Chicken, Potatoes, and Zucchini
For a few years, I would cook skin-on, boneless chicken breasts at least once a week. As happens when you cook something repeatedly, I reached a point that I could turn out a moist chicken breast with crisp skin by starting in a pan, and ending in the oven. It's not the most exciting thing in the world to eat, but lately my son has decided that anything with "fat" is inedible. He defines "fat" broadly, unfortunately, but he's willing to eat chicken breast.
So tonight I bought some bone-in chicken breasts, a couple of zucchini, and a couple of potatoes. I wanted to duplicate the sauce I made a few nights ago to serve with a strip steak - which featured some cured black olives I still had in the fridge. I changed it a little, but it still featured the olives front and center. I took the chicken breasts off the bone, reserving the bones in the freezer for future stock.
I also made the potatoes just a bit differently. Last time I put the strip steak on top of the potatoes to finish cooking in the oven. This time I cooked the potatoes separately, and I trimmed them before starting.
I had some "heirloom" tomatoes that I'd bought at Whole Foods for use in making pizza. Yes, I know it's not tomato season here. These were really quite good though, and if I've sinned against the Locavore movement, so be it. You'll have to trust me if I tell you that's the least of my sins.
Anyway, when I realized I wasn't going to use all of the tomatoes, and that some of them were a bit too ripe, I decided to make tomato water.
Here's how the dish turned out:
Click for an image that includes the zucchini
The chicken is pretty simple: salt and pepper, then flour, then a very hot frying pan with a little oil. In this case, grapeseed oil. Brown the chicken on both sides, then pop the breasts in a preheated 350
The sauce was equally simple. Around a pint of chicken stock, a half cup of marsala, a tablespoon of fresh rosemary, and a dozen or so cured black olives, halved. Reduce that by 3/4, and mount it with a couple of tablespoons of butter just before you serve. Tonight I reserved the Marsala until I'd cooked the chicken breasts, and used it to deglaze the pan before adding it to the sauce.
For the (waxy, thin-skinned) potatoes, I just cut a bunch of 1/4 inch thick slices, then used a small round form to cut them into identical sizes. There really wasn't much to the trimmings, but the end result was nice on the plate. I browned the potatoes in butter, then roasted them for around 15 minutes. They came out with just a bit of texture, which is what I was going for.
I sliced the zucchini on a Japanese slicer so that it was almost translucently thin. I started by sauteeing some diced tomato in olive oil, marjoram, then added some tomato water I'd made over the weekend. (I had some ripe tomatoes that I cored, then put into a food processor, pureed, then strained over cheese-cloth to get around a cup of clear liquid that has a wonderful tomato flavor.) I poached the zucchini slices in the tomato water for around 5 minutes. They weren't falling apart, but they were tender. Next time I'll add a little more flavor to the water in the way of garlic, or additional herbs.
The meal worked out, even if the sorta-Mediterranean flavors involved weren't appropriate to the cold-ish weather we're having at the moment.
