illdothedisheslater

Most people had a magic dish growing up that their mom would give them when they were sick – scrambled eggs, chicken noodle soup (canned or homemade), Campbell’s Tomato Soup with buttered Ritz crackers, plain buttered noodles.  Jello or popsicles.  Ginger ale, tea with honey, or lemonade.  Older readers might remember mothers giving them a nip ‘o the hard stuff to help them sleep.  (Unfortunately not at my house.)  My favorite food discussion website has hundreds of such suggestions – some far more exotic as the answers come from all over the globe – congee, hot milk with onion, matzo balls and kreplach.  Sick food is on my mind, because I’ve been super-sick.  My hulked-out cold blossomed into a monster that I now suspect was walking pneumonia, but thankfully I got my boogie-woogie flu vaccine back in November.

I have two go-to meals that I eat when I’m sick and can’t handle real food or cooking.  One is chicken noodle soup (canned) with a ton of black pepper in it.  The other is (duh) pasta, also with extra pepper.  I’m not sure why the pepper – maybe the capsaicin numbs the throat while the heat clears up the sinuses.  And Diet 7-Up is my drink of choice, although I’ve been tearing up the herbal tea this week.  Unfortunately this bout of pneumonia did not result in a drastic weight loss like my last one did, but I was able to kick my caffeine addiction due to not wanting anything for three days but Diet 7-Up.  The problem with all these sick foods?  Nothing is particularly blog-worthy.  They are comfort foods, and easy to prepare by harried mothers or slogging snot-zombies (me).   But while I still can’t speak above a whisper (I really miss the sound of my own voice), I’m starting to feel just a little bit human again, and may even venture out of the house tomorrow to watch Downton Abbey with my girlfriends.  Since we are quite the eatin’ & drinkin’ bunch, I’m going to my old standby – my famous chicken salad.  I will then make chicken stock from the bones, since that’s something I can monitor from the couch, and is slightly ambitious. (Okay, broth then – stock is bones, broth is meat, we all know that.  But it goes along with my sick theme.)

Chicken – sadly the chicken breasts at local grocery are almost inedible now.  They are enormous, tough, and stringy and taste vaguely of cardboard.  Luckily my excellent local butcher (a thing of the past, but I’m SO grateful we still have one) was having a sale on chicken this week, and I was able to whisper my order to the kind man in the white apron behind the counter.  He lectured me on the importance of finishing my round of antibiotics while he split the chicken breast with a cleaver.  You don’t get that kind of service at Kroger.

Here are the ingredients:

(Not pictured: one lemon, because I forgot to put the lemon in the picture again.)

Nothing fancy here – this is just straight-up basic chicken salad.  No nuts or grapes or curry powder.  I like my chicken salad to taste like chicken.  BUT it’s the method that makes it great, and the ingredients.  Bone-in chicken has so much more flavor than boneless breasts and let’s face it – the breast meat can be pretty bland.  Now here’s the best tip – don’t boil them.  Boiling strips the juices out, again leaving bland stringy meat.  I lay the breast in a single layer in a 9 x 13 roasting pan (cake pan, Pyrex, whatever) and pour chicken broth in until there’s about half an inch of liquid in the bottom of the pan.

Gross, I know.

Cover tightly with aluminum foil (aluminum foil techniques number in the twos:  cover tightly or tent loosely.  We will be experimenting with both techniques with this recipe.)

Set in a pre-heated oven at 350 and let them bake until done.  I can’t give times because the size of the breasts, the geography of different ovens, and heat conductivity of pans vary so wildly.  Check on them at around 30 minutes – I recommend a meat thermometer.  When the breasts have reached between 160 and 170 degrees, take them out of the oven, transfer into a large bowl, and tent loosely with foil.  Don’t say I never taught you anything.  The remaining broth/juices/stuck-on bits go into a large stockpot – and keep it handy.

Once the chicken is cool enough to handle, I introduce my second fantastic tip:  get out your stand mixer.  You know you want to.  You were so excited when you got it as a wedding gift, but you never pull it out or use it as much as you like – here’s your chance.  It used to be that making chicken salad meant an hour or more hunched over a bowl, tearing the chicken to bits while my cat and dog circled me like sharks, occasionally snapping at each other.  Bloodsport.  Gladiator time.  But now – just pull chunks of chicken out and drop them (about one to two breasts at a time) into the bowl of your mixer.

Using the spade attachment, turn it on low for 30 seconds to one minute.

Boom.  Perfectly shredded chicken.  Leave it on too long and you end up with chicken dust.

Fifteen minutes later, I have this:

Eight and a half pounds of chicken yields approximately four pounds of shredded meat.  I also usually shred one or two breasts by hand to ensure chunkiness.  I don’t like my chicken salad too smooth and pudding-y.  The bones, skin, and any leftover mystery bits go into the stock pot with: one celery stalk, two carrots, one large scallion (because I don’t have any regular onions), one stupid bay leaf (because why not?), a handful of salt, a ton of black pepper, and enough water to cover everything.  Set on the back burner on low and let it simmer for hours.  Once it’s reduced, strain through cheesecloth set in a colander and freeze – now you have homemade broth!  Like, a lot of it!  You can do that whole freeze in an ice cube tray thing, but when do you ever need just one cube of broth?  Is it cheating to start your broth with broth from a box?  No – I’m sure about this.

(Disclaimer:  I wore rubber gloves when handling all the food today.  It’s not easy to cook in rubber gloves, but due to my ongoing plague and the fact that I will be feeding this to other people (husband and I can’t eat five pounds of chicken salad by ourselves), I thought it best.  I also had to stop and rest more than once.)

Back to the salad.  Once the chicken cools completely, add one cup of diced celery, a teaspoon of salt, two teaspoons of black pepper, and halve your lemon (not pictured) and squeeze over everything.  Pick out seeds.  Then my final secret – white sugar.  It seems unlikely, and I’m not a person who likes sweet stuff on my meat (I’m looking at YOU compotes, fruit salsas, and glazes).  Just enough adds a little sweetness and flavor, but doesn’t make it candy-like.  Start with half a cup and add a little more later if the taste doesn’t come through.

Then mayo.  Lots and lots of mayo.  Put in more mayo than you think you’ll need, since the chicken will kind of soak it up as it sits.  Miracle Whip?  No.  Never.  Get the hell out of my kitchen.  There are two types of people in this world, and I am a mayonnaise girl.  Mix it up good – this is another place where the rubber gloves come in handy – see also: Meatballs.

So there we have it – the best simple chicken salad in the world.  It’s perfect for potlucks, work lunches, sandwiches, funerals, cracker treats, and Downton Abbey viewing parties.  My preferred method of conveyance is Club Crackers.  And I like to portion it out in deli containers for easy gifting.  Do I have to mention this goes in the fridge?

Now I’ve exhausted myself, filled the sink with dishes, and yearn once again for my couch.  But in exciting future news, Christmas yielded a bonanza of ambitious food-related items, including a grill, a smoker box, and a cheese press.  Get ready for some real complicated, time-consuming, and ambitious cooking coming soon.  Right after I take a nap.

Note to my reader (or readers, if I’m being optimistic) :  In going back and re-reading some older posts, I was horrified to find typos.  Dozens of typos.  I am using a free word processing software that does not have any sort of spell-check, and have discovered Tumblr’s spell-check doesn’t pick everything up.  (Obvs – I mean they spelled “tumbler” wrong.)  Now granted I sometimes make up words, but I’m still embarrassed by all the errors.  Feel free to point out in the comments if you see one (made-up words notwithstanding) and I will hustle to correct it.