Scott Hutcheson

The Paillard of Love

Originally published in quality newspapers the week of January 23, 2011

Most people over the age of about 40 remember Steve Martin as not just a white-haired comedic actor but also as a prematurely-grey, white-suited stand-up comic. Among his many memorable bits was one observing how “those French have a different word for everything.”

When I first started becoming interested in cooking I was a bit intimidated and even a little put off by the French. They ate snails, for crying our loud! They may have called them escargot but they were still snails. It didn’t take long, however, to realize that a lot of what many of us eat and who we prepare our food, we owe to the French. We refer to our main course as an “entrée,” we “fillet” our fish, and we “sauté” our vegetables. These are all French terms or American versions of them.

With the proliferation of chef-helmed cooking shows more home cooks are becoming comfortable with a basic French techniques. One that we’ve moved into the regular dinner rotation in our own home is the “paillard” which like some of these other French words sounds a little more fancy-pants than it really is. A paillard is really just a thin piece of meat, usually chicken or veal, that can be cooked quickly.

My wife has recently returned to carnivorism after more than a decade as a vegetarian and she will not yet let me bring veal into the house so our paillards are of the poultry variety.

A boneless, skinless chicken breast can be transformed into a paillard in one of two ways. One way is to place the breast between two sheets of plastic wrap and pound it flat using a mallet or even a heavy flat-bottomed pan. The other technique is to use a knife. For this method you place the breast on a cutting board and use a knife to cut down the middle of the breasts, lengthwise, but only cutting half way through the flesh. Then you hold your knife with the blade parallel to your cutting board and slicing toward the left edge of the breast without cutting through the edge. You repeat this cut with the right side and then open up the breast almost like a tri-fold brochure. Either method should leave you with a piece of chicken that is about a quarter to a third of an inch thick.

There are several different ways you can prepare these palliards but the recipe below is pretty classic and one of our favorites. You’ll need about one breast per person and you can serve them with anything you like. We enjoy this these with mashed potatoes and a simple salad of greens with lemon vinaigrette.

Chicken Paillards with a Lemon Shallot Pan Sauce

• 4 chicken breasts, prepared as palliards
• Kosher salt and Cracked Black Pepper
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1 cup dry white wine
• 1 shallot, finely chopped
• 1 cup chicken stock
• Juice of one-half lemon
• 1 tablespoon butter

Heat a medium nonstick sauté pan to medium-high heat and add the oil. Season both sides of each palliard. Sautee the palliards one at a time in the oil, about 2-3 minutes on each side. Add more oil if needed. You can keep the pieces warm in a 200-degree oven while cooking the others. After all the chicken is cooked, add the wine and shallots to the pan and use a wooden spoon to scrape up any of the tasty bits of chicken on the bottom of the pan. Add the chicken stock and let the liquids reduce by half. Add the lemon juice and whisk in the butter until melted. Taste and add additional salt and pepper if needed. Pour sauce over chicken immediately before serving. This will make four adult servings.

Chocolate, Chili, and Civility

Originally published in quality newspapers the week of January 16, 2011

Nancy met Paul while they were both in college and after a short courtship they were married in 1962. She spent a good portion of that decade pregnant, having her five children over the course of six years. She chose to be a stay-at-home mom during those early years of their family’s life and did a lot of volunteer work in her community. Today, she and Paul have six grandchildren who call them Mimi and Pop. Nancy is a self-confessed chocoholic and her recipe for chocolate mousse is a favorite of family and friends.  She entered it into a March of Dimes recipe contest to help raise money for the charity, and it is, in fact, an award-winning dessert.

John was born in Cincinnati, one of 12 children in his German-Irish family. His grandfather owned a neighborhood cafe that served cold beer and hearty fare, and John earned his first paycheck mopping the floors there. Although it took him seven years, John put himself through college by working as a janitor. Over the years, he has risen to the highest ranks of his profession, a long way from mopping floors and cleaning bathrooms. His work keeps him away quite a bit but when he’s home one of his regular stops is to his favorite Cincinnati-style chili joints.
 
Nancy and John now work together…sort of. They are both members of the U.S. Congress. Nancy’s last name is Pelosi and John’s is Boehner and they have just recently switched roles, with Rep. Boehner as the new Speaker of the House and Rep. Pelosi as the new Minority Leader. I’m not sure what the personal relationship is between these two individuals but they are symbols of our two-party system of government in the United States, a system that’s civility, or lack thereof, is currently being questioned.
 
The tragic shooting in Arizona will likely prove to be completely unrelated to any heated political rhetoric, but the event did seem to heighten the conversation about how we should behave toward one another when it comes to civic affairs and how our political discourse at all levels – federal, state, and local could take on a different tone.
 
I’ve got some ideas about how we might be able to make that happen. How about a Capital Hill pitch in, potluck, covered dish supper, dinner on the grounds, or whatever it’s called in your neck of the woods?  What if Nancy made her award-winning chocolate mousse and John brought a big ol’ Crockpot of Cincinnati chili? What if, just for an hour or so, all talk of politics was replaced by the swapping of recipes and the bragging of grandparents? Could something so simple begin to change the tone in Washington?

Janet Flammang, a professor of political science and the author of A Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics. and Civil Society, tells us that the table is one of the first places where we learn about being civil to one another. She notes that, “It is at the temporary democracy of the table that children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civility—sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending—and it is these habits that are lost when we eat alone and on the run."

Maybe what is good for children would be good for Congress and good for the rest of us as well. Maybe regular breaking of bread together would help us reacquire those habits of civility. It just might be worth a try.

