Winter Picnic

At our most recent dining experience at Alborz, I ate for the first time (at least to my knowledge) chicken salad. Yeah, can you believe that, Gentle Reader? For someone who grew up eating a lot of what most folks would call tuna salad--canned tuna mixed with Miracle Whip and sweet relish--chicken salad shouldn't be a foreign thing, but it was for me. And I lost my chicken salad innocence not to any run of the mill chicken salad. No, my first chicken salad was the exotic olivieh, described on its card on the buffet as a Persian chicken salad with potatoes, pickles, eggs, olives and sweet peas. I'm not a fan of olives, but this salad was damned tasty.

Was I inspired to find a recipe for it and make it myself? No. But I was amenable to trying a recipe for a turkey salad I found in the December issue of Austin Fit, the same source as the fairly successful kam kash dish I made in October. That the boy saw the recipe and thought it was something he'd like to try, I felt all the more compelled to give it a shot.

I had just one problem: I had no diced turkey and had no plans to acquire any turkey, despite the boy's ongoing hints and musings about his desire to eat a traditional holiday turkey meal. So what's a faudie to do?

Lie to her son. Big time.

Cranberry-pear Turkey Salad2 C turkey breast, diced
1/3 C dried cranberries
1/2 C bosc pears, diced
1/3 to 1/2 C cilantro, roughly chopped
4 T Dukes light mayonnaise
3 T lemon juice (1 medium lemon)
1/4 t black pepper
1/2 t lemon zest
1/2 t sea salt (fleur de sel)

1. In a small bowl, soak the cranberries in hot water for 10 min. and then drain.
   
2. In a large bowl, combine the diced turkey breast, drained cranberries and pears.
   
3. In a separate bowl, combine the cilantro, mayonnaise, lemon juice, pepper, lemon zest and salt and mix thoroughly.
   
4. Add the mayo concoction to the chicken mixture. [Yes, Gentle Reader, the recipe in the print and online edition of the magazine use chicken, not turkey. The writer and I were apparently on the same wavelength. -The Faudie]
   
5. Chill until serving time.

Yield: 2 1/2 C
Serving size: 2/3 C

Nutritional Info
Calories: 266
Fat: 8 g
Sat fat: 2 g
Protein: 33 g
Carbs: 15 g
Fiber: 2 g
Cholesterol: 81 mg
Sodium: 489 mg

The Faudie's Futzings
Well, Gentle Reader, have you guessed the big lie I told the boy?

Don't judge me too harshly, please. Turkey and chicken are both poultry, right? It's not like I was trying to pass off tofu as turkey. And a large chicken breast I already have in my freezer is easier to dice and brown than doing the same to a turkey breast I don't have. And if the boy took no notice of the switch, so much the better!

Here are some other futzings:

• I used the boy's Miracle Whip Light instead of the light mayo called for in the recipe.
  
• My dried cranberries were sweetened, but I'm not sure if I was intended to use unsweetened. I believe you can get such things--or else the one barrel of dried cranberries at Whole Paycheck was mislabeled and not properly identified as sweetened.
  
• I don't think I used quite a third cup of chopped cilantro because even to me that seemed like a helluvalotta cilantro. I can't even imagine using a half a cup of the stuff, especially with such a small amount of mayo.
  
• I'm not sure that the half of the large lemon I squeezed into the mayo concoction yielded three tablespoons, but it was probably somewhat close.
  
• I'd zested the aforementioned large lemon before halving it to juice, so I'm pretty sure I had well more than half a teaspoon of zest in the mayo combo.

And yes, I used the full amount of fleur de sel in the mayo combo. I've had that little baggie of higher-end fleur de sel in my spice cabinet for more than a year; I'd never even opened it once since its purchase at the bulk foods playland at Central Markup. I was thrilled to finally have an opportunity to use it. Did it make a flavor difference? Hell if I know!

So enamored was I with the zesty lemon flavor of the Miracle Whip-cilantro concoction that I decided to add to it by browning the diced chicken breast in a wee bit of Monini lemon-flavored olive oil. Did that result in lemon overkill? Not to my taste buds. All that lemon tartness was the right counterpoint to the sweetness that lingered in the cranberries and was hinted at in the pears.

