Yemenite Step chicken

A short post to remind myself of a recipe. Years ago I had a very memorable plate of chicken at a restaurant in Jerusalem called the Yemenite Step. I called it “honey rosemary chicken” because those were the dominant seasonings. Thinking about it recently, I googled and found that while the restaurant no longer exists, people remember the chicken. I even found a recipe. I could link to it, but basically the recipe is “fry pieces of chicken in a pan with some olive oil and just keep pouring more honey and stripping more rosemary sprigs into it until it tastes like Yemenite Step chicken,” — literally there are no other seasonings. (I put in a little salt, it just seemed wrong not to.) Anyway, this is just to record that I did this (with some boneless chicken breast from Conscious Carnivore — I assume this would work with bone-in thighs too but might require slightly more technique.) The chicken was good, I threw some leftover rice from the fridge into the pan after the chicken was done and cooked it in the honey/chicken liquid and that was good, everybody was happy, it was extremely easy. Whether it’s actually Yemenite I have no idea.

Blueberry ricotta crepes and the mighty Thr-Ian’s

Don’t miss the superb blueberries currently on offer from Flyte Family Farm, available at the Saturday market on the corner of Mifflin and Pinckney. Yesterday night I had two fresh pints of these and no idea what to make for dinner. But I also have this little crepe pan I’ve been learning to use since I accidentally left my nonstick skillet empty on the stove and bubbled half the coating off it. So: I made some crepes (using this recipe) and filled them with blueberries and sheep’s milk ricotta from Butler Farms.

Delicious! But labor-intensive to put together, especially since my little pan makes just one crepe at a time. So here’s a question, pancake fans: what if I’d just mixed the ricotta and blueberries into the batter and fried it like a pancake? Would that have been just as tasty? And if I do mix the cheese in the batter and fry it, would something simple and cheap like cottage cheese be as good as fresh ricotta?

The crepes were a success, but the food victory of the week obviously belongs to Adam B. Hirsch, who recently became the first person to eat at all three Ian’s Pizza locations (two in Madison, one in Chicago) in a single day. Cue Olympic theme!

Improvised miso soup

I went out this afternoon during CJ’s nap to do a little spectral sequence wrangling in a local coffee shop. On the way, I was happily surprised to find that my local Asian grocery, Lee’s Oriental, was open on Easter Sunday. So I bought a couple of bags of stuff and made the following off-the-cuff soup, which I record here for future reference:

Saute about half a big head of napa cabbage, a bunch of enoki mushrooms, and 6 cloves garlic in the bottom of the soup pot. Pour a gallon of water on top of it and bring to boil. Stir in about 1/4 c miso (I was using Korean miso, which the shopkeeper — Lee himself? — warned me was very strong; usual miso recipes seem to want more miso per unit of water.) Then add 2 lb soba noodles (I used Sukina brand “Japanese vermicelli”) and boil for about 7 minutes. Three minutes before the end of cooking, add a big handful of bean sprouts (about a cup) and a bunch of scallions, coarsely chopped. One minute before the end of cooking, crack three eggs in the soup and stir furiously until scrambled.

At table, the soup can be garnished with pieces of deep-fried tofu (more precisely: ajitsuke inari age) and sesame oil.

Remarks: The bean sprouts and enoki mushrooms were probably unnecessary; neither really asserted themselves in the final soup. I might have used less soba; it absorbs a lot of soup, so that by the time we were done with dinner, the leftovers were really no longer a soup with noodles, but a noodle dish with a thick glutinous sauce. But it will probably be easier for CJ to eat this way. Soup, per se, remains a challenge for him.