Dumplings & Grandmothers: Soft & Warm

Originally published in quality newspapers the week of January 10, 2011

Everything about my Grandmother Smith was soft and warm, from her manner to her middle and from her feather bed to the way she sort of whisper-whistled hymns while doing her daily chores. To say that she was soft, however, is just part of who she was, because she was also strong. She was the kind of strong you had to be to be when you were a widowed mother during the Great Depression and the kind of strong you needed to be to send your sons off to war.

When my sister and I visited her Arkansas home a couple times each year, we would fight over which one of us got to sleep with her at night. One would bunk with her in her double bed while the other got the single feather bed that was on the other end of her bedroom. Either was a pretty good deal but sleeping with “Ma Ma” was the grand prize. I can vividly remember nestling up against her warm back and throwing my little arm around her soft waist.

My grandmother lived well into her 90’s but she died about the time I was becoming interested in cooking. She was a wonderful cook and I would loved to have spent time with her in her kitchen, learning to make some of my favorites, her chicken and dumplings in particular. Like many women from that era, she was not one to work off recipes.

On my trip home to see my own mother last month, she recalled that she had sat with her mom in the kitchen one day while she was making her chicken and dumplings and taken notes. Mom had recently run across those notes and made a copy for me. It was the best Christmas present I could imagine.

I spent some time last week recreating the recipe and ended up with something really close to what I remember from my childhood. I’m sure this recipe won’t mean as much to you as it does to me, but if you don’t already have a favorite chicken and dumplings recipe, I hope you’ll give this one a try and tell your family it came from a grandma in Arkansas who was soft and warm as those dumplings in their bowl.  

Ma Ma’s Chicken and Dumplings

• 2 quarts chicken broth
• 2 chicken breasts
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon shortening
• 1-1/3 cups buttermilk
• 2 tablespoons butter
• Salt and cracked black pepper to taste

Pour the chicken broth into a stock put and bring to a boil. Once boiling, add the chicken breasts and when the broth returns to a boil, reduce the heat to medium, cover, and simmer the chicken for 18-20 minutes. To be sure it is cooked completely you can remove one of the breasts and insert and probe thermometer. Chicken should be cooked to 165 degrees. Remove breasts from the broth and set aside to cool enough to handle. Leave the broth simmering.

For the dumplings, combine the flour, baking soda, and salt in a mixing bowl. Use your fingers to work in the shortening, pinching it and incorporating it through the flour mixture. Mix in one cup of the hot broth and one cup of buttermilk. Dough should be about the same consistency as biscuit dough. Place the dough on a floured surface and work in enough flour so that you can use a rolling pin to roll the dough out to just a little thicker than piecrust.

Bring the stock both up to a boil. Use a knife to bite-size cut pieces of the dough dropping them into the boiling broth. As the dumplings are cooking, remove the meat skin from the chicken breasts and tear the meat into bite-size pieces.

The dumplings will only need to cook for 2-3 minutes. You can tell they are done when they begin to float and puff out just a bit. Stir in the butter and remaining 1/3 cup buttermilk to thicken the broth. Add the chicken pieces and serve immediately. This will make about four adult-sized portions.

2011: The Year of Eating Intentionally?

Originally published in quality newspapers the week of January 2, 2010

2010: The Year of the Tea Party, the Politically Conservative Woman, the Tablet Computer, the App? Only time will tell what we will remember most about 2010. Time Magazine picked 26-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as it’s Person of the Year and the film about Facebook tops most critics’ best-of lists so maybe 2010 will be known as the year social networking hit the mainstream. Even my 87 year-old stepfather set up a Facebook page in 2010.

We probably don’t need to spend much time thinking about the year that was. It’s over. We’ve thrown out the calendar. Maybe instead we should spend some time considering what we would like 2011 to be the year of. Much of what occurs during the next 360 or so days will be out of our control. Perhaps something so unexpected and monumental will occur on the world stage by December 31 we will unanimously concur on that being the defining moment of 2011.

Maybe it will be a medical breakthrough that will dramatically change the lives of millions; or perhaps some new bestselling book will enlighten us with a new way to think about the world and our place in; or it could be that the ultimate underdog story stirs our spirits and renews our hopes.

Baring any of these scenarios, I’m hoping another theme might rise to our collective conscience in 2011, that of eating intentionally. One of the byproducts of living in the richest country in the world, where food is so plentiful and inexpensive for most of us, is that eating becomes as routine as breathing and little, if any, intention goes into what we put into our mouths.

So what exactly is intentional eating? Well, it can actually be a lot of things. Paying attention, for instance, to where our food comes from and to the impact made by our food choices. Were the people who helped bring that food to our plates – those who planted it, harvested it, processed or prepared it, and sold it – were they treated with respect and paid a fair wage? What about the animals we eat? Where they treated well during their short time on this earth? Can we be more intentional when it comes to these issues?

Can we be more intentional about our own health and the health of those for whom we are responsible – our own children and the children fed during the school day with our tax dollars. Are we being intentional when it comes to feeding our children or are we sacrificing nutritious and wholesome for fast and cheep? Are we making sure we model good food choices and teach our children to live healthy lifestyles?

Can we be more creative when we choose to change our own lifestyles. I have a friend, for instance, who decided she needed to loose 30 pounds but rather than making it just about her, she decided to outlive her life by garnering support from friends who pledged $1 for each pound she lost to help build sanitary kitchen facilities in poor villages half way around the world. 262 people raised a total of $7,860. Talk about eating, or eating less in this case, for a very intentional reason.

There are lots of other ways we could be more intentional in our food choices in 2011. Most of us will eat over 1,000 meals during this year. Will all of them be intentional, surely not; but could some of them be? In my case, I’m resolving to make more of mine mean something in my own life, in the lives of my children, the life of my community, and in the lives of those far away. If any of you care to join me, perhaps we have a chance of making 2011 the Year of Eating Intentionally.