Great Expectations

My daughter made dinner last week.  This is not any kind of a remarkable feat.  She is, afterall, 13 years old and has mastered the only skill truly required to cook:  she can read.  Still.  It seems like it was 20 minutes ago that I was making airplane noises while I scraped pureed peas off of her lower lower lip with a plastic-coated spoon.  What the hell happened?  Apparently children grow up without your permission.  Who knew?

It didn't help that she pulled my volume of Julia Child off the shelf and decided to make supreme de volaille archiduc.  Really?  Chicken breast sauteed in onions and paprika in a Madeira-cream reduction sauce?  I had figured when I gave her the green light to cook dinner that we'd be dining on Cap'n Crunch.  Of course, as I gingerly turned over about $15 worth of chicken breast, I realized that we still might.  Indeed, I had visions that this poor chicken was destined to make a charred journey from shrink wrap-to stove-to trash.  Secretly, I wondered if I had any meat sauce stashed in the freezer that I could pull out after what I was sure would be a chicken cremation. 

I was mistaken.  The dish was everything you would expect of chicken breasts sauteed in butter and then slathered with heavy cream and booze.  It was amazing.  Eating my words never tasted so good.  My daughter had the whole family practically licking every morsel and drop of it off the plate with our tongues.  

I have often observed that the secret of successful parenting is to simply lower your expectations.  It seems, however, that the real joy of parenting is watching your children exceed them.


Supreme de Volaille Archiduc (something in French)
By Julia Child

1.   Rub 4 boneless chicken breasts with fresh lemon juice and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

2.  Finely mince one medium sized onion (about 2/3 cup).  Drop the minced onion into boiling water for 1 minute; drain, run cold water over them, and drain again.  This technique lets you quickly soften the onion, but by pouring cold water over the hot onions, you stop them from continuing to cook.

3.  Heat 4 Tbsp of butter in a large saute pan until foaming and add the blanched onion and 1 Tb of  red paprika.  Cook the onions over very low heat for about 10 minutes.  Low heat here is critical.  Butter burns really quickly;  if your pan is too hot you can turn your back for a minute and wind up with a black slurry.

4.   Add the chicken breasts and saute until they are slightly golden. 

5.  Move them to a casserole dish and finish them in an oven pre-heated to 400 degrees, about 20-30 minutes.  Julia Child claims that the meat is done when it "is springy to the touch"--whatever that means.  I have to either stick a meat thermometer in it or cut it open peak inside, a fact of which I am not particularly proud, but which I passed down to my daughter.   

6.   Pour into the now emptied pan that you used to saute the chicken, 1/4 cup beef broth, 1/4 cup port, Madeira, or dry white vermouth.  We  used Madeira.

7.  Add 1 cup heavy cream.  Yeah, baby, yeah.  This recipe tastes amazing for a reason.

8.  Add back in the reserved onion and paprika mixture.

9.  Stir the sauce constantly over high heat until the cream boils down and slightly thickens.  Season to taste with lemon, salt, and pepper.

10.  Serve the sauce over the now fully cooked chicken breast and garnish with parsley.  Pair it with anything that will absorb the sauce:  risotto, potatoes, polenta and a fresh green, such as those frozen green peas that languish for months in the back of your freezer.
11.  Ask your daughter when she's making it again.

Mushroom Smothered Pork Chops

Remind me not to shop at Costco.  I needed a handful of mushrooms last week, and since I was there anyway for some salmon, I got lazy and picked up a mega-sized container of 'shrooms.  The thing was massive.  How could any average family really plow through all of those mushrooms unless they also offered some hallucinogenic value?  Because it kills me to simply buy groceries only to eventually shovel them into the compost heap, I was bound and determined to use those mushrooms.  As I watched them slowly turn from white to brown, and observed the stem start to separate from the button top, a feeling akin to panic erupted.  There's nothing worse than a refrigerator full of mushrooms except perhaps a refrigerator full of rotten mushrooms.  I mean the purpose of a refrigerator is to store food--not garbage, and the only thing to stop that process was a cook.  But what in the hell do you do with a pound and half of mushrooms that aren't quite as fresh as they should be?  Here's a thought:  mushroom smothered pork and mushroom risotto.   The mushrooms are practically stewed, so it won't matter that they aren't quite pretty enough to slice and toss on a salad.  And not to brag, but I also cleared out 3 onions, some leftover chicken broth, and 1/2 bottle of a truly sucky pinot grigio, and the meal was phenomenal.  Sometimes I amaze myself.

Served with roasted tomatoes and patty pan squash,
a salad, and a lovely Viognier 

 Smothered Pork chops with Mushroom Risotto

1.     Dredge 4 thick boneless pork chops in flour seasoned generously with rosemary, salt and pepper.  Pan sear in hot, but not smoking, olive oil until a light golden brown--about 4 minutes each side.  Set aside.

2.     Add about 2 Tbs olive oil to the pan, and add 3 medium-sized chopped onions and one and one-half pounds of sliced mushrooms, scraping up any bits from the pan-seared pork.

3.     Saute for about 3-5 minutes until just tender.  Add 1/2 bottle of pinot grigio.  Don't even think about sipping it.  It's been sitting in the refrigerator for 3 weeks because it was too gross to drink.  Ignore what the Food Network advises about never cooking with a wine you wouldn't drink.  Bull.  For God's sake, you are going to boil the hell out of this wine.  What is that going to do to the structure and nuanced flavors of a really good wine?  If it's good enough to drink, drink it.  If it isn't--cook with it. 

4.     Continue to let the onions and mushrooms simmer in the wine until most of the wine has been either absorbed or boiled off.  Place 1/2 of this mixture on the pork chops.

5.     Add 1 cup of risotto to the mushroom mixture that remains in the saucepan.

6.     Continue to add hot chicken broth to the mixture, one cup at a time until the rice is plump and tender--about 2-3 cups of broth depending on how much wine the rice initially absorbed.  This process will take about 20 minutes, and requires you to consistently stir the risotto. 

7.    In the meantime, preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and place the previously set aside pork in the oven for about the same 20 minutes. 

A word here on cooking pork.  Cooking pork has been forever ruined by the fear of trichinosis.  Do not underestimate this fear.  Trichinosis is a horrible, debilitating, life threatening disease--that no one in the modern era has ever contracted.  Still, it is largely responsible for both the Jewish and Islamic faiths wholly writing off any meal associated in the least by pig.  The fear of trichinosis caused my mother to cook pork to such a degree that it really should have been more properly advertised as: "Pork--the other gray meat."   But despite what the Department of Homeland Security would have you believe, there's a big difference between fear and reality.   The fear is trichinosis; I get that, and that fear is huge.  The reality is that pork cooked until it is just slightly pink, with the juices running clear and white, tastes simply and utterly amazing, and it is completely safe.  Really.  For years, I've not just been eating pork, but have actually been enjoying it, and well, I'm not dead yet.