Poultry

FLAVOR BOOSTER Fennel, tomato, and wine are common ingredients in Mediterranean cooking; in this recipe, they make a wonderful bed for chicken breast halves. Once the chicken is cooked through, the vegetables become a flavorful sauce to serve alongside.

FLAVOR BOOSTER Chicken thighs and drumsticks are not as lean as breast meat, but they have great flavor and stay juicy when cooked by long and slow methods such as braising. Here, they are braised in an oil-free liquid seasoned with soy sauce, brown sugar, fresh ginger, garlic, cilantro, balsamic vinegar, scallions, and ground spices.

WHY IT’S LIGHT This leaner take on a classic soup includes meatballs made with ground turkey instead of beef for less fat and fewer calories. To ensure the meatballs are juicy and flavorful, use dark-meat turkey with at least seven percent fat.

I like to roast a chicken with nothing more than a few herbs and seasonings. It is always satisfying, and the pan juices make a perfect sauce for the cooked bird.

Thomas likes to roast chicken and vegetables together in what he calls one-pot cooking. The vegetables make a bed for the chicken and prop it up so that it browns nicely, and the juices from the roasting bird permeate through the vegetables that caramelize on the bottom of the pot. He also removes the wishbone before cooking to make carving the roasted bird easier.

A boiled dinner, which to be more precise might be called a simmered dinner, is an assortment of meats and vegetables simmered slowly and gently until tender. The resulting broth is clear and full of flavor and the meat is fork-tender and moist, comfort food at its best, restorative to body and soul. A variety of meats can be put into the pot; among them is usually a gelatinous cut to add a bit of body to the broth and a bony one to enrich the flavor. Some favorites are short ribs, brisket, beef cheeks, shanks, oxtail, chuck, beef tongue, chicken (either legs or a whole chicken), and sausage, or sausage-stuffed cabbage leaves. A boiled dinner is often served with the broth as a first course followed by the meats and vegetables, but I prefer to serve it all at once, with the meat and vegetables arranged in deep soup plates, moistened with a generous ladle of broth. Typical accompaniments for the meat are coarse sea salt, pickles, and a piquant sauce such as salsa verde, Dijon mustard, horseradish cream (grated horseradish, heavy cream, a pinch of salt, and a splash of white wine vinegar), or a tomato sauce spiked with capers. It is worthwhile to get the meat a couple of days ahead and to season it generously with salt and pepper. This will make it even more succulent and tasty. When a beef tongue is included (and I am quite partial to tongue in a boiled dinner), it should be soaked in salted water for at least eight hours to purge and season it. When deciding how much meat to buy, plan for ample leftovers. The broth makes fabulous soups and risottos and the meat is great sliced and served hot or cold with salsa verde, or in sandwiches, or chopped for hash. Classically, a boiled dinner is made with water. For a richer, sweeter broth, I like to use chicken broth instead, or half chicken broth and half water. This dish is easy to make, but it does take a while to cook, so plan for a few hours of simmering. Keep the pot at a bare simmer, with bubbles breaking the surface only now and then. Cooking meat at a boil will make it dry and stringy. Because their flavors can dominate the broth’s, beef tongue, sausage, and cabbage should be cooked separately from the beef and chicken. As an option to cabbage and sausage, or as a lovely further addition, consider preparing stuffed cabbage leaves. Add vegetables to be served with the meats towards the end of the cooking so that they leave a fresh, sweet taste in the broth. Here is a recipe for a complete boiled dinner—a classic Italian bollito misto—that includes different cuts of beef, a beef tongue, chicken legs, sausage, and stuffed cabbage. This is a bountiful dish that can easily be pared back all the way to the simplicity of boiled beef with carrots alone. Although this is a long recipe, some parts can be prepared in advance. The meats and tongue can be cooked ahead and stored in their broth. The sausage, stuffed cabbage, and vegetables are best prepared and cooked close to serving time. Timing is not critical; once everything is cooked and ready to eat, all the meats and vegetables can be reheated together in the broth and served.

