Stewed Lemon Chicken - Attempt #2

For my second attempt at using preserved lemons, I went back to a simpler recipe: one whole chicken in a crockpot. This time I was looking to avoid the overpowering flavor of the olives and bringing out the lemons more. I wasn't feeling particularly adventurous this time, so I stuck with flavors that I knew would work with chicken and lemon: just some fresh rosemary and garlic.

I only used two quarters of preserved lemon for this one. I scooped the pulp out of the quarters and set those aside. Then I trimmed away a bit of the pith, and minced the rind. I also took two big sprigs of fresh rosemary (courtesy of my Mom planting it in a box on my patio during one visit - thanks Mom!), stripped the leaves and minced those as well, adding them to the lemon rind. Then I chopped one large, fat clove of garlic and added that to the lemon and rosemary, and then whisked in some olive oil to all that to make a sort of chunky paste.

Next, I took my chicken (a 3 1/2 lb. roaster), and carefully separated the skin from the breast with my paring knife - this was the only tricky part, since it's hard for me to get under the chicken skin far enough towards the neck without tearing it near the cavity. I stuffed as much of the lemon-rosemary paste under the skin as I could, and then put it in the crockpot. I drizzled some olive oil over the chicken, and rubbed it over the surface, both to coat the chicken and also to distribute the lemon-rosemary paste a bit under the skin. I threw in some new potatoes and some unpeeled cloves of garlic around the chicken, and stuffed the pulp from the lemon quarters into the cavity of the chicken. Then I sprinkled a generous amount of Kosher salt over the chicken, and also a ground pepper blend for spiciness, and tucked a sprig of rosemary under each leg of the chicken. Lid on, set the crockpot to low, and off to the office I go!

Before

Nine hours later, I got home and my kitchen smelled delightfully of garlic, rosemary, and lemon. The chicken had stewed in it's own juices and was a nice golden brown. The garlic cloves were soft and mushy and sweet and nutty and the potatoes were easily pierced with a fork.

After

This turned out a LOT better than the previous preserved lemon recipe. The chicken was tender and falling off the bone, and both it and the potatoes tasted wonderful from sitting in the herb-garlic-lemon-enhanced chicken juices. I just mushed the potatoes a bit and smeared the soft garlic cloves into them, and spooned the juice from the chicken over them and the chicken, and everything was deeeeeeee-licious. The flavor of the lemons was noticeable, but not overpowering, and nothing needed more salt or pepper.

I'm definitely going to be revisiting this recipe next time whole chickens are on sale, but I think the next time I use the lemons, I'm going to try then with seafood and see how that goes. I have to say, it was really heartening to find a dish I really liked that used the preserved lemons after the unpleasant encounter with those DAMN OLIVES AND YES I AM STILL HATING ON THOSE THINGS.

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!

Vodka-marinated Steak

I found this recipe in Nigella Lawson's "Feast" - it was touted as being a Scandinavian-influenced recipe, and since I have a healthy dose of Scand in me and the recipe has just the right amount of quirk (beef and booze = cannot lose) in it, I had to give it a try. It's a really simple recipe with a few household cooking ingredients and quite a bit of vodka combined into a marinade that doubles as a gravy.

The marinade itself was easy to make, but I think the next time I won't even bother with the gravy, because that was kind of a pain to make. Basically you mix a few crushed garlic cloves with thyme, and equal amounts of vodka and olive oil. The steak needs to marinate for a few hours, so I prepared it a day in advance.

This is one SHINY steak, isn't it? Smells really good with the garlic and oil, though.

Cooking the steak itself didn't go so well. The problem was that the steak was so huge that it just barely fit into the pan I was frying it in. This might not sound like a big deal, but when the steak began to cook, all the accumulated juice and marinade seeped out of the steak, which under normal circumstances would have been fine. Problem was, since the steak already took up all the real estate in the pan, the juices accumulated on top of the steak, so instead of frying, it was submerged in liquid and I wound up with a braised steak instead of a fried one. It still tasted great, but instead of tasting like a fried steak, it tasted more like a big, flat pot roast.

