Cardoons

I have been a big fan of Mario Batali's for years, and he has waxed rhapsodic about cardoons so often that I have developed a near-pathological desire to try them. Unfortunately, we don't see so many cardoons around our parts. Most folks around here don't even know what they are.

So what are they? Cardoons belong to the artichoke family. We grew one a few years back but unfortunately couldn't figure out how to harvest it; when it flowered, the flower looked just like an artichoke. You don't eat the flower of the cardoon, however; you eat the stalks, which look like celery on steroids.

The local Whole Food had cardoons in stock a few days ago. It was the first time I'd ever seen them in their 'ready to cook' format, and I immediately knew that my commitment to eating locally was about to be compromised. I grabbed what appeared to be the best looking bunch (what does a good cardoon look like? I truly have no idea), plunked down my $3, and started planning my preparation.

Fortunately I have a mountain of Italian cookbooks at home. I lean most heavily on Mario Batali, Marcella Hazan, and Giuliano Bugialli, so that's where I started my research. They all agree that cardoons should be washed, cut into 2" or 3" sections and soaked in acidulated water (a little lemon juice does the trick; skip this step and they will start to turn brown, which I'm pretty sure does not effect the taste but does mar the presentation), then simmered for 30 minutes in acidulated water. The tough strings running through the ribs must be removed; most chefs say that this is easiest to do after cooking.

Because I had never had them before, I wanted a simple preparation that focused on the flavor of the cardoons, so I rejected a delicious-looking but too-elaborate-seeming recipe for cardoons baked with béchamel, cheese, and the like, and chose instead to sauté the cardoons briefly, then dress them with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

My results were mixed. My instinct was to boil less rather than more; I didn't want the cardoons to turn to mush. As a result, they were cooked but still a bit crunchy. A few of the smaller pieces had cooked further and had the consistency of a well-prepared artichoke heart; they offered a little, but not much, resistance to the bite. This is the way cardoons should be prepared, I think; cooked this way, they truly are the poor man's artichoke.

One bunch of cardoons makes an awful lot of cardoons, much more than the missus and I could eat in one sitting. I used the rest the next day in a lentil soup that also featured pancetta, parsnips, carrots, garlic, and onion. As we say down here in the South, it was some good.

Tacos de Lengua

I was a lucky kid; my mom knew how to get me to try foods that I never, ever in a million years would have tried if she told me what they were. The most memorable example is tongue. The first time she served it, I asked what it was. "Beef," she said. By the time I knew what cut of beef I was eating, I was hooked.

Tongue is very, very tasty; if you haven't tried it, you really have missed out on something wonderful. Like most organ meats, it's not especially good for you. It's high in calories, high in fat, and high in cholesterol. But like all such things, it can and should be enjoyed in moderation.

The tongue my mom served was a cured beef tongue, the style preferred by Jews. Mexicans eat fresh tongue, and because there are so many more Mexicans than Jews in North Carolina, fresh tongue is generally what's available to me. That's fine, because fresh tongue is what you need to make tacos de lengua (doesn't that sound so much better than 'tongue taco')?

I bought a locally produced buffalo tongue (frozen) at the Carrboro Farmer's Market. I defrosted it, brined it for several hours, then simmered it in salted water spiked with some peppercorns and a few bay leaves for three hours. After it had cooled enough to handle, I stripped off the skin. This is easy to do, as the skin is thick and separates easily from the meat. You just have to slice through to the meat, grab a sheet of skin, and pull. It'll come off in a half-dozen or so pieces. I discarded the skin; it's garbage. Then I cut the portion of tongue I planned to use into 1/2" cubes and reserved the rest for later use.

Finally, I heated a skillet with a tablespoon or so of olive oil. When the oil started to shimmer, I added some ground cumin, some cayenne, some garlic salt, some salt, and some pepper and let that all toast for 10 or 15 seconds, stirring constantly. When the aroma of the spices started to waft up from the stove, I added the cubed tongue and cooked until the edges started to crisp a bit, stirring frequently so that the spices would coat the tongue evenly.

Heat some corn tortillas. Did you forget to make pico de gallo? Make it now; diced onion, diced tomato, chopped cilantro, maybe some jalapeno, maybe a little minced garlic, lime juice. Toss, taste, adjust. Fill a tortilla with tongue, dress with pico de gallo, eat. Yum.

Toxinex™: For the New You

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Side effects of Toxinex™ may include one or more of the following: rapid hair growth, dry heaves, acute pain in the testicles or labia, development of a tail, profound enlargement of the eyes and/or tongue, spontaneous and frequent orgasm, kidney and liver failure, suicidal thoughts, hearing voices, acute depression, and an irresistible urge to procure an automatic weapon and take out every last bastard at the nearest McDonalds, starting with the one who was laughing at you the last time you were there. If you experience any of these symptoms, contact your physician to determine whether you should increase or, God forbid, decrease your dosage of Toxinex. Under no circumstances should you discontinue the use of Toxinex™; Toxinex™ changes the chemistry of your cells so that they can no longer form cell walls without Toxinex™. Cessation of Toxinex™ usage typically results in immediate and painful death by internal hemorrhaging.

Toxinex™: For the New You. Ask your doctor for it today, lose your SANITY tomorrow. The first bottle's free!

Chicken

There are many, many different wonderful ways to prepare chicken. For presentation, you can't beat roasting a whole bird (we always stick a lemon, flesh perforated by a fork, in the cavity as per Marcella Hazan's instructions; we refer to this dish as Chicken Lemon Up the Bum). Roasting is not without its perils, however; it is difficult to gauge exactly when the bird is done, and when chicken is cooked whole, the various parts of the bird don't always finish cooking at the same time. The result is either a dry breast or a dark meat portion that could give you the trots.

