roasted chicken and salad

Chicken bits and chicken broth from the chicken roasted previously for fun and then frozen. You'll recall the bird was picked apart and the pieces frozen separately so it could be used as needed. All the rest, with the bones cracked open were cooked in water under pressure, strained, then frozen in cubes so it too could likewise be used as needed.

As it turns out, each compartment in the cubical ice tray holds precisely 1/4 cup of liquid, if precise measurement means anything. In my case, it doesn't. For the sauce today I used three cubes which I estimated sufficient for the amount of roux I prepared, but even that wasn't actually measured. A nob of butter, a careless tablespoon of flour, salt and pepper and powder of two types of chiles to form a hazardously hot paste into which the liquid would be poured to form the flavored sauce. This time, the liquid was three ice cubes of broth. Once melted, it turned out to be insufficient liquid so I added splashes of whey until I was satisfied with the consistency. All this took three minutes -- the heating of the flavored roux paste, the melting of the broth cubes, the thinning with the whey. Actually, the thing that took the most time was toasting the croutons for the salad. That's what determined the timing of the meal.




I'm having fun with the new powders from Savory.

For your chile edification, because you never know when you'll be presented with a pop quiz on chiles, or in need of an answer to pry open a difficult crossword corner, or find yourself faced with the category of "Popular Chile Peppers" on Jeopardy!, and in dire need of a question for a Jeopardy! answer to solve a daily double, or be taken to a restaurant by your new boss and handed a menu printed in Spanish. See? I'm looking out for your well being.

Chipolte is a smoked and dried jalapeño pepper. The word is Nahuatl. The native Mexicans employed a process whereby meat and vegetables are allowed to dry within an enclosed space exposed to heat, an ingenious method of preservation developed by people of an earlier civilization.

Whole, they look like this in the grocery store. They also come canned, usually in adobo sauce. One or two of these will completely Mexicanify a stew.

Ancho pepper is the dried form of poblano pepper. Poblano is arguably the most popular pepper in Mexico. It's mild. The word means "the people." It's the pepper most likely to be stuffed with cheese for a chill relleno. Relleno means "stuffed." When poblano peppers are dried they turn flat and wide sort of heart shaped. Ancho means wide or width. They look like this. They can also be dark red.