Skip to main content

New year's persillade

I spent a bit of time on New Year's Eve doing some menu planning for my next cooking stream. I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that it involves 6 dishes, none of which I've made before, and is an undertaking that will change the culinary landscape forever. That's totally not a baseless exaggeration or clickbait of any kind, but if you watch that next stream, you'll learn the 3 Key Secrects Why Chefs Hate Me And You Won't Believe Number Seven! 
Anyway, after looking at photos, making some drawings, and having a think, I decided that I also needed to eat that night. Since I'd already spent what little brainpower I had on a menu, I wanted to keep it simple for dinner, so I used an old fallback I learned from a Jacques Pepin video a few years ago: persillade. I started off by slicing up a chicken breast into little thin cutlets which I seasoned with salt and paprika.
I pan fried the chicken in butter and olive oil, as one does. 
The persillade part comes just as the chicken is finishing cooking. I had minced up a bit of garlic and parsley and kept that shit in a bowl off to the side. When I had about 15-20 seconds left on the chicken, I dumped all of that in and tossed it all around to give a little bit of a coating to the chicken, then pulled all the meat out to rest.
Rather than making an official "side dish" with this, I just made a quick saucy vegetable mix to top the chicken. I dumped some diced red onion into the pan after the chicken came out, let that sweat a little bit, then added some diced yellow bell pepper and thinly sliced baby bella mushrooms with another little bit of butter. I sprinkled a little salt to draw out the moisture, then let all of that simmer for a minute or two before I dumped in some thinly sliced radish, as well. I didn't want the radish to get too soft, so, while it still had a little bit of crunch, I pulled the veggies off the heat and got ready to eat.
The beauty of simplicity is that it's simple. I stacked some of the chicken in the middle of my plate, then scooped some of the veggies on top. Easy peasy. The green from the parsley and red from the radish gave a nice little bit of color to a somewhat otherwise monochromatic dish. 
Flavorwise, persillade is always a homerun. It's tough to go wrong with parsley, garlic, and butter. The extra butter that I added in with the mushrooms really went a long way towards giving the veggie "sauce" a nice, creamy texture, and the veggie blend with the butter came with just the faintest touch of sweetness that really brought it all home. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I don't understand food

Part 1 the morning after, while eating a sausage, egg, and cheese everything bagel from Bergen Bagels Last night, I had the pleasure, privilege, and audacity to eat at a Brooklyn restaurant named Aska . I know it's cliche to refer to a fancy restaurant meal as a life-changing experience, but this was straight up paradigm-shattering. I've written before about food being a medium of communication, about how I strive to reduce food waste as much as I can, about sharing our cultures and stories with each other through the meals we create, but seeing how Chef Fredrik Berselius is able to do this at such an intricate, elegant, and elevated level is both humbling and inspiring. The experience started before the first bite. I walked into the 10 table restaurant, and they knew me by name. I was shown to my table (right in the middle of the place, looking directly into the open kitchen), and they even pulled my chair out for me and pushed it up under me. I was a little uncomfortable with...

Perspective

 I used to drive a 1986 pickup truck that was a heap of trouble on wheels. Mind you, I learned to drive in 2002. That piece of shit loved to just, you know, die. In the middle of intersections. While turning onto side streets. While accelerating from a stop sign. While braking for a stop sign. While cranking. It just died whenever it felt like it. It had AM radio and hand crank windows. That's literally it. No FM, no AC or heat. There were seatbelts for 2 of the 3 seats. I fucking hated that truck. On the other hand, it was my truck. I drove it to church, to work, and to the library; that was as far as I was allowed to take it, and I took it all of those places. I remember the first time I got it to idle while parked. I remember singing "The Prayer" over its dying engine multiple times. I think my younger brother probably has some flashbacks of some of those moments. But, as old, beaten up, shitty, annoying, and objectively terrible as it was, it sure was nice to have it ...

Why not give a shit?

About a month ago, I cooked up a big pot of a miso vegan stew. It was a Sunday evening, so I knew I needed to cook enough for Sunday night dinner and Monday's lunch. A vendor was taking us out for dinner on Monday, so I needed enough to cover Tuesday's lunch, too. I had plans with a friend on Tuesday night, so I wouldn't have time to cook, so I needed enough for Tuesday dinner and Wednesday lunch, too, so I said, and I quote, "Fuck it. I'll just cook enough for the week." Unfortunately, as I packed away my leftovers that night, I realized that I cooked enough for a week and a half. Normally, that wouldn't be a huge issue, except that I was leaving town Friday morning and wouldn't be back until Monday evening and did not have room in my freezer to store more than a bowl. Luckily, I was able to pawn a few bowls off on coworkers, so it all worked out alright. However, when I told this story to someone close to me, they said I should think about donating t...