Moroccan Chicken with Preserved Lemons

This was the first recipe that I used my preserved lemons on, which is courtesy of the Epicurious website - you can read the whole recipe here. I'm thinking this is actually a pretty common recipe, because I looked at about six different versions of the recipe before settling on this one. The others either asked for ingredients I didn't have (I don't keep harissa on hand, typically), or used chicken livers (not a line I'm willing to cross for this blog just yet).

So, I set to work on this recipe. I did the whole mise en place to start, and right away I ran into a little trouble. You see, the recipe called for 16 pitted green olives. I'd bought them with pits. No biggie - not hard to pit an olive, or so I thought. Apparently, olives are different from cherries and avocadoes in the sense that while cherries and avocadoes can have their pits coaxed out of them pretty easily, olives HANG the F*CK ON to their pits with their FINGERNAILS. My first three attempts at pitting an olive wound up with me nearly slicing my finger open with my knife, and the accursed pits lying on my cutting board, glaring at me triumphantly with tatters of olive flesh hanging off of them, in a puddle of brine.

The irrational part of my mind took over. Instead of satisfying my mouth's curiosity towards preserved lemon, I would satisfy my ears with the statisfying crunch the pits would make... when I crushed them with my claw hammer. Unfortunately, the pits were slippery and hitting them with a hammer only caused them to shoot across my kitchen and hit the far wall. I was completely frustrated at this point, but then I noticed that only the pit had gone flying - the flesh of the olive (what was left of it) was still on the cutting board. That was an "A-HA" moment I needed, and I dumped out the 16 olives I needed, and proceeded to GENTLY squish each one with the flat side of my knife. The pits came out pretty easily, and I cut the olive flesh into strips. The rest of the recipe proceeded smoothly; it's not a hard one to pull off. And the finished product looked just like the photo from the recipe.

And for all that... I didn't like the finished product. I'm not the biggest fan of green olives, save for in martinis, and the taste of the olives kind of overpowered most of the other ingredients, except for the preserved lemon. Which, I don't think I cut out enough of the pith from the lemon before putting them in this recipe - they were too bitter, although the lemon flavor itself was incorporated nicely into the chicken breast, which was about the only part of the recipe I kinda sorta liked.

What I DID really like was the couscous I made to go with this. I toasted a handful of cashews, pecans, and almonds in a frying pan, and prepared a batch of couscous with chicken stock, a dash of garlic powder, and butter. When the couscous was ready, I fluffed it, and tossed in the toasted nuts and a little bit of chopped dried apricot. Yum

So, the first recipe I used preserved lemons in didn't go over so well. But, I wasn't about to give up so easily after waiting a month to make them. I already knew what I was going to attempt for my next recipe, and this time, NO ACCURSED BRINY GALLSTONES-OF-SATAN UNPITTED FREAKIN' OLIVES!

Preserved Lemons

A few months ago, I was reading one of my Indian cookbooks for the umpteenth time, and came to a section that detailed the creation of pickled lemons. I'd also read about something similar in one of my Nigella Lawson cookbooks, although the recipe in that one was for "preserved", not "pickled". Most recipes and references to this ingredient call it "preserved", so that's what I'm going with, even though in both cases it's still technically a pickle. The idea of using these in cooking sounded interesting to me, so I decided to try and have a go at making and using my own batch of preserved lemons.

I wanted the unsweetened version, both as my own personal preference, and also because the recipe was a bit simpler: quartered lemons, kosher salt, and lemon juice. Combine and let sit for a month - piece of cake. I was tempted to use spices like cloves or bay leaves like my Indian cookbook did, but I didn't want to shoehorn myself into a particular flavor of preserve that might limit what I could use them for, so I kept it simple. The Nigella recipe used quite a bit of sugar and resulted in a much sweeter pickled lemon (of course), and also called for some boiling and just sounded a little fussier than I wanted to deal with.

It just so happened that at the time my supermarket had Meyer lemons in stock (they usually don't), and on sale. I'd never made anything with Meyer lemons before, and I'd read they were sweeter and more aromatic than regular lemons. They're also rounder, more plump with pulp and juice than regular lemons, and a slightly orange tint to their rind that makes them particularly bright and hints at more intense flavor than their paler brothers. I bought about a dozen of them and brought them home. Half-dozen of them got quartered and I managed to fit them snugly into a bell jar. Over those, I dumped a large amount of Kosher salt.

Then came the problem - the juice from the remaining six lemons wasn't nearly enough to fill the jar the rest of the way. I only got about a third of the way up the jar. So, I figured I needed another dozen Meyers, but unfortunately there were only about seven left at the store and three of them were ones I didn't pick for a reason - they were a bit soft and sickly-looking. But, I figured since I was only after their juice it didn't really matter what they looked like on the outside. I had to go with regular lemons for the rest of the juice I needed, but I did manage to fill the jar the rest of the way.

Once the jar was filled, it was a simple matter just to keep it in my refergierator, and gently shake it every few days to keep the brine circulating, and do it for a month. Ok, so I had a generous amount of pickled lemons at my disposal - the question was what was I going to do with them? It seemed that Middle Eastern, particularly Moroccan was the way to go, since preserved lemons figure most prominently in that region's food. I did find a recipe that intrigued me, but that's a subject for my next post. Later!