Ritzy! Cheddar! Chicken!
In my 20s, my happy place was the Bed Bath & Beyond near Lincoln Center. (R.I.P.) An eagerness to play house — and to grow up — meant using my meager teaching paychecks to buy a new pot, a new pan or a new knife whenever I felt lost in the world. Nothing calmed my anxious nerves like gliding down those escalators and thumbing my way through the gadgets and housewares that would come to overstock my first adult kitchen. My kitchen is fully stocked and optimized now that I'm in my 30s, honed through multiple moves, career changes, failures and some successes, too. I don't need any more pots and pans, so my paychecks these days mostly go toward white Cheddar Cheez-Its (the best Cheez-It flavor). My new happy place is the Target in Downtown Brooklyn, where the snack aisles are long and tall, and the Cheez-It selection is supreme. I mention this not just as a recommendation for a casual midweek stroll to calm the nerves, but also as a reminder that anything can be an ingredient in a recipe, so long as it tastes good. My Ritzy Cheddar chicken breasts call for a sleeve of buttery Ritz crackers and freshly grated Cheddar cheese to coat sour-cream-tenderized chicken, but you could use whatever snack-aisle heavy hitter speaks to you and your inner child. Featured Recipe Ritzy Cheddar Chicken BreastsA reader, Ariel, wrote that she replaced the Ritz crackers with jalapeño-Cheddar Cheez-Its, as that's what she had on hand. "I think it was an upgrade," she wrote. Another reader, Linda, wrote that she used saltines to "excellent" effect. My cousin Jaime, from whom I first learned about cracker-crusted chicken, used to crush up Ritz Bits cracker sandwiches to coat her poultry, which lent a certain je ne sais quoi. If you'd rather save your Cheez-Its for happy hour with a glass of wine (how we consume them in our house), may I direct you instead to a Pierre Franey classic for dinner? Skirt steak with lentil salad, a recipe from 1990, hits all the right notes: A simple salted and peppered steak, seared quickly in a pan, tops a mustardy lentil salad flecked with tarragon. A little butter, garlic and parsley deglazes the lovely stuck-on bits in the pan so they end up in your belly. Also on my list this week is Ali Slagle's new corn and cod green curry, a straightforward, chill and brilliant prism of fresh corn, coconut milk and fish (which I'll pick up from my local fishmonger, Fish Tales). Frozen corn works in a pinch, and green curry paste — one of my favorite pantry staples — helps get you there in little more than 30 minutes. What's your relationship to eggplant? If you love it, try Melissa Clark's spiced eggplant and tomatoes with runny eggs, which is not unlike an eggplant version of shakshuka. Be sure to read her accompanying column about the dish, where she talks about how she thought for years that her husband didn't like eggplant, so she avoided cooking it for meals together. (Turned out, it was a misunderstanding.) My partner does not like mushrooms, but unlike Melissa, who is an angel, I force-fed them to him for years to understand the boundaries of his preference. I learned he just doesn't love when they're rubbery in texture. (Same!) So next on my list, for us both: this one-pot mushroom and ginger rice from the doyenne of vegetable cooking, Hetty Lui McKinnon. "The Chinese cooking technique of velveting — dusting protein in cornstarch to keep it tender and silky during cooking — is usually reserved for meat or seafood," she writes, "but here, the same method is used for the mushrooms, allowing them to stay juicy and plump as they cook in the rice." Mmm! It's Rosh Hashana this week. Might I nudge you toward Claire Saffitz's challah recipe, which she says is "ideal for first-time bread bakers"? (Watch the delightful YouTube video for a full primer.) While you're waiting for your dough to proof, you could make a trip to Target. The Cheez-Its won't buy themselves.
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Monday, September 30, 2024
Ritzy! Cheddar! Chicken!
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