Bawdy chicken: Spicy Grilled Chicken Paillards

Cumin and paprika add plenty of flavor to Spicy Grilled Chicken Paillards, but not much heat, as do orange juice, lemon juice, honey, cinnamon and red pepper flakes to the sauce. Recipes below.

Marion has accused me in the past of being a culinary Francophile. And I’m the first to admit she’s right. Casting about for some grilling ideas for this week’s post, I came across a chicken recipe that called for chicken breasts sliced or lightly pounded into flattened pieces. If they’d used the modern term for this thin cut of meat, cutlet, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second glance. But no, they used the older French term, paillard [pronounced pah-YAHR], apparently named for a late 19th century Parisian restaurateur. Okay, I was interested.

I say “apparently” because, while food sources told the above story, numerous online French-English dictionaries made no mention of Monsieur Paillard or his cutlet. Instead, every last one of them defined paillard as some variation of bawdy, coarse, rude, lewd, libertine… Given the origin of Blue Kitchen’s name, I was of course totally hooked now. I had to make some bawdy chicken.

The first step was to find a recipe or some recipes to play with. After looking at a number of them, I landed on one with Moroccan influences. Considering Morocco’s French ties, it seemed like a good way to go. As with many North African savory dishes, it includes sweetness, a little heat and the ubiquitous cumin. The heat in this case is extremely subtle—mainly you notice a wonderful mix of flavors.

Paillards aren’t always chicken. They can also be made from boneless slices of turkey, veal, beef and pork. Because they’re so thin—typically a mere 1/4-inch to 3/8-inch thick—they’re meant to be cooked quickly. That makes them perfect for weeknight meals or anytime you have lots of other things you need to be doing rather than cooking.

Pounding the chicken—or any other meat—into thin slices also beautifully tenderizes it. Even cheaper, tougher cuts of meat fare well with this process. You can sauté paillards, cook them in a grill pan or actually grill them as I did here.

Pasta, vegetables and overcoming deal breakers

A mix of vegetables takes center stage in this Pasta with Chickpeas, Fava Beans, Pecans and Spring Peas, with bacon playing a supporting role. Recipe and variations—including vegetarian and vegan versions—below.

Sundays are often when I cook whatever I’m posting the following Wednesday. But this past Sunday found me spending more than an hour at the Crafty Beaver hardware store, puzzling out what I needed to solve a minor plumbing problem and build a small bookcase. [Don't be overly impressed—the bookcase is going to be, shall we say, elegantly simple.] Then I spent a good chunk of the afternoon solving said plumbing problem and starting on said bookcase. When it became clear I wasn’t going to get around to cooking, Marion offered to make this wonderful dish, solving both dinner and what to post. All I had to do was not start devouring my meal before I photographed it. I’ll let Marion tell you how this excellent pasta came together.

The other day the New York Times ran an article by Kim Severson in which good cooks were asked about their recipe deal breakers, “those ingredients or instructions that make them throw down the whisk and walk away.”

Experienced, talented cooks cited abstruse ingredients [48 freshly picked grape leaves, vast quantities of fresh animal blood], fussy or intimidating instructions [the recipes of Thomas Keller were particularly noted], recipes with several recipes within them, recipes that demand dangerous conditions, extreme equipment [a couscousière, cornet molds—and I say that as, um, the owner of cornet molds, and of a heavy copper tin-lined tarte Tatin pan, hauled home from Paris, that has become a place to keep our bananas]. My favorite example was the author’s own: She will not make any dish that requires an assistant. That made me laugh out loud.

