There was such an outpouring of love and support from people after the release of my last batch of excerpts, and I can’t tell you all how much it meant to me to see that.
If you haven’t read those excerpts, I highly encourage you to do that first before you read this one. You don’t necessarily need to, but there’s a lot of additional context that is provided in that initial post that I probably won’t be retreading here. If you’d like to check it out, the link is here:
In the effort of trying out various formats and focuses for this project, here’s another excerpt from the prospective book:
Control of the Kitchen
(AKA The Chapter in Which I Cook Chicken)
Unfortunately, I’ve never been much of a cook. That’s not to say that I don’t like cooking or even that I’m bad at it — just that my whole situation has often led to me spending the least amount of time possible in the kitchen and only cooking very sparingly.
This is, at best, annoying, because a lot of actual-good-for-you-to-consume food has to be cooked first in order to reap the benefits of not being a human and not a wild animal. It’s not a healthy behavior, nor is it a very convenient one. It’s definitely one of those things that I’m still very much so working on.
With all the issues I have surrounding food, it’s easy for the kitchen to be a place I associate with heightened anxiety and frustration. However, that’s not the entire story.
For anyone who doesn’t know or remember, I was in college to become a microbiologist, so I was in several lab classes for both chemistry and biology. Long white coats, disposable gloves, big notebooks full of hand-copied instructions on how to perform the latest experiment — the whole nine, really. I adored those classes. Getting to work with things hands-on is a very enriching experience and I highly recommend it.
We had to do things like thoroughly wash our hands all the way up to the wrist, wipe down surfaces before and after experiments, do detailed measurements of various compounds in specific orders, etc etc etc.
Some of you may have already picked up on where I’m going with this but if you haven’t, working in a kitchen reminds me a lot of working in the lab. Clearing and sanitizing yourself and a place to work, measuring out ingredients, setting the heat on low medium only to realize for some reason the burner has two settings, Off and ACTIVELY BURNING YOUR FOOD — it’s great!
Through my limited experience cooking, I discovered that while a lot of my anxiety around the kitchen has to do with my issues with food, a lot of it also comes from an adjacent but separate issue — when I don’t know how to do something, or am not confident doing something, my brain for some reason initiates SHUTDOWN MODE.
I start to worry about all kinds of things. I don’t know what I’m doing! I don’t have any instructions! I was told how to do this only once and completely forgot what I was told! Food costs a TON these days, if I mess it up I’m costing money we don’t want to be spending! If I do it wrong, people could get sick or not eat it and then it’s also a waste of money! Is there a specific way to cook this? I can’t taste test a lot of what I could make, so I can’t tell if it’s good or not —
And so on, and so on.
It gives me the feeling of “I need to step aside and let someone who knows what they’re doing handle this” and cuts off any ability to actually learn what I need to do unless I calm myself down and reorder my brain.
Several months ago, we decided to start doing dinner days in my family. I’d cooked a little bit, so I chose the one thing I’d cooked a few times before and that became my dinner.
Tuesdays are my dinner day. Every Tuesday, I cook basically the same thing: chicken. Most of the time, I also cook broccoli, and depending on what’s available there’s sometimes mashed potatoes and beans as well.
The recipe isn’t complicated at all stepwise.
Through trial and error, I seem to have decided that doing the broccoli first is better. Raw chicken is practically a hazard, so in lieu of rewashing the cutting board or using two cutting boards, I just do the broccoli first and save myself the trouble.
In this house we’ve discovered the wonders of steaming broccoli, so I load the steamer with just enough water that it’s slightly visible when pressed down, wash the broccoli, then cut it into what we lovingly refer to as “little trees” — cutting the little stalks off of the main stalk so they all still stay together instead of falling apart into a broccoli mash. This is important for the texture problem, but we’ll get more into that later. About two heads of broccoli is good enough for this part. We load it into the steamer and press cook.
Routinely this ends up with the broccoli finishing while the chicken is still cooking, which was alarming the first few times it happened, but my mom showed me a trick which is basically that you turn the steamer off and stuff a towel between the handles and the steamer bowl, picking the bowl up off of the burner (because otherwise it can and will burn whatever you’ve got steaming).
Depending on your steamer, this may not happen to you.
Sometimes we do this dinner with steaming corn instead of broccoli, but the process is basically the same. Wash the broccoli, tear off as much of the stringy bits as possible, put it in the steamer, if it finishes way before its time shove a towel between the handle and the bowl to prop it off the burner.
The chicken is of course the star of the show.
Moving the chicken from the freezer to the fridge a day or so before cooking allows more than enough time to defrost but putting it in the microwave for 3 minutes works too. This is particularly useful for me, who never in her life has had the foresight to remember to take the chicken out of the freezer and put it in the fridge.
We wash the chicken with hot water, tear or cut off any googly white bits of fat, then use the cutting board to slice the chicken into pieces, each roughly the size of my thumb (as measured from my fingertip to the first knuckle), though larger or smaller pieces are fine. I generally cut the chicken breast once along its longest axis, then as many times as necessary along its shorter axis. If a piece comes out particularly thick or large, I cut it in half until it roughly matches the others.
And then comes The Bowl.
