Posts tagged Chicken
Honey Soy Chicken Wings

 I first made these honey soy chicken wings a few years ago when I was working long hours in San Francisco. I wanted a nice comforting dish that didn't involve standing in front of the stove for too long. And preferably something that could be reheated easily the next day. The result was these chicken wings, which take only 10 minutes of marinating time and 30 minutes in the oven. They are as delicious as they are easy, packed with flavor from the honey, hoisin sauce, sesame oil, and soy sauce. Try them out and let me know what you think!

I want to share a recipe that has always been dependable, through good days and bad. Whenever I get home late from work, and don't feel like doing much on the stove, I would marinate wings in a honey, hoisin sauce, soy sauce, and sesame oil mixture, then stick them in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes. Really, it can't be easier, and the flavor combination is tried-and-true. Sometimes I would add cayenne for a spicy kick.

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Sriracha Garlic Wings

It's hard to get enough of chicken wings, especially in the summer, and especially when there's some major sporting event on. For as long as I can remember I've followed the Olympics religiously. Swimming, track, gymnastics, tennis, diving, you name it. I'll follow prelims as well as finals and ooh and aah over all the heartwarming background stories of athletes I had never heard of two weeks prior.

(And being in Beijing for the 2008 games, in the center of all the action, was such a fun experience!)

This time around I'm watching everything from my couch in Brooklyn. And for watching any kind of sports action from your couch, spicy chicken wings is practically a must-have. It's an easy and filling appetizer or, depending on portion size, full on-dinner. And they're downright delicious.

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Lemongrass Chicken Wings

I finally joined the Park Slope Co-op after two years of living in the neighborhood. And it's been kind of life-changing. Not because I'm suddenly exposed to organic and seasonal food, since I've been buying both for years, but because I no longer have to trek out to Chinatown for ingredients like lemongrass, curry leaves, etc. And having so much lemongrass close by has made me use regularly in the kitchen again, such as for making Vietnamese chicken curry and Thai lemongrass and ginger iced tea.

Earlier this week I decided to make lemongrass chicken wings. As some of you might have guessed by now, I love wings and will try to find any excuse to make them, whether it's for a summer cookout, mid-winter tiki party, Chinese-Caribbean party, or just reviving a homestyle Chinese dish that involves Coca-Cola.

The best way to extract full flavor from lemongrass, as I once learned from the ex-boyfriend of an old roommate who was a pastry chef, is to bruise the white ends of the lemongrass stalk with the blunt edge of your knife's knife before slicing. This releases the lemongrass flavor much better than simply chopping. The marinade for these wings is plenty flavorful, with fish sauce, lime juice, garlic, ginger, and shallots. To get some nice browning in the oven, I baste the wings with a honey and soy sauce mixture during the roasting.

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Black Bean Chicken Wings

A couple of weeks ago, I had the hardest time finding chicken wings in supermarkets. It seemed that stores around here just couldn't keep enough in stock for the Super Bowl. So I had to wait...and wait...until almost a week later, to make these black bean chicken wings that I had been craving.

We tend to think of chicken wings as appetizers, but they're almost always served as entrees in Chinese homes. See, for example, the soy sauce chicken or Coca-Cola chicken wings I wrote about last year. (Coke may have only been in China for a few decades, but is already a popular cooking ingredient.) Black bean chicken wings is another popular dish, with a deep earthy flavor from either fermented black beans or jarred Chinese black bean sauce. The wings are first seared until golden on each side, then braised for 15 to 20 minutes in a covered wok or pan. I added a bit of cayenne pepper for a mild smokiness, but you can always double the portions for more of a kick.

So even though chicken wing fever has died down from a week ago, this still made a tasty meal for a cold, gray Saturday, when 20 minutes in front of the stove was just long enough to not interrupt a Netflix marathon.

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Thai Basil Chicken Fried Rice

Remember my Thai Basil Sangria post from a couple months ago, in which I became excited by the prospect of being able to grow herbs indoors during the winter? Well, that excitement might have been premature.

In early November sun was still streaming in through the windows for 8+ hours a day. It was still warm enough that I was able to crack open the window to let in fresh air. Not anymore, on both accounts. And my window plants, consequently, have been fading, even with religious watering.

All my herbs, including the Thai basil plant that was so lively before, are nearing the end. So for lunch one day, I decided to use up as much of it as possible while it was still somewhat healthy. I didn't want to trek to the store to pick up curry paste, so this Thai basil chicken fried rice was the answer. And it made me wonder why I didn't make fried rice with Thai basil more often. I used up not only most of the basil but also some leftover chicken in the fridge. Best of all, I spent only 5 minutes in front of the stove for a very tasty lunch.

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Chinese Almond Chicken

I don't know what it is about chicken and nuts, but they seem to go perfectly together. Other than pork with peanuts, no other meat gets the same natural pairing, at least with whole nuts. There's a well-known chicken dish for just about every kind of nut out there, from Kung Pao chicken to chicken with cashews, all with different sauces and slightly different preparation methods.

Almond Chicken is another winner to add to that list. It was a pretty popular dish starting around a century ago, served alongside egg foo young and chop suey at Chinese restaurants in the U.S. From the 1940s through the 1960s, cookbooks aimed at American housewives printed recipes to allow them to recreate the popular dish at home. Why its popularity waned (at least on the East Coast!), when cashew chicken and walnut chicken are still Chinese menu standbys, is a mystery for the ages.

