Fall Feast
Thoughts on cooking season, and a recipe
The thing we didn’t like about Sicily, where we just traveled for vacation, was the food.
Not quite. We had a lot of great food! But we also had a fair amount of poor food, and we found the quality of restaurants to be pretty uneven. By the time we reached the end of the trip, I really couldn’t wait to get back to cooking every night.
Over the last year or so, I’ve found that I enjoy restaurants less in general. I’m not sure if they’re just getting worse, or if I perceive them as being worse because I’ve gotten better at cooking. I’ve gotten to the point where I can eat a dish in a restaurant and pretty much make it at home, often better. We usually only go to restaurants for cuisines that are difficult or time-consuming to make at home now. And we save a lot of money.
Other than writing, cooking is one of my favorite things to do. So many people think it’s hard or expensive to cook great food at home, or they just don’t enjoy it. I wonder if some people might enjoy it if they got better at it. A little bit chicken-and-egg, I know. I’d like to write more here about cooking—not about food, per se, but about how I got good at it, and how you can eat well for very cheap.
Today, I want to show you something I almost bought:
So I said I can replicate most things I eat. This looked good, but it was too pricey—it came to almost $20, for some chicken breast, squash, and rice. So on a day when I had nowhere to go, I spent a little time trying to make this.
A couple of tweaks: I used sweet potato only, I added stuffing, and I skewed the chicken-to-filling ratio more towards filling. And a little trick: pre-salt the chicken, which helps it stay juicy. This is called “dry brining.” It really works.
Here it is before rolling up: two chicken breasts butterflied, pounded flat, and lined up with each other to make one big chicken layer, with plastic wrap underneath. I rolled it up like a sushi roll, basically: plastic wrap = sushi mat, chicken = seaweed, filling = fish/crab stick/avocado.
To help it keep its shape, I tightly wrapped it in plastic wrap and kept it in the fridge for a few hours. At this point, you could unwrap it and re-wrap it in aluminum foil, again to help it keep its shape, and roast it. I opted to sous vide it first, still plastic-wrapped, inside a Ziploc bag (they’re the same plastic, and are considered food-safe). After the sous vide bath, it was fully cooked. I kept it in for about three hours at 140 degrees—more than enough time pasteurize the chicken. The sous vide circulator, which we got for Christmas a few years ago, is a really cool gadget to have in the kitchen.
So here it is, ready for a final quick high-heat roasting:
Cross-section:
And here’s the meal, complete with everything fall!
Now this wasn’t exactly quick and easy. But it was a series of pretty simple steps, and very common, inexpensive ingredients. Half my rice and stuffing were left, so I froze them. Next time, all I need to do is defrost two chicken breasts and roast a cubed up sweet potato.
With each bite, my wife and I were amazed how good this was and how special it felt. The key is really time: we have it, because we’re both fully remote. I imagine we’ll confine dishes like this to weekends when we have kids, but if anything, it’s even more important to eat well and stock the house with good, real food when you have kids.
My mother used to make me homemade baby food: pureed carrots, mashed peas, shredded chicken. I understand picky kids who only eat dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, I guess, but then again I didn’t know what a dinosaur-shaped chicken nugget was. Then again, my mother was a stay-at-home mom and I was homeschooled, so my experience isn’t necessarily replicable. But I realize how much good there was in it, and to the extent that it’s possible, I want to replicate it in our home. And a big part of that is a simple, fancy weeknight fall feast.
Related Reading:
Plant-Based Patties, Italian Peasant Style
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I like and enjoy cooking but don't do it nearly as often. Mostly because I think it is kind of a waste of time. Even simple meals require 30-45 minutes of labor (I know you think it is less but time it out with prep, cooking, and cleaning). And sometimes you really make something amazing, and sometimes you make something terrible. But the worst case is you make something that is just completely fine that you could have purchased which maybe would have cost you more if you bought it but it would just be done. Restaurants have extreme advantages in terms of specialty of labor and purchase power that you can never achieve. If you are cooking for a family and particularly a large family, you can get closer to some kind of equilibrium.
Yes, exactly. Plus, restaurants have gotten SO expensive, and most of them use garbage ingredients like soybean oil even among the hoity toity “farm to table” set. And we have a kid, and not really any reliable childcare, so I’m happy to spend the time putting together a lasagna from scratch, or Swedish meatballs, or searing a giant Chuck roast before tossing it in the crockpot with the leftover wine from my parents’ 50th anniversary party.
There definitely is this strange combination of lack of skills + (perceived?) lack of time...but at some level it really is just a question of priorities. Everyone wants to “eat healthy”, but without recognizing that this project takes time and effort. Yes, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers spent hours in the kitchen - partly because they didn’t have crockpots and air fryers, but also because they knew that feeding their families well was a very important task. In the convenience of “tv dinners” and “meal replacement shakes”, we seem to have forgotten that, as a culture, which makes me sad.