THE MINIMALIST

Every Wednesday the Dining Section of the NYTimes comes out. And every week I read it religiously. One of my favorite writers is Mark Bittman, aka the Minimalist. And even though I always read his column and last week watched a series of his videos (he's actually quite entertaining and funny), I'd never made any of his recipes. But last week, he made chicken stuffed thighs, and since I had all the ingredients to make it (minus the chicken thighs, which we picked up later at the store), I decided it'd be a yummy dish to make for dinner.

First, here's a picture of something fun. It's a pre peeled packet of garlic that Tom bought at the supermarket. They're quite handy since you don't have to do all the work of peeling the garlic and I like that they come in little packets so they don't all go bad so quickly. It is quite wasteful, though, with all the plastic and such, so I'll stick to my regular heads of garlic once we run out.

I had spinach rather than swiss chard, so I decided to skip the step of boiling the spinach since I knew it'd cook rather quickly anyway. So first I sauteed the pinenuts with the minced garlic.

What I should've done was toasted the pinenuts first, because the garlic ended up cooking a lot faster than the pinenuts and I was forced to add in the spinach just to stop the garlic from burning too much. But it cooked down fairly quickly and I took it off the heat to cool. Meanwhile, I set out to pound the chicken thighs. It wasn't too hard, though kinda tedious. And by the time I was done, the spinach mixture had cooled down enough to handle.
Mark Bittman makes this look really easy in his video, but in actuality, rolling up those thighs wasn't the easiest thing. The stuffing would pop out, even though I tried not to overstuff them. And they were slippery, so piercing them with the toothpicks was also kinda hard. I had to end up rerolling at least two of them. But this is what they look like when they're done.Next came the cooking, which was pretty easy. You just sear them on one side for five minutes, flip them over for another few minutes, and then add some liquid and let it cook down. He suggest that you use sherry, but I substituted chicken stock instead.The entire thing came out quite well and I served it with a side of steamed cauliflower. When I reduced the liquid in the pan and spooned it over everything, it tasted even better. So I'd definitely make this recipe again. It wasn't too hard and I can see how you could have a whole variety of stuffings. Plus it looks kinda fancy, even though it's easy to make. And I guess that's what's so great about the recipes by the Minimalist. I'll certainly be trying out a few more in the future.