The Crispiest Chicken in Mustard Cream Sauce

September 22, 2016 at 7:00 AM

Be still my heart and soul. This meal. Without fail, I eat this dish at least once a week and I see no end in sight. This stove-to-oven method of cooking chicken thighs and legs makes the crispiest skin I’ve ever achieved sans fryer. It’s incredible to contrast the tenderness of the baked chicken with a skin that audibly cracks when cut because it’s fully rendered and cracker-crisp.

The sauce is truly life-changing. Tangy, garlicky, and just the right amount of creamy. I, personally, am not a pure cream sauce fan–you’ll never see me ordering the fettucine alfredo. For me, when something is just pure cream, it’s almost too rich. I need something to cut through the richness and bring a bright and sunny flavor to the mix. Brandy, wine, lemon, onion, garlic, two different mustards, chicken broth, and a touch of cream create something ever-so balanced and matched with just the right amount of contrast.

I have been making this chicken dish for going on about six months and every time I do, I get the measurements more spot on and the ingredients just that much more to my liking. I started making the sauce with only wine, then I added brandy, and the next week–lemon juice. Then, I used all three. One day I used just dijon mustard then another day, I threw whole grain mustard in the mix. It’s really a great thing that I love to eat, so much, because who else is going to fine-tune my recipes for me?

I included, below the recipe and method for this meal, all the variations that I have tried to date for your experimentation pleasure. I hope you adore this recipe as much as I do. It’s something special.

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Filed Under: Chicken, Entrées, Pasta, Recipes

Pasta Alla Carbonara

February 18, 2016 at 4:00 PM

Pasta, bacon, egg, black pepper, and cheese. The five food groups. Just kidding (I’m so funny.) Well, anyway, I really wish those were the five foods I needed to stay wholesome. The concept of a no-carb diet, and one that does not include eating pasta, continues to endlessly extend beyond my comprehension.

Carbonara is one of my favorite pasta dishes of all time. It is an Italian dish that consists of hot pasta, mixed with the previously mentioned egg (raw egg…but trust me), bacon, black pepper, and cheese to create a creamy sauce. Then, it’s finished with more cheese and if you’d like, some fresh herbs. It’s perfectly indulgent, luscious, and all those other words you hesitate around your friends to use to describe your meals for fear of them calling you a food snob. 

Mixing a raw egg into hot pasta is seemingly tricky business. The key to making Pasta Alla Carbonara, the way the plan of the world intended, is to mix the sauce off direct heat or else you will end up with scrambled egg & cheese pasta–which I have made, by mistake, and isn’t bad tasting (at all) but it’s definitely not a silky carbonara. My trick for getting the egg not to scramble up on you is to add hot pasta water (literally, the water the just pasta cooked in) to the egg & cheese in a bowl, slowly, before you add the pasta so that the egg mixture comes to a warm temperature all on its own and isn’t shocked into a eggy scramble when the pasta enters the situation. 

I am not the first person to toss an egg yolk on top of a bowl of carbonara but I sure will not be the last. This dish is finished with an egg yolk and each person gets to delightfully poke the yolk and stir it into their hot pasta. It’s dreamy. It is commonly said, among the culinary folk, that when you are making a simple dish with very few ingredients (like this one,) it’s so important that you use the best ingredients. That means, ones that taste lovely all on their own because you won’t taste much else. You know, “good” olive oil like Ina Garten says. Or the real parmesan cheese (parmigiano-reggiano) not the powder in the green shaker. When you are cooking up a pot of pasta with your favorite jarred sauce, by all means pull out that green shaker of cheese but please, I beg of you, get the good stuff for this recipe. 

When it comes to eggs (and you all know I love me a good egg,) I use the freshest and most humanely raised eggs I can find. It makes such a difference in taste–you will never go back. Believe it or not, cage free and free range are not the best eggs you can get your hands on (Read this: great blog post.) Cage free simply means the chickens are not kept in crates/boxes and they can still be in a very small, confined space. Free range means that the chickens have access to a free roaming space but are not raised in one (think big cramped space with a small door to outside, if they can get to it.) Pasture-raised is just that. Raised outdoors, as they were intended to be raised. Vital Farms does just this and sells their eggs all over the country. When I’m not picking up my eggs from a local California farmer, these are my absolute favorite. And when you are eating just an egg yolk, mixed into that amazing hot pasta, it needs to have the best flavor you can get. 

