Friday, July 27, 2012

Chicken-fried Chicken à la King Ranch Chicken.

Yeah, it's a mouthful. © Ryan Schierling
As with any recipe that's been around for more than 75 years, there will always be nebulous narratives about the origins. Vague references to obscure cookbooks – long out of print, written by chefs long-since dead – are all we have to rely on. Well... that, fond and faded memories, and Wikipedia.

Fried chicken has been around since chickens evolved from dinosaurs. Delicious, delicious dinosaurs.

Chicken à la King dates back to the late 1800s – a hotel cook in Philadelphia, perhaps. In the simplest forms, it is diced chicken in a cream sauce with sherry and mushrooms, usually served over toast points.

King Ranch Chicken can be traced to a 20-year stretch between 1945 and 1965 and despite the moniker, has no ties to the sprawling Kingsville, Texas ranch of the same name. It is, roughly, a chicken enchilada casserole with a spicy cream sauce and a boatload of Colby and Jack cheese.

Junior League cookbooks and soup can labels will provide a wealth of knowledge when it comes to the standards like fried chicken, chicken à la King or King Ranch Chicken. Follow recipes to the letter and you will be blessed with crowd-pleasing, pleasantly bland, rib-sticking, middle-of-the-road, middle-of-America fare. However, venture off the path into the hinterlands, and you will find the bastard chicken, I mean children, of these tried-and-true classics.

Boned, butterflied, and buttermilked chicken thighs are dredged in well-seasoned flour and fried until crispy. Texas toast is slathered in butter and griddled. Tiny brown mushrooms are quartered and sautéed with a hit of sherry. The pale green sauce is born of roasted tomatillos, poblano and serrano peppers, onion, garlic and a lot of heavy cream.

It is fried chicken. It is Chicken à la King. It is King Ranch Chicken. It is all of these, and still none of these.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

My coleslaw can beat up your coleslaw.

BFF on a bun. Slaw on pulled pork with mustard sauce. © Ryan Schierling
There is only one coleslaw recipe in this household. I will admit, we have prepared others on a whim, when experimenting with dishes that seemed like they'd benefit from a crunchy, slightly sweet and tangy cabbage salad on the side. As much as I love cabbage in all forms, none of them stuck.

This one, I wrote down for the first time in 2005. I don't remember how long I'd been making it before it was finally put to paper, but full of bluster and bravado on an old blog, I branded it Ryan's Bad Ass Coleslaw. Somehow the moniker stuck. If I had to rename it now, in 2012, I might be a little more humble. I'd call it... Ryan's Bad Ass Coleslaw. Hey, we're all proud of our children, right?

Alright, sorry, it is a nice slaw, and it's a perfect barbecue side. It also has no mayonaisse, which is a sticking point for some coleslaw traditionalists, but mayo weighs down a lot of picnic dressings and I wanted to keep this as light as possible to give the cabbage, carrots, green apple and jalapeños center stage. The simple dress for this salad is a mixture of cream, apple cider vinegar, honey or agave nectar, and salt. That's it. That's all it needs.

Unless you wanted a little help from Bad Ass Coleslaw's friends – pulled pork and mustard sauce. 

Sunday, July 15, 2012

BBQ pop-up.

(L) Hot BBQ. (R) RL Reeves, Jr. © Ryan Schierling
By the time this has posted Sunday afternoon, you'll have already missed it. Like a finger-lickin'-good flash-in-the-pan – this one-shot meat-and-two melee, noon-time, barbecue pop-up at Three Little Pigs is history.

Chef Raymond Tatum's pork-centric trailer is closed Sundays and Mondays, so Tatum's friend RL Reeves, Jr. (scrumptiouschef.com) got the green light to throw a little brisket party. Word was passed around in the days prior through various channels, and if you were in the know, you got proper Texas plate lunch. There was brisket (smoked on the old mobile pit that followed Willie Nelson and ZZ Top around on tour in the 70s), beans, slaw, peach cobbler and sweet tea.

What felt like a summertime backyard picnic – old country on the radio, Lone Star tall-boys being passed around, folks hunkered over pecan-smoked meat and pinto beans so sweetly porcine you'd swear they were a part of the animal – could become a regular, if somewhat impromptu, gig with a rotating menu.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Masa is manna. Plantains are love.

Sopes con platanos. © Ryan Schierling

As far back as memory serves, I've had a food crush of biblical proportions on masa de maize. Unlike plain old cornmeal or fresh-roasted corn, masa is made from corn baptized (or cooked… whatever... semantics) in a solution of slaked lime. I'm pretty sure there must also be some kind of mystical ceremony involved before these divine kernels are ground into this dough-of-the-gods. My personal food mythology even goes so far as to claim that the manna collected by the Israelites as they wandered the desert was actually masa. I'm just that committed.

There are certainly lots of wonderful Mexican items that are created from masa – tamales, tortillas, gorditas. But the one I believe shows the best that masa can be is in sopes, with just enough tender cakiness to highlight the fresh masa flavor and a brief deep-frying which gives them a wonderfully light golden crunch.

The little restaurant that introduced me to proper chilaquiles is the same joint that introduced me to this sope – Señor Moose Café. Reasonable prices, unassuming and casual, this place serves up "Mexican Mexican" food. Comida tipica from many regions of Mexico grace their menu, with an authenticity that does not shy in the least from using ingredients such as chicken livers and/or making their own 25-ingredient mole. The sope with plantains (sope con platanos) on their breakfast-lunch menu was a deeply-appreciated favorite of mine. And, once again, I have been driven to making my own out of a desperate sense of loss and burning desire. When it gets to the point that you're considering booking tickets to either Seattle or the state of Nayarit in Mexico, you know it's time to get cooking.
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