Chicken | Sybaritica

I had de-boned some chicken thighs with a view to doing a Yakitori sort of dish but the weather was not very nice for grilling on the chosen day and I decided to just play around a little instead. There were some leeks needing to be used in my vegetable crisper and I rather thought the two could be used together in some way…

I ended up coating some sections of the leek in garlic butter, salt and pepper, and then baking them wrapped in slices of Prosciutto for about twenty minutes (just until the leeks were beginning to soften). Then, I placed the cooked bundles inside the thighs, added some chopped fresh sage and then rolled everything up. I baked the rolls for another twenty minutes or so at 375 degrees and took them out when nicely golden.

As pictured above, I have presented one of the rolls (I did 4) as a sort of appetizer and I think one could play around with this basic idea in any number of ways. Here, I drizzled a little Redcurrant Jelly over top of the roll (sliced in two to display the stuffing), and garnished the plate with a little sprig of rosemary. The roll, of course, could be cut in various different ways for service, and all sorts of other sauces and garnishing’s would work nicely too.

My wife and I actually had two rolls each as part of a main course. I served them alongside a vegetable preparation consisting of sweet corn braised with a little chopped daikon green in chicken stock and apple sauce. For a starch, I included a helping of a store-bought herbed bread dressing I wanted to use up and the whole combination was very nice. I did, however, made some mental notes of things I would change about the chicken rolls…

First, the Prosciutto ended up being just a little leathery. I have encountered this before (especially with the cheaper varieties) and I think that Pancetta, or maybe even regular bacon would be better. A bit more leek stuffing would also have been better and, after thinking about it, I imagine that a hot pepper jelly would be really good as a condiment too. I was pleased with this but I will enjoy fiddling with the basic theme again and maybe you can even try a few twists of your own…

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Today’s dish is a pretty good example of what often used to appear on westernized Chinese restaurant menus as ‘Moo Goo Gai Pan’. That name, or some variant on the spelling, is a rendering of the Cantonese words for ‘Button Mushrooms with Chicken Slices’. Generally, the mushrooms in most restaurants would be the canned variety and the basic ingredients would almost always be ‘bulked out’ with one or more additional vegetables. Today, I am also going to use canned mushrooms but I am limiting the ‘bulk’ to just a little broccoli…  Read more

In my post about the Argentinian Chimichurri sauce for grilled meats, I noted that the preparation is also used as baste and marinade during the cooking process. Chimichurri is probably most closely associated with beef but the tangy-herbaceous notes also work very nicely with chicken. Today’s recipe would be terrific on the barbecue but, this not being the season in these parts, I am going to bake in the oven instead…  Read more

Today’s dish is very flavorful and very simple to make. As long as you have the ingredients, you can put it together at the last minute without a lot of fuss…  Read more

Today’s production is very Indian in character and features chicken roasted in a green spice blend, or masala, whose central ingredient is dried Fenugreek leaf (known in India as ‘Methi’). In my post on the fresh Fenugreek Leaf, I noted that, whereas the fresh article is useful as a vegetable, when dried, the flavor becomes very concentrated and, as a culinary herb, lends dishes a very warm, almost maple-like flavor that is quite unique… Read more

You can certainly barbecue a whole chicken in its original shape (either with or without a spit), but butterflying it and opening it up so that it lays flat on a grill allows not only for a faster barbecuing time, but ensures more even cooking too. We will take a look at this technique in today’s post and, if you have never tried butterflying a chicken before, don’t worry… it’s really very simple…  Read more

The following dish was inspired by a recipe I came across in one of my Chinese cookbooks in which slices of chicken breast are stir-fried with a variety of watercress in a light sauce of thickened chicken stock. As part of my wife’s summer green-house project, she interspersed some of her primary crops with fast-growing radishes (both white and red), and, when she needed to thin some of these out, I decided to use the greens to do a similar, but somewhat modified, version of the aforementioned original…  Read more

I recently came across these rather curious sounding sausages and couldn’t pass them up. They are made by a company with the very singular name ‘Spolumbo’s’ and I don’t think I’ve yet seen a more interesting combination.

The sausages came three to a pack so I grilled them up and made two ‘hot dog’ type dealies and then sliced up the third so my wife and I could try it without any other flavors getting in the way. The sausage was actually pretty good but we both agreed that there was no hint of either rum or pineapple in the meat but that it was obviously chicken rather than the more common beef or pork. Curiously, the flavor reminded me very much of roast chicken with a mildly herbed stuffing.

I can’t say I was ‘wowed’ by the experience especially, but I would buy them again sometime as the ‘hot dogs’ I made were very nice. I grilled the inside surfaces of the buns and then brushed them with garlic infused olive oil, slathered on some hot English mustard and then topped off the whole with chopped pickled banana peppers mixed with parsley. It was a great combo…

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Some time ago, I used some leftover chicken that had been red-cooked by poaching in my Chinese Master Sauce and deep-fried it to very a very delicious result. Since then, I have wanted to try the same technique with a western style poaching medium and my ongoing Firepot Stock seems an ideal choice for this experiment.

My firepot stock is now almost three weeks old and this will be the second use of it as a cooking medium. I have also brought the stock to a boil on several occasions to keep it fresh and, in some of those instances, simmered it with the trimmings of beef, ham and pork from other dishes. The depth of taste is gaining complexity and I think it will add a nice flavor to the chicken as well as derive a little more depth in return… Read more

Well, here it is … my entry for the International ‘Shanghai Chicken’ project proposed by fellow blogger Stefan.

Stefan’s ‘rules’ specified that the dish could be an existing traditional recipe, or one created for this project, but it ‘has to include chicken, chilies of some sort, vegetable greens, and nuts’. My creation conforms to the basic theme but with just a tiny bit of a twist…

Basically, I aimed for a dish that somewhat resembled the one giving rise to the project… I also used cubed chicken but I substituted cashews for pine-nuts and incorporated the chili component into a sweetened tomato base. For the greens, I also deep-fried this particular component but – and this was the major flight of fancy – I looked to the sea for my green vegetable and used a dried seaweed popular in Japanese cuisine known as ‘Wakame’.

Read on if you would like to see a few more details and my verdict on the final product…  Read more