Like every person reading the article, I immediately started putting together a similar list in my head. What magic words stop me from trying a recipe? Here are a few:

• 3 sticks butter
• 1 cup lard
• The phrase “on the third day”
• Any amount of insects [I will cheerfully eat pretty nearly any organ meat, but cannot make myself even consider eating an ant, a grub or a cicada]
• Dried bean curd sheets [I shy off thanks to a series of ridiculous kitchen disasters years back that pretty much became one of those little private running jokes, in this case between me and a never-conquered recipe called Tinkling Bells]
• “Have your butcher bone the pig, leaving the head intact” [that recipe, by the way, also includes the phrase “re-form the pig in its original shape,” which sounds so wistful somehow]

I have been cooking certain cuisines for years, but a long time ago I recognized that no matter how far I reach, there is always going to be an unbridgeable gulf between me and the most genuine examples of these foods. I have already said I am not going to eat anything with insects in it. I am not going to eat anything that in the US is construed as a pet. I am not going to eat any endangered mammals, and certainly not their paws.

Also, I am not going to cook anything out of a book the size and weight of a table, no matter how elegant the illustrations.

Years ago, I was standing in our back yard and reading some Martha Stewart magazine and came across a recipe for a ham baked on new-mown grass. There was a great deal of information about the grass you should choose to mow, how to make sure it is pristine, how to cut it… All I remember is opening my fingers and letting the magazine fall out of my hands and walking away from the magazine, which I believe eventually blew out of our yard or perhaps even decayed there, I don’t care, whatever, and I never read any other Martha Stewart publication again until a couple of weeks ago, when my sister [who for a couple of years had been saying, “It’s not what you remember!”] snuck a copy of Martha Stewart Living into a pile she was passing on to me. Okay, so I read it, fine, and once I navigated past the annoying crafts and the too many pastels I came across a pasta dish that, of course, sounded good, so good we had to mess with. Meaning that, for today at least, one of my ancient deal breakers has been overcome.

This descendant of Martha’s recipe asks you to cook the pasta in a moderate amount of water until the water is all absorbed and concentrated and cooked away leaving just pasta. I am usually nervous about this approach, not least because it means standing over the stove for seven or eight minutes and stirring pretty often, rather than wandering off to pick up the newspaper or look out the window at a puzzling brown bird. But I really like the technique here. It endows the pasta with a depth that is needed in a dish this spare.

This recipe begins with a lot of pasta—one pound uncooked—so it will serve five to six people easily. The next day Terry was able to celebrate Take Your Wife’s Cooking to Work Day.

Spring, schming—It might as well be chili dogs

The lack of reliably warm weather this spring calls for comfort food, and Turkey Chili Dogs don’t just hit the spot—they obliterate it. Recipe below.

This week’s post was supposed to be a light chicken sandwich celebrating the flavors of spring. I’d already created it in my head, and just thinking of it now, I can actually taste it.

But spring is being especially coy this year. We should be flinging windows open, airing out the apartment and waking to birds singing. Instead, we awoke this weekend to a cold rain being blown hard against the windows. The temperature was in the 40s and not predicted to do a lot better than the low 50s, and besides the rain, there was a wind advisory.

I had to absolutely will myself out of the warm bed to get my day started. Clearly, some light sandwich celebrating spring was not going to happen. Comfort food was called for. And to my way of thinking, there are few foods more comforting than a chili dog on a raw day.

We’ve sung the praises of chili here before. And we’ve presented various takes on it—my three-bean chili, Marion’s amazing chili and even a white chili. Whatever your regional preferences—beans, no beans, meat, no meat—chili is just plain good.

Hot dogs are less universally understood. Growing up in St. Louis, hot dogs were what you got at the ball game or something you threw on the barbecue grill for the kids when the grown-ups were having burgers. So I was somewhat mystified when I moved to Chicago the first time [this is our second tour of duty here, as I like to put it] and there seemed to be a hot dog stand every other block or so [outrageous real estate prices have diminished the number of hot dog places severely, but Chicagoans can still find plenty of places to get a great dog].

Then I had one. The word revelation springs to mind. As Doug of Hot Doug’s says, “There are no two finer words in the English language than ‘encased meats,’ my friend.” Unless you live in Chicago or New York, you may not get this level of fervor for the seemingly lowly hot dog. And even if you do get them, you’ll get all kinds of takes on what makes the perfect dog, some of them regional. Here is how NPR’s Daniel Pinkwater, born in Chicago but now living in exile in upstate New York, describes a Chicago dog:

“First, it’s on a poppy-seed bun which is doughy and substantial, but not heavy. The bun is lightly steamed at the point of serving.

