illdothedisheslater

I know my way around a chicken breast – believe me if you make as many hundreds of pounds of chicken salad as I do, you know where every scrap of meat is hidden.  But thighs remain a scarlet mystery to me.  Even eating them is difficult – there are bones in odd places, cartilage and fat where there oughtn’t be, and it’s pretty much like biting into a stack of kites.  That’s why I’m so baffled by Cooks Illustrated’s insistence on using boneless, skinless chicken thighs for every recipe where a normal person would use breasts.  They insist they’re cheaper, more flavorful, and basically pouring out of  every butcher counter in the country.  Yankees.  (Shakes head sadly.)  Of course you can never find boneless, skinless chicken thighs.  Three grocery trips and nothing.  I despair briefly, then eventually find them at Walmart.  

There are several ingredients missing from this picture.  Sorry.

See there are literally millions of cooking blogs, but very few that advise trips to Walmart over fresh, local, seasonal, organic, free-range gourmet stuff.  All of those things are great, but if you want thighs?  Wally World it is.  Sorry, earth.  I’m a normal human being with a normal budget, and normal access to ingredients.  I will not be making anything calling for fresh Alsatian sea scallops, organic cherry peppers, or fresh herbs in winter time (lie – this is a lie. This recipe has fresh herbs.  I bought the exorbitantly priced plastic-shrouded herbs, because rosemary is in the title of this recipe, and I wasn’t going to use the dried up little swords.) (I will also be eating these words later in this post.  I will practically choke on them.)

Sometime last winter my friend JR made a delicious Crock Pot stew-type-thing with chicken thighs, rosemary, and garlic that sounds just perfect for this oddly aggressive winter.   What I really want to make is a Super Bowl football stadium out of food, but that would be expensive and wasteful, since we are not hosting a Super Bowl party, thank goodness.

Don’t sneer.  I know Crock Pot cooking is not terribly ambitious, but I promise this has lots of steps and ingredients.  The recipe is from Southern Living for “Rosemary Garlic Chicken Quarters”, but I suspect this would make a great soup/stew, so I’m going to give adaptation a try.  Plus I have some wonderful homemade broth (not pictured) in my freezer (not in cube form, because I am not a homemaking cyborg) from the Chicken Salad post.

So.

(Editor’s note: In the literally millions of cooking blogs online, there will be (probably) literally millions of “slow cooker” recipes.  I say Crock Pot.  It’s just one of those words – a proprietary eponym, if you wanna get fancy – that says what it means, even though it’s a brand name.  I use Kleenex, not facial tissue.  I throw Frisbees, not novelty flying discs.  Band Aid.  Dumpster. Q-Tip.  I Google stuff – I don’t web search, and you will see me in hell before I Bing anything.)

I begin by chopping about a quarter pound of baby carrots into soup-friendly sized pieces and lining the bottom of the Crock Pot.  This will keep the chicken off the bottom, and keep it from sticking.

For the second layer, I lightly saute the (8) chicken thighs.  In bacon grease.  Because I ain’t no Yankee.  Every good Southern girl should have a container of bacon grease in the fridge.  If you don’t, then I’m sorry but how the hell do you make green beans?  After three to four minutes on each side, transfer the chicken to the Crock Pot, and add salt, pepper, and two teaspoons of paprika.

Since I’m not an animal, I sadly pour off all but one tablespoon of bacon grease, and saute half a yellow onion until translucent and tender.  Use this time to scrape up the chicken bits that are stuck to the pan (fond), because that’s flavor country.  Then I add an astounding TEN cloves of pressed garlic.  The garlic only gets about thirty seconds of saute time before it will start to burn and turn bitter.  Then deglaze the pan with half a cup of white wine (not pictured), and pour the whole mess over the chicken.

I am not pleased.  This is very pale and unappealing, so I throw in a handful of chopped fresh parsley (not pictured) for color.  I’ll be adding some more veggies later, but they’ll turn to mush if they go in this early.

Then I realize I completely forgot two tablespoons of chopped fresh rosemary (not pictured – I forgot the effing rosemary! It’s in the title of this recipe!).  And I forgot to add two cups of chicken broth, without which this soup will not be soup.  This is boxed broth – the homemade stuff will be added later, once it defrosts and melts.

The Crock Pot goes on high for two hours.  Dish time.  This time can also be used to roast the additional vegetables – yellow squash, three Roma tomatoes, and zucchini, since I love zucchini.  You can also go ahead and cook the noodles.  For soups, you will want to boil noodles until they’re just north of al dente, then shock them with ice water to keep them from turning into mush.  This recipe involves a lot of mush prevention.  I am using mini shells, which look pretty and will catch the broth like little bowls.

Two hours later the house smells heavenly.  (My heaven smells like garlic.)  The chicken should be cooked through, so remove it from the Crock Pot and place it into a large bowl.  When it’s cool enough to touch, shred it into bite-sized pieces.   This is where things start to go wrong, then continue to go wrong for a very very long time.

This chicken is shit.  (Not THE shit.  Just shit.)  “Enhanced”?  Maybe, I don’t know.  What I do know is that the texture was brought to you by the good people at Michelin – not the restaurant star ones, the tire ones.  It is dense, rubbery, un-chickeny, will not shred, and tastes nothing like chicken.  I am horrified by what I have created.  I want to flee to the North Pole to escape this chicken.  It’s completely unusable.  I fish it out, cursing all the while, rinse the onions and garlic off and chop it for my pets.  Thank you Walmart, for reminding me that chain groceries have ruined meat forever.

I turn my attention to the broth.  While the chicken may be shit, the broth is like a liquid garlic fart.  I showed admirable restraint in only using ten cloves of garlic, instead of the recommended twelve, but it’s way, WAY too much.  I love garlic, but this isn’t “Wow, that’s garlicky!”  It’s more like “No one will ever kiss me again or want to sit next to me on an airplane.”  There are no discernible chicken or rosemary flavors.  Now my hell smells like garlic.  Damned monkey’s paw ruins everything.  I skim out all the garlic, onion, and herbs, add two more cups of chicken broth, then sulk on the couch for an hour, watching Top Chef for inspiration and reading Hugh Acheson’s blog.  Sulk over, now it’s time to try to salvage this mess.  Luckily I have a rotisserie chicken from Costco in the fridge, so I shred the meat up and add it to the garlic soup, then add my homemade broth.

Better.  It’s still garlicky, but it’s edible.  The homemade broth gives some great chicken flavor and depth, and I breathe a sigh of relief.   Once the vegetables and noodles have been added, with some additional paprika and more rosemary, I think it’s back on track.

Well you win some, you lose some guys.  The reason everyone at work thinks I’m a brilliant cook is because I only take food in when it tastes good.  My kitchen, like everyone else’s, has seen its share of stinkers.  While I might have pulled a win out of my ass this week, it was close.