Jacques' Covid Kitchen

In case you haven't yet discovered it, Jacques Pépin has been giving great little five-minute cooking lessons on Facebook all during the Covid shutdown. He takes whatever he finds in his fridge and makes some magic nearly every day. You can tell he's stuck at home, too, as his hair keeps getting longer and he sometimes repeats the same shirt - as we all do on Zoom these days. His recipes are really simple and his delivery is, as usual, warmly charming. If you haven't "friended" him on Facebook, I think you'll enjoy his lessons.

I certainly am. Last week, he made a version of a famous regional dish from Lyon where he grew up called "Poulet au Vinaigre" or Vinegar Chicken. I had heard of this dish a long time ago and tried to replicate it without success, so I was surprised that M. Pépin would give even a shortened version of it at a time when we don't have a lot of ingredients around.

I need not have worried - his preparation was simple and the result was quite tasty. Give it a try and I expect you, too, will be adding M. Pépin to your Facebook friends.

Poulet au Vinaigre from Jacques Pépin 

You will need a small non-stick sauté pan with a lid. Serves 2.

Ingredients

2 chicken thighs, skin on and bone in

3 cloves of garlic (1-1/2 Tbs approximately), crushed and finely chopped

3 Tablespoons wine vinegar (I used red wine vinegar as I couldn't see which kind he used)

2 Tablespoons ketchup

Salt and pepper

Instructions

Salt and pepper both sides of the chicken thighs and cut with a sharp knife along both sides of the bone on the under side of each to flatten a bit.

Place the chicken thighs, skin side down, in the cold sauté pan and place over medium-high heat. No fat is necessary, the chicken skin will release enough fat to complete the dish. Cook without turning until the skin is richly browned and crisp. Don't allow the fat to burn - it should be nicely brown, too.

Once the skin is browned, cover the pan (still no turning) and cook with just the steam from the meat for about 20-25 minutes, until the meat near the bone is no longer pink and the meat is tender. Remove the thighs to a serving dish, skin side up. The skin should be crisp.

Crush the garlic cloves under the flat blade of a knife to remove the peel, then finely chop (or you could use a garlic press). You should have about 1-1/2 Tablespoons of garlic.

Add the garlic to the rendered fat in the sauté pan and fry for about 20 seconds, then add 3 Tablespoons of vinegar, swirl the pan to incorporate the juices, and cook until the pan is almost dry - this step will dissipate the sharpness of the vinegar. 

Add 2 Tablespoons of ketchup to the pan and stir. Add salt to taste, and pour over the chicken and serve. If you aren't serving right away, pour the sauce around the chicken rather than over it, so the skin stays crisp.

I am certain that this recipe isn't "classical" French cooking, but it's homey, quick, and delicious - who could ask for more right now?  In these crazy days/weeks/months when we rely so heavily on social media, I was happy to find an old friend cooking away in his kitchen, preparing food for his beloved Gloria, and making recipes he remembers from his childhood in Lyon.

Amusements

For the past eight months, I have had time on my hands. 

We do keep busy delivering for our local Meals on Wheels chapter, delivering a week's worth of frozen entrées to our clients every Monday. We are, of course, masked, and we deliver the food, ring the bell, and back off at least six feet as we wait for our clients to come to the door to retrieve their food. We enjoy a short visit with each person on our route. If these safety protocols seem excessive to you, remember that these dear clients are often very much at risk with pre-existing conditions. We would feel terrible if we brought the Corona virus to their homes.

Because we are in our 70s, we also need to be careful for ourselves and the few friends and family with whom we interact (at a distance). It feels strange to always be assuring people, even in print, of how careful we are but one of the most noticeable features of this strange time is the differing levels of risk-aversion we encounter. Some of our contacts are pretty casual, willing to come to our house to eat food prepared in our kitchen and served on our china, but draw the line at hugging. Others are okay with visiting outdoors, as long as we keep the six foot distance. Still others will meet outdoors as long as we are all masked and distanced. One couple, both attorneys that we adore, actually came up with a four-page contract outlining what is acceptable behavior for visits, including a dire threat of ostracism if the guidelines are breached. And some dear friends have asked us not to visit them in person at all, depending on Zoom and the like for their social contacts.

We also do our own grocery shopping but we limit that to stores that have good safety protocols, insisting on masks, sanitizing carts, limiting the numbers in the store. 

But, a few hours doing Meals on Wheels and another hour grocery shopping does not begin to fill the days. I tried jigsaw puzzles and even completed a very challenging 1,000+ puzzle but after that one, I was toast. We are trying to limit television (except My Beloved's auto racing programs) to the hours after dinner, so we don't usually turn on the television during the daytime. I have taken to walking a mile or so in the early mornings just after dawn. We have leisurely mornings with the newspaper and coffee stretching past 10am. During the warm months, I spent nearly every afternoon with a good book on our street-facing deck where I could safely greet neighbors as they walk by and watch the birds coming to my birdbath and sunflowers.

