Crispy, braised chicken thighs with oven roasted tomatoes, olives, and garlic confit

This dish utilizes a couple staples that I like to have in my fridge at all times: garlic confit and oven roasted tomatoes. To make garlic confit, just buy a bunch of peeled garlic cloves at the grocery store, throw them in a small pot, cover with canola oil, and simmer over very low heat until the garlic cloves are very soft and a knife or fork easily slides through them. Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up a month.

For the oven roasted tomatoes, cut a bunch of roma tomatoes in half, lengthwise, place them cut side up on a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and then scatter some fresh thyme over everything. Roast in the oven over very low heat (~250F) for 8 hours. Store these in an airtight container, covered in oil, for up to a month.

Now, on to this dish.

INGREDIENTS:

(2 servings)

• 4 chicken thighs, bone in, skin on.
• 8-10 oven roasted tomato halves.
• 6-8 cloves garlic confit.
• 1 cup assorted olives.
• 2 tsp sherry
• 1 Tbsp garlic oil (from the garlic confit)
• 1 shallot, minced.
• 1/2 to 1 cup white wine.
• 2 sprigs thyme
• salt and pepper.

Preheat a 10 to 12 inch skillet over medium to medium high heat and preheat the oven to 350F. Season the chicken thighs with salt and pepper. Add oil to the pan, and once the oil begins to shimmer, add the chicken, skin side down. It is important to make sure the pan and the oil are adequately preheated before adding the chicken, otherwise the skin will stick to the pan. Let the chicken cook for a few minutes. Periodically, check the chicken by seeing if you can move it around without getting any resistance. At first, the skin will stick to the pan, but once it is cooked enough, the cells in the skin contract and, magically, almost, they stop sticking to the pan. If you try moving the chicken to early, you'll get burnt skin stuck to the bottom of the pan. No good. Once the skin is nice and crispy, turn the chicken thighs and cook for another minute on the other side. Remove to a plate, drain the oil and accumulated fat, reserving about 1/2 Tbsp.

Add the shallots and garlic confit. Cook until the shallots become translucent, then add the wine, sherry, tomatoes, olives, and thyme sprigs (you can leave these whole and remove before serving). A little smoked paprika might be a nice addition to this dish as well, if you happen to have some lying around the pantry. Let this mixture simmer for a couple of minutes.

Add the chicken back to the pan along with any drippings that have collected on the plate. Place the whole thing in the oven, covered, for about 15 minutes. Remove the cover and blast the chicken under the broiler until the skin crisps up again. Alternatively, you could just leave the chicken uncovered in the oven.

This dish goes well with roasted potatoes.

Last dinner in my Chicago kitchen

Here's the last dinner I made in my Chicago kitchen. Tomato salad, braised greens, grilled corn with chile and lime, and grilled steak. It was a bit of an eclectic mix. But it used up the last of the vegetables in the fridge.

The tomato salad was pretty straight forward. Just slice up the tomatos, mix with thinly sliced shallots, capers, olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper.

The greens (purple kale) were braised in some pork stock and a smoked ham hoc that had been sitting in my freezer. I also added some red pepper flakes and raisins. The raisins add a nice bit of sweetness and they soak up a lot of the savory flavors from the braising liquid. To make this dish, you want to start by sauting one bunch of sliced up kale along with a few cloves of sliced garlic. Add the stock, ham hoc, raisins, red pepper flakes, and maybe a tablespoon of cider vinegar. Let this simmer for a while (until the greens are very soft), remove the ham hoc, pick off the meat and toss this in with the greens.

I served the corn with a chile lime spread. I made the spread by mixing melted or softened butter with mayo in about a 1 to 3 ratio, and then adding lime juice and Mexican chile powder. Slathered over some grilled corn, this stuff is really, really good.

My "Go-To" Pasta Dish

I probably make orechiette with rapini and sausage more than any other pasta dish. This is an easy dish to make, which may be why I turn to it so frequently, but it also has a really nice balance of flavors. Another nice thing about this dish is that you can leave the meat out without losing too much flavor, making it a nice option for vegetarians.