Once the dish is assembled, braised chicken legs take less than an hour to cook, and they can be combined with almost any herbs, spices, and vegetables. Their meat is tender and succulent, their sauce concentrated and tasty. Legs are the best choice for a braise, but breasts may be included for those who prefer white meat. Just keep in mind that in order to remain tender and juicy, breasts need to cook for a much shorter time. Start by seasoning the legs with salt and pepper. If time allows, do this a day ahead. Leave the legs whole, or cut them through the joint to separate them into thighs and drumsticks. Brown them in a cast-iron or other heavy pan over medium heat, in a generous amount of oil, skin side down. Or for more flavor, use a mixture of oil and butter. It takes about 12 minutes to get the skin really crisp and golden brown. Take the time to do this or you will be disappointed in the end, because if there is only superficial color on the skin it will wash off in the braise, leaving the skin pale and unappetizing. Once the skin is browned, turn the pieces and cook briefly on the other side, about 4 minutes (there is no skin to crisp on this side and the meat will brown quickly). Remove the chicken legs from the pan and pour off the fat. Add wine, tomatoes, broth, or water to deglaze the pan, scraping up any brown bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. Cook the aromatic vegetables in a bit of oil as directed or add them raw to the pan. Arrange the chicken legs, skin side up, on the vegetables, and pour in the deglazing juices and broth or water to come halfway up the sides of the legs. Bring to a boil, turn down to a simmer, cover the pan, and cook for 45 minutes. Or bake in a 325° F oven. When the chicken legs are cooked, remove them from the pan and discard any loose herb stems or bay leaves or bouquet garni (squeezing it first to extract any juices). Strain the juices into a small pan or bowl and skim off all the fat. Taste the sauce and add salt if needed. Reunite all the parts, plus any vegetables that have been cooked separately, and serve at once or reheat later. If there is too much sauce, reduce it to concentrate the flavors. The salt will concentrate, too, so don’t add any more until the sauce has finished reducing. When braising chicken breasts, do not remove the skin or the bones; they both contribute flavor and help keep the meat moist and tender. Remove the first two joints of the wing by cutting through the joint. Leave the breasts whole or cut them in two so that the thicker wing portion is slightly smaller. Season and brown the breast pieces with the legs. Add the browned breasts with their resting juices to the pan after the legs have been cooking for 30 minutes. There is another method for braising chicken legs. The legs are cooked in the oven, covered, until tender and uncovered and browned at the end. This works especially well when cooking for a crowd, but is not suitable for breasts. Nestle the seasoned legs, skin side down, into the aromatic vegetables (cooked or not, as required by the recipe) with the herbs and spices. Pour in enough wine and stock or water to reach halfway up the legs. To save time, bring the stock to a boil before adding. Cover the dish tightly and bake in a 350°F oven for 40 minutes, or until the legs are tender. Uncover the dish and turn the legs over. If the liquid is so deep it covers the legs, pour enough off to fully expose the skin and reserve it for later. Return the legs to the oven, uncovered, and cook until they are golden brown on top, about 20 minutes. Skim the sauce and serve as above.

This is a simple dish with an impressive presentation, and it works with any combination of grilled meat, fish, poultry, or vegetables. A molcajete is a mortar made of lava rock that is usually used with a pestle (also made of lava rock) to make fresh salsas. Because it is made with a natural rock, it has an excellent ability to preserve heat and keep a dish hot, and that’s how I use it in this recipe. If you do not have two molcajetes, ovenproof earthenware bowls (about the size of cereal bowls) are an acceptable substitute.

I’m a little obsessed with mole (Mexico’s national dish, also known as mole poblano). I even visited its birthplace, the Convent of Santa Rosa in the beautiful colonial city of Puebla. Traditional mole takes days to make and is just as marvelous and multileveled as the most complex French sauce. Here you get a much easier version with nearly authentic results in terms of flavor. Do a little experiment and taste your mole right before you add the chocolate and then right after you add it. If you don’t get what it means when gourmands talk about “depth of flavor,” you’ll get it when you make this comparison. My great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and I all like to sprinkle it with plenty of additional sugar and a dollop of sour cream after it’s on the plate. You can make the sauce on its own and use it for very impressive enchiladas—or do as I did when I was a kid: spoon a few tablespoons over Mexican rice and chow down.

