The Cheapest, Best Side Dish: The Carrot and Zucchini Sautée

When making a complicated main dish, it's often helpful if your sides take little to no effort to assemble, can be  largely cobbled together from crap you have lying around anyway, actually taste better slightly burned and can be sacrificed in small portions as peace offerings to your small child to prevent him from gnawing on electrical wires or eating the scum around the base of the trash can. If they're also relatively good for you and make you look more awesome in the kitchen than you actually are, so much the better.

This is my go-to on all of these counts. It's especially effective here in Lebanon since the country is blessed with some of the best carrots on the planet and an overabundance of stubby little zucchini squash that they call "koosa" which is a word that still kind of makes me giggle. For a very phallic squash, the term is counterintuitively close to the pronunciation of the Arabic term for a lady's naughty bits. This is a fun bit of trivia, especially since the word "courgette" is one of the most obscene borrowed terms in the English language. But I digress. 

The trick to this recipe is twofold: 1. Slice your vegetables paper thin, and 2. Overcook them. And I mean the second. You want your carrots limp, your zucchinis browned nicely and your onions gooey and caramelized. 

Ingredients:

2 small carrots

1 large zucchini (3 small koosas)

1/2 yellow or spring onion

olive oil

salt

pepper

a squeeze of lemon juice

1. Thinly slice your carrots, zucchini and onions and combine in a large bowl. I like to cut the carrots at a 45 degree angle to the core to make them oval shaped. This doesn't improve the flavor, but it impresses the simple minded and is a nice aesthetic touch. (My motto: creatively sliced carrots say "Hey, I give a damn")

2. Sautéeing means cooking in a small amount of oil at a high temperature, so do that. Heat some olive oil in the bottom of a large, flat bottomed pan on high medium heat and toss the veggies all in together, poking them about in the pan to coat with oil. Let them cook for a bit before you flip or stir them. You should get some heat marks on the zucchini, but no burn marks. But really, the onions will be your guide - if you turn them black right away, you're a bit too hot. 

3. When everything is looking close to cooked, give a quick squeeze of a lemon slice, stir it in with some salt and pepper, then cover and cut the heat. Let it stand for about three minutes and serve. You'll be surprised at how good this is. 

It goes especially well with white rice and fish since it makes its own sauce. 

Chicken Kievon Bleu with Lavender Honey Mustard

For those of you who actually used to frequent this blog, apologies for the hiatus. Actually, I don't apologize. I was in Nice for about a week on business/pleasure and had a wonderful time and you're not going to ruin it for me now.

Nice is actually a charming city that deserves its own post (forthcoming), if only for the fact that it wouldn't exist were it not for the fact that in the 18th century, wealthy British people with tuberculosis needed somewhere to go to die (apparently they don't just go into the back yard and face north). I'm just kidding, wealthy British people aren't actually like dogs. Okay, maybe SOME of them are, but all of my British friends are great.

Why is France even remotely related to Chicken Kiev? Because, like pretty much all Russian cuisine that people pay attention to, aside from borscht, it's derived from the French. In this particular case, a Frenchman named Nicholas Appert, who all amateur food historians on the internet clamor to note also invented canning. This latter contribution is currently pretty awesome for those of us too lazy to boil our own beans, but at the time they could only use glass, so it was more like "jarring." They later developed tin cans that were soldered together with lead, which had some pretty nasty consequences for those who had to subsist on them for a long duration. So basically, he invented a stuffed chicken dish and indirectly killed lots of people. It was actually named "cotelettes de voaille" for quite some time until some smartass in New York in the late 19th century decided to use the name "Chicken Kiev" to prey upon the Russian immigrants in the city. (See this creepy looking dude for the source) 

How did I know it was French without the aid of Google? Come on, it's stuffed chicken. The French have a compulsive urge to stuff things with other, often inappropriate things (there's a joke there somewhere, I'll let you have at it). While in Nice, we bought some truffle-stuffed Brie because it sounded interesting and elegant (it was, but it was not) and saw all manner of beasts that had been hammered flat and rolled together in butchers' windows. It was like peeking into the gates of heaven. 

Chicken Kiev is known for its herbed butter filling, but because I don't consider butter to be a stuffing per se, I've modified the recipe to include cheese and pork to be less gross, just as fattening and a bit more substantial. Basically, mixing the nice parts of Chicken Kiev and Chicken Cordon Bleu. You'll appreciate it, trust me. You can add tarragon to it as well, but since I've added a honey mustard sauce for the top, I didn't want to risk my flavors clashing. 

Warning: prep the filling beforehand since it needs to congeal a bit. Also, you need toothpicks and standard stuff for breading. 

Ingredients: 

2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (halves of the butterflied whole) 

1/3 cup green onion, finely minced

1 tbsp parsley, finely minced

1/4 cup ham

2 tbsp softened butter 

1/2 cup light, white cheese (mozarella or jack - we use Keshkaval) 

salt

pepper

Also: 

oil for frying

1/2 cup bread crumbs

flour

oil

1 egg

milk

for the Honey Mustard Sauce (approximations, you go by taste)

2 tbsp mustard

2 tbsp mayonnaise (if you want it creamier, add more mayo)

1.5  tbsp honey

1/2 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp lavender, ground

salt

pepper

Preparations: 

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. 

1. Soften the butter and mix in the herbs and cheese, salt and pepper. Chill it and prepare the other stuff. 

2. Place your chicken breasts (one at a time) on a cutting board between two pieces of plastic wrap that is ideally not cling wrap, since it will stick to itself and completely defeat the purpose. Take a mallet, pestle, hammer, smooth rock, or whatever and hammer the chicken flesh until it's thin and spread out rather evenly. 

3. Place a wad of filling along one of the long edges of the chicken, then tightly roll it until it's in a nice, greasy little log. If it's loose and ugly looking, it's entirely your fault and you should either redo it or feel ashamed when you serve it. Pin it together at the ends and in the middle with toothpicks. 

4. You need 3 dishes: the first with with flour seasoned with salt and pepper, a second deep middle dish with egg and milk mixture, and a third with seasoned bread crumbs mixed with a bit of flour and salt. Did you see that? I hyperlinked myself up there. 

Coat the roll in flour, transfer to the egg bath and coat in egg (use a spoon if the toothpicks get in the way), then finish by coating the whole thing in bread crumbs until nicely covered. 

5. Heat some butter in a pan and sear the Kievs on both sides briefly, then transfer to a pan covered in baking paper. Use baking paper. 

6. Bake at 400 degrees for 20-25 minutes

7. Let rest 3-4 minutes, then remove the toothpicks and serve with the sauce (below). This is great with sauteed zucchini, carrots and onion.  

Making the Lavender Honey Mustard Sauce (I capitalized it because that's its proper name)

1. Hammer the lavender blossoms in your mortar and pestle. 

2. Mix all ingredients together until smooth and tastes the way you like it, then put in the fridge to marry. 

3. Serve on chicken or alongside as a dip.