The Soaked Bean

Seeking Nourishment, Finding Traditions

Chicken Thighs for Grandma Stella, or What Comfort Food Means to Me

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chickenthighs

(Featuring my friend Marcos’s hand)

Every year as Samhain approaches I get to thinking about my ancestors, specifically my grandma Stella, with whom I was really close; all the ways in which, even though she’s passed on, we’re still close, the ways in which she’s still here, walking beside me.

You probably know this holiday by its other name.  Like many other festivities (Christmas, Easter), Halloween originated during pagan times, when the connection to Earth Spirit was a palpable piece of our lives.

Samhain’s pagan roots have more to do with this kind of ancestral thinking and remembering than with pillowcases weighed down with chocolates, cotton cobwebs strung up in eaves, tealight flickering from the innards of a pumpkin, fake blood splattered across painted face.

Samhain, or the in-between point between the Autumn Equinox (Mabon) and the Winter Solstice (Yule), was believed to be the time when the “veil” between our world and the Otherworld was thinnest.

This makes sense seasonally: nights are longer, trees have lost their leaves, there’s a chill in the air that’s dug in its heels, committed.  The world around us is dying, shedding what is no longer needed in preparation for the season of stillness ahead.  And so, in many folkloric traditions, Samhain is a time to connect with those that have done the same, those that have passed from this world to the next.  An occasion to communicate with our ancestors, to honor them, in whatever way we so choose.

The most communal way, in my opinion, is through food.  Now, my grandma Stella was a chef and what the francophones amongst us would call a gourmande, but I believe that even if your grandparent was more comfortable in the garden or at the racetracks or behind a fishing pole, chances are there’s some memory you have of them that involves food: the DQ soft-serve you’d get with them whenever they came for a visit, a hot-dog at a ball game, a specific brand of potato chips, a recipe that’d been passed down for matzo ball soup, sauerkraut, dolma, fry bread, kimchee.

I found this recipe for pan-roasted chicken thighs in the archives of Bon Appétit a while back, and I’ve been making it often ever since.  It tastes familiar, like the chicken my grandma used to make, also pan-roasted.  Her version was “breaded” with crushed cornflakes–less an Eastern European tradition than a Long-Island one.  The pan of perfectly crispy chicken gingerly positioned in the center of her flecked table, with sides of potato salad and coleslaw in Summer, mashed potatoes and green beans in Winter.  I can’t think of a more comforting meal, a meal that makes me feel more nourished, in all senses of the word.

If I put my nutritionist chapeau on, I can think of how nutritive chicken is: high in protein, or the building-blocks of our muscles, our cells, high in fat-soluble vitamins and the fat needed for their assimilation, rich in vitamin B6, selenium, magnesium, iron; the added benefit of the bones which make a mineral-rich broth.

Taking that hat off, I’m met with so much else.  I think of how precious meat was once considered (before the advent of factory farms), and still is.  Taking an animal’s life is a sacred act, part of a sacred cycle; the plants which give their lives to nourish the chicken, the chicken which gives its life to nourish us, our bodies which, eventually, give themselves back to the soil, and on, and on.  When we invite other people to our table, when we offer to share this valuable food with them; these gestures lend so much more to the equation than the recommended daily intake of magnesium.

I think of the time spent preparing the chicken.  This is a simple recipe, but it does require attention to the stove, time passed in the kitchen.

I think of my grandma, all the afternoons and evenings spent gathered around her kitchen table, all the games of Scrabble played–after the pans were picked clean.  I think of how curious she was about my life, how attentive a listener, her laugh.  I think of the love she had for me, a love that felt limitless, bigger than I could ever hold in arms or mind.  All these things, all this love contained in a chicken thigh.  Comfort food, indeed.

And of course, there’s also this undeniable fact: a crispy poultry thigh, roasted in its own sputtering fat tastes damn good.

I made this recipe this past Samhain, nestling pan in the center of my table, inviting family and friends to gather ’round, passing along some of grandma Stella-style love.

Pan-Roasted Chicken Thighs

From Bon Appétit

Ingredients:

4 chicken thighs (preferably from pasture-raised chickens)

chunky salt

sprinkle of aromatic (dried or fresh rosemary or sage or thyme)

knob ghee

Instructions:

  1. Preheat oven to 475 F.  Place a cast-iron pan on stove and add ghee.  Turn heat to high.  Sprinkle salt and aromatics on chicken.
  2. When pan is nice and hot, arrange chicken thighs skin side down in pan.  Cook on high heat for 2 minutes.
  3. Lower heat to medium, cook for another 12 minutes.
  4. Move pan to the oven and cook for another 12 minutes.
  5. Take pan out of the oven, flip chicken and cook for another 5 minutes.
  6. Let rest for 5 minutes, serve and enjoy!

Meat Monday: Kibbeh Bil Sanieh + Nostalgic Food

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pine nuts

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgic food, what it means when we eat something that’s linked to a cultural experience, a specific place or person.

There’s this study that was conducted more than 10 years ago that I often turn back to. In essence, it tested the nutritive value of nostalgia, of pleasure in food, in eating.