“The hot dog is all beef, spicier than the New York variety. It is steamed and has a natural casing. It snaps when you bite into it, and squirts hot deliciousness. A variant is the Polish sausage which the gods ate on Olympus.
This is what goes on it:
• Yellow mustard
• Bright green pickle relish
• Chopped onion
• A kosher pickle spear
• Two slices of tomato
• Two tiny but devastating peppers
• And all-important, celery salt

“All of this is fitted together with fiendish cleverness enabling the eater to get most of it in his mouth, and only a little on his shirt. If there are fries, they are hand cut, skinny and glorious.”

Chili + Dog: The whole equals waaaay more than the sum of its parts. Okay, we’ve established that these foods are wonderful in their own right. I’d heard that chili dogs were even better, but it took Marion to introduce me to their delights. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, as I recall, and we suddenly found ourselves in the lovely semi-deserted darkness of the original John Barleycorn, a long, rambling bar and restaurant on Lincoln Avenue. I had a burger in mind, but Marion started exclaiming when she found chili dogs on the menu. I was skeptical, but even back then, I’d learned to trust her taste buds.

So we each ordered one. Honestly, it fell a little bit short of amazing. But it showed me amazing could be had. As with almost every chili dog you’ll find in a bar, restaurant or hot dog stand, there wasn’t enough chili. Here’s how you can tell: If you can pick up the chili dog and eat it without utensils, there’s not enough chili. Hell, if you can see the hot dog or much of the bun, there’s not enough chili. We bury them. In fact, for the photo above, I kind of skimped on the chili just so you could see the dog and bun.

But the wonder of the combined flavors was undeniable. Our first impulse was to order more there and tell them not to be so shy with the chili. But then we had a better idea. We hightailed it out of the bar, headed for the grocery store and then went home and cooked up the first of many chili dog orgies.

Pasta Frittata: Eggs elevated

Peppers, Parmesan and leftover pasta come together beautifully to give eggs a rustic sophistication, as Pasta Frittata. Recipe below.

I don’t know about where you are, but here in Chicago, gas has already blown past four dollars a gallon. And milk is getting close to that price. So when I saw that Ginny over at Just Get Floury had posted a challenge to make a dish that serves at least two people for five dollars or less, it sounded like an idea whose time had come.

Ginny calls her event the Dollar Dish Duel, and while she just challenges her readers to “make a dish for $5 that must feed at least two people,” I took it to mean more than a simple side dish [who can't steam some green beans for under five bucks, for instance]. To me, the challenge was to make something substantial that either stood alone as a meal or became a meal with the addition of a small salad or the aforementioned green beans or, as I chose at the last minute, some fresh strawberries.

Ginny says in her rules that you can use three staples from your pantry—salt, pepper and oil were her examples—without counting them in your budget [there's still time to enter, by the way—the deadline is May 5]. I further interpreted the rules to mean that if I only used a portion of something and the rest were saved for a later use, I could count the cost of only the portion I used against my five-buck limit.

With this wiggle room, even meat could work within the guidelines. And after all, I’ll often buy a package of chicken breasts or ground beef planning to get two meals from it. But as much as I love meat, I decided it would be more interesting to make a meal without it for this event.

Most important, though, it had to be good. I wasn’t interested in simply proving I could whip up a meal for cheap. The meal had to be something I would happily serve, if not to company, then as a family dinner. Something we would happily eat. And something I would happily make again.

Soups and scrambles and stir fry all immediately came to mind, but nothing really got me excited. Soups and I are taking a little break right now; I just feel the need to see other courses. Scrambles sounded too breakfasty. And stir fry main courses without meat almost always involve tofu. Yawn.

Then I thought of an elevated form of scrambled eggs: Italian frittatas. Specifically, a frittata Marion has made a number of times, using leftover pasta. She hadn’t made it in so long that we’d forgotten where she first saw a recipe—or even what to call it. The classic frittata is kind of an Italian omelet and doesn’t include pasta.

