Chicken and Veal Stew

I needed a meal for four. I had chicken for two, veal shanks for two, and absolutely no desire to go to the store. A look into the pantry revealed potatoes and carrots. I had what I needed for a stew!

The first step was to braise the veal shanks. A braise will be successful if the meat is dredged in seasoned flour, then browned before beginning the actual braise. There’s nothing fancy here, just some salt and freshly ground pepper in flour. Be sure to leave air around each piece while browning, even if you have to do it in stages, as in this case.

It isn’t strictly necessary to use aromatics, but I really like to melt some mirepoix to make an extra rich broth. I didn’t have celery, so I used carrots, onions, and red capsicum (bell pepper), better known as the Cajun trinity. I just cooked the trinity in some extra virgin olive oil until the onions were starting to look translucent.

You really need wine and stock for a good braise, although stock alone will work fine. I had some wild mushroom stock left over, and a goodly stock of dried wild mushrooms to make more. I put the shanks into the pan and added hot stock until it was about halfway up the shanks. This went into a 350°F/175°C oven, uncovered, for about three hours. After an hour or so, I turned the shanks over, and turned them back about two hours into cooking.

At this point I needed the oven to make bread, so I finished the stew on the stovetop. It would have worked just as well in the oven.

While the braise was working, I skinned two chicken leg quarters and visited the herb garden for rosemary, thyme, and parsley. The rosemary and thyme were wrapped in a scrap of cheesecloth and secured with a food-safe band–kitchen twine would have worked fine.

After the shanks had cooked to the point that the meat fell off the bone, I removed the veal bones and added the chicken quarters along with more stock and the now-reconstituted dried mushrooms used to make it, three cloves of garlic, and the herb packet.

I cooked this, covered, at a simmer until the chicken meat literally fell off the bones when I picked them up with tongs. At that point I added baby red potatoes, quartered yukon gold potatoes, and carrots. I continued cooking at a simmer until the potatoes were done.

Then I strained the liquid into another container and degreased it. Meanwhile the pot went back onto the stove with wine, which was reduced by one-half, then more stock, and finally the degreased juices from the braise and simmer. At this point I tasted the sauce, and added a bit of salt and pepper. Notice that this was the first and only seasoning, other than the small amount of salt and pepper in the flour used for dredging.

Cooking slowly for more than five hours extracted a lot of flavor from the veal and chicken bones, as well as from the meat. Wine has some sodium in it, and reducing the stock and juices concentrated the flavors. Thus, only a small bit of salt and pepper was needed. The parsley isn’t there just for looks. A bit of  minced parsley adds a subtle fresh note that really finishes a dish.

Turned out that I made too much. No one seemed to complain about having this stew two days running, and yes, it was better the second day!

Technique: Breaking Down Poultry

Photos by Donald L. Mark

There was a time when every home cook knew how to break down whole poultry into parts, because they didn’t have a choice. Then we learned to pay exorbitant amounts of money for other people to do it for us. Well that’s just silly. It only takes a small amount of instruction and one chicken to learn how to break down poultry, and you get to eat the chicken because YOU CAN’T FAIL.

Whole chickens are usually less expensive than their parts. The day I bought this one it was 99 cents per pound, wings were $1.29 per pound, legs and thighs were $2.39, and boneless skinless breasts were $3.29. If I had purchased just the two breast halves I would have spent about six dollars, but instead I bought the whole chicken for $4.27. You can get a quart of good chicken stock and four entrée portions from one chicken. That’s about a dollar a serving plus a few cents for chicken stock.

Okay, so what do you need to break down a chicken? A cutting board, a knife, a plate for the parts, and some paper towels. I use a boning knife because I happen to have one, but any sharp knife you’re comfortable with will work.

Start by rinsing the chicken in cold tap water, cleaning out the inner cavity where you’ll find the neck, gizzard, liver, and heart, and patting it dry with paper towels. Save everything except the liver for chicken stock. Use the liver for paté, a quick snack, or pet food.

Lay the chicken on its back on the cutting board. Pull the leg and thigh away from the body and make an incision in the skin to give yourself room to work.

Feel around to locate the joint between the hip and the thigh, then snap the thigh downward to pop it out.

Using the tip of your knife, remove the leg quarter from the body.

