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...

The hibiscus flower has bloomed, day 3

Now y'all know I love to experiment, and I generally go into my experiments with a plan, an experimental design, if you will. But after playing for a few days with squid and not royally fucking anything up, I was feeling a little restless, so I decided to just say "yes" to whatever popped into my head. Dry fried ginger, pattypan squash, and red onion? Sure, that sounds like a good combo. Purple sweet potato, shishitos, and sweet onion dry fried? Why not? What if I dump some some butter into that ginger/squash/red onion pan? I bet that will taste good. How about I dust some chopped squid with salt and oat flour and squirt it with some fresh lemon juice? I'm sure that will be fine. And I bet what will be even better will be tossing that squid into the ginger pan. That's when I remembered how much I loved that squid that was cooked low and slow. Unfortunately, I was out of white wine, so I looked in my fridge and saw some high pulp Simply Orange orange juice. I poure...

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...