This recipe is one of my favorites ever. It comes from my aunt Marcela, a chef who inspired me to enter the magical world of the culinary arts. We not only share the same name and the same career, we also agree that sweet and spicy is one of the best combinations when preparing Mexican food. Store-bought apricot preserves, used here, work well; just be sure to buy the best you can find. A kitchen syringe is a useful tool for injecting the hens with a flavorful mixture of broth, butter, and tequila. The result is a moist and succulent dish.

There was always a roast chicken in our fridge when I was growing up—but I’d be lying if I said my mom cooked it. There was a wonderful rotisserie place a few blocks from my house and they would deliver a succulent roast chicken, fresh salsa, homemade tortillas, and frijoles charros (like the frijoles on page 155 but with tons of bacon in the mix). We’d all stand around the kitchen table and make soft tacos, adding a few slices of avocado. We used leftovers for chicken salad, flautas (rolled up and fried chicken tacos), or tostadas (fried tortillas spread with refried beans, topped with shredded chicken, shredded iceberg lettuce, crema, salsa, avocado slices, and, in my house, a drizzle of olive oil and red wine vinegar). This recipe is so easy and yields such a flavorful, succulent chicken that I doubt any rotisserie place in your neighborhood can rival it. And I doubt you’ll have leftovers. But if you do, go to town with tortillas, beans, avocado, and any of the salsas in this book and make tacos.

This is the best burrito you will ever taste in your entire life, and that’s no exaggeration. To “confit” is to preserve the duck meat by first curing it in salt, then cooking and storing it in its own fat. This is one of those things that I eat only on occasion, for obvious reasons, but look forward to tremendously. Take into consideration that the duck must be prepared a day ahead—but believe me, it’s worth the extra effort. (You could also buy duck confit already made to cut the prep time way down.) I must confess to you that, on occasion, I’ve used lard from a local butcher when I don’t have enough duck fat (which I buy at Whole Foods), with the response from my uninformed family usually being, “Marcela, the duck tastes different today. It tastes . . . better.”

Few things are more enticing than the smell of a chicken roasting, but for a special meal or a romantic evening such as Valentine’s Day, I like to serve game hens, so each person can have a whole bird of his or her own. It’s a beautiful presentation that is ridiculously easy to put together, and the pan juices, full of fresh citrus flavors, are especially delicious. If you prefer, though, you can easily make this with a large chicken; just increase the roasting time to 60 to 75 minutes, depending on its weight.

Chimichurri is the A1 sauce of Argentina, and no self-respecting steak there would be served without a dose of this herby green sauce. But chimichurri also has a lot in common with an Italian salsa verde, which gave me the idea to pair it with the more delicate combo of chicken and shrimp. I add oregano for a deep earthiness, and crunchy bites of pancetta put it over the top; you’ll want to serve this sauce over everything from broiled fish fillets to sliced tomatoes or even crostini.

Burger purists often complain that substituting ground chicken or turkey for beef results in a dry, bland burger, but that needn’t be the case; these are super juicy and full of flavor. To keep them moist, I mix some of the garlic mayo right into the burgers themselves, then smear a bit more on each bun for good measure. Easy and yummy, yummy, yummy.

Nothing warms up a cold winter night like chicken soup, especially when there are hearty chunks of chicken and pieces of pasta waiting in the bottom of the bowl. When I came home from the hospital with Jade, friends and family took turns bringing food by for Todd and me. Sandra Tripicchio, who is an invaluable part of putting together my shows and books, made us a big batch of this lemony chicken soup, and it’s been a staple in our house ever since. You’ll love the way the lemon brightens the soup’s flavor.

You can substitute italian linguine or spaghetti for the rice noodles in this dish. Although the texture will not be the same, the dish will still be good. Boil the noodles nearly to doneness in the normal fashion, then rinse before proceeding