Clementine-Soy Chicken Thighs

Happy (Chinese) New Year!

For some reason, we always celebrated Chinese New Year when I was a kid. I don’t know why, but I always looked forward to it. It was so fun, and we didn’t eat Chinese nearly as often back then as we do now. Mom would take out the electric wok and cook dinner right on the table – usually a chicken stir fry. The next night, we’d wrap the leftovers in tortillas and eat them as fajitas. Yum.

I made this clementine-soy glazed chicken a few weeks ago and thought it would be the perfect Chinese New Year post. But then I started researching and apparently I had it all wrong. The holiday has all sorts of food traditions, like eating noodles to bring long life and dumplings to bring wealth. And apparently serving a chicken or duck whole represents health, but serving it cut – like these thighs – is the opposite. Oops.

Oh well. This dish is delicious any time of the year, and you should definitely make it (if you’re superstitious or prefer to celebrate the New Year more traditionally, just wait until tomorrow.)

I almost always have a crate of clementines sitting on my counter this time of year, but they go bad quicker than I can eat them so I’ve been trying to come up with ideas for cooking with them. I’ve found that roasting them concentrates their flavor and makes them super juicy! For this dish, I roasted them along with some chicken thighs, then used the juice in an Asian-inspired sauce. The chicken was great, with a perfectly crispy skin stretched over juicy meat, but the sauce was really the highlight of the dish. It was delicate and tangy, with a slight hint of perfume from the citrus. It was delicious spooned over the chicken, but even better mixed into the red quinoa that I served on the side. Thanks to the sauce, I’d say it was some of the best quinoa I’ve ever eaten.

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Fettuccini with Cauliflower, Prosciutto and Peas

Can we talk about cauliflower for a second? It’s a great vegetable with a really unique flavor. I love it and, if you haven’t tried it lately, you really should give it a second chance. But there’s a right way to do cauliflower and a wrong way. The cauliflower “steaks” that food editors seem to have decided should be all the rage this winter? NOT the right way. In fact, it’s a pretty decent way to confirm any suspicion that you may have had that cauliflower is gross.

This pasta, on the other hand, with the some of the cauliflower caramelized in the oven and the rest pureed into a creamy sauce? Even if you think you hate cauliflower, you’ll love this.

This dish is based loosely on one that I had at OTTO when I was in New York City last September. If you ever find yourself in NYC looking for a great meal at a reasonable price, I highly recommend you check OTTO out. It was easily the best meal I had in 2011.  The house-cured charcuterie was amazing. The pizza, a perfectly thin, perfectly charred crust topped with anchovies, capers and chilis, was sublime. And the pasta with spicy cauliflower? There’s no way to describe it other than sexy. Don’t even get me started on dessert.

There was only one problem with the pasta: After a few transcendent bites, it started to get … boring. There was no variation in texture, no acidity to cut through the rich sauce. It was fork full after fork full of the same of the same delicious bit, and I thought it needed something more. Something to jar your senses and bring you back down to earth.

It took me a few attempts to get this recipe exactly the way I wanted it, but it was worth every last attempt. I added roasted cauliflower and peas for texture, prosciutto for richness, and a smattering of sun dried tomatoes to give it a little bite. The sauce isn’t quite as smooth and luxurious as Batali’s (I suspect his uses heaps of butter and cream), but the flavor and texture is wonderful. It sure is a pretty darn good way to eat cauliflower.


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