To make The Bowl, we start with a layer of olive oil covering the bottom of a medium sized mixing bowl, then one to two passes each of the following:
Garlic salt
Garlic powder
Onion powder
Iodized salt
Chili powder
Mrs. Dash Original
Mrs. Dash Herb and Onion
Fine black pepper (little lighter on this one)
Ground chili and Onion
If you’ve done this right, it will make a very unappetizing-looking slurry at the bottom of the bowl. Dump the chicken into this, then mix until the contents are equally distributed. If the chicken isn’t mixing easily or the seasonings are getting clumpy, add more olive oil.
Once the seasoning is evenly distributed over all the pieces, get this:
You go back and do it over again.
Another pass of garlic salt, garlic powder, onion powder, iodized salt, chili powder, OG Mrs. Dash and Herb and Onion, black pepper, and ground chili and onion. Ideally, this will completely coat the top layer of your chicken pile. You should not be able to see the chicken anymore. You should look at this and go oh no. Oh what have I done. If you’re questioning if you put too much, you’ve probably put just enough.
Mix until contents are once again evenly distributed. Add more olive oil as needed, but only enough that it mixes well — you don’t want to wash away all the seasonings you just put on it.
If you thought to yourself that we were done with the copious amounts of garlic, you’re dead wrong, because at this point we get out the pan and put about half a spoon’s worth of minced garlic on the bottom. You can also throw this in The Bowl if you want, but I prefer to do it in the pan so none of it gets lost in the transfer to the pan.
Put the chicken in at a low-medium heat, stir frequently, and after a few minutes put the lid on the pan.
It’s usually at this point that I forget how to cook the chicken, and stare with growing concern at both the pan and the stove as I try to remember how the process goes at this point.
I’m not 100% sure even as I’m writing this, (which is why this isn’t a recipe blog), but to my recollection after a few minutes I put the lid on the pan to help cook the inside of the chicken, and all that excess olive oil goes from being on the chicken to creating a bubbly water layer (It pops! Watch out! Wear long sleeves! Wear a lab coat!) that I can never remember if I need the lid on or off to dissolve and end up taking the lid on and off several times and stirring.
By the time the oil has all burned off, the chicken has usually turned a slightly more off-white-brownish color, at which point we turn the heat up to high and continue to stir. You’ll notice I do a lot of stirring. I never know what to do with my hands when I’m cooking.
In this case, the stirring is important! We want to make sure one or both sides get crispy but don’t burn. The crisp is very important.
I’ve encountered an issue at this stage sometimes where the crispy part becomes crumbly and doesn’t stick to the chicken. I’ve a working theory that this happens when too much olive oil is added, or possibly the chicken isn’t cooked fast enough? Investigation pending. It still tastes great either way though, so if that happens to you don’t freak out.
I can’t say much for the optional beans and potatoes portion of this. Most of the time I’m just reheating them from a previous dinner’s leftovers. Also, I don’t eat either of these things, so I can’t attest to how they taste.
Once the chicken is crispy but not burnt, it’s ready to go, and the broccoli (or corn) should be too. I take mine with butter, and if it’s the broccoli, I make a point of eating it ASAP to avoid any potential food issues.
Broccoli is a weird food for me because it falls into the same category as eggs (and to some extent, pancakes): foods that I can enjoy, but only under certain very specific circumstances, usually highly reliant on them still being hot or very warm at the time of consumption. Lukewarm or cold broccoli? Not a chance.
Broccoli can easily turn to mush if it’s in the steamer for too long, which is bad texture. However, if it’s not in the steamer long enough, it can stay more solid, which is bad taste and bad texture for me. In this case, I actually prefer the broccoli to be more on the soft side than the crunchy side, which is very unusual but it’s the only way I’ve come to like broccoli — eating it fast, first, hot, and with butter.
The main concern with the chicken texture-wise is just making sure that it’s crunchy on the outside. The seasonings do the rest insofar as making the chicken consistently great. With how much garlic is used, you can also be sure you’re fending off all the local vampires.
So, other than a haphazard chicken recipe and a way to keep bloodsuckers far from the house, what do we take away from this?
What we take away from it comes from something that happened as a result of learning how to cook this and learning how to do it consistently — confidence, and experimentation.
When I first started cooking this recipe, I had to ask and re-ask my mom how to do it several times. Whenever anything was slightly different to what was expected, I stopped and asked what to do. When my mom gave me her recipe in measurements of “some of this” and “about two shakes of that” I was baffled. I did my best to count up specific measurements and called her over to check if I thought I’d put too much or too little.
As I grew more confident on this meal, though, I grew more comfortable with the lack of rigorous measurements and got a much better sense for eyeballing how much of what should go where.
When I found out we were out of the usual seasonings, I discovered that I was more willing to attempt and be okay with deviations to the formula, picking up and adding things that I enjoy from each time cooking.
There’s a lot of value to be had in a meal in which I have total authority and autonomy to decide how it is cooked, when, what’s in it, and more. There’s a lot of value in the confidence and comfort of having a recipe that I know like the back of my hand and can replicate well enough that I’m not scared to deviate from it in small ways.
The kitchen still acts as the seat of a lot of anxiety for me, but having my own dinner day, learning and perfecting the recipe, and even making changes to it, have all been really integral to my non-negative perception of the world in and around the kitchen.
Thank you all for reading, that’ll be all for today. I hope you found the delving into this topic interesting and if you did a like would be much appreciated. I’m not sure how I feel about briefly becoming a recipe blog, but autonomy in the kitchen is something I’ve wanted to address for a while. Even now, I’m not sure I covered everything I really wanted to with this topic, but I hope you all enjoyed what was presented!