skillet cooking, comfort food, and the summer split

It's easy to tell that there's a change in the air from the Farmers Markets. Almost overnight, the apricots are gone. Not a one to be found. If you look, you can find blueberries, but they're not that easy to find. The raspberries are darker, sweeter, less water and more intensity of flavor. Peaches and nectarines are heavier, as if they are holding all the moisture for one last hurrah for summer. Grapes have come in, as if to replace the apricots, and plums are everywhere. Today, I bought six different varieities of plums for my friend Brad. And I could have gone for more. The first greengages are here. Greengages, made so popular by the wonderful novelist Rumer Goden, and here for such a short time, almost like Elinor Wylie's wonderful line "summer, much too beautiful to stay." Think about that line for a minute, will you? Get it?
No, summer isn't over, but it's changing. I'm aware, this summer, for the first time, of there really being TWO summers. One ending, one beginning. Perhaps I'm more aware of it because of the split in the summer of my own life: a first half that was blissful, wonderful, the best summer I have ever had, and a second half that has been sad, emotional, tiring and defeating. I have been telling people who know something about theatre that this summer will go down as my "Into the Woods" summer. If you know the Sondheim play, think about Act I as compared to ActII, and you'll know exactly what I mean. As I told Brad this afternoon, at the end of Act II, I curled up into the fetal position and cried. I've done that more than once this second half of summer. And I have a feeling there's more of that to come.

How does this impact my work in the kitchen? Well, maybe some cooks can leave their emotional baggage outside of the kitchen door. Not me. It all comes out in the cooking. And what I find myself craving to cook are soft, slowly cooked, combinations of vegetables and meat. Things that have lots of flavor, but that I can leave alone on the stove to fend for themselves, because I'm not really capable of doing so. Food that feels SO satisfying, that I can almost believe that someone else made it for me, instead of my cooking it myself. Nothing wrong with that feeling, by the way. If you're comforted by your own food, then you're a good cook.

Last night was the end to an emotionally very tough day. The last thing I needed was challenging food. And as the day wore on, the dinner presented itself to me: it would be skillet chicken, in a tomato and onion sauce. It's a measure of the way the day went, that instead of tomatoes, I used peppers. But it was still good. And it's worth recording, because it's really a template for many dishes of this type.

You'll see dishes referred to as "smothered." Things like "smothered" pork chops or lamb shoulder, or chicken. I think that comes from the fact that what you do in these dishes is cover them, part of the way through the cooking, and deny their access to air. By doing that, and lowering the heat on what you're cooking, you can concentrate the flavors, and produce a liquid that, even by itself, is substantially nutritious and tasty. You almost don't need the vegetables and meat. But eat them anyway. Here's my v ariation.

Start with a whole chicken. Cut it up yourself. It's not that hard to do. Really, it's not. But if you do feel intimidated by the process, get two halves of the bird, and cut them down, or in a pinch, get two whole chicken legs, and a breast with the wings. You CAN cut off the wings without any trouble, and split the breast in half. Salt it overnight if you can, the way I tell you to do with all of your meat. Bring it to room temperature.

Then, get a red onion and slice it into half moons. And peppers. LOTS of different peppers. I had red bells, yellow bells, orange bells, a variety new to me called Jimmy Nardellos (long, red and sweet), and my favorite pimentons, which are green, and sweet, but not all of them. The fun with pimentons is that one or two of every ten is spicy, and there's no way of telling which is which. Slice the peppers into bite sized pieces. For pimentons, they're so small, all you have to do is stem them. Get the bottom of a large skillet covered with oil, and then when it's hot, brown your chicken. Brown it REALLY well. This is important for skillet cooking: when you "smother" meat, you take away the chance for it to brown any further, so do it now. It will take a while: maybe six minutes on one side, and four on the other, to get really good color on the chicken, and your kitchen will get smoky. Then move it out of the pan, and put it on a plate for a few minutes. Check your oil level in the pan. You only need about two, three tablespoons. You can dump all the oil out and start with fresh oil, but then you're losing all that chicken flavor. So add more if you need it, or pour some out. Put all the peppers and onions into the pan, with a few sprigs of fresh rosemary and add more salt than you think you'll need. Peppers are somewhat insipit, and if you don't salt them well, your dish will suffer. Cook the peppers all together with the onion, for about five minutes. You just want to soften them. Then, put the chicken pieces back in the pan, right on top of the vegetables, and then cover the pan and reduce the heat. Reduce it really far. You don't want much heat, because you're going to cook this for about thirty minutes. You want the chicken cooked through, so check the thickest part of the breast for "doneness" after thirty minutes, and if you need more time, let it go further.

While this is happening, cook yourself up a pot of whatever comfort starch is calling out to you. I am a pasta man, but when it comes to chicken, the only thing that will do is rice. And that's what we had.

Somehow, making zucchini with this seemed wrong. But a cucumber salad, with a creme fraiche dressing, was an absolute necessity. As was wine. LOTS of rose'.

It may very well be the case that nothing is ailing you, and may the Creator continue to bless you if that's the truth. But if you do have something on your mind that needs fixing, try making a comfort dish like this. It won't solve anything, but you'll feel really good about yourself. To solve things, get a friend like Brad. This is for you, kid.