have had a quasi-queasy relationship with eating meat in my adult life, I feel good about our freezer full of local meat. I don't want to get all preachy here, but it matters to me that the pork and the chicken we're eating this fall comes from animals raised by friends. I can attend a silly fundraiser cocktail party peopled by principled foodies, talking about the omega fatty acid balance in factory meat today, and not despair over the coming meal. I can read about factory farms and feedlot meat and not change my dinner plans. This is a good thing. And pairing it with veggies from our garden (Still! What is this November weather we're having? I still have lettuce in my garden!) makes me glad, glad, glad. I love this.

And so, back to the chicken soup. We took all the spare parts, so to speak, from all those chickens we cut up and made some killer chicken soup from them. And then (I hear swearing coming from the vicinity of the woodstove. I think this is not a good sign.) we froze a bunch of it in ziplock bags. And at the end of the day today, with my back aching - this is another story - and Hubby itching to get at that woodstove, that chicken soup from the freezer tasted like manna. It's nothing special, just carrots, celery, onions, chicken and chicken stock. But it honestly tastes better than just about anything else we've had in weeks. A salad of napa cabbage, cress, and tangerines, and this is heaven.

So, go make some chicken soup, preferably from a nice, fat, local chicken and see what I mean. And fear not, we'll not burn down our house, nor poison ourselves with carbon monoxide (I'm pretty sure that the carbon monoxide detector does work, in contrast to the smoke detector, apparently). I think that Hubby is slowing down in there- this is a good sign, I'm sure.

Monday Night Dinner

I came home early after hitting the mid-afternoon blahs. The office was so quiet today - no distractions, no bustle, no stimulation, and as the heat built over the course of the afternoon, I found myself increasingly drifting laterally, getting sidetracked from the work at hand to delve into something not so relevant to what I should have been doing... this for instance.

I came home with groceries and Ralph, uncharacteristically, came immediately away from his work in the office and we put away the cold stuff and then went right out to the hammock. (Though this gives us rather more agency than we felt at the time. Maybe it's better to say we drifted out to the hammock). He is reading Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which I'm actually also reading in between novels. But today I read The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. It is witty, engaging, hard to put down. And so we spent the late afternoon, swinging gently back and forth, in the shade of two maple trees, head to toe in the hammock.

When we finally came in for dinner, I pulled out the left-over chicken breast from last night's grilled whole chicken- Ralph (dear, clever, forward-thinking Ralph) had shredded it last night before putting it away. I mixed the chicken with a diced spring onion from the garden, basil, mayo, Dijon mustard, horseradish, and capers. It was delicious. We ate it on bread with lettuce from Arethusa Farm- a red buttercrunch lettuce, one of my favorites that I never remember to plant in our own garden. Very nice cap to a lazy Monday evening.

I really wanted a photo to post because the meal was lovely to look at with that bright red lettuce, but alas, it was good, what can I say? I didn't get to it in time. So instead, here are some photos I took of our garden aliums- looking vibrant and vigorous from all our rain.