cook: smothered chicken

Winter has commenced here in Northern California preceded by a short, kind of summery fall, this past Wednesday with a steady patter of rain and gray skies. I had chicken drumsticks, white potatoes, half a head of cabbage, and a massive craving for comfort food. Hence, Craig Clairborne's Smothered Chicken recipe in the New York Times. I'm guessing this is an old Southern (but new to me)technique of pan frying a chicken, where a whole chicken is spatchcocked and cooked in butter on low heat with a plate on top and a heavy weight of canned goods weighing the plate in a cast iron pan. My large Dutch oven, which I found at a thrift shop is cast iron, but is oval instead of round, and so I used a salad plate and my tea kettle filled with water to weigh down the chicken.                        

I salted and fried the chicken drumsticks in 2 tablespoons of melted butter on an electric stovetop setting of 4 for 25 minutes. I then turned the drumsticks over. The fat that was in the drumsticks' skin rendered nicely and turned a lovely golden brown as well as smelled delicious in that browning butter. Back went the plate and weighted tea kettle over the chicken to cook another 15 minutes.

Next but not pictured, I removed the chicken and left all the drippings and butter in the pot to brown a little less than 1/4 cup of all-purpose flour to which I then added a bit of water and a leftover jar of canned chicken broth and a heaping teaspoon of Better than Bouillon chicken stock and generous sprinkling of ground black pepper to whisk into a gravy. I returned the chicken drumsticks to the pot to simmer in the gravy on medium (or a setting of 6 on my electric stove) for 15 more minutes--that's less time than the recipe called for because I was using drumsticks instead of a whole chicken. In the meantime, I was also cooking mashed potatoes and sautéing cabbage in another tablespoon of butter.

Onto my favorite salad bowl plate or blate as I call it went the mashed potatoes, cabbage and a chicken drumsticks with that tasty gravy poured over protein, carbs, and vegetable.

This weeknight dinner is today's leftover lunch, and again I can't wait to tuck into this meal on a November cloudy day with a possible high of 63 degrees in the San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula.