What I Ate For Dinner

Gotta say, I've never been a huge fried chicken fan. Sure, I've had some of the good stuff, but it brings back too many stinky and unglamorous memories to do it myself. Back before the bright lights, fat paychecks and adoring fans of the blogosphere, I worked the ole' Sunday brunch for a couple of years. One of my duties was the fried chicken station: introduce the chicken to the egg wash, bludgeon in seasoned flour, fry mercilessly, and repeat. I felt like I was a "culinary undertaker": the chicken had so much potential, so many possibilities, so much to look forward to, but it always wound up leathery, fatty as all hell, thick crusted and nasty. Oh, yes, and then there's the matter of sifting pounds of seasoned flour at a time to avoid clumps, and then at the end of the shift, filtering several gallons of 350 'er so degree fryer grease. So, to say the least, I've long been a bit put off by this southern standard.

Until now! David Chang has a wonderfully ingenious method that minimizes the time the chicken spends swimming around the fryer, and still produces maximum flavor and texture. And there's no breading to worry about. Instead, this preparation features a three-step process, and it's simple. I use bone-in thighs, though breasts, wings and drumsticks would also work well.

Start by brining the chicken for at least an hour in a mix of water, salt and sugar (Chang's recipe calls for 4 cups lukewarm water, half cup of sugar and another half cup of kosher salt for a brine suitable for an entire 3 to 3.5 pound chicken). Be sure to seal up the chicken and brine in a lidded container or freezer bag, and then let it marinate in the 'fridge.

Then yank out the pieces of chicken, remove them from the brine, and steam 'em. The idea is to cook the chicken the whole way in the steamer, which (depending on how much you're dealing with) can take in the neighborhood of 30 minutes. Then stick the steamed chicken back in the 'fridge. Chang says to leave the pieces of chicken in the 'fridge for two hours or overnight, and then to let 'em rest at room temperature for 30 minutes before frying. But a Baron is a man of many obligations and anxieties, so I shortened the prep time to about 20 minutes in the 'fridge and 10 minutes on the counter. And the produce of my abbreviated labors was still amazing.

Now you're ready to fry the chicken. I use peanut oil in a medium saucepan. Heat the oil to 375 degrees (F), just enough to allow the chicken to be mostly submerged. I also use wooden chopsticks to handle the chicken in and around the fryer, which minimizes splatter. Be sure to pat down the chicken with a paper towel before frying, or you're ganna have hot grease all over the place.

The pieces of chicken are already cooked, so just let 'em fry until deep brown. That took about four or so minutes per piece for me. Be sure not to crowd the fryer. It shouldn't take too much time at all since they've already got the brown sugar in 'em, and as that caramelizes in the fryer, they'll crisp up and go brown. Yank 'em out when beautifully browned and let 'em hang out on some paper towels. Serve hot. If you have to do these in batches, which is likely, you might use a warm oven to keep the early finishers warm while those bringin' up the rear finish off at the spa.

Chang suggests a vinaigrette for the chicken, and it is a must. This stuff is serious--and simple. For a cup (which is more than you'll need for two people), his recipe asks you to combine the following in a bowl large enough to vigorously whisk the mix (sotto voce: you don't really have to measure, but the ratios are important, so I'll include the volumes listed in Chang's recipe here. I've modified a few elements, but the spirit remains the same. Like most things in life, this one's to taste):

2 tablespoons finely chopped garlic
2 tablespoons peeled and finely chopped ginger
¼ teaspoon of finely chopped chilies (I used Serrano)
¼ cup rice wine or white wine vinegar
¼ cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons neutral oil (Chang suggests grapeseed, though I used peanut)
¼ teaspoon sesame oil
1½ tablespoons sugar
Some freshly ground pepper.

Whisk the above together. Taste, adjust and repeat until perfect. Smile.

To serve, toss the fried chicken with the vinaigrette in a bowl and serve warm. If you're a conscientious host, you'll throw a little of the vinaigrette out for dipping. And there you have it, fried therapy for a fryer-weary Baron. Man, do I hate fryers. But this one mitigates the usual humiliations of the industrial, or even at home, fryer, and delivers nobly.