A group of Swedish women and a group of Thai women were given two meals (one, traditionally Swedish, the other traditionally Thai) with the same nutritional content of iron and then tested to see how much iron they’d absorbed from each meal.

This study was conducted when the idea that “a calorie is a calorie” was huge (which I suppose, in some circles, still is), and I imagine that their findings were, at the time, a revelation.  The Swedish women absorbed only half the amount of iron from the Thai meal as the Thai women and vice versa.

But it didn’t end there.  Both meals were placed in a blender and each group was given a blended version of their traditional meal.  Once again, absorption rates were far lower than when they’d eaten the meal as they remembered it and when it was, most likely, beautiful (because can we all just admit that blended is not nearly as beautiful as un-blended [which is why all sorts of berries and bee pollen are added to the tops of smoothie bowls, yeah?]).

This study is still fascinating to me for 2 main reasons.

#1: Nostalgic foods, comfort foods do more than just nourish our weary souls; they increase the absorption of nutrients that nourish us in a very tangible way.

#2.  The lattice-crust, the edible wildflower, heck, even the parsley garnish.  These little touches that make our meal more beautiful also make our meal more nutritious.  Turns out there’s a deeper calling to make our food beautiful than impressing our dinner guests or instagram followers.  (That being said, I know this dish isn’t *technically* the most beautiful [it is essentially a meat-pie, after all], but the pine-nuts and sage-leaves and pretty pattern do help).

bahart meat kebbeoven

Which brings me to kibbeh, specifically kibbeh bil sanieh which is essentially meat and pine nuts in a meat and bulgur shell.  Kibbeh is an incredibly nostalgic food for me.  Growing up with an Iraqi grandmother she always seemed to have a pie plate of it in her fridge, which we often ate cold and with a side of torshi.

I don’t have my grandma’s recipe for kibbeh, sadly, but this version comes pretty close.  For those w/o deeper ties to middle eastern culture, perhaps you’ve tried other kinds of kibbeh — football shaped and fried seems to be the most ubiquitous –braise those in tomato sauce and you’ve got a traditional Iraqi preparation, though one I don’t ever remember my grandma making.

I’ve been wanting to recreate her version of kibbeh for a while now, as for me, it’s a perfect Summer food, when you want to reserve turning on your oven on for fruit pies and the like.  You can make it at the beginning of the week and you can keep it in the fridge and bring it along on picnics for days after (I’d say at least 3), or you can even freeze half of it for those Summer nights when a dinner-game-plan has fallen by the wayside.

kebbeh plate

Kibbeh Bil Sanieh

For the baharat (adapted slightly from Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem):

Ingredients:

  • 1 teaspoon coriander seeds
  • 1 small cinnamon stick, cut into shards
  • 1/2 teaspoon cloves
  • 2 teaspoons cumin seeds
  • 2 teaspoons cardamom puds
  • 1/2 whole nutmeg grated

Directions:

Grind everything together in a mortar and pestle or spice grinder.  Store in sealed glass jar.

For the dough:

Ingredients:

  • 1 and 1/2 cup bulgur wheat, soaked overnight and drained thoroughly the next day
  • 700g ground grass-fed beef
  • 2 large yellow onions, cubed
  • 2 tablespoons baharat
  • 1 teaspoon Celtic sea salt
  • handful of sage leaves

For the filling:

Ingredients:

  • knob ghee
  • 1 large yellow onion, minced superfine
  • 1/2 cup beef bone broth
  • 500g ground grass-fed beef
  • 1 tablespoon baharat
  • sprinkle Celtic sea salt
  • 1/2 cup pine-nuts

Directions:

  1. Make the dough first, as it should chill for at least 2 hours in the fridge.  Add cubed onions to a food processor and process until the onions start releasing their juices.  Add beef, baharat, salt and bulgur to processor and process until everything comes together in a pale-colored, paste-like dough.  Cover and chill in the fridge.
  2. On medium heat, toast the pine nuts until golden brown.
  3. While pine nuts are toasting, heat big skillet on medium-heat and melt ghee.  Add onion and pinch salt and let cook for a few minutes.
  4. Add beef, salt, bone broth and baharat and cook until everything is browned.
  5. Turn off heat and mix in pine-nuts, reserving a few for the topping.
  6. Set aside meat mixture and let cool.
  7. Start the crust:  separate your dough into two even halves.  Use a little bowl of cold water to dip your hands while molding the bottom crust (it will make it easier to shape the crust).
  8. Add filling.
  9. For the top crust: Grab little pieces of dough and mold into a ball.  Press the ball flat between your palms and place it atop the meat filling.  You’ll work like this for the top; almost like patchwork, patching the little flat pieces together until they completely cover the filling.
  10. Score your kibbeh — here is a lovely illustration.
  11. Press your thumb into the center of the pie down to the pan.  Add a little olive oil to a bowl and use a brush to make an oil-wash on the top of your kibbeh.  I made a pattern w/ pine-nuts and sage leaves on mine; get creative, go wild!
  12. Bake in oven at 180C for 30-40 minutes, or until kibbeh is browned and crust is cooked through.
  13. Serve w/ fattoush, torshi and cooked greens.