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It’s a miracle this meal ever got made.
The night I made this meal followed a 24-hour period in which I got a flat, tried to fix it, couldn’t, tried to put on the spare, couldn’t, learned that my rims are too cool for school and for most regular tire tools, had my car towed, called my insurance company several times, and paid an ungodly amount of money for a whole new set of tires. I also had my busiest day at work yet.
So what I wanted to do was order pizza, have too many beers, and feel sorry for myself. I was trying not to feel like my trip to the grocery store to obtain the ingredients for tonight’s meal had somehow caused my flat tire. After all, it was the first time I’d bought curry paste, and my first flat since high school. There must be a cosmic connection.
But I’m just too smart for that, so I cooked this meal anyway. (Actually, I’m pretty sure the red curry paste caused the flat, but it was worth it.)
If I were to do this again, I would cook the chicken the Julia way. The Cook’s Illustrated way is very specific and probably very good, but I’m more comfortable with the traditional saute method and I find it more forgiving. The recipe adaptation below reflects this change, but if you’re curious, Cook’s Illustrated sautees the chicken skin-side-down for about 6 minutes, flips it, adds 3/4 cup chicken broth,and covers for 15 minutes. It then has you remove the chicken, pour the broth into a container, and cook the chicken another 8 or so minutes, skin down. The chicken was, admittedly, very moist and flavorful, but I burned the skin before the chicken was done, so I’ll stick to what I know.
I’ll also warn you: the sauce smells weird while it’s cooking. It’s something about the strong flavors, the sugar, and the acid, but it doesn’t smell appetizing until it’s reduced quite a bit. It smells… funny. But then it cooks down and things start to mellow, and it turns into this complex, fresh, and utterly unique sauce. Just trust the process and wait for it to smell good.
I’m glad I didn’t order pizza.
Chicken with Spicy Thai Sauce
Adapted from Cook’s Illustrated (you need a subscription to access this recipe)
Serves 2
Note: This is excellent with cilantro-lime rice, coming soon!
You will need:
4 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
2 tbsp. vegetable oil
3 tbsp. lime juice, freshly squeezed
1/4 c. light brown sugar
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp. fish sauce
1 tsp. red curry paste
3/4 c. chicken broth
2 tbsp. fresh chopped cilantro
Heat the oil in a skillet on medium-high until the oil shimmers. Season the chicken on both sides with salt and pepper. Add chicken to skillet, skin-side-down, and cook about 5 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally. Flip chicken and cover pan. Cook, shaking occasionally, about 15 minutes. Check for doneness (Thighs should be about 165 degrees in the thickest part, if you actually take your chicken’s temperature. I don’t, and will someday get salmonella, but you should.) and remove chicken from pan. Keep warm either in oven or by tenting with foil.
Add 2 tbsp. lime juice, sugar, garlic, fish sauce, and red curry paste to the hot pan. Cook, stirring constantly, until a spoon dragged through the sauce leaves a thick trail. Add the chicken broth and reduce to about 1/2 c. Remove from heat and stir in remaining lime juice and cilantro.
Pour sauce around chicken and serve immediately.
I love Cook’s Illustrated. I love this magazine so much that I bought Handsome a subscription for Christmas, even though I am generally the chef and baker in our house. I also pay about $25 a year to have access to their entire online archive, because their recipes are just that good.
If you’re not familiar with this magazine, the accompanying web site, or the television show, the basic premise is that the kitchen staff tackles a recipe and tries to make it in the best possible way. They consult multiple versions of a recipe, test them, and come up with the most foolproof recipe possible that can be made in pretty much any kitchen. The magazine itself is gorgeous; the back cover of each edition contains a series of painting on a theme, like different mushroom varieties or whole baking spices. They also don’t use photos in the magazine, relying instead on black and white sketches to illustrate techniques and processes.
When I searched the archive for a blueberry muffin recipe, I was a little daunted at first. They offered recipes for Classic Blueberry Muffins, Anytime Blueberry Muffins, Lemon Blueberry Muffins, The Best Blueberry Muffins, muffins that were topped with almond crunch, cinnamon streusel, or orange glaze, or muffins rolled in cinnamon sugar. Decisions, decisions.
Then I spotted a recipe for The Best Blueberry Muffins… made with frozen blueberries. The admirable folks in the America’s Test Kitchen, after my own heart, optimized a basic blueberry muffin to maximize blueberryness using frozen blueberries, which, as we all know, are a different beast than the preferable, fresh variety. All I had on hand were frozen berries, so my decision as to which recipe to tackle was easily made.
