Stuff I've Been Cooking — December 2023

A surprise hit chicken and a mountain lasagna.

It’s time for another “Stuff I’ve Been Cooking” column. This time around, I have a chicken I’m very excited to discuss as well as a lasagna situation I’ve been meaning to share for weeks now. There’s no more time to delay; so let’s get to it.

Cider-Braised Apple and Jerusalem Artichoke Chicken

I had a real time-crunch last week. Come Wednesday night, I had to transcribe three Bravo shows in one night ahead of a grueling podcast session the next morning. There was no time to waste… so naturally I decided to throw a 90-minute chicken braise onto the schedule for no good reason. I truly can’t even remember why I thought this was a smart idea. I think I just wanted to cook some chicken.

For a recipe I turned to Adeena Sussman’s book Shabbat, which I had yet to cook from despite my huge enthusiasm for it. This felt like a great night to dive in (actually, it was a terrible night for experimentation, but I was on a path of extreme procrastination evidently). Anyway, after leafing through some pages, the recipe for “Cider-Braised Apple and Jerusalem Artichoke Chicken” leapt out at me. Not literally — that would be horrifying and surreal.

I really love Jerusalem artichokes, but I never seem to cook with them. For the uninitiated, Jerusalem artichokes - also known as sunchokes, or, for some, fartichokes (I’ll let you figure out the etymology on that one) — have nothing to do with Jerusalem or artichokes. They’re actually tubers harvested from sunflowers. The “-choke” part comes from their flavor, which is vaguely smokey and artichoke-y (a perfect combination). The “Jerusalem” part, according to Sussman, is just a translation quirk from the word “girasole,” which is Italian for sunflower.

According to Wikipedia, Jerusalem artichokes are also known as “earth apples,” which I reject because a) it sounds lame, and b) it’s confusing because the French translation of “earth apple” is “pomme de terre,” which, when translated back to English, actually means potato. So what I’m trying to say is let’s stop making earth apples a thing in the context of Jerusalem artichokes.

Also, just going to take an important stance here: I prefer to say “sunchoke,” mainly because it’s easier to type than “Jerusalem artichoke.”

Where was I? Sunchokes. I love them, even if later on they turn my derriere into the brass section of the LA Phil. This recipe calls for sunchokes, apples, and chicken — a pairing I felt I could almost taste but not quiiite. I was so intrigued by how this combination of ingredients would work, but the 90 minute cooking time was truly the last thing my hectic night needed. “Don’t worry,” I reassured myself. “There’s no way I’ll find sunchokes. After all this hand-wringing about time management, you won’t even make this recipe.” Realistically, I would probably just make a simple 30 minute chicken and get on with my night.

But miraculously, there on the supermarket shelves was a 1lb bag of sunchokes. This was kismet! I was now celestially obligated to make this chicken, despite the hideous workload awaiting me. I’m glad I did.

Despite taking 90 minutes, the dish was relatively easy. First, I cooked the sunchokes in the microwave for seven minutes — which felt strange but totally worked. Next I seared various bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, which of course took longer than expected, especially since I had to do it in batches. Generally speaking, this step in recipes always takes 2.5 times longer than promised. But, that being said, all that time is spent doing literally nothing. Really not that taxing. I actually used the window as a chance to chop apples and do dishes.

Once the chicken achieved some beautiful color, I removed it from the pan and sautéd onions and the sunchokes in the remaining schmaltz. I actually drained some out because those thighs really released quite an impressive amount of chicken fat. The onions and sunchokes eventually began to brown, at which point I added garlic, sage, and diced chili, followed eventually by a mixture of chicken stock, apple cider, cider vinegar, mustard, corn starch, and honey. That all simmered and reduced, and then finally, the chicken returned to the party, but this time I added some apple slices to the pan too. It all went into the oven for 45 minutes and emerged bubbly, browned, and ready for wild consumption.

What a recipe. The chicken was great, but honestly it was upstaged by everything else in the bowl (and btw you should serve this in bowls, not plates). The broth was brilliantly layered — sweet, almost too sweet, but reined in by the mustard, vinegar, and the smoky sunchokes. People who are particularly sensitive to sweetness might want to use Granny Smiths, but I personally was fine with Honey Crisps. I served this to my boyfriend and our friend, and all three of us couldn’t stop slurping this fascinating broth. It was, dare I say, beguiling.

On a frigid Los Angeles evening (it was an icy 64 degrees), this braise was comforting, warming, and deeply satisfying. Part of me is very inspired to rethink this as a soup. I suspect the apple element will need to be toned down even further, but that’s okay because I’d probably just double the sunchokes.

Really happy and delighted with this dish. It was well worth staying up until 2:30 AM working. Sussman notes that we can use potatoes in place of sunchokes, which I’m sure is lovely, but if you have the resources, time, patience or fortitude, I’d seek out the sunchokes.