A little noodling around on Google, though, turned up boatloads of frittata recipes using pasta—and leftover pasta, at that. Some were baked, some were started on the stovetop and then broiled to finish [the classic frittata technique]. Some used cheese, some didn’t. Some even insisted on using pasta mixed with red sauce, which sounded more like a desperate measure than a recipe to me. But virtually all of them involved mixing the beaten eggs with the boiled pasta before any of it went into the pan. I followed Marion’s approach instead, sautéing the cooked pasta in the skillet before adding the eggs. It gives the frittata a satisfying crunchy quality we really enjoy.

Ethnic Paris: Spicy shrimp from the Indian Ocean

Easy, flavorful Shrimp Rougail [Rougail de Crevette], originally from tiny islands in the Indian Ocean, is one of many exotic taste treats found throughout Paris—and in The Ethnic Paris Cookbook. Cumin, fresh ginger and a fiery little Thai pepper [whose heat can be dialed down] make it a lively main course.

Last week I wrote about crêpes, calling them the ultimate French comfort food. And they are indeed quintessentially French, as are old men in berets, accordion players on the Paris Metro and six-week vacations.

But in Paris, there’s a whole other culinary world besides crusty baguettes, café au lait and stinky cheeses. As with many major cities, Paris is a magnet to people from all over the world. And those people bring their cooking with them, giving each neighborhood or arrondissement its own special flavor.

On one visit to Paris, for instance, Marion went with our friend Marianne, who lives in Paris and who was born in Hong Kong, to the 13th arrondissement for lunch. The 13th really is a mix of things Paris was and has become—the pretty little Butte aux Cailles neighborhood, a tiny quiet 19th century enclave; and the biggest Chinatown in Paris. The latter was their destination. They perused a high-rise shopping mall and then had lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant. What impressed Marion most that day was that all of their transactions there in the heart of Paris—in the restaurant and in the mall—were conducted in Mandarin. English would get you nowhere, French and German would get you nowhere.

As further proof of the diverse wealth of Paris, just take a look at The Ethnic Paris Cookbook. Sarah over at The Delicious Life recently received a review copy and generously offered it up as a prize in an impromptu drawing. And I won!

This colorful cookbook has more than 100 recipes from internationally renowned chefs who have come from all over the globe to make Paris their home. Everywhere from Cameroon to Cambodia, China to the Caribbean.

And then there’s the delicious, lively shrimp rougail above, from the Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mauritius. Nominally part of Africa, these tiny specks of land some 500 miles east of Madagascar are more shaped by their inhabitants’ ancestries—Indian, African, Malagasy, Chinese and ethnic French—and by their ties with France and Great Britain than they are by their proximity to the African continent.

Rougail can be a fiery condiment or a simple, spicy tomato-based sauce as it is in this easy-to-make main course, which I adapted from the book.

Crêpes: A delicious way to always have Paris

I’ve been thinking of Paris lately, and that has me thinking of crêpes. And as wonderful as dessert crêpes may be, the savory variety is what I always crave. Recipes for these delightful, paper-thin French pancakes and a satisfying poulet aux champignons [chicken in mushrooms] filling below.

This week, Blue Kitchen is all about France. A couple of events conspired to put me in this state of mind. First, the excellent biopic of French singer Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose, has come out on DVD [more about this at What's on the kitchen boombox?]. And just last Friday, our friend Cara Black was in town promoting Murder in the Rue de Paradis [An Aimée Leduc Investigation], the latest in her acclaimed series of Paris-based mysteries [more about this at WTF? Random food for thought]. If you’re still hungry for Paris and France when you’ve finished here, you’ll find some interesting links at the end of this post.

A movie and a book got me pointed in the general direction of “something French.” What focused me on crêpes was Ben’s post about strawberry crêpes at What’s Cooking?

