Scottish Cow

Chicken Wings, Forget the Buffalo

Let’s get the Q & A out of the way…

You:  You live in Buffalo, right?

Me:  Yes.  Well, 10 minutes to the south, but close enough.

You:  And you made some chicken wings…sweet.

Me:  Yeah.

You:  But…um…those don’t look spicy.  Or buttery.  Or dripping with Franks.

Me:  Nope.

That’s all.  I’ll let you know what happens on my way to work tomorrow.  I’m guessing there’s gonna be a police blockade along with a couple greasy cooks from the Anchor Bar looking for the guy in Buffalo making chicken wings without the, uh, Buffalo.  I may be breaking some unwritten rule I don’t know about…I mean, I didn’t grow up here.

Two more things before we can talk about what’s actually in the picture above.

1)  Designers of menus at crappy chain restaurants all across the country right now are taking their bland, boring items, throwing the word “Buffalo” in front of them, and putting some hot sauce on top.  Stop it.  Very annoying.  Well, at least you aren’t celebrating our other national claims to fame – an almost good enough football team and crappy winter weather (which isn’t really that bad.)

2)  The chicken wing is a really underused item.  Why is it that you rarely see them other than on the appetizer menu in “Buffalo” form?  They are delicious (much tastier than the breast).  They are cheap (much cheaper than the breast).  They cook really quickly – much quicker than your dry, expensive chicken breast.  Not you personally.  Just someone out there, who had a dry leathery chicken breast for dinner.  We can get wings from a farmer up the road for under $2/LB, frozen in nice 1 LB packages.  Molly calls them “chicken bones” and plays the drums on her plate when she’s done.  What’s not to love?

Looking for something different to do with chicken wings wasn’t difficult to do.  You can pretty much take any kind of dry rub, sauce or glaze and work from there.  I wanted to do something with lavender, because it’s great and it goes with chicken.  Honey because I wanted something sweet, and lemon, because me and lemon, we can’t stay away from each other.  Getting married soon.

The wings went into a bath of some lemon juice, a little vinegar, salt/pepper and olive oil for about an hour before we ate.  Some flavor, some tenderness maybe (not really an issue with these guys) and an interesting study that’s been popping up lately – we knew that those yummy charred crunchy bits on grilled food (hmmm…none of those in the photo above) were delicious and also potentially a carcinogen.  There’s research now that a quick acidic bath might actually help mitigate some of that.  The phrase “unmarinated breasts” appears in that article.  Hopefully that doesn’t cause any unnecessary blushing or run-in’s with your corporate IT policies.  Either way, the marinade doesn’t hurt the wing, so make a basic vinaigrette and let the wings hang out in that.  It may end up having some benefits.

I grilled them directly over a hot charcoal fire, gas grill would be fine, so would a broiler.  As soon as the wings were basically done, but weren’t completely crispy, they got the glaze.  It was a big scoop of honey, a lemon’s worth of juice, a big handful of chopped lavender and some more s/p all whisked up together.  It tasted good just as is – the first clue that it was going to be good on the wings.  Brush it on one side of the wings, flip them, let them sit for a minute, brush and flip again.  Keep doing that – but be careful.  The honey has this deep, dark urge to burn, and it will not be stopped.  If there’s any left, you can give the wings a little coat after they come off the grill.

These won’t be the last non-Buffalo chicken wings this summer.  A perfect dinner served with a salad, and some ice cream for dessert. 

The ice cream was homemade “coffee with crunchies” (Molly’s name for Coffee Heath Bar Crunch) using the coffee ice cream recipe from David Lebovitz’s Perfect Scoop.  Super good.  Here’s the beans soaking in milk, cream and sugar.  What a way to go.

A Tale of Two Sandwiches

We love sandwiches. Thankfully, there are no gluten allergies or carbophobics in our family. We usually have a few different types of bread around, and lately at least one of them is usually homemade. If you've got the bread part covered, a good sandwich can't be far away.

I have no qualms about publicly admitting my love for peanut butter and jelly (except I'd rather have jam or preserves). I like chunky, we usually have smooth, but that isn't enough to keep me away. I will even lay claim to having invented (at least in my sphere of influence) the renown Peanut Butter and Jelly on Waffles. Yes, substitute toasted waffles for bread for a transcendental experience.

Yeah, maybe transcendental is taking it a tad past reality, and for health reasons, let's just agree not to eat those too often.

Here are two of our favorites. The first, pictured above, is made from one of our most common leftovers, and the second from two "pantry" ingredients we almost always have on hand.

