Hearty food for hot times

There is a "tradition" or a "custom", depending upon your anthropological bent, that during hot weather, all people want to eat is cool, light food. "Oh, it's so hot I just want a little salad. You know, something green with a light dressing." "It's way too hot to eat, all I want is a few cherries and a peach or something like that."

I will bet you that a few hours later, the very people who said that are rooting around in the refrigerator, looking for the cream puffs left over from the night before, or a frozen Mars bar, or getting a big bowl of ice cream "because it's light , and after all , all I ate was salad."

You know anyone in that camp? Have to look very far? Hmmmmm. I ain't gonna deny my own guilt here.

Appetite is appetite. There is no rule that says that in the winter you eat hot food, heavy food, rich food, and in the summer, you turn it around. We have to break ourselves of that thinking. Admittedly, cooking with high temperatures, making slow simmers, etc, are more exhausting in summer. We sweat. We SWEAT big time. And there's so much that we want to do that there is always some resentment if, your loved one fesses up and says "osso bucco tonight sounds like it would really hit the spot," and you're looking at a thermometer that reads 92, and a humidity index of 87. "Sure dear, whatever you like... (asshole)."

Know what I mean? So, what we, as cooks have to have in our repertoires, are things that are somewhat hearty, and also fast. I think grilled meat may have been invented just for that kind of thing. There are few things that take less time, and are as satisfying, than a perfectly grilled steak. And there are other items as well. I would like to add an item to that list, something I made yesterday, a sort of chicken cacciatore.

If you read a few blogs back, you saw my rant about a badly written recipe for this dish. The one I'm presenting to you here, took me about thirty minutes to cook. It fed four or five people (I don't know if everyone got some), and whilst I consider , somewhat arbitrarily, this to be an autumn dish, it really isn't. When I served it to my farmers, no one said "Oh, I can't eat that, it's summer."

I use chicken thighs in the recipe, because chicken thighs are the best part of the bird for me. They're juicy, they have good mouth feel, and relative to other parts of the bird, they're cheap. I don't know why they're neglected, except perhaps for the fact that it's dark meat. Get over it.

For this recipe to come together quickly, you have to have your ingredients ready. Have eight chicken thighs, patted dry and salted, waiting. Get one, large onion, a pound of mushrooms, two or three cloves of garlic, four bay leaves, and about two cups of tomatoes of some kind. What I mean by this is exactly what it sounds like. I don't care if it's tomato sauce, or the confit I wrote about before (that's what I used), or fresh tomatoes, or whole canned tomatoes, whatever you have on hand. You will also need olive oil.

Slice the pound of mushrooms into about 1/3 inch slices. Use creminis if you can find them, and if you can't , use the plain button ones. Don't get fancy here. Then, cut your onion, lengthwise, into quarters, and slice them, so that you have a pile of quarter moons. Crush the four garlic cloves and peel them.

Get about 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a pan, and then heat it up. The pan should be big enough to hold all of the chicken. When the oil is hot, put the thighs in the pan, skin side down, and let them cook away until you get them as brown as you like. It's gonna take about 6 or 7 minutes. Then, remove them to a plate. Take a look at the fat in the pan. You will probably have more than you started with. Dump some of it out. What you have now, is flavored fat, with the taste of chicken to it. Add the onions first, with a good sprinkle of salt. When they begin to get translucent, add the mushrooms, and the garlic, and the bay leaves. Stir everything together. The mushrooms will almost immediately start giving up their liquid, and when they do, keep an eye on them. When it reduces a bit, put the chicken thighs on top of them, skin side up and then put your tomatoes on top of the chicken. Cover the pot, lower the heat, and put it aside for about twenty minutes. In that time, the chicken will cook through and get very, very tender. It gives you time to make some polenta, or boil some potatoes, or my favorite, a pound of plain, boiled pasta. And once that's done, you've got a meal that is fit for summer. It probably took you a bit longer than thirty minutes to put together, and you're feeding a nice group of people, with something tasty. And if you have someone who insists "all I want is salad," make him one. And leave a plate of this in the kitchen . He'll be in there.