Oh gosh darn, I should have totally taken photographs of my absolutely decadent braised chicken drumsticks I made last night served with a white wine reduction sauce and brown rice, but I had a friend over and it would have been weird to photograph it. The chicken was amazing and cooked to perfection, absolutely tender, a wonderful introduction to braised dishes but to me the real star was the sauce which was just so flavorful. My friend of course loved my cooking, too. He says I spoil him and maybe I do just a little, tiny bit.
Braising is when you take meat and sear it first, getting that nice caramelization action going on on the outside and then you submerge it in stock and simmer the stock until the meat is all cooked through and tender. It works on really tough meats but it's cool with stuff like drumsticks, too.
Before I seared my drumsticks, I marinated them for half a day in the refrigerator in sea salt, ground black pepper, sage, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce and some garlic powder. I seared the meat in a stainless steel pan and then I moved it to a plate and added chicken stock, white wine, scraping it with a scraper while it deglazed the surface and then added the drumsticks back in and filled the pan up to half or two thirds the height of the drumsticks with some more wine and stock in an about-one-to-three ratio and then I threw in some chives and some ginger powder to the pan and then brought the liquid up to a boil and then simmered it for 45 minutes making sure to turn the chicken every ten or so minutes.
Then I took the chicken out onto a different plate covered with tinfoil while I reduced the liquid on the pan to a thicker more gravy-like viscosity. I added some sea salt, too, while it reduced. The sauce was a very good flavor, the reduction concentrating the chicken and soy flavors. It went great with rice, but the sea salt might have been unnecessary. In the end I had some sauce leftover. I did end up chugging some because my friend dared me to, but that's another story.
Anyway, lunch today was fried brown rice I made along with diced breakfast sausage, green onions, some leftover French fries all diced up of course keeping in mind that potatoes in Chinese cuisine are treated like any other vegetable and an egg scrambled on the pan with everything else. I know, this screams "breakfast for lunch". Everything was stir fried on a skillet in a mixture of butter and safflower oil and then I threw in the sauce from yesterday for flavor. The sauce thickened from standing in the refrigerator so I put it in the microwave at 80% power for 20 seconds before adding it and the dish ended up being, aside from super-eclectic-fusion food, pretty scrumptious, much more flavorful than the traditional soy-sauce-white-rice-pea-corn-spam fried rice dish my mother would make with a wok.
This whole post should like compensate for half a picture or something [via "a picture is worth a thousand words" rule].
Overall ratings:
Last night's dinner:
Probably my best chicken preparation yet.
Lunch:
Delicious application of leftover foods.
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About the author: A prolific contributor to Jul with some 2211 posts published, Sofi better fancies herself as a cinema geek, a composer, an occasional gamer, a budding fashionita, an absolute cooking newbie and a general life enthusiast-satirist. She is responsible for a number of notable discussions about meteorology and current events and may be contacted at any time through private messaging.