A recipe for a non-French Chicken Provençal
We're hitting an accidental theme-within-a-theme with this experiment, as I've chosen three recipes in a row that a. I have no memory of eating and b. are related to a famous chef. But I'll excuse that by arguing that this is teaching me a bit about where my dad got a lot of the recipes he didn't grow up eating or having with friends: through his cookbooks, and the New York Times, like any "good" New Yorker.
One major difference in attempting this recipe is that I was actually serving a group of people, most of whom had never tried out my cooking. So even though it was a weeknight, I wanted to impress, if only slightly. After making dinner plans with friends Joanna and Brad, I'd invited myself over to their house to cook because I have a small apartment (that's an opportunity for me to tell you to read about my struggles with said apartment's fridge here). It's something I've been doing lately if I want to cook but also need to get out of my house. Is it polite and/or lower-stress for them? Honestly, who knows. Probably not, because inevitably I have to ask them if they have x dish and y staple. Someone write Dear Prudence, find out the etiquette of this new thing I'm doing, and then don't tell me because I don't really want to stop doing it just yet.
I say all this to preface that there was certainly a little more struggle on my end, both to figure out which dish to cook and also where to purchase what I needed for it, since I wouldn't be at my usual store. I actually almost went to three different grocery stores because sometimes I try to buy something at a store even though I know they won't have it, just because it's convenient, which is entirely counterproductive and also embarrassing. (A few weeks ago I went to four grocery stores/bodegas to find harissa even though I knew I wouldn't be able to find it at any of them. I ended up using sambal oelek, which I could have bought at the first place and which worked fine even though it's not quite the same flavor palate.) Part of my wandering journey included Eataly, where I will often stop before remembering that it's extremely hard to navigate, very expensive, and now the urban dictionary definition of problematic. (Truly the MOMA of food.) There are supposedly things that are pure pleasure in this world, but one thing about getting older is coming to the realization that even food can't always be pure pleasure.
I settled on serving an adaptation of Jamie Oliver's Ligurian Chicken, which is apparently a common recipe out of Liguria, an area on the northwest coast of Italy. (Sounds nice!) The recipe was in a 2003 Times profile of Oliver, which describes it as "a typical farmhouse stew":
''What I found quite interesting with this dish, being English,'' Mr. Oliver said, ''is that when you eat this, it's quite delicately flavored. It's perfumed with the wine and the rosemary. You get this kind of meaty kind of saltiness from the olives, and what's really interesting is if an English housewife got hold of the recipe, she'd probably stone the olives and have quite a lot of them. But in Italy, literally for eight people they put that much and they leave the pits in.'' In his hand he cradled about two dozen olives.
Mr. Oliver continued, ''When you cook olives whole like this, it's almost like an anchovy. The salt comes out of the olives, and the olive becomes more like a vegetable. And the salt from the olive flavors the chicken really wonderfully.''
I can attest to the fact that the olives are quiet salty, making the comparison to anchovies very apt (I did use anchovies, even though they're optional. If an anchovy is optional, it really isn't). This recipe calls for a whole chicken cut up and dredged in flour. While I don't mind tackling that when I have the time, I wasn't in the mood this night, so I just bought a bevy of pieces and set about searing them. Doing them in batches is a little challenging--and not really explained as a strategy in the recipe--given that you then add garlic and rosemary to the pan while the chicken is still cooking. But I moved some things around and took the pieces in and out and made it work. After the chicken is seared you pop in the wine, tomatoes, anchovies and olives. It is not yet tomato season in our part of the world so I was unhappy with what I had to use; as you can see in the photo above, they're a little lacking in color. And I ended up fully covering instead of partially covering the pot for most of its simmer because in my haste I misread the recipe and was not using my logical brain, which meant that the broth probably didn't cook down as much as it should. But in the end this is basically chicken provençal--my go-to large dinner party dish, introduced to me by my sister and mother--for Italians, by which I mean it is delicious and takes almost no work, yet seems slightly fancy.
Though my father's suggestion was to serve this dish "with pasta or rice," I did a side of Alison Roman's delicious roasted broccolini with lemon and parmesan which is super easy, particularly if you get spazzy at the end and forget to add even more salt and pepper and lemon, and a loaf of extremely local bread for starch. Instead of doling out the sauce onto each plate, it was perfect for just dumping the pot in the middle of the table and having everyone dip their bread into it at their leisure. I pressed my extremely nice hosts and additional dining partner for feedback and they all said it was good, though perhaps the five (six???) bottles of wine (some was for the chicken I just described in detail, okay) we consumed on a Monday had made them more relaxed and positive about the whole experience. Until the next morning, of course.
P.S. In response to last time around, Ben points out that "the point of a rice cooker isn’t that rice is hard, it’s that you’re *extremely* lazy." What if you're too lazy to buy a rice cooker though? What is laziest then?