For me, crêpes are the ultimate French comfort food—the humble pancake made elegantly thin and filled with all manner of delicious concoctions, both sweet and savory. In Paris, they can even be gotten as street food, an even bigger treat. You get to watch your crêpe be made right in front of you, and then it’s wrapped and ready to eat on the go, as you make your way to your next attraction.

In Chicago, my go to place for crêpes is La Crêperie. This very French little neighborhood bistro opened its doors in 1972 and probably hasn’t been updated since. It has the wonderful, slightly scruffy, tobacco-stained patina that only age can give it. Some days, the food is stellar, others merely dependably good. But given the friendly, unhurried service and charming setting, that’s plenty good for me.

La Crêperie makes two different kinds of crêpes for their sweet and savory offerings. The crêpes for savory main courses are made with buckwheat flour. So when I started looking for recipes, that was one of the ingredients I had in mind. As always, I found numerous recipes, looked for similarities and differences, then created my own.

For the filling, I just knew what I had in mind, my own take on poulet aux champignons—chicken, mushrooms, wine, cream—and winged it. One of the beauties of crêpes, though, is that they are so wonderfully versatile; La Crêperie’s menu includes 15 different fillings that run the gamut from coq au vin to scallops to a chicken curry! So while I’ll give you my recipe below, once you’ve made the crêpes, feel free to experiment away with the fillings.

Straddling seasons: Pot roast and fresh asparagus

Cooking for the calendar, this weekend saw some beautifully skinny fresh asparagus, simply prepared. Cooking for the actual weather, though, called for a hearty pot roast. Recipes below.

Before we get to the food, a quick little digression about blogging.
When I started Blue Kitchen a year and change ago, I knew it would be a way to indulge my passions for food, photography and writing. I also knew it would make me think more about food and cooking, ultimately making me a better cook. What I didn’t know is what a wonderful international network of warm, sharing friends and fellow bloggers I’d be plugging into.

This kind of welcoming environment isn’t necessarily unique to food blogging, but it seems to be more prevalent here than elsewhere. Interestingly, according to a food blogger who specializes in restaurant reviews, it’s mainly found among bloggers who write about making food, not critiquing it. My friend Ronnie writes two blogs, the wonderfully eclectic Out Of My Head and the advice-filled Work Coach. She also reads a wide range of blogs and says she hasn’t found this kind of community anywhere else.

The latest example of this comes from Lydia over at The Perfect Pantry. She was just given the E for Excellent Award—by four different bloggers, no less. She then took a turn, passing the award along to five other blogs. Including this one. Thanks so much, Lydia! I learn something new every time I read your blog, so it means a lot that you thought of me.

And now my turn. The easiest thing would be to award it to everyone in my blogroll. They’re all wonderful sources of information and great reads to boot. But I’ll try to narrow it down to five. And I’m sticking with food blogs, just because [we food bloggers are a clannish lot]. Just as Lydia was in her choices, I’m every bit as swayed by entertaining writing as I am by good food. Maybe even more so. These bloggers deliver, post after post. Every one of them has made me think—and made me a better cook in the process:

Ann, at A Chicken in Every Granny Cart; Christina, at A Thinking Stomach; Jennifer, at Last Night’s Dinner; Patricia, at Technicolor Kitchen and Toni, at Daily Bread Journal.

Okay, back to the kitchen. Here in Chicago, the calendar says spring [yeah, it says that everywhere north of the Equator, I know]. The thermometer takes a different view, often dipping below freezing. In fact, the tulips you see here were an impulse purchase, something to remind us that it is indeed spring. So when we were planning one of those Sunday dinners we don’t do enough of, I decided to split the difference. For the calendar, I made fresh asparagus, suddenly plentiful and affordable again. And for the chilly weather, I made a satisfying pot roast, complete with chunky vegetables. Let’s start with that.

I’ve been on an oven braising kick lately. Soon the weather will heat up and I won’t want to do the same to the kitchen. But for now, it’s a great way to let tough cuts of meat like chuck roast get all nice and tender without drying out. You’ll find more about the technique here. My other pot roast recipe in the archives is a more exotic take on this humble, hearty meal, made with Biryani Curry Paste and pan roasted on the stovetop. I call it Terry’s Mysterious Pot Roast. You can use the stovetop technique for the more traditional recipe below, but honestly, oven braising will keep it more moist.