You can make this dish with regular supermarket brocolli, and it is quite good, but I prefer the more bitter rapini, or broccoli raab. This is a classic dish that appears on numerous restaurant menus and on this blog here and here. Because I make this dish so frequently, I have had the chance to tweak the recipe several times. The main difference between this dish and the last version that I posted is the addition of oven roasted tomatoes. In my opinion, the "brightness" and acidity of the tomatoes is a welcome addition to this dish. I've made this iteration of the dish three or four times and am pretty pleased with it, so I thought I should include a step-by-step on how to make it.

First, we'll start with the necessary ingredients. This recipe makes two large servings or four to five servings if it is served as the pasta course for a multi-course meal. If you gather and prep your ingredients ahead of time, assembly is a snap.

You will need 2 cups of dried orechiette, 1/4 cup walnuts (toasted), 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese, 3 cloves of roughly chopped garlic, 2-3 oven roast Roman tomatoes, 1/2-3/4 bunch of rapini, 1 Italian sausage, 1-2 anchovy fillets, olive oil, and red wine or balsamic vinegar. You may also add 1/2 to 1 tsp of red pepper flakes if you want to add a little heat.

Start by bringing a pot of water to a rapid boil. Salt the water and blanche the rapini for a little over a minute.

Remove the rapini and rinse under cold water. Set the rapini aside and let it drain in a collander. Bring the water back to a boil and add the pasta (you can add a little oil to the water to reduce foaming in the pasta water). The pasta will be done in about 10 minutes, and you can use this time to finish the other ingredients. First, remove the sausage from the casing and break apart into small chunks.

Cook the sausage with 1 Tbsp of olive oil for 2 to 4 minutes over medium high heat. When the sausage has browned, drain on a paper towel, leaving the oil in the pan. Add the garlic, anchovy, and red pepper flakes to the pan and cook over medium until the garlic just begins to change color.

Once the garlic begins to turn golden brown, add the rapini and the oven roasted tomatoes. Before adding these ingredients, cut the rapini into 1 inch length, and cut the oven roasted tomato halves (you will have 4 to 6 of these halves) into quarters. (To make oven roasted tomatoes, just cut the roma tomatoes in half, length wise, toss with olive oil and salt, and roast in a 200F oven for about 8 hours).

Toss everything together and let the mixture cook for another couple minutes.

Next, you will need to add the walnuts. Make sure to toast the walnuts in a dry frying pan, toaster oven, or oven before using them. This brings out the flavor a bit. If you don't toast the walnuts, they can have a sort of stale flavor to them, so this step is key. Roughly chop the walnuts and then toss them in with everything else.

When the pasta is al dente, add it to the pan with all of the other ingredients along with 1/4 to 1/3 cup of the cooking water.

Toss everything together, then add the parmesan cheese, 1 Tbsp vinegar, and season with a pinch of freshly cracked black pepper.

Tomato and mozzerella "sandwiches"

I made this as a first course for dinner the other night. It's more or less an insalata caprese, but with a little twist, given the ingredients I had on hand. The main components of the dish were slices of fresh mozzerella sandwiched between slices of red and yellow heirloom tomatos. Instead of seasoning the tomatos with kosher salt, I used some alder smoked sea salt to give the tomatos a hint of smokiness. To further up the savory element of the dish, I dressed the tomatos and mozzerella with some chive oil (using chives from the back porch garden) that was spiked with some anchovies. The result was a dressing that had a slight savory tone, like ceasar salad dressing. I topped it up with some nice aged balsamic vinegar from Modena.

Locally raised steak, smoked blue cheese, and arugula and tomato salad

This is a pretty straight forward meal that relies on the ingredients more than anything else. The center of the dish was a ribeye steak from a farm in Vermont. The steak was seasoned with salt and pepper, cooked rare, and then garnished with Tuscan olive oil and smoked blue cheese. The salad was arugula dressed with the same olive oil, lemon juice, and kosher salt. The tomatoes were seasoned with salt and pepper and left to sit for about 15 minutes, then topped with olive oil, sweet balsamic vinegar, and chives. I find that letting the salt sit on tomatoes for a while really improves the flavor.

