Bread and water; one-pot chicken and rice
I was out of milk today, so I couldn't make pancakes (I think I couldn't anyway... could I have used water?). But that was fine, because I wanted to experiment with "primordial" stovetop bread cooking... just flour and water. ChatGPT had said it was easy. Make some not-too sticky dough, make a ball, flatten it out, and cook it in a hot pan with no oil! I was skeptical but the house was empty so the coast was clear to... experiment. Learn. You know. Burn things.
I discovered that you can make a ball of dough that's passably non-sticky, but as soon as you knead it (in a bowl with a fork, like I was doing) all of its pent-up sticky comes to the surface. So I had many false starts. "Looks good! [kneads a little more] Oh! Way too sticky! [washes hands]"
Eventually I got something acceptable.
I think this was actually still one of the too-sticky ones
It was difficult to flatten. I tried to toss it like a pizza, which was very fun, but didn't give satisfying results. Eventually I got it kind of okay, still too thick, but whatever, I threw it in the oil-less pan.
It started burning in a very short amount of time, so I flipped it over and found it actually released from the pan pretty easily. I cooked/burned it on the other side and put in on a plate.
I took a bite. It was better than I expected. But a tortilla it was not. It was like a very sad pancake. Heavy and wet. But tasted like flour and water. I put a bunch of butter and salt on it and... it went down pretty easily. I almost liked it. Definitely better than that horror of buckwheat I made a few weeks ago.
When I got to the other half of the dough for take 2, I found it was magically far better disposed than the first ball of dough. Suddenly I remembered something ChatGPT had said about letting the dough rest. It suddenly made sense. The feeling was totally different. I don't know how to describe how it was better. It was just so much easier to handle. After doing literally nothing to it.
I had higher hopes for this one, but I had permanently stained the pan by burning the first one, and I didn't want to do that again, so this time I put butter in the pan first. I couldn't imagine more butter could be bad. And it wasn't. This one turned out more like a... buttery dumpling or something. It looked less bready. I can't even say it tasted better.
Clearly I have not discovered the secret of flour-and-water-on-the-stovetop bread. But I did learn a lot.
My superchef sister reached out after my last chicken writeup and
I'm just interrupting this program to mention how awesome it feels to be listening to an Arabic podcast while writing and actually have real meaning intrude in my consciousness. Just a moment ago I was writing all this up and suddenly understood "...myself first" from the program I have in the background. And even better, when I clicked over to watch for a few seconds, I immediately grabbed on to the fact that what the subtitles translated as "I admit that it is there [talking about depressing]," what the speaker had really said was "I say: you are there." (I'm not saying the subtitles were deceptive, only that I could tell how un-literal it was) That's so cool. Ugh. Best feeling ever. Okay. Back to food.
gave me lots of useful suggestions. One of them was along the lines of: you can brown your chicken pieces in butter and then instead of merely steaming the chicken, you can put rice all around and pour the liquid for the rice (water or stock or whatever) into the pan and cook the chicken and the rice at the same time. A brilliant idea and one I imagined promised really flavorful rice!
So, knowing it would probably take a few tried to get the timing right, I tried it this evening. I browned the drumsticks in butter for looonger than I thought necessary (part of her instructions), and did a much better than normal job of browning all sides (I had floured the outsides first, too). I topped up the butter when it started getting a little dry. After it had browning for a long time, I threw half a head of minced garlic in there, and a little later a cup of rinsed rice, which I sort of toasted in the butter that was already there before I added two cups of chicken broth (from the store). I let it start bubbling then put the lid on and sat at the table and worked on this blog entry.
In terms of cooking mechanics, it all turned out better than I expected. The chicken was cooked more or less right (could have been a tad more) and the rice was just about right... maybe it could have been cooked a little more, too. But within the acceptable range.
The rice was really good; the chicken was good; but the reality I ran up against is that there are no brown bits when you cook it this way and all the drippings are in the rice. Which makes the rice better than normal, by a lot, but it means you can't make a pan sauce! And then what am I supposed to do?