My Dad's chicken salad. It's the best. Everyone agrees and you will too. It has two special ingredients that take it well beyond your typical minced-up-chicken-with-too-much-mayo mess: toasted pecans and lavender. Our family is blessed with pecans falling from trees in my grandmother's backyard in sunny Texas. Each year, after the collecting, shelling, picking through and bagging, we end up with a few bags in our freezer and they never last as long as we'd like. The lavender was an accident. My dad thought he was adding tarragon from the garden, which has similarly shaped leaves, and to be fair, there wasn't a big lavender colored flower on the top of it yet. What a mistake it was. It plays so well with the rest of the ingredients, and it seems like you can't add enough. If it's fresh, great, if not, we have enough dried to last the rest of the year, and it tastes just as good.

The second recipe is from the first meal I had in Amsterdam. Goat cheese and honey. Overwhelmed with jet lag and the awe of a first trip to Europe, we travelled via tiny boat from my cousin's apartment to a cafe somewhere in the city for lunch. It was this sandwich and a cold beer. The goat cheese was served warm in a crock, and you got to assemble your own sandwich on a crusty roll. This is pictured on a ciabatta roll (not homemade), toasted well, and assembled quickly so the cheese can melt and the honey can run. The acidity of the goat cheese and the sweetness of the honey are a match made in oh-man-i'm-dribbling-honey-all-over-my-sweater heaven.

The recipes:

Dad's Chicken Salad Sandwich

Mix in a big bowl:

Leftover chicken (grilled, roasted, poached or cooked by divine intervention)
Finely chopped onions/scallions
Diced sweet red pepper
Diced jalapeno/poblano or pinch of dried chili flakes/powder (optional, if you want some heat)
Several pinches of chopped fresh, or dried lavender
Nice handful of toasted (toaster oven is great for this), chopped pecans
Small pinches of salt/pepper

Mix everything together and start adding mayonnaise slowly, mixing it in well. You really only need enough to bind everything together.

 

Goat Cheese and Honey Sandwich, as if you needed a recipe

Put a bunch of both on crusty, warm bread:

Honey (we like acacia honey, which seems both mild and richly flavored at once)
Soft goat cheese

Eat quickly, without sharing.

Our Roast Chicken

The title says it all...do we need another roast chicken recipe? No, probably not. But it's an undisputed classic, indisputably one of our favorites and there are a zillion variations and twists. People like that. People like that it's a blank slate food - a fairly mild canvas for delivering other flavors. And then the leftovers (I think that's what we like) - soup, stew, sandwiches, quesadillas? Oh yeah.

Despite being able to cover chicken will all kinds of sauces and toppings, a good chicken doesn't need much more than some salt. For a good roast chicken, especially if it's a mass-market bird to start, it seems like either a brine or a dry salting ahead of time makes a <strong>huge</strong> difference. Our chickens spend there lives just up the road, but they still get the salt if there's time. I like the salting as opposed to the brine, because it's easier, more flexible and the results are just fantastic. I think I read about it first in the Zuni Cafe Cookbook - you just get a nice dry chicken, sprinkle it well with salt/pepper and whatever other seasoning you want and let it sit in the fridge from overnight up to a couple days. Both the brining and the salting permeate the whole bird with flavor, make it moist and keep it tender. If you've never tried it, you'll never go back.

I like to butterfly the chicken (also known as "spatchcocking", but I can't say/type that without laughing, thanks to a sense of humor retained from my 12 year-old self). You just take a pair of kitchen shears and cut straight up the back on both sides of the backbone, and then flatten out the bird. I haven't figured out the whole removing the breastbone thing yet.

It cooks quicker, looks cooler and is easier to carve up afterwords.

This one just got some finely chopped rosemary along with the salt, which is great with chicken and convenient for us, as we haven't managed to kill our rosemary bush yet. Lemon zest is super too.

When we ate this last Saturday, we had it with a little bit of aioli for dipping it in (an unnecessary, but delicious indulgence), some food-processored white beans, a salad and some bread. Simple, tasty, great meal.

Roasted Chicken, The Way We Had It Last Weekend

Rinse and dry:
3-5 LB Chicken

If your kitchen obeys the same natural laws as ours, bigger chicken will take longer to cook.

Sprinkle chicken liberally with:
Kosher Salt
Pepper (not as much as the salt)
Fresh Rosemary, minced fine - (other herbs, lemon zest... all good)

Cover and put in the fridge for at least overnight.

Preheat oven to 450. Oil a cast iron pan (or other heavy pan big enough for chicken) lightly, and put it in the oven to get hot. Take it out when the oven is ready, and put the chicken in breast side down. Put it in for 20-30 minutes, more importantly, until the skin is starting to get some color and crisp up. Take it out, flip the bird, turn the heat down to 400, and leave it in until it's done.

There are a lot of recipes that start it breast up, flip once, and then flip again. Too much flipping I say, but you should try it. We should roast as many chickens as possible.