Béarnaise sauce could be considered a "daughter" to the "mother sauce" Hollandaise. Both feature egg yolks and butter, but béarnaise is considered the derivative daughter sauce because it is adulterated with vinegar, tarragon and shallot, thereby breaking from motherly tradition and becoming a renegade condiment that is actually interesting. Apropos of lexicon, however, I must mention that, for me, béarnaise has a more vixenly quality that seems to fall outside of the placid and inert kinship appellations "mother" and "daughter." I think of it as more of a mistress to the solid but stolid, "well-respected-sauce-about-town" hollandaise. Sure, slather some H-sauce on the 'ole Eggs Benedict, and you've got a $12.99 brunch entrée, but you'll find that béarnaise packs its bags with so much more intrigue, danger and allure that you'll have a hard time maintaining interest in brunch fare. So don't tell your cardiologist, or your brunch buddies (with whom you are, most likely, getting fleeced, if you're the type to go out to brunch); this siren of a sauce likes you all to herself.

Béarnaise usually shows up on grilled beef, so tonight, I'm doing a strip steak on the grill, which I serve with lightly fried potatoes and a salad of fresh greens. Steak grillery is pretty easy. Throw it on, turn it, yank it off. Like a record. I prefer to treat steak almost like sashimi and just carve off small, nearly raw slivers from the mother lode. La méthode de Baron, shall we say?

For the sauce, start by sautéing shallots and tarragon in olive oil in a medium saucepan. As the shallots get some color and turn translucent, season with salt and pepper and add enough white wine vinegar to coat the bottom of the sauce pan. Reduce until there is just enough vinegar in the pan to form a small puddle when the pan is tilted sideways; to put it another way, reduce until there's about a tablespoon or so vinegar left and the shallots have gotten a good soaking. Kill the heat and allow the pan to cool. This is crucial, since you don't want to wind up with scrambled eggs. Again, this ain't brunch.

As the saucepan cools, beat two egg yolks in a bowl with a little bit of water (two or three tablespoons, I'd guess). Beat with a whisk until foamy on top, and then pour the egg into the cool saucepan.

On the lowest possible heat, beat the eggs, shallots etc. on the stove constantly until the eggs thicken. Do not, under any circumstances, stop beating them before they thicken, or they will scramble and you'll be at brunch. Which would suck. On my stove, it took about a minute for the eggs to thicken, although yours may be different. If you have trouble moderating the temperature, or you have an intense (if unstated) fear of failure, hedge your bet and remove the saucepan from the heat from time to time. A few moments on, then a few moments off. All the while whisking, of course. This is a sort of sissy way to do it, but it works.

Once the eggs come together and thicken, taste the sauce. I usually add more tarragon at this point, and re-season with salt and pepper. If you want more sharp acidity than the vinegar has already given you, then you can squeeze some citrus juice into the sauce now, too. All seasoned up? Now throw in a few hunks of butter. If the butter is at room temp to begin with, then it'll melt in easier. At any rate, set the heat to the lowest setting and stir the butter in until it's melted. Taste. If you want more body, go for more butter. Serve immediately.

As for the potatoes: traditionally, a steak like this cries out for steak frites. Well, turns out they're kind of a hassle. I want to do them for the blog sometime, but for tonight, we have a low-oil, low-stink alternative. Cube up some potato and blanch them in ice water. Then slice the cubes thinly so you have little tiles of potato. Then fry those up, being careful not to crowd them, in about an inch of oil. Yank 'em when golden brown, salt 'em, and y'er ready to rock.

Mussels are one of the easiest and most delicious summer foods to prepare. The home chef, in particular, is well positioned to knock them out with quality on par with most of the professional big boys. They're cheap, widely available, and require little time, special equipment or knowledge to handle properly. Perhaps the biggest pitfall comes down the line before anything even goes in the pan, for housing mussels in the 'fridge at home requires almost as much attention (though still not too much) as actually cooking them.

Mussels are sold alive, which means you want to avoid suffocating them. A fresh mussel is a closed mussel. That plastic bag your seafood guy sent you home with is a veritable body bag, unless you intervene. First thing you want to do when you get home with the mollusks is remove them from the bag and place them in a bowl. Then nestle the bowl containing the mussels into a larger bowl that contains ice water. Then cover the bowls with a damp kitchen or paper towel and store in the 'fridge. These, I've heard, can remain in storage for up to 48 hours, but I would recommend that you purchase your mussels on the same day you plan to prepare them. Freshness is a key here.

Once you're ready to put 'em on the dance floor, give 'em the once over to make sure their tuxes are on straight. You might find shaggy hairs hanging out of some of them that look like frayed string (or a mullet). Yank these beards out. Also go through them to make sure none have opened. If you find some that have, give them a sharp rap and see if they close. If they do? Still good. If they don't? They're unusable. Then, give them a scrub to remove any debris, mud, gunk, etc.