Caprese

Here's a simple little snack I made with some nice local ingredients from Savenors. It's just organic cherry tomatoes, sliced thin, super fresh mozzerella from Fiore Di Nonno, a really good cheese maker based just up the street in Somerville, some nice thick, aged balsamic vinegar, Campo Corto olive oil, salt, pepper, and a little parsley. 

Heirlooms

Every week, a farmer's market comes to Harvard Square, and last week, one of the stands had a bunch of great looking heirloom tomatoes on sale. Here are two salads I made. The first is a caprese with basil, parsley, and chives from the herb garden on our back porch.


For the second salad, I combined a variety of different colored tomatoes with shallots, garlic, basil, parsley, salt, pepper, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. Its a pretty simple salad that is only as good as the ingredients that you put into it.
This salad was part of a larger meal that I made when Gustavo was visiting our place for a couple of days. Below is penne with peppers and sausage. For this dish, start by making a simple tomato sauce with San Marzano tomatoes if they are available. While the tomato sauce is cooking, begin prepping the peppers. The finished product will look a lot better if you use a variety of different colored peppers. The key to making this dish good is to peel the outer membrane off of the peppers. Its a bit of a pain, but it really makes a big difference in the texture of the dish. I usually cut the peppers into quarters and then take the skin off with a vegetable peeler. Once the peppers are peeled, cut them into squares (about 2cm) and throw them in with the tomato sauce. Next, slice up a couple sweet Italian sausages and cook them separately with a bit of olive oil. It is easier to get nice thin slices if you partially freeze the sausages. If you put them in the freezer when you begin to make the tomato sauce them enough time to firm up. Add the sausages to the sauce when they are cooked and season the sauce with a pinch of red pepper flakes, salt, and balsamic vinegar. Add the vinegar a little bit at a time and stop once you can just begin to taste the vinegar in the sauce. Peppers, sausage, and vinegar is a classic combination, and the goal is to try to get a nice balance between all of those elements in this sauce. Be judicious with the vinegar, though, since too much will over power all of the other flavors. Let the sauce simmer for a little while to let the flavors mix, and then to finish the dish, spoon some of the sauce into a pan with some almost cooked penne (any shaped paste will work well) and cook the sauce and pasta for a minute or so. This last step helps the flavors of the sauce penetrate the pasta and is something that you should do with any pasta dish.

As a first course, I made a bunch of mussels. These are good, easy, and cheap. You can prepare mussels a million different ways. For this dish, I cooked up a lot of garlic with shallots, pancetta, and a generous portion of butter. After a few minutes, add a cup or so of white wine, bring that to a boil, throw in the mussels and cover. After a couple of minutes, the mussels are done. Season with some salt and pepper and garnish with parsley. Serve with bread to soak up all of the broth. That's all there is to it. It takes about 15 minutes to make and all the ingredients cost about $8.

Gazpacho

I love good tomatoes. It's hard to get good tomatoes where I grew up in Washington state, but, fortunately, you can get some great tomatoes in Boston. It was a hot day, and the first batch of heirloom tomatoes had just arrived at the store, so I decided to make gazpacho with seared scallops for dinner. Here's the finished product.

The recipe comes from a Bobby Flay cookbook. It includes all of the veggies pictured above, diced really small. Use only half of the onion, and put half of the tomatoes and one cucumber in a blender with 6 slices of good white bread and a couple of cups of tomato juice. Add the diced vegetables to the puree along with olive oil (a couple tablespoons), red wine vinegar (~1/4 cup), lime juice (2 limes), and salt and pepper to taste. I thought that this recipe was a bit heavy on the onions, so I would do one of two things next time: use half the amount of onions or soak the onions to take the bite out. Soaking the onions involves changing the water and squeezing moisture out of the onions about every 10 minutes. I also would have pureed more of the vegetables since I like a smoother gazpacho.
I served the Gazpacho with a Kim Crawford sauvignon blanc, which is a really great summer wine. Here's Andre, getting ready to dig in.

Soup and sandwiches

With the right additions, boxed soup can be pretty good. Abby and I enjoyed this quick lunch of boxed, tomato soup infused with thyme and garnished with parmesan cheese, parsley, and a hint of truffle oil. On the side is grilled cheese sandwich with some really great mustard that I picked up at Whole Foods the other day (Medocino Mustard's Seeds & Suds mustard, if your interested).