Delicious, delicate: Tarragon mustard sauce

Cream, tarragon, wine and mustard add up to a sauce that brings a delicate finish to pan-seared pork medallions. Recipe below.

I just checked our fridge. We currently have six different mustards in there, most of them either from France or French in style. And ironically, even our über-American yellow mustard is French’s brand. Obviously, mustard is big with us.

It’s big with France too. A city in Burgundy even gives its name to perhaps the most famous mustard or moutarde. According to The Nibble, the city of Dijon had long been a gourmet center. The mustard, developed in local monasteries, “was based on particularly strong and piquant mustard seeds grown in their chalky soil and densely wooded terrain.” In the 1850s, a local mustard producer substituted verjus [an acidic, sour liquid made from green juice of unripe grapes] for vinegar, creating a smoother, less biting product that became the standard. Today, while mustard is still a big industry in Dijon, the term Dijon now refers to a style of mustard rather than place of origin, and vinegar has again replaced verjus in most commercial mustard.

The venerable French mustard maker Maille has been at it since 1747, and their Dijon Originale is my go to for straight Dijon. Just how seriously France takes its mustard—and indeed, pretty much all of its food—can be summed up in this statement from the Maille website: “Its recipes have not changed since they were written down by Antoine Maille in a vellum notebook watermarked with the Arms of the King of France.”

Mustard figures prominently in many French sauces. That’s because, when you combine it with butter or cream and perhaps some herbs, it takes on a wonderful delicacy. Forget the puckery, vinegary zing straight mustard delivers. Mustard sauces offer a subtle, complex liveliness shaped equally by all the ingredients. And when I started experimenting in the kitchen, that’s exactly what happened with this sauce.

Warm and sunny: Moroccan Braised Beef

Last week, I sang the praises of oven-braising cheap cuts of beef for flavorful, juicy tenderness. With winter maintaining its icy choke hold on the Midwest, I was inspired to explore this technique further. Nothing like firing up the oven for a couple of hours and enjoying a hearty, meateriffic dinner to take the edge off the cold. Eventually, my virtual explorations led me to Morocco.

“Morocco.” The name alone conjures up exotic visions—Marrakesh, Casablanca [and Bogart and Bergman], souks [Moroccan markets] filled with dates, nuts, fragrant spices… Traditional Moroccan cuisine is as influenced by Europe and the spice trade routes as by being part of the African continent. Indeed, it is a mere eight miles [13 kilometers] from Spain at the narrowest point of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Lamb, chicken and beef all figure heavily in Moroccan cooking, especially in their stewlike tagines [the name for the dishes themselves as well as the special ceramic pots in which they're cooked].

As do spices. Cumin, ginger, coriander, cloves, cinnamon, turmeric, cayenne, saffron… Various takes on the Moroccan spice blend Ras-El-Hanout use some or all of these and other spices. The emphasis is on bold flavor, not heat. The recipe that became the basis for my braised beef even called for [authentically or otherwise] the Indian spice blend garam masala. Again, given the centuries of the spice trade through the region, it didn’t seem off the mark. And when the spice mix hit the hot pot early in the cooking process, it gave us an instant preview of the exotically delicious meal to come.

Mixing sweet with savory is also a big part of this cuisine. Besides onions, the vegetable that appeared most frequently in the recipes I found was carrots. And raisins showed up in more recipes than not. Once I’d settled on the beef dish, I started looking for a Moroccan side to accompany it. After the fourth or fifth recipe with raisins and pretty much the same spice mix, I served a simple salad on the side. And I opted for spooning the beef over a bed of ditali, instead of the recommended couscous. I felt the scale and texture of the tiny tubes worked better with the chunks of beef.