Then there's braising chicken parts, as in a fricassee or coq au vin. The results are delicious, but I find it impossible to prepare chicken this way without turning the skin into a pale, unappealing goo. Dredging in flour and browning up front helps a little, but fact of the matter is the bird will eventually wind up steaming, and that's going to take all the crunch out of the skin. Also, the resulting sauce must be carefully defatted unless you're going for that Eastern European/Jewish where's-my-heart-attack-I-want-my-heart-attack-right-now!!! effect.

Chicken under a brick is a fabulous preparation, but it's a little labor intensive. Also, because it requires prolonged browning over very high heat in a shallow pan, it results in a lot of fat spattering. The missus, who is on cleanup duty, does not so much appreciate this, so I've shied away from this preparation lately.

For now, my preferred method is to bake the chicken parts. Baking and roasting, in truth, are pretty much the same cooking technique; baking traditionally refers to chicken parts, however, while roasting refers to cooking a bird whole. No, I do not know why that is. What do I look like, the danged Internets? But I digress…

I like to buy my birds whole. They are cheaper that way (making it easier for a cheapskate like myself to pay the 100% extra for an organic chicken or more still for a pastured bird--see note below), and it seems intuitively obvious to me that a whole bird has less likely begun the rotting/degrading/flavor-shedding process than has a package of chicken parts, all other things being equal. Buying a whole bird also means that I can butcher the bird exactly to my specifications and treat myself to some gizzards when I'm done with my prep work. Cutting up a chicken takes all of two minutes. With poultry shears I cut out the spine, then split the bird along the breastbone. Separating the dark meat quarter takes no time at all, as at this point it is attached to the breast quarter only by skin. I trim off the wing tip, find the joint between the wing and breast, and--snip!--I have six pieces to cook: two breasts, two wings, two leg/thigh portions.

Next up is the brine. Brining effects a magical transformation on poultry (watch Alton Brown to find out why; I've had the how and why explained to me many times but it keeps escaping from my head when I'm not looking) that makes it more tender and flavorful. A brine is basically a saline solution, which you can spike with other flavor enhancers. I add some peppercorns, a few bay leaves, and a splash of fruit juice (lately I've been using apricot nectar; try it!). I generally prep and brine the chicken in the morning or early afternoon. It's ready for cooking by dinnertime.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Cook the chicken parts, skin side up, for 20 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 degrees and cook for another 30 minutes (for a 4-pound bird; I'm no rocket scientist but I suspect you'd want to cook a larger bird for a little longer and a smaller one for slightly less time). The skin will start to brown a bit and perhaps puff slightly. The chicken parts will release some juices and they will be clear, not pink. When these things happen, it is time to eat chicken.

Last night I served this with a mixed green salad (we are eating a lot of salad around here these days, probably more in the last month than we had in the previous seven years) and parsnip-and-sweet-potato home fries. These were very easy to make. I simply diced the parsnips and sweet potatoes up into a fine 1/4"-dice, heated some oil in a hot skillet over high heat, tossed in the veggies, and started cooking, stirring occasionally to prevent burning. High heat caramelized the exterior, giving each piece good crunch and extra sweetness. After about five minutes I tossed in some fine-diced onion and a little butter, then a little more butter, and then just a wee bit more butter. Once the butter goes in, make sure to reduce the heat to medium, because butter burns easily and you do not want that to happen. I was a little worried about this dish as I've never tried cooking potatoes in a skillet (without boiling them first, anyways) but I had no cause. This dish was a winner and will be entering the regular rotation around here.

NOTE: There are so many different types of chicken out there in the marketplace today. Most common are those produced in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO). These are your Perdue/Tyson/etc. chickens. I am now committed to avoiding these birds for so many reasons: (1) they have been genetically modified for size, growth speed, and resistance to disease when placed in unnatural conditions (i.e. living nuts to butts with thousands of other chickens in very confined quarters), but not for taste; (2) they are raised in unnatural conditions which also happen to be extraordinarily inhumane; (3) these unnatural conditions under which they are raised also result in all sorts of significant environmental damage.

Organic birds are better, but the term "organic" only means that the birds weren't fed genetically modified plants or plants that were grown conventionally (an odd term since "conventional" growing is a relatively new phenomenon, while its counterpart "organic" is how humans have been growing food for millennia). It usually means they weren't pumped full of antibiotics, either. Most organic birds you'll find at the Whole Foods will ensure right on the packaging that the birds are antibiotic-free. However, organic birds are often raised in CAFO-like conditions. I'd rather the bird I eat didn't spend its entire life as if it were experiencing a never-ending New York City rush hour subway ride.

The term "free range" chicken suggests the bird led a better life, but that's not always the case. Government regulations allow the designation "free range" for birds raised in confinement pens so long as the birds have access to a pasture. That access is typically located at a single point at one end of a long pen; few birds ever find their way to the pasture, nor would they be inclined to since all their food is in the pen. This, unfortunately, is the way a lot of producers of free-range organic chickens run their operations.

So now I try to buy my chickens at the farmer's market from someone who raises chickens the old fashioned way, in a pasture. I must admit I'm not orthodox on this because those chickens are pretty expensive, but as often as possible that's the way I go. The organic and free-range organic birds, while not ideal, are at least a lot healthier for us as consumers than are those CAFO birds, I'm convinced.

Thus ends our lesson on chicken! Oh, yeah, one more thing:

C is the way to begin
H is the next letter in
I, I am the third
C, that's the middle of the word
K. I'm fillin' in
E, we're gettin' near the end
C-H-I-C-K-E-N
That's the way to spell chicken!