A recipe for a different kind of chicken

If you are reading this and know me well, you already know about Favorite Chicken. (You'd better!!!) But if you're reading this and you don't know about Favorite Chicken, you will soon, because this is going to be a journey into whence Favorite Chicken came.

Let me back up. In the mid-aughts, my father gathered together all of his recipes and my mother's recipes and all of their parents recipes and some recipes their friends were known for. Then he put them together into black binders and gave copies to my siblings and some extended family. The front page looks like this:

(My dad took that still life. Copyright him.)
I must have left my copy at home when I went to college, so in 2008, I emailed him a note that had the promising subject line of "salmon?"

i was going to make salmon for dinner tonight...do you have that recipe for the teryaki salmon that harry makes? its relatively easy right? i meant to bring my "cookbook" with me that you put together of all our family recipes that i like, but i forgot. i may have you send it to me once i get things in greater order/decide what art i'd like to decorate the apt.

i am in the beginning stages of a cold, and so am feeling a bit under the weather and have been wishing that i was home if only for the potato-leek soup. other than that, things are going really well and i'm happy. school starts monday, so we'll see how long this lasts.

(The Harry here is our family friend Harry who I have known since I was born and also shares my birthday--lucky for him! The skepticism that my happiness would last as into school starting was me knowing myself well--lucky for me!)

"Easy if you have the right ingredients," my dad wrote of said salmon recipe specifically, before laying out the steps. He then attached a digital copy of the book--called FaveRecipes.doc--and added, "I'm happy that you're happy." I have referenced the digital copy every since, because Google Drive tends to be everywhere I am, whereas that black binder is not.

But the extent to which I've use the cookbook has been limited; as we all probably do, I tend to rely upon the same recipes over and over again. It provided me substantial comfort and some popularity among my peer group when I craved my mother's mac and cheese whilst dealing with cold Chicago nights, but I never strayed past the Everything the Light Touches portions of the book, into my paternal grandmother's hamburger and rice recipe, or our neighbor's mother's instructions for liver pate. Hence the Favorite Chicken, which is roast chicken as my mother made it for me for practically every birthday for 18 years, named such early on because it is, perhaps obviously, my favorite chicken. Though I could eat it for 18 more birthdays, I realized it stood for something more recently. I had been exploring the ways in which my own tastes and other cultures and histories intertwined through new recipes, but there was plenty to explore in the ones I already had access to. I didn't like hamburger and rice as a kid, and so I've never made it as an adult. But I'm not a kid now. What could I learn from returning to it?

For however nostalgic I tend to be—I'll keep an old birthday card from someone I don't even see anymore, or a receipt from that pizza place in Rome I had that meal at that one time—there's a fear in that nostalgia. I hold on to a lot of things that have memory attached to them, but rarely do I engage with the substance of what that memory means.

Anyway, that's what I hope this newsletter is: me working through cooking recipes from my family cookbook--yes it's VERY 2002 Julie/Julia Project, I know, but what can we do but all try to be Julia Child?--some exploring of history, some good food, some funny moments, sporadically received by you, the person with an email address. The first one is short; in Fave Recipes, as I have come to call it, there is a recipe for chicken--though not FAVORITE chicken, we'll get there, okay?

I've basically made several iterations of this guy before--one I like particularly was actually brought my way via a dinner hosted by the ex-boyfriend of a friend who was trying to impress her friends. Let's just say that he needed to be trying, and leave it diplomatically at that.

But despite his character limitations, he was a very good cook and the dish he made for us is one I've made quite frequently since--essentially the above recipe with some freshly grated parmesan in the breading. You serve the chicken over a bed of arugula, generous on the salt and pepper, with a dressing that my friends now refer to as "the good dressing you make" because it is my go-to; about equal parts lemon and olive oil with a couple cloves of minced (preferably pressed, if you're me) garlic. A key detail is pouring the dressing all over both the leaves and the chicken so it soaks into the chicken and it's just so garlic and lemon and good.
I wanted to try the veal version of my father's breaded meat, but as you likely know, veal is not dime-a-dozen in your average New York grocery store. So I settled for chicken after happening upon some very thinly sliced ones, which felt like a good omen. (I've found that pounding meat gets out all of my aggression but makes everything in my apartment rattle and then I feel so guilty about the noise I'm inflicting on my neighbors that all the tension I've just worked out comes right back.) I didn't add the water to the egg, and I actually hadn't even thought to dry the chicken out on a wire rack in the fridge; as far as I've ever been told, you want to get breaded meat in the pan as soon as possible so it doesn't get soggy, so this step would seem to go against that? After some very light research, I've found that the meat drying actually is something people do, but I'm lazy--or what my friend Dayna recently categorized as "an eyeballer"--in the kitchen and so I didn't.

So this week's resulting meal, served for myself and my younger sister, was a combo of the friend's ex-boyfriend's recipe and my father's, sort of. I forgot about the parmesan and instead just sprinkled some feta on top because I recently might have decided that feta is one of the best cheeses? And also the store only had regular mixed greens but we ate it all, duh.

Anyway, if you like little stories and explorations and decidedly not professional photos of food because I want to eat what I make immediately and not spend time taking a pic and things like that, subscribe? And let me know what you're cooking and thinking and feeling too, I'd like that. They will be way shorter than this, I promise.

KATE