Week of 4 Apr, 2010

A new week a new trend.

This week I've been thinking ginger. I'm not sure where the inspiration came from, but it's at least related to my secret (well not so secret) desire to make my own ginger beer. Some of this was also started when some friends and I decided to make our own drink mixers (including tonic water).

After a little trip to the grocery store last Tuesday, I was a little richer in ginger, and did not yet have a mechanism to turn it into ginger beer, so I took the middle road and started to put it into other things.

I started a little early on this weeks theme actually doing the first thing with it on Thursday. Currently I'm on a lowered carbohydrate diet which really means that trying to do something with ginger and chicken (the first thing I found in our freezer) becomes much more challenging when you can't whip up a simple teriyaki style ginger-soy marinade.

Thursday:

Ginger-soy chicken

3 cloves garlic minced
1 tbsp chopped ginger
1/4 C soy
1/4 C olive oil
1/4 C Port wine
2 tbsp rice vinegar
2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breast meat

I marinaded the chicken briefly (about 10 minutes) and then lightly fried this (in a few tablespoons of olive oil, so not too hot).

The upshot was that it was very tender and had okay flavor, but was just a little too salty without the sugar to mediate. I wanted to add some sesame oil and seed which I think might have added more flavor with less salt, but didn't have it on hand ... so yeah, no great shakes.

Sunday

What is more traditional than Adobo on Easter Sunday? Um .. okay, probably lots of things, but it's what I had, and so it's what I made.

I had read a little bit about braising recently in this month's Cook's Illustrated, and so I wanted to go in that direction, but I also had a bunch of leftover chopped ginger and garlic that needed to be used, and that didn't jive with the light sage butter sauce that they were trying to do so I went off in a slightly different direction.

Impromptu Adobo

4 Chicken thighs, skin-on, bone-in, trimmed (but not aggressively so) to remove excess skin
2 tbsp minced ginger
2-3 cloves garlic
2 tsp (or more) crushed red pepper
1 C low-sodium soy sauce
1 C vermouth
2 C vegetable stock
1/2 C rice vinegar (augmented with balsamic, since I ran out)'
1/4 C canola oil for frying

Preheat the oven to 325

I fried the chicken thighs skin down in very hot canola oil until they were nicely browned (about 5 minutesish). I then turned them over to start the cooking on the bottom as best as possible, and cooked them there for about 4-5 minutes as well.

I removed the chicken from the skillet, and drained off all but enough oil to cover the bottom, and then cooked the ginger, garlic, and crushed red pepper in that until the garlic started to brown. I then added the vermouth to deglaze the pan, stirring to get all the browned bits unstuck from the bottom.

I added the chicken back to the pan, skin side up, and then added the rest of the liquids essentially until most of the thigh was under liquid, but the skin was still above the surface.

I then put the whole thing in the over for a little less than an hour.

It came out quite nice, although I was impatient, so I didn't reduce the liquid as much as I might have once I took it out of the oven. I did add a little cornstarch to thicken the pan liquid and then served that over the thighs, but I think that I could have reduced it by half or more so that it took less sauce to give the final dish the punch I was looking for.

Anyway, that's it for now, perhaps I'll augment this post in a bit.