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

November 2, 2017 By Lauren

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!

Filed Under: Animal, Chicken, Dinner, Fall, Lunch, Meat Monday, Recipes, Seasons Tagged With: ancestral cooking, chicken thighs, fall, hallomas, pan roasted, samhain

Apple-Butter & Living Seasonally

November 23, 2015 By Lauren

appleIt’s that time of year, again.  When, suddenly, we find ourselves submerged, inky hours encroaching, then outnumbering the light ones, begging the answer to the question:  who’s afraid of the dark?

Darkness is what is unseen, what is felt, what lies just beyond the borders of what’s known.  It’s mystery, reflection, emotion, it’s boundless, vast, expansive.  Quiet.  Shrouding, obscuring, shape shifting.  It’s slippery, transformative.  Still.

Pretty frightening stuff, all grouped together like that, if you ask me.

Thankfully, we can avoid all that.  When night comes, we can arm ourselves w/ artificial light.  We can bathe in its various shades–the yellows and whites from lamps and overhead fixtures, the blues from screens; we can string beads of it ’round plastic pine-needles or trimmed hedge; we can shuttle from office to tinsel-strung department store to super-market check-out lane until we no longer notice that it’s dark out, at all.

We can push straight through November and the holiday season to March, to June and back again, maintaining the same pace, the same forward-march, and, what w/ all the Important Things to do during the holiday season–the shopping and cooking and hosting and eating and cleaning–, who has time for such things like being quiet, still?

I’ve been thinking a lot about season rhythms, lately and especially as I read through Jessica Prentice’s wonderful Full Moon Feast.  Her chapter on “The Moon of the Long Nights” is intended, I believe, for December, but I find the longest nights to be those happening now, when the sun rises around 8 and night’s fallen by 5.  I’ve thought a lot about these rhythms before, but always as related to food–digging up ramps in May, fat-slices of tomatoes in August, steaming bowl of pot-au-feu come December–and I had the realization that I’d never deeply considered seasonal living until, like (ahem), just now.

Perhaps the days are getting shorter for a reason, and, perhaps by turning our backs to the dark, and all its implications, we’re missing out on something that comes but once a year.  I’m not talking black friday, or christmas-movie marathons, or 99-cent candy canes.  I’m talking about a long Winter night’s sleep, and all it yields.

Prentice uses anthropologist’s T.S. Wiley’s book Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar and Survival to go delve into this subject.  Wiley posits that the same light that allows for the walk home, the trip to the grocery store, the hot shower long after the sun has set has positioned us all within a sort of perpetual summer, w/ the same shorter nights of sleep and the same disruptive effect on our hormones.

Our pre-agrarian and even some of our agrarian ancestors would have had nearly fourteen hours of sleep during Winter’s long nights.  Somewhere towards the middle, they would have entered a state quite different than the sleep we know.  Due to the release of the hormone prolactin, they entered a state of, as Prentice terms, “quiescent wakefulness,” during which brain-wave readings were shown to be similar to those observed during transcendental meditation.  Wiley writes, “It was in this period of time, which we no longer have access to, that we solved problems, transcended stress and, most likely, talked to the gods.”

Divine communication aside, Wiley’s hypothesis that the body’s–specifically our endocrine system–responses are cyclical just feels right.  I’ve always been drawn to the Hermetic maxim, “As above, so below”, so it serves to reason that our body’s needs would change w/ the seasons.  And while fourteen hour nights are just ever so slightly out-of-reach for most of us (just slightly), a full nine-hour night–or what’s needed to have our hormones functioning w/ ease and grace– is certainly attainable.

The holiday season does everything it can to turn our backs to the dark.  What I really take from Wiley and Prentice is this feeling that it’s okay to turn towards it, to be still, to slow down, to let any personal transformations unfold as they do.  I rarely eat tomatoes after their season because the taste, the texture, the smell, the feeling–it all feels off, wrong.  Maybe having the same expectations of self–of legs to carry me at same quick stride, hands to work at same swift speed, brain to filter in world through same lens–is wrong, too.

This Winter, like Jeannette Winterson, I’m choosing to embrace the night.  To reflect, feel, explore.  To light candles and take long soaks in the tub.  To sleep when I’m tired, even if it’s only 9pm.  To feel fine w/ not staying up later, not doing more, missing out.  To turn inwards.  To rest, even if all other signals are telling me to Shop ‘Til I Drop, Lose 5 Pounds, Find The Perfect Gift, The Perfect Me, and so on.  To take quiet walks in the woods.  To dream.

To make this slow-cooked apple-butter, which is sweet and rich and achingly simple and best enjoyed on one of these darkening Fall nights spread on rye-toast, or slathered on roast chicken or layered on crust of apple pie.

Print
Apple-Butter

Ingredients

  • 1 pound (or 2 kilos) apples, a mix of varieties is lovely but using the same variety will work just as well
  • 1 cup apple-cider, preferably fresh-pressed
  • 1 stick cinnamon, or handful of cardamom pods, or few star anise

Directions

  1. If you have a food-mill:
  2. Chop apples. Add them to sauce-pan w/ cider and spices. Heat on medium-low, stirring all the while, until you've made apple-sauce (20 minutes or so).
  3. Run through food-mill to remove skins + spices. Add to slow-cooker, set heat on low and cook overnight. If you don't have a slow-cooker, you can cook in oven, on low, for 8 hours or so.
  4. If you don't have a food-mill:
  5. Peel apples. Then follow all above steps, making sure to remove spices before adding apple-sauce to slow-cooker/oven.
  6. Spoon into sterilized glass jars. Keep refrigerated and enjoy it within the month.
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Filed Under: Fall, Fruit, Plant, Recipes, Seasons, Sides

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