Good morning. This week, Eric Kim brought us a recipe for sautéed chicken breasts with a gin and sage pan sauce (above), adapted from the one he found in Amy Thielen’s forthcoming cookbook, “Company.”
I like it for a couple of reasons. The first is the elegant juniper pop of the sauce, luxe and surprising. The second is for the technique used to cook the chicken breast, skin-on, skin-down, slow and careful. It’s like cooking a steak or an expensive fist of black cod. “Be prepared to stand stoveside and watch the bottom of the pan with predatory focus,” Thielen wrote in the introduction to the recipe. You’re preparing a fond for the sauce as much as you’re crisping the skin and protecting the breast meat.
Even those who have largely forsworn chicken breasts in favor of thighs may be brought around. Eric made the recipe for his boyfriend. “This is the best chicken I’ve ever had,” he told him. Well, all right. This weekend, let’s see what your people think.
You could cook Lidey Heuck’s creamy cauliflower soup with rosemary olive oil. While we’re on the subject, do make sure to pick up a print copy of the Sunday edition of The Times, to see New York Times Cooking’s gorgeous special section devoted to soup. (It’ll be at libraries, too.) You can find a version of it here as well, with Lidey’s recipe alongside a host of other delicious potages, among them red lentil soup, vegetable maafé and butternut squash and green curry soup.
Alternatively, you might take a run at Craig Claiborne’s quiche Lorraine. Or Gabrielle Hamilton’s version of the very same dish. I might spend a few hours preparing sauces and condiments for the coming weeks: chile crisp, say, or XO sauce, nuoc cham, maybe some fruit caramel for Sunday’s French toast.
And definitely I want to make Swedish meatballs again. This has been my weekend joy these last few weeks: warmly spiced beef and pork in a savory, brandy-spiked gravy, with buttery mashed potatoes showered in chopped parsley and a few dots of lingonberry jam on the side. (If you can’t find lingonberries, red currant jelly’s a nice substitute.) It’s very lagom, if we’re still using that term.
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Now, you’d have to do a lot of finessing to make it have anything to do with vinaigrettes or borscht, but you’re going to love Elisabeth Egan’s dispatch from Nantucket, where she traveled recently for the Elin Hilderbrand Bucket List Weekend, in The Times.
