muckefuck | Seems everyone's posting recipes (Reply)

Last night's experimental new recipe, escabetx de gallina, was so dirt simple I can recite it from memory. However, you might want to wait to try it yourself until we've eaten the results tomorrow.

Put 4 cups of olive oil, 2 cups good red wine vinegar, 4-6 scallions (trimmed at both ends), 2 tablespoons of black peppercorns, 5 bay leaves, 2 heads of garlic (separated into cloves and peeled), and a bunch of fresh thyme into a large pot or (preferrably) a terracotta casserole. Bring to a boil and add fowl. (The recipe said 6 pigeons [yeah, right!] or two small chickens; I used one large chicken, cut up, and that seems to have worked out well.) Reduce heat and simmer for an hour. Cool for another hour or so. Put in fridge for at least 24 hours before eating. (The author recommends slicing the breast meat and serving the other pieces whole.)

Of course, this will leave me with about a quart of heavily-seasoned vinegary chickeny oil that I hate to simply pour down the drain. Does anyone have suggestions for what to do with it? When making sauerbraten, standard operating procedure is to cook down the marinade, thicken it with crumbs, and serve it as a gravy, but I'm not sure that would work as well with the escabetx and, further, I don't know what I'd put it on.

I came across the recipe over the weekend while reviewing my various romesco recipes. (Thanks to

foodpoisoningsf for the inspiration.) One recipe uses it as a dressing for salt cod/tuna salad, which I might persuade

monshu to try by eliminating the salt cod. We were looking for good, tasty plan-ahead-and-serve-cool recipes for the coming weekend anyway, which explains how I came around to giving the escabetx a whirl. If we can find good mint, I'll actually go through the trouble of fixing favas in order to try out the Catalan-style bean salad, too.

Chef Jeff came over to watch me cook, so I gave him a thigh to marinate at home. Fortunately, pickling isn't foreign to the Thais; like the Vietnamese, they also serve versions of ceviche utilising lots of lime juice. Realising I needed to feed him, I picked up some No Name brand salmon filets and threw together a no-frills dinner by pairing them with plain white rice and sauteed green beans. They were perfectly decent pieces of fish, but I wish I'd known that they were pre-marinated. The seasoning wasn't bad, but--like virtually every prepared seasoning mix--it was saltier than I like it. I was planning on a light marinade of soy sauce and ginger wine until I discovered this. Also, he said he likes thyme a lot, so I served Farigoule as digestif, which I think overwhelmed him a bit, either through syrupiness or alcohol content.