Now for the preparation of today's entrée, Moules à la Basquaise, based on Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook recipe. Start by roasting bell peppers (red look great but any color will work) in a 500 degree oven until blistered on most surfaces and charred on some. This can take 20-30 minutes. Once they're out of the oven, you'll need to get the skins off. Bourdain has a good trick: let them cool a bit (but not completely), and then place them in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap for ten or so minutes. This, I found, makes removing the skins quite simple once they've cooled enough for you to do so. Chop the roasted and skinned peppers into strips, julienne style.

Now to the stove. In a large pot, sauté chopped shallots in olive oil until slightly colored and translucent. Add garlic and the sliced roasted bell peppers, season with salt and pepper, and sauté briefly--probably only about another minute or so. Now add enough white wine to thickly coat the bottom of the pot. This is the liquid in which the mussels will cook, and which will also be the savory broth in which they're served--so don't skimp on the booze.

On medium-high heat, bring the wine up to a simmer and dump in the mussels. A restaurant (read: generous) portion would be one pound of mussels per person, although I go with three-quarters of a pound per person. Cover and allow to simmer on medium high heat until the mussels open--about five to eight minutes. As you simmer the mussels, be sure to SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE the pot while covered every minute or so. Shaking the pot bastes the mussels. Once the mussels open, finish with some butter and chopped fresh herbs (sage, basil, parsley, you name it).

For service, dump out the mussels with some broth into a bowl. You'll want something to mop up the broth, so this dish is usually served with crusty bread. To add intrigue to the bread, just puree tomatoes in a blender with white wine and salt, then transfer to the stove and let some of the liquid boil off. The idea is that you wind up with a moist paste. Add herbs to finish, and slather the tomato paste onto a crusty baguette cut lengthwise.

This weekend, as Americans kick their already red-lining nationalism into high gear and laud the grandeur of war by blowin' stuff up, some Bud Light Lime-woozy, smoke-choked minds will hungrily turn to a more genteel arena of combustibility: the grill. But not everyone will be blarin' the J.P. Sousa and cruising around, Burt Reynolds-style, with the T-tops off in an '88 Pontiac Firebird on the fourth. As regional royalty, you see, I can't help but view American independence and the whole democracy thing as sort of a mixed bag: progress some say, sure, but it well nigh put we barons outta business. Some people don't even believe that I am low-level nobility, and no one on my block responds to my requests for land tax. Philistines, you all! But I've got a skewered counterpunch with which to serve the Home of the Brazen its comeuppance, au style du Baron. Today, my feeble resistance comes in the form of Japanese food for the Fourth of July weekend. Such blasphemy (the cuisine of a former enemy as communion in the holiest cathedral of jingoism!) probably puts me on some CIA watchlist.

Yakitori is one of the most common--and delectable--staples of Japanese pub (or izakaya) food. This idea is just to yaki (grill) your tori (chicken) on a skewer. Tonight, we're knocking out a typical variety called negima, which is just chucks of chicken grilled on a skewer with scallions. That's pretty straightforward: just be sure to soak the skewers in water for 20 or so minutes so they don't get blow'd up on the grill, and don't crowd the chicken onto the skewers. Honor the homesteaders by giving those dogs space to roam.

Gotta say, though: Chicken skewers are great 'n all, but they're really just a vehicle for the sauce. And this sauce is versatile, since you could use the ingredient line-up as a marinade for the chicken, or thicken it up with roux (as I do) and slather it on the chicken before service. Or you could Double Down and do both--if you like livin' on the edge.

Ideally, tradition tells us, you've got some mirin (sweetened rice wine mix-mash) or sake around to use as a base. I don't because I can't stand the flavor of either. So, I start with white wine, add some soy sauce, hoisin, grated ginger, wasabi and/or siracha. Whisk those together and season with salt and pepper. You can also add chopped green onions if you're looking for something to do with the pieces you didn't put on the skewers. At this point, you've got what could be a marinade.

To sauce 'er up, throw the above mash into a medium saucepan and bring to a simmer/low boil. Let the flavors come together for a moment, and then taste. Too sharp? Add more sweet stuff like hoisin or brown sugar. Too bland? Re-season with salt and pepper, as well as some more ginger and wasabi. Pretty damn delicious? Go blow something up to celebrate.

Thicken it up with a roux (equal parts oil and flour), and let the sauce overcome the chicken skewers like an illegal occupying force deployed by a cowboy-president backed by a knuckle-dragging electorate and a spineless congress. Your sauce should not be the edible equivalent of a non-binding resolution.

I served this up with a light, crispy summer salad. Combine sliced jicama, cucumber and carrot in a bowl and sprinkle with salt and brown sugar (this is the quick pickling method of David Chang). I'd probably go two parts salt to one part sugar. Refrigerate for 10 'er so minutes. Eat.

See? It tastes good to not be a provincial nationalist!