Cooking night after night is like biblical genealogy. One dinner begets another the way Paul begets Sarah (or whomever, sorry, haven’t read the big B in a while). Let me catch up on a few recent dinners, a chain of events that resulted in a salad I will love for time immemorial.
When the crisis started I had a freezer full of homemade chicken and turkey stocks. It all disappeared into beans, soups and stews, and I’ve been having a hell of a time finding chicken backs and wings. So one day I decided to prepare Chinese-style white-cooked chicken with the idea that the poaching liquid could be fortified and do double duty as stock.
You can find a lot of recipes for white-cooked chicken online: It is basically gently poached whole chicken that emerges soft and juicy, with a faint but pure chicken flavor. After poaching the chicken in salted water with a splash of cooking wine*, you shock it in ice water to stop the cooking and firm up the skin that I think gets that kind of chewy, bouncy “Q” texture that many Asian people love (think boba, mochi and pho meatballs). What makes it is the sizzling ginger-scallion sauce that goes on top.
We ate the white meat, saved the dark for another use and jacked up the poaching liquid with all the vegetable trimmings, herbs and weird little onions I need to clear out of the fridge. Result: oddly but appealingly salty stock.
None of this stock made it into the freezer. Feeling flush with the fresh stash I made a risotto for dinner that I flavored with pulverized dried porcini and topped with garlicky roasted button mushrooms. Risotto is a weird date: it’s hard to stop eating (like pizza), and it doesn’t like to play second fiddle to a main-course protein as much as we like to force it into that role. It has to be the meal. What it needs is a statement salad. No greens, cherry tomatoes and half-moon cucumbers in vinaigrette, but a salad that demands a bit more attention.
I had a bunch of Tuscan kale (cavolo nero, king of the brassicas), which can be the base green for a cool salad. There wasn’t much else, but I did have some really big carrots that could be cut into thick ribbons on the Benriner mandoline. Inspired by my friend Chandra who recently talked about pickling onions, I decided to give the carrots a quick pickle in white wine vinegar and salt; they were sweet enough that I didn’t want to add sugar. Then I started rooting through the pantry to see if I had any nuts that weren’t rancid when a container of dukkah (a Middle Eastern mixture of herbs, ground nuts and spices, meant to serve as a dip with olive oil) caught my eye.
The salad was starting to at least sound interesting, though I worried that the flavors would be too sharp if I made a vinaigrette. So I went to the Hidden Valley.
Actually we don’t have ranch dressing. But I mixed together some mayo and buttermilk and tanged it up with the orange, vinegary juices expressed by the carrots after sitting in their salty solution for a few minutes.
Speaking of salt, Have I got a garlic tip. Roughly chop a big garlic clove, cover it in a generous pinch of salt and let it sit on your cutting board for 5 minutes. The 12-year-old in me wants to add a parenthetical (it’s just like salting a slug!). You can then just smash it with the back of a knife into limpness and juices, scrape all this into a tea strainer and then steep it in the dressing. Beautiful garlic flavor, no stinging, bitter little bits.
I loved the creamy, mild garlic dressing against the slick, tangy carrots and the rough, nutty dukkah. I think this recipe would work just as well with ground nuts, cornbread crumbs or panko toasted in butter if you don’t have dukkah.
The next day we got an order of food and I put the whole chicken on the grill propped up on an open can of flat Diet Coke. Ain’t gonna waste beer. I was looking forward to the first grilled dinner of the season and really looking forward to the smoky stock I’d make from the carcass. I had some cabbage to braise and leftover cornbread to turn into a pan of dressing. Since I didn’t have any stock, I flavored both the cabbage and dressing with chicken bouillon cubes I had put in the order for emergencies. I wish I could show of my real-people bona fides, stop it with the snotty food boy and say that bouillon cubes are just fine in a pinch and made me nostalgic. Alas, I thought they were disgusting. It wasn’t that nice, faint but true chicken flavor of the white-cooked bird but rather the fakey chicken flavor of Cup O’ Noodles and Chickin in a Biskit crackers. I have about a gallon of stock for the next few days.
Giving my kale a happy ending
Tuscan Kale Salad
1 large carrot
3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
Salt
1 large garlic clove
1 bunch Tuscan kale
About 1/4 cup buttermilk
About 1/4 cup mayonnaise
2-3 tablespoons dukkah
First, quick pickle the carrot: Cut it into 6-inch lengths and cut wide, meaty ribbons with a vegetable peeler or with a mechanical slicer, such as a Benriner. Place it in a bowl with the vinegar and about a teaspoon of Diamond Crystal salt. Toss well and set aside for 10 minutes. Roughly chop the garlic and just cover in salt.
Wash the kale and tear nice bites of the leaves from the stems, which you can discard. Put the wet kale pieces into your salad bowl, grab a couple-three paper towels and really give the kale the full Massage Envy deep tissue treatment. It is fun, and you’ll end up with perfectly dry leaves with the kind of limp texture your tongue will read as silky.
Mix the buttermilk and mayo. If you don’t have buttermilk, plain yogurt or half and half is fine. Whisk in the expressed carrot juice until the flavor is what you like. Scoop up the garlic and place it in a tea strainer. Crush it with a spoon over the dressing bowl and then place in the dressing for about 5 minutes. When you take it out, push and scrape to get all the juices that pass through the strainer. Toss it all together, adjusting the flavor with salt and carrot juice, throw in some dukkah and yumbo your night away.
*Here’s another tip: keep a bottle of white vermouth next to the stove. Since it’s fortified it doesn’t go off. It subs in for Chinese cooking wine (as does dry sherry, which I enjoy drinking too much to make sure to have around) and sake. It cuts right through the smell of fish, and it makes the best butter sauce. It seems to like leeks and shallots more than plain white wine.