When the husband and I sampled the finished dish, it was still fairly warm. That warmth combined with its creaminess got me thinking about that oddball creamy couscous and vegetable dish I made a while back. While I had no desire to ruin a perfectly fine batch of couscous with thick, creamy sauce again, I thought the hint of creaminess the chicken salad had would go nicely atop a bed of couscous or even quinoa--and perhaps a bed of jasmine rice for the couscous-hating boy.

Aha! Thursday night's supper was solved!

I've Got One Hand in My Pocket[bread]
But I woke up Thursday morning reconsidering that grain accompaniment. Hey, we're talking about chicken salad here. Shouldn't it be paired with a baked grain product? Don't I have four functional bread machines? Shouldn't I be able to whip up some kind of bread product that would complement the zesty-sweet flavors of the chicken salad?

With visions of Middle Eastern flavors on my mind, I whipped out my collection of bread machine cookbooks and tracked down a recipe for pitas.

Pita Bread1 1/3 C water
3 T olive oil
2 C bread flour
1 1/2 C whole wheat flour
1 1/2 T sugar
1 t salt
2 t yeast

1. Add the ingredients to the bread machine in the order recommended by its manufacturer.
   
2. Select the Dough cycle, then start the machine.
   
3. At the end of the cycle, divide the dough ball into 10 smaller balls.
   
4. Preheat a conventional oven to 500 degrees.
   
5. Flatten each ball into a disc, rolling each one into a circle of about 6".
   
6. Place the discs on a baking sheet and allow to rise for about 20 min.
   
7. Bake the discs for 8 to 10 min.

Yield: 10 pitas

Nutritional Info
This recipe is yet another in the long line of recipes we've used from Donna Rathmell German's The Bread Machine Cookbook. You should very well know by now, Gentle Reader, that she did not include nutritional info for each recipe. Bummer.

The Faudie's Futzings
I didn't change up the recipe, but I did inadvertently...alter the baking instructions. Let me attempt to explain, Gentle Reader.

I knew Thursday was going to be a screwy day, but I wanted somehow to present warm pitas come suppertime. That goal was impeded by my desire to kickbox with the husband, which takes about an hour and makes it kind of difficult to pop in and out of the kitchen to do things. If I got the pitas rising as we started kickboxing, I figured could still get the pitas baked and supper on the table and then get the boy to bed on time. Would it matter that I prepared the dough midmorning and then stuck it in the refrigerator until it was time to divide and rise? Well, we'd just have to hope for the best.

My quest to achieve the best result given the circumstances collided with one big wall: I had it in my head that the way to get the discs to rise was to put them in an oven that had been preheated to a certain temperature and then shut off, as Greg had done the two times he'd made pizza crusts from The New Best Recipe.

Heh.... Needless to say, the husband thought I was referring to the pizza crust's baking temperature, so he told me to heat the oven to 400 degrees. I even put the pizza stone in the oven, as I'd learned from an older episode of The Splendid Table featuring Shirley Corriher, author of BakeWise, The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking, that baking on baking stones was just the way to go. So when I put the pitas in the oven--half of them on a piece of parchment paper directly on the stone, the other half stayed on a second piece of parchment paper on a cookie sheet--to rise for 20 minutes, they were in a very warm oven. Where they baked prematurely...

...and looked nothing like pitas.

While the pitas were pretty pathetic to behold, they were wonderfully tasty--although they tasted nothing like pitas I've ever eaten. Our pitas tasted more like yeasty, whole wheat dinner rolls or even the Fabulous Flats whole wheat naan we buy at HEB.

Oh well. I wouldn't be The Faudie if I didn't fuck something up in my kitchen every now and then, and the FSM knows I was overdue for a fuck-up.

By the way, I did make some couscous for me to enjoy. I added some lemon zest, freshly squeezed lemon juice, a bit of lemon-flavored olive oil and a handful of dried, sweetened cranberries to it to give it some panache. The spur-of-the-moment couscous salad wasn't as good as the fabulous orange couscous salad I often make from Kim Sunée's Trail of Crumbs, but it wasn't awful either. The chicken salad atop it worked out nicely.