Make It!

On Sunday nights, as we clean the apartment and pay bills and get ready for Monday (and, these days, count down the minutes til Mad Men), I’ve taken on a quick cooking project that helps keep us eating healthfully and well at home all week.

I quickly roast up two chicken breasts, cool them, and store them in the fridge. Then I can make chicken sandwiches or chop chop salads, have an easy topping for greens, or make clean-out-the-fridge quesadillas that are actually good. Knowing that there’s a potential dinner in the fridge is a huge deterrent from ordering take-out. Now I realize that Sunday cooking for the week isn’t a totally original plan, but this chicken situation causes so little mess I figured I’d tell you about it in case you wanted some motivation.

The bonus is that I get to snack on the crispy chicken skin, since it won’t stay crispy for long. (Read Amateur Gourmet’s post on why you shouldn’t toss crispy chicken skin.) By the way, I use bone-in, skin-on chicken because it stays much more flavorful than boneless skinless.

Here’s all that you do: Turn the oven to 425°F. Take two bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts and place them on a foil- or parchment-lined baking sheet. Rub them with some softened butter or drizzle with olive oil, then season quite generously with salt and pepper. Bake for 3o to 35 minutes, until the skin is golden and the chicken is cooked through.

I’ve never been a fan of puckery vinaigrettes. But neither do I want to dress my greens in candy-sweet dressings heavy with honey or sugar.

So I figured out a way to reduce the bite without increasing the sugar–oranges.

Instead of using lemons or vinegar in your vinaigrettes, squeeze an orange instead. If you do like some tang in your dressing, you can play around with how much of the lemon juice/vinegar you replace with fresh orange juice. See the tip in action here.

When I bake muffins, I dread cleaning the pan afterwards. It’s bad enough that batter has cooked into the crevices of each muffin cup. What’s worse is how all the little bits of grease sticks onto the unfilled muffin tins – the two extra if you’re only make 10 of the 12 cups in the pan. The residue rarely comes off the pan, try as you might to scrub.

Now I’m no neat freak, but that stickiness really annoys me–it attracts dust, and it might worm its way into a future batch of muffins. Fortunately, Alex’s mom showed me that if you fill any unused cups with water, you’ll avoid the built-up all together. Now, I fear nothing about baking muffins except how quickly they disappear from the counter.

Perfection. The perfect cookie, the perfect cookie container. For years, I kept every gift box and product package I thought might one day fit a cake, some cupcakes, a gift of brownies, or holiday cookies. I stowed the boxes in the Closet of Doom. Occasionally, they fell on my head. Rarely was any box a perfect fit for any sweet I was gifting.

I moved onto multi-sized pouches and containers I’d buy at cake supply and gift stores. But those too had to be piled in the Closet of Doom, and sometimes they weren’t the right size either. But I love giving sweets to friends, especially this time of year. How to transport them without hoarding little boxes?

So the whole reason that I started the Make It series was to have a place to share recipes that aren’t really recipes.  Strawberry Butter is one of those.

If you’ve made strawberry butter before, you probably think me silly for bothering to post directions – the process is that easy. But if you’ve only eaten the creamy fruity stuff on a popover (Popover Cafe on the UWS is where I first tried strawberry butter) or other breakfast bread, I guarantee you’ll be ecstatic to add this non-recipe to your repertoire.

All you do is take a 1/4 cup of jam, which, by the way, doesn’t have to be strawberry (try Sassy Radish’s Peach Jam with Apricots and Black Pepper or anything from jam genius Mrs. Wheelbarrow – or what ever looks good at the farmers’ market or the supermarket), and mix it til combined with a stick of softened butter. If you make the flavored butter ahead of time, take it out of the fridge to re-soften before serving to your friends at brunch.

When I cook, I make a mess. Flour on my shirt, sugar on the floor, that kind of thing.

But when I cook meat, I have to be neat. The prospect of contaminating my whole kitchen, from sponge to stove, with salmonella is terrifying. I use a plastic cutting board, save the meat for the end of my prepwork, and wash up in very hot soapy water.

I also make a private little salt-and-pepper reserve just for seasoning my chicken, steak, or pork chops.

The need to make a cake comes on suddenly. One moment I’m fine sitting on the couch with a book, and the next moment, I’m creaming butter and sugar for a Raspberry-Lemon Cake. If you zero in on the instructions of a baked good that starts with creamed butter though, you’re likely to notice that the recipe specifies room temperature eggs.

Of course, at the moment baking inspiration strikes, the eggs are in the fridge.

I’m all for breaking rules, but when you add cold eggs to warm butter, you risk curdling your butter and jeopardizing the well-being of your cake. Room temp eggs will blend into any batter much more easily than their cold counterparts.

And so I’m bringing you this tip–I picked it up while working on the kitchen set of a fast-paced cooking show–so you don’t have to abandon ship and leave the already-creamed butter and sugar for the fish.