In hindsight, this may have been too tall an order for this lazy Sunday morning. I often violate the conditions of Lazy Sunday Morning to make some breakfasty baked good. This particular Sunday, I was exhausted to my bones. I had spent the previous Thursday running around, making final arrangements to graduate. On Friday, I graduated and moved out of my apartment. On Saturday, I entertained my mom, sister, and a friend, going to dinner, lunch, watching two movies, and making a coconut cream pie (also from a Cook’s Illustrated recipe). And I hadn’t slept well Saturday night. Muffins from a mix, or even regular homemade muffins, are relatively simple. This recipe was not.
For this recipe, one has to make lemon sugar (I made lemon-orange sugar). Then one makes blueberry jam. Then melts butter. Then whisks dry ingredients, and then wet ones. Then rinses frozen berries and pats them dry, thus permanently staining a hand towel because someone doesn’t use paper towels. Then one mixes the berries with the dry ingredients, and the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients. Then one divides the berry batter among the muffin tins. But what about the jam? You put a dollop on top of each section of muffin batter, and swirl it. Top with the sugar, bake for 17 minutes, rotate pan halfway through.
It’s exhausting.
But it’s worth it. The result is a moist muffin with bursts of berry flavor; the citrusy sugar topping is a nice surprise, but I could easily skip it. The process is labor-intensive and I used up what felt like every bowl in the house, but for blueberry muffins? It’s worth it.
Blueberry Muffins with Frozen Blueberries
Adapted from Cook’s Illustrated (link may not work, as I believe this is a recipe accessible only to subscribers)
Citrus Sugar Topping
1/3 c. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. finely grated citrus zest (original recipe calls for lemon zest, but I used a mixture of lemon and orange zest)
Muffins
2 c. frozen blueberries
1 1/8 c. plus 1 tsp. sugar
2 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
2 large eggs
4 tbsp. butter, melted and cooled (original recipe calls for unsalted butter, but I used salted and did not omit the salt in the recipe, and I found this to be fine)
1/4 c. vegetable oil
1 c. buttermilk (I used 1 c. whole milk plus 1 tsp. vinegar, mixed a few minutes ahead of time)
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 425 degrees and spray a 12-cup muffin tin with nonstick spray.
Mix 1/3 cup sugar with citrus zest in a small bowl and set aside.
Heat 1 cup blueberries with 1 tbsp. sugar in a saucepan over medium to medium-high heat for about 5-10 minutes, stirring frequently. Mash blueberries frequently and reduce mixture to approximately 1/4 cup. Remove from heat and cool to room temperature.
Wash other 1 cup blueberries well and dry. Set aside.
Mix flour, salt, and baking powder in a large bowl.
In a separate bowl, whisk 2 eggs and 1 1/8 cups sugar until fully mixed. Add butter and oil gradually and mix well. Add buttermilk and vanilla and mix well.
Mix reserved blueberries (the washed and dried ones) with the flour mixture.
Add egg mixture to flour/blueberry mixture and fold together, being careful not to overmix. (Batter will be lumpy and have flour spots; that is okay!)
Divide batter evenly among 12 muffin cups.
Place one tsp. of blueberry jam on top of each cup of muffin batter, trying to press it below the surface. Use a skewer or chopstick to swirl the jam into the batter, making a figure 8 motion.
Top each cup of muffin batter with the citrus sugar topping.
Bake 17-19 minutes, turning the pan halfway through. The edges of the muffins will be golden brown when they are done.
Delish!
For the last several weeks of school, my brain was too full to tackle anything more difficult than pasta or chocolate chip cookies. I was writing final papers, getting forms signed, running interference between my department and the graduate office, and heading to campus for last-minute meetings and assignments. There was plenty of stress eating, but not much real cooking or baking. Things were so crazy that I nearly let Mother’s Day slip past me.
Luckily, I caught it in time to ask my own mother what she would like for Mother’s Day, and had the foresight to suggest we celebrate in person a week late, when she would be in town to see me graduate, rather than celebrate by mail. My sister and I coordinated to get her some gifts, but she also asked that I bake her something. She asked that I bake her a coconut cream pie.
My mom is the one who most frequently asks me to bake for her. It started when I was little; she would let me help when she made no-bake cookies, those little delights of chocolate, oats, and peanut butter you mix in a pan and drop onto wax paper on the counter. I’ve made those cookies as an adult, but somehow they lose their magic if Mom isn’t eating one too soon, when it hasn’t set and is still warm and gooey.