Mountain Lasagna

Let’s get this out of the way: mountain lasagna is just lasagna that you eat in the mountains. Also, this is not a thing. I just made it up for this newsletter. But it feels like it should be a thing! (unlike “earth apples”)

At the end of September, I headed a few hours east of Los Angeles to Big Bear Lake (notably, in the mountains) with some friends and several dogs to enjoy a cozy weekend in a cabin. There were ambitious plans to roast chickens one night, make lasagna another night, and wedge in an onion soup somewhere along the way.

Unfortunately, a variety of mishaps on Friday meant that we didn’t all arrive in Big Bear until about 7:30 PM; so the roast chicken bonanza suddenly turned into Domino’s Pizza, which honestly was not the worst. We did also have an impromptu tinned fish happy hour with an even more impromptu ricotta-garlic-dill dip thing; so it all felt very high-low culture and fun.

Since we had so much ricotta for the lasagna, we made an impromptu spread for happy hour.

When Saturday rolled around, we were very determined to lasagna-it-up (mountain lasagna, if you will). I’ve made Ina Garten’s famed turkey lasagna, and I’ve made the Allrecipes World’s Best Lasagna (both live up to the hype), but earlier in the week, my friend Judy and I had seen a video for Alison Roman’s “Very Good Lasagna,” and we were both intrigued.

Alison Roman’s recipe basically has us slowly simmering a simple tomato sauce for 45 minutes before layering it amongst noodles, ricotta, parmesan, and tons of mozzarella. The end product was cheesy, oozy, and comforting. It was exactly the sort of indulgent, nostalgic dish you’d want to eat on a cold night in a log cabin (although, we technically were in some sort of A-frame chalet — but the point remains). I thought it was fabulous. I’m not sure where it ranks with the other two iconic lasagnas, but it miiiight beat them. We’re going to need a cook-off to get to the bottom of this.

Notable tip: when making the sauce, a simple step is to add a half can’s worth of water to the pot. We overlooked this seemingly minor instruction, but truthfully, it made a difference. The lasagna, despite being delicious, wasn’t quite saucy enough for me, and had there been that extra water in the pot, I know the sauce could have stretched farther. And the reason I know this is because Judy made the lasagna again two days later (it was that good that she felt compelled to fix the mistake) and this time, she added the water. It made all the difference. Truly.

I won’t say this is the definitive lasagna recipe until I revisit Ina’s and the Allrecipes one, but it is, at the very least, a varsity level competitor. Long live mountain lasagna.

French Onion Soup…ish

So… about that French onion soup. I had never made French onion soup before; so I spent a lot of time researching recipes. It needed to be classic enough to feel like a hug, but not too complicated, given we’d be using an unknown kitchen setup. Naturally, I started with Julia Child, eventually moving to David Lebovitz before finally landing on Ina Garten. A barrier to some of the more classic recipes was that they all required individual bowls that were resilient enough to survive a trip under the broiler. That’s a tall order for any kitchen, let alone an Airbnb kitchen.

Ina’s recipe appeared to be the most user friendly. Plus, it welcomed fennel to the party, which I liked. But drama struck this recipe from the outset. You see, I am a relatively new SUV owner. I’ve spent my life driving sedans, and while the transition to a taller, larger vehicle has been relatively seamless, there are still some growing pains. One such issue is remembering that a sedan’s trunk is very different than an SUV’s.

And so I naively opened my Kia Sportage trunk, not realizing that my prized sherry bottle had tumbled out of its grocery bag, eagerly awaiting its first taste of sweet, sweet freedom. Within seconds of the trunk door rising, the bottle rolled on out, shattering loudly at my feet. Shit.

I told myself it was no big deal. We would just get a new bottle up in Big Bear. The joke was on me though because THERE WAS NO SHERRY IN BIG BEAR. This just in, folks: sherry is apparently NOT a mountain liquor!

Welp, this is all a long and harrowing way of saying that my attempts to compensate for the sherry with brandy and sauvignon blanc were admirable, but a far cry from the real thing. As delicious as this soup was, I definitely missed the sherry. Who knew?

No one was sadder about the sherry than Gus.

Curiously, Ina’s recipe calls for chicken stock on the Food Network site but beef stock on the Barefoot Contessa site. We used chicken stock, which was lovely, but next time, beef stock is the way to go. Chicken stock just can’t deliver those deep, back-of-the-palette flavors (dare I say umami?) that beef stock can.

Here’s the good news. Judy was in charge of all things gruyere and sourdough, and she brilliantly adapted some of Julia Child’s technique to great success. Instead of placing all the soup bowls under the broiler, Judy placed a toasted piece of sourdough at the bottom of each bowl - over which we poured the soup. She then floated a second slice over sourdough in each bowl (this piece of toast had melted gruyere atop it). This method worked like a charm. And at the end of the day, don’t we only really care about sour bread and ghastly amounts of cheese? Despite this soup’s setbacks, it worked and worked quite well at that.

Just a pretty photo of a fried egg over pearl barley:

Nothing really to write about here. I just loved the way this photo turned out on my Instagram story!

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Welp, this update is entirely too long; so guess what? I’m going to write a sequel — hopefully ready for next week. Several more interesting dishes to report back on!

What have you been making lately?