Okay, enough preaching. More recipe-ing!!

Ingredients Serves 2
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon salt
4 ounces of good quality bacon (approximately 2 strips), roughly chopped
1/2 pound linguine or any other long noodle (1/2 box)
1 cup parmigiano-reggiano cheese, finely grated
1 tablespoon black pepper, freshly ground
Fresh italian parsley, to garnish

Directions
1. Bring a large pot of water to boil. Add 1 tablespoon of salt.
2. While the water boils, cook the chopped bacon pieces until crispy and brown, over low heat, in a heavy bottomed skillet (cast iron is best.) Low and slow prevents burning and will allow the bacon to cook evenly! Spoon the bacon bits out and place on a paper towel to drain. Pour out the bacon grease into a measuring cup. Save 1 tablespoon of it and set aside.
3. Cook pasta for length of time indicated on the box, until just al dente. Do not drain before taking out 1/2 cup of starchy cooking liquid! (The water the pasta is cooked in) Drain the pasta.
4. In a small bowl, mix the egg whites that you’ve separated, half of the cheese (1/2 cup,) and half of the black pepper (1/2 tablespoon.) While mixing the ingredients, slowly drizzle in half of the pasta cooking water to slowly bring the eggs to a warmer temperature.
5. Add the hot pasta into the pan that you cooked the bacon in and toss with bacon grease that was set aside and warm over low hear for 1 minute.
6. Remove from the heat, and slowly add in the egg white/cheese/black pepper/hot pasta water mixture into the pasta while mixing continuously.
7. Stir in cooked bacon bits.
8. Add hot pasta water, as needed, to achieve a smooth and creamy sauce. Add in slowly! You don’t want the sauce to get too watery.
9. Divide pasta into two bowls and create a small well in the center. Place an egg yolk into the well, in each bowl.
10. Finish with remaining cheese and black pepper, evenly. Garnish with parsley.

This post was in happy partnership with Vital Farms, all opinions are (always) my own.

Filed Under: Eggs, Entrées, Pasta, Recipes

Breakfast Fried Rice

September 24, 2015 at 7:30 AM

I’ve decided that you make Breakfast Fried Rice when you order Thai food and they ask you if you want a side of rice and you say yes, even though you already ordered like 4 other things and one of them actually already came with rice but they didn’t tell you that over the phone because they decided to play on your fear that you wouldn’t have any rice. So, there’s that tiny little takeout container, that is only used for rice, in your fridge the next morning–completely untouched, still with those little steam beads on the inside of the flaps. 

The only reason this is called breakfast fried rice is because it has bacon in it, then furthermore, because I think it’s best with a 7 Minute Egg on it. There may be an adjustment period for those of you that do not equate rice with morning time but don’t knock it until you try it. The only downside is that the first couple times I made this, while testing the recipe, it didn’t kind of feel like dinnertime and made me even more cranky that I had to go to work afterwards. You’ve been warned.

Breakfast Fried Rice
Serves 2
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Prep Time
5 min
Cook Time
15 min
Total Time
20 min
Prep Time
5 min
Cook Time
15 min
Total Time
20 min
Ingredients
  1. 2 cups brown rice, cooked
  2. 2 pieces of bacon, coarsely chopped
  3. 1 shallot, finely diced
  4. 2 teaspoons low-sodium soy sauce
  5. 1 teaspoon rice vinegar
  6. 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
  7. 1 tablespoon cilantro, coarsely chopped
  8. 1 tablespoon chives, coarsely chopped
Instructions
  1. Cook bacon. In a large non-stick skillet over medium heat, brown bacon until crispy, about 5 minutes. Remove from pan and place on a paper towel. Discard bacon grease from pan.
  2. Sauté shallot. Lower heat and add shallot to the same pan where the bacon was crisped. Cook until soft, about 2 minutes.
  3. Pan fry rice. Raise heat back to medium and add cooked brown rice to the pan along with the soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sesame oil. Pan fry, stirring frequently, until rice has developed a crisped texture, about 8 minutes.
  4. Serve. Top with chopped herbs.
Notes
  1. This dish is perfected, in my opinion, with a soft-cooked egg. Search “7 Minute Egg” for the recipe.
One Happy Place https://www.onehappyplace.com/
Filed Under: Breakfast, Eggs, Pork, Recipes