The beef itself was tender and full of flavor; the raisins [which plumped up to resemble small, golden grapes] and spice blend lent a definite sweet note to the savory meat. The cayenne delivered a bit of heat that sneaks up on you without overpowering the dish. Together, they served up a bit of warmth and sunshine on a cold Chicago night.

Slow good: Oven-braised beef stew

A couple of quick notes before I get started:

First, is green the new color of Valentine’s Day? Carmen and Aimee of the website Ecoscene report that Chicago high-end chocolatier Vosges Haut-Chocolat not only makes exotic treats guaranteed to spice up your Valentine’s Day—they do it green. In fact, they’re soon to be LEEDs certified.

Next, a quick little toot of the Blue Kitchen horn. Sometime last Sunday evening, the odometer clicked over to 100,000 hits. Very cool to see. But enough about me—let’s talk about stew.

I work in advertising. In just about every agency where I’ve worked, you’ll either see the following sign [usually in the print production manager's office, if the agency's big enough to have one], or creatives will bring it up when they think the suits aren’t standing up to the clients enough, particularly regarding deadlines:

GOOD
FAST
CHEAP
Pick two.

I know this sign isn’t unique to advertising—I’ve seen it in at least one car repair place, for instance. But wherever you see it, the message is clear. If you want something done good and fast, it’s going to cost you [almost anything can be done fast, if you throw enough money at it]. If you want something fast and cheap, it ain’t gonna be pretty. And if you want something good and cheap, it’s going to take some time.

Which brings me to beef stew meat. Stews were made for the cheap cuts. Chuck roast, the cut most commonly used for stew meat, has lots of connective tissue in it, which requires a long cooking time to break down so the meat will be tender. Conversely [and somewhat perversely], more expensive cuts of beef—steaks, for instance—get tougher the longer you cook them. This is why you should never order steak more than medium rare in a restaurant; and according to Anthony Bourdain, if you order a steak well done, you are guaranteed to get the worst steak the chef has at hand, because the steak is going to be ruined and it’s assumed you wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Here’s what the Restaurants & Institution’s Beef U site says about connective tissue:

“Connective tissues are the tendons and ligaments that attach muscles to the bone, and help give muscles their shape and form. The amount of connective tissue determines the meat’s tenderness; the greater the connective tissue, the less tender the meat. Muscles that are used for locomotion and power (i.e., in the legs and shoulders) have more connective tissue and typically yield less tender meat. The muscles of support (i.e., in the back – rib and loin) move less, are not as important for locomotion or power and, as a result, are more tender.”

Chuck comes from the shoulder, one of those locomotion and power sets of muscles. No problem—you just cook it a long time. Well, except the problem with that is the meat can tend to dry out when cooked a long time—especially, it turns out, on the stovetop. It’s nearly impossible to keep the temperature low enough with the pot sitting right there on the flame.

Blake over at The Paupered Chef wrote about cooking short ribs, another notoriously tough cut—wrote about it twice, in fact, once admitting his failure and once telling how he got it right. I remembered reading the second post and storing away in my brain that the difference was cooking them in the oven instead of on the stovetop.

Now, I’ve cooked stew for years. Good stew, not great stew. Oh, it’s always been hearty and satisfying, and I’ve generally gotten a nice mix of flavors going with wine and herbs. But often, the meat has tended toward the tough, dry, stringy side. Even if I cooked it over low heat for a couple of hours, same deal. So when stew weather hit with a vengeance—a spate of snowstorms, frigid temperatures and howling winds—I decided to solve this problem once and for all.

When meat’s the problem, start with meat solutions. I already knew what vegetables I wanted in my stew and how to prepare them, so instead of looking for stew recipes, I focused on the meat—specifically ways to braise beef, a slow, moist method of cooking. Remembering Blake’s tale of two short ribs, I rejected any stovetop recipes I found. Once I settled on a basic oven-braising recipe, I did what I always do—borrowed from other recipes I’d stumbled upon in the process as well as my own cooking experiences to morph it into my own take. And that take was delicious, if I say so myself—the beef flavorful, juicy and fork tender.