When I got older, Mom would buy cake and brownie mixes and talk my sister and I into baking a pan of brownies, or a pan of yellow cake with canned chocolate frosting. Sometimes we’d get refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough, which may or may not have made it all the way through the baking process before being consumed. Our pantry was usually stocked with a variety of muffin mixes; many a Saturday morning started with my sister and I baking muffins for mom. Mom would always rather be the baked-for, rather than the baker. If you know her, you know this suits her personality quite well.
Although I still consider myself a novice baker (this was my first cream pie, after all, and I wasn’t at all sure how to tell if it would set correctly, thicken up right, or come out edible), I got an early start at my mother’s side, as she showed me how to use a measuring cup, how to crack an egg without getting shell in the batter, and let me in on that all-important secret: the best way to clean a bowl is to lick it. I think I may have mentioned this before, but I’m pretty sure it was my mom who told me that if you can read, you can cook. Even complex recipes are simple if you follow the directions.
This is one of the more complex recipes I’ve ever followed. There’s a lot to do, and in a certain order. My sister was with me, so I was trying to explain the process along the way to a young woman who was incredibly dubious of both of our abilities on this front. Still, sharing the kitchen with my little sister to make our mother a pie was a special, if hilarious, experience. My sister raised her eyebrows when I brought out the food processor, jumped at the noise when I pulsed the animal crackers, and generally was awesome as sous chef while our mom laughed at us and read a book in the next room. We both looked at the coconut milk with some concern until a friend nearby assured us that is really is supposed to look that way. Sister was utterly nonplussed with having to wait between steps, and then having to wait three to four hours before we could eat the pie.
This pie was very tasty and not all that difficult to make, although it is somewhat complicated. It has a strong coconut flavor and is guaranteed to please the coconut-lover in your group. A word to the wise: if you are a texture eater (as I am), you should strain out the coconut flakes before you add the milk-coconut milk mixture to the egg mixture. I found the coconut flakes in the pie itself to be off-putting, but no one else minded. It’s a texture thing. The texture people among me will understand.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.
Coconut Cream Pie
Adapted from Cook’s Illustrated
Crust
6 ounces animal crackers
2 tbsp. sweetened shredded coconut
1 tbsp. granulated sugar
4 tbsp. butter, melted and cooled
Filling
1 14-ounce can whole coconut milk
1 c. whole milk
1/2 c. sweetened shredded coconut
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1 tbsp. granulated sugar
1/4 tbsp. salt
5 large egg yolks
1/4 c. cornstarch
2 tbsp. butter, cut into two pieces
1 tsp. vanilla
Whipped Cream
1 1/2 c. cold heavy cream
2 tbsp. granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
For crust: Preheat oven to 325. Combine animal crackers, coconut, and sugar in a food processor and pulse in one-second pulses until crumby. Then process for 5-15 seconds until fine.
Combine crumbs with melted butter in a bowl until mixture looks uniform. Press into bottom of a 9″ pie plate (I used a 9.5″ pie plate, because that’s the pie plate I have and that’s the kind of girl I am) with the bottom of a ramekin or flat-bottomed cup.
Place pie in lower third of oven and bake ~15 minutes, rotating halfway through baking time, until crust is medium brown. Set pie pan on a wire rack and cool at least 30 minutes.
For filling: Combine milk, coconut milk, 1/2 c. sugar, and salt in a saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally.
In a separate bowl, whisk yolks, cornstarch, and 1 tsbp. sugar until fully combined. Add milk mixture to egg mixture a little at a time, whisking constantly (this is tempering the eggs, so they don’t scramble); you should add the milk mixture in 4-5 batches. [This is the part where, if you are a texture person, you would strain out the coconut before you add the milk mixture to the egg mixture.]
Return mixture to saucepan and cook until boiling. Allow to boil, stirring, for one minute, so mixture can thicken.
Remove from heat and stir in vanilla and butter until butter is completely absorbed. Pour into the pie shell and smooth the surface with a rubber spatula. Cover with plastic wrap, pressing the plastic wrap onto the surface of the filling, and chill in the fridge for at least three hours.
For whipped cream: Just before serving, combine heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla in a bowl. With a hand mixer, beat on medium or high until soft peaks forms, about 3-4 minutes.
Spread onto pie, attempting to make a pretty design.
Slice and serve. Keeps in fridge, covered, for several days, or until your boyfriend finishes it.