Now, feel along the breast centerline with your fingers and locate the breast bone. Using the tip of your knife, make an incision along one side, keeping the tip of the blade against the bone and cartilage.

Carefully scrape the tip of your knife along the rib cage while pulling outward on the meat to separate the breast from the bones.

Cut along the wishbone, then pull the breast away from the rib cage, scraping the meat away from the rib cage as necessary, then cut it free.

If you wish, remove the wing by first dislocating the joint, then cutting through the cartilage. Note how I’ve curled my fingers to keep them away from the knife. I want to cut the bird, not myself!

Repeat these steps on the other side, and you’re done. It’s just that easy, and since all poultry are constructed the same, the instructions work just as well on duck, goose, turkey, or any other edible poultry. Makes you wonder why you paid so much more for those parts than you did for the whole bird.

Pea and Mushroom Soup

When mushrooms have been sitting around a day or two longer than they really should, or you find a sale on dried mushrooms, make some mushroom stock. Then, when you need an umami-filled light lunch or quick soup, you’ll have a great base to build upon.

I had more shiitake mushrooms than I could use, and they were starting to dry out, so I cut them into large chunks and put them into a small sauce pan with some filtered water. After they’d simmered for an hour, I added more filtered water and some porcini powder, then let the pot simmer another 30 minutes. After letting it cool a bit, I strained it, pressing as much liquid as possible out of the mushrooms. The result was a very rich mushroom stock with a nice dark brown color. A stock like this will last for 3 days in the refrigerator or a month in the freezer.

To make this soup, I cut some crimini mushrooms into thick slices and lightly sautéed them with a some butter and extra virgin olive oil; leave out the butter for a dairy-free soup. I added some chunks of grilled chicken, but it would have been an excellent vegan soup without the chicken.

I added mushroom stock to the fry pan and let the chicken warm up for about 3 minutes. Then I poured everything into a bowl.

Next, I added a bit of canola oil to the fry pan and quickly fried some cooked soba noodles–make sure you use 100% buckwheat soba noodles to make this gluten-free. Once the noodles began sticking to the pan, I poured the mushrooms, chicken, and stock into the fry pan to deglaze, added whole sugar snap peas, and grabbed some bowls. After about two minutes it was ready to serve. Total time, start to finish, was about 15 minutes.

Such a short cooking time means the peas were still crunchy, a great contrast with the mushrooms. The umami-rich mushroom stock made this a very satisfying meal.

Pantry Soup

Chicken Soup

What’s pantry soup? That’s when you make a soup out of what you have in your pantry and freezer. The trick is to make sure you have a ready supply of the sorts of things you almost always need.

I make it a rule never to buy parts of a chicken, only the whole chicken. The only exception is when I buy chicken livers so that I can feed my friend’s cat, Beau, his favorite treat–minced chicken livers with garlic. Recently I needed two chicken leg quarters to make dinner for two, so I was left with two half-breasts and a carcass. The two half-breasts went into freezer bags for later. The carcass I made into stock.

Another rule I follow is never throw away vegetable parts. I save all parts of carrots, celery, onions, and mushrooms for stock-making. If I don’t need them right away, they go into a freezer bag. Yes, they’re better fresh. No, I don’t always make stock right away.

Chicken Soup Mise en Place

So, it was time to make lunch. The freezer yielded a quart of chicken stock, a chicken breast, and a bag of frozen peas. The crisper drawer yielded a carrot and celery stalk, plus half an onion from the previous night. I found some lemon pappardelle in a cupboard.

I brought the stock to a gentle boil and added the chicken breast to poach it. Meanwhile, I diced the mirepoix. Once the chicken was reasonably cooked, I pulled it out of the pot to cut it into bite-size chunks. The mirepoix and the chicken chunks went back into the pot along with the noodles. Any noodle would have been fine, or I could have added a grain like rice to make it gluten-free, waiting about 15 minutes to return the chicken to the pot. When the noodles were mostly done I added some frozen peas.

Total prep time? About 10 minutes while the chicken breast poached. Total cost? I’m not sure, but I’d estimate less than $2. That’s two bucks. Or less. Because the chicken and stock were leftovers from other meals, the mirepoix couldn’t have cost more than about 75 cents, I didn’t use more than about 50 cents worth of frozen peas, and no more than 75 cents worth of noodles.