This recipe for almond chicken is adapted from Ken Hom's Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese-American Childhood. He writes that the more old school Chinese-American restaurants serve the dish with a "dark-brown sauce, a sort of ready-made gravy that is artificially colored to make our American customers more comfortable with Chinese dishes."

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Braised Chicken with Chestnuts

For the past few days, ever since daylight savings, I've been thinking about winters back in Massachusetts. When I was younger, around this time of year, the old Jordan Marsh department store in Boston (now a Macy's) would set up the "Enchanted Village", an almost-over-the-top holiday wonderland that took up a whole floor of the building and drew in hoards of visitors with its lavish window displays. There were mechanical teddy bears in Santa hats waving at you. Toy trains chugging over and under snow-capped plastic mountains in dizzying figure eights. Endless repetition of Jingle Bell Rock and other holiday standards. Parents and kids and babies in strollers coming from all directions. And I went back year after year, loving every single minute.

(To this day, I'm a huge sucker for Christmas displays, even though my Sunday school education and church-going ended somewhere around third grade.)

And en route from Jordan Marsh, next to the Salvation Army bell ringers, there would inevitably be a guy selling fresh roasted chestnuts. I'd share a bag with whoever I was with, either my mom or aunt or a friend. Munching on the chestnuts, I'd also start humming the opening lines of The Christmas Song to myself, even the nuts weren't actually roasted, as the song goes, over an open fire.

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Chicken Tikka Masala

On nights when I'm not recipe-testing for the cookbook, I crave at least one of the following: a) sushi, b) pizza, or c) Indian food. Good versions of first two are easy to find in my Brooklyn neighborhood, but the third is, sadly, lacking. I don't live anywhere close to Jackson Heights, Murray Hill, or East 6th St., so cravings have to be satisfied by just rolling up my sleeve.

(When I was in Beijing, which was lacking in not only good Indian food but stores to find non-Chinese spices, I periodically whipped up Chinese-Indian food like Gobi Manchurian and chicken lollipops.)

Chicken tikka masala might be many people's introduction to Indian food, even though it's more or less an Indian-British fusion dish. Some claim that it was invented in 1960's Britain, when chefs began adding gravy to chicken dishes to satisfy the British palate, while others argue that it originated much earlier in India during British colonialism.  It's such a part of British culture that 5 years ago British foreign secretary Robin Cook declared it "a true British national dish. The Scots claimed that it originated in Glasgow, much to the outrage of chefs in India. But whatever its original, there's little dispute that the yogurt-marinated chicken bathed in creamy tomato sauce is delicious and crave-worthy.

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Chinese Burmese Chili Chicken

Almost every omnivore in the U.S. goes wild for chicken wings. Juicy meat, glistening skin that can be roasted, grilled or fried...what's not to love? Yet very few of us seem to feel the same about chicken thighs or chicken legs. Last July, when every store in my Brooklyn neighbordhood was out of chicken wings, I had no trouble finding abundant supplies of fresh, organic chicken legs for less than $2 a pound.

A recent article in Slate about the U.S. needing new markets for exporting dark chicken meat  made me ponder (again) why we are a nation of wings and chicken breast lovers who toss or export the rest of the bird. You can't find more polar opposites, as far as chicken parts go, than wings and chicken breast. One is all skin and rich dark meat that oozes flavor, the other is lean and frankly, rather bland on its own.

While I like chicken breast in chicken noodle soup and somestir-fries, it's rather boring compared with dark meat and shines only when paired with tastier ingredients. You can't just rub a skinless chicken breast with olive oil and pepper and salt, stick it in the oven, and call it good.

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Foodbuzz 24x24: Mid-Winter Tiki Party

 So the holiday season is over, it's snowing for the 20th time this month, and the road to spring looks long and arduous. You want to be some place warm. Like Tahiti, or Oahu. But there's that cost thing. If only there were a place in New York where you could go and pretend to be in a tropical paradise. Some place with Mai Tai's and an occasionally overactive radiator, for example.

So read the beginning of the invitation for my Brooklyn tiki party. The end of January seemed like the perfect time to throw one, in conjunction with Foodbuzz's 24x24 event, wherein 24 bloggers around the world host food-themed events of their choosing on the same night. Tiki seemed like a natural choice; Chinese food plays a pretty big role in tiki culture as we know it in the US, and donning a lei and drinking tropical punches seemed like the perfect way to spend a winter's evening.

We no longer have a Trader Vic's in New York, but the city has seen some high-profile Polynesian-themed establishments open in the past year, including Lani Kai, The Hurricane Club, and Painkiller. Years ago, before the tiki revival trend, for a fun night out I used to go to Otto's Shrunken Head on East 14th, where you can get highly potent concoctions and listen to The Ventures cover bands.  My current apartment, with its open kitchen layout, seemed like the perfect spot to recreate a tiki bar.

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Chicken and Apple Dumplings

Ever gone apple-picking on a 90-degree day? Last weekend probably had the last of such summery temperatures until next June. But instead of lounging on the beach, I was at the apple orchard helping to pick about 30 pounds of crisp, earlyish-in-the-season apples. Signs of fall weren't completely missing: on the drive up the Hudson from New York, I spotted abut one in 30 trees with a vibrant red or orange hue.

The cool weather on the radar for this week (and my insatiable craving for appley desserts) is probably a good sign that it had been the perfect time to go apple-picking.

What does one end up doing with 30 pounds of apples? Apple bread, apple fritters, and apple cookies were all cranked out this weekend. In lieu of apple pie, we attempted apple pandowdy (which, I was reminded, is in the lyrics of an oldies hit.) For something savory, I decided to try apple dumplings.

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