And, still, there is plenty of time. Plenty, plenty, plenty.

One of my occasional pleasures is painting. I'm not good at it - I make no bones about that - but I do enjoy the colors, the decisions about what to try, and the variety of things on which one can make marks. I made a set of napkins and painted them with Black-eyed Susans. I decorated a bird house for cousin Jan, who livens her weathered back fence with multi-colored bird houses of all different shapes and sizes. I potato-printed some note cards to give as gifts. I have tried still life and landscape, both with disappointing results - I seem to be better at decorative than fine art.

So, when the days seem longer than usual, I get out my paints. My Beloved's younger daughter gave me some lovely papers that she was not using, so I sometimes use those, although I feel slightly guilty at using such nice materials for such sad failures. Time spent painting goes by faster - I wonder if the Theory of Relativity encompassed painting time?

So, around here, it's not unusual to find newspapers splotched with color. Maybe I should just frame them and call them art.

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Chili Days Are Here Again

 

My favorite part of Facebook is the memories part where they present things that you posted or saved from years ago. I love scrolling back and remembering all the adventures we have had that I posted for friends to see over the years. It also helps to remind me when I saved a recipe that sounded good at the time - sometimes, they are no longer appealing but this time I hit the jackpot.

My friend Angela had posted this recipe for a vegetarian chili from What's Gaby Cooking, saying that her children loved it. I'm always looking for good vegetarian recipes as we try and try again to reduce our meat consumption. We will never make it to full-on vegetarian, and that's okay, but it's still good to change things up.

So, what's not to like about Sweet Potato and Black Bean Chili?  There's a video of this preparation if you want to do a search for it under that name, but it's pretty simple so you likely won't need it. I made some changes to Gaby's recipe based on what I had at home. It makes a pot of chili large enough for four adult meals, but not such a huge pot that you are eating it for days on end. In my book, that's a win.

Sweet Potato and Black Bean Chili, from What's Gaby Cooking?

Ingredients:

1 sweet potato, peeled and diced

1 red onion, chopped

1Tablespoon olive oil

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 Tbs chili powder

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

Salt to taste

1 cup vegetable stock (or I used chicken stock because I had it on hand)

1 can fire-roasted diced tomatoes (or I used a small box of crushed tomatoes, again, what I had on hand)

1 can black beans, drained

1 lime, rolled, cut and squeezed

Toppings: your choice - chopped avocado, cream, grated cheese, chopped cilantro, and we usually like to eat a few tortilla chips with chili for more texture and crunch. You can also add hot sauce if you like more spiciness.

Instructions:

In a large, heavy pot add the olive oil and heat. Add the sweet potato and onion, and stir. When the onion starts to smell good, add the garlic, chili powder, cumin, and salt to taste and stir them all together. 

Add the stock, tomatoes, and black beans, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat, cover, and simmer until the sweet potato is tender and the sauce is as thick as you like it, about 20 minutes, give or take.

Ladle into bowls and top with your favorite toppings.

The Lucky Ones

 Well, here I am again. A couple of years have passed since I last wrote a blog post but everything in our lives for the past six months has changed due to the Covid pandemic, and the addition of dangerous levels of smoke from the many fires in California, Oregon, and Washington have finally brought me to my knees. 

The lockdown caused by the virus wasn't too bad - I missed things like riding lessons at my stable and not seeing my grandchildren frequently and always at a distance, but I counted myself amongst the lucky ones who weren't worried about losing a job (I'm retired) and my income (pensions, thank heavens), or trying to homeschool young children. My Beloved and I even continued (masked and distanced) to deliver for our Meals on Wheels clients, so we got out of the house once a week to do something rewarding. As I said, we were the lucky ones.

Then, the fires began and, again, we were still amongst the lucky ones. The fires were not close to our house and no one we knew was threatened, at first. But the heavy smoke blew all over California and turned, for a least one day, the sky a dull orange color, darkening the sky so much that our automatic headlights came on as we delivered at noontime for Meals on Wheels. Each day since has come with gray smoke in the air and a layer of ash falling like dirty snow over everything. That snow represents peoples' homes, and cherished mementos, and livelihoods, not to mention their very lives. That recognition has weight, even for the lucky ones.

That level of smoke meant that it was advisable to stay indoors as much as possible. One of my small pleasures during the Covid lockdown has been to sit outside on our deck to read in the afternoon. I would take a magazine or a book out there, with a glass of ice water, and spend a few hours under the sunshade either reading or chatting with neighbors who stopped by, carefully distanced, or strangers who found their way down our small street. So, when the smoke came, I had to come indoors.

Yes, I can still read inside. But it got harder to feel lucky, much harder.