The gravy was delicious, if a bit salty. You could taste the faint bite of the vodka in it. To be honest, though, I preferred those boiled potatoes I made to go with it. Those were done just by scrubbing a few red potatoes (and I had a small yellow one I added as well), and boiling them in salted water until they were easily pierced with a fork. Then I drained the water out, leaving the potatoes in the pot, and threw in a big glob of butter and snipped some fresh dill in as well. When the butter was melted, I just popped the cover on the pot and gave it a good vigorous shake to coat the potatoes with the butter and dill.


I think I'm going to try this one again with a thicker cut of steak and cook it the way I like it - more seared, with a crispy brown exterior and a juicy rare inside. For now, this recipe is on probation.

Meat-cake, MEAT-CAKE, MEAT-CAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!

I found out about this little food oddity in a sort of roundabout way. I was reading a recap off of Television Without Pity's website for "Top Chef", and there was a little link to the Black Widow Bakery for something called "meat-cake". Basically, it's a ginormous meatloaf recipe split up and shaped into rounds like a layer cake, stacked and "frosted" with mashed potatoes.

Intrigued? Hell, yes - but that was a LOT of meatloaf for just me to eat - I'd be picking at it for a week if I made it for myself! Still, I couldn't let go of the idea, and luckily an opportunity to make this fell into my lap just a few days later. My boss was celebrating his birthday, but this was during Lent, and he swears off sweets of all kinds during that time. Could there have been a more obvious sign that I was meant to make this cake? I think not (of course, if his birthday had fallen on a Friday, I'd have been in deep shit - for some reason I can't imagine making the cake layers out of fish or mac and cheese)!

Basically, I followed this recipe almost exactly as it appeared on Black Widow Bakery's site (I didn't do the glazing that the original author tried, as that clearly didn't work for her). However, I didn't feel like whipping out my pastry bag and piping potatoes around the side, and I'm a lousy artist - if I tried to emulate the steak drawing, I feared it would look more like a part of the female anatomy than anything else. No, instead I chose to decorate the cake with parsley springs, cherry tomatoes, and strips of precooked bacon.

It really wasn't hard to make - actually, the worst part of it was "kneading" the six pounds of beef by hand. The beef was ice-cold, and since there was so much of it that needed to have the eggs, seasonings, and spices mixed in that my hand alternated between being numb and aching badly from the cold. But, once it was mixed, portioned, and popped into the oven, it was smooth sailing all the way. When it came out of the oven, I grabbed up my trusty serrated knife (Xmas gift from my old friend Banana), and trimmed off a bit of the top and sides to make all the layers uniform.

Verdict? Pretty damn tasty. Just the right amount of salt in it for me (although I like my meat to be on the salty side), although the "cake" portion was kind of dry for me. But, I suppose that's necessary - if I made it moister by using less bread crumbs, I'd run the risk of the cake being too juicy or too soft for me to stack it or even remove it from the pie pan without it falling apart. C'est la vie and all that jazz. Most of the people I work with who saw the cake cut themselves a slice, and they all seemed to like it. That actually brings to mind the one negative with this cake - it's quite heavy and quite hard to cut, so make sure your knife that you use to cut this is pretty damn sharp before you make this. There were leftovers, but the garlic and oregano in the cake really imparted a nice flavor to the meat overnight, so the leftovers were still pretty damn tasty for lunch the next day.

Definitely something I'd make again for a special occasion. Next time, I think I might go for a more Italian-type flavor. I made a sort of stuffed meatloaf a while ago that was made with red wine added to the ground beef, and the meat surrounded a center of mozzarella cheese, mushrooms, and spinach, and I thought it was absolutely delicious. I'm thinking that instead of the ketchup-brown sugar filling, I could use spaghetti sauce and some chopped fresh tomatoes, or maybe stack some slices of mozzarella cheese and fresh spinach leaves between meat layers, and decorate the cake with cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, red onion slices... I'm not sure how I'm going to go about "frosting" the cake - maybe use garlic-flavored mashed potatoes and grate some fresh Parmesean and press it into the top and sides of the cake. Well, I guess that's an experiment for another day.