Vinegar-Braised Chicken with Farro and Watercress by Alison Roman

For the past 8 months, the vinegar-braised chicken recipe  has sat unwritten in my blog’s Google Doc. Every time I saw the title sitting there, unaccompanied, I opted to write about another recipe. I didn’t have much to say about this chicken when I first made it, but now I’ve really put myself in a pickle because I can’t remember anything about how I made it or how it tasted. All I know is that I made it on April 5, 2021 because there’s photo evidence that tells me as much. 

What I can deduce from all of this is that the chicken wasn’t a ton to write home about. I had to skip on the farro because of my gluten-aversion, which left only watercress and a simple roasted chicken to try. This recipe also has one of the shortest ingredient lists of all of Alison’s main course dishes, leaving the burden of flavor to just salt, pepper, vinegar, garlic, and a tablespoon of Yuzu Kosho. 

Now hear me out, there are plenty of tasty chickens that use the same small amount of ingredients for flavor. But such a short list is off brand for Alison. One of her defining features is bold, in-your-face flavor. She doesn’t hold back. Which is why this recipe felt like a departure from her normal routine. 

Perhaps I’d find this chicken refreshing if I made it again. I’ll probably give it a try! If you’re reading this and felt differently, please tell me? 

216 recipes cooked, 9 to go.

Swordfish-like Steak with Crispy Capers by Alison Roman

I made this dish — well, actually my brother mostly made this dish — using a .4 lb. swordfish steak, which we split between 6 people. I’m at the point where I’ve eaten more seafood in one year than I have in my entire lifetime, so I was not about to buy 16 oz. of swordfish. 

Swordfish itself is rather dense, on the drier side, and dons a distinctly fishy taste. It’s not a personal favorite. Neither is it a favorite of my family members, who generally stay away from anything fishy and stick to the occasional salmon filet once or twice a year. (We’re from coastal Orange County and we still don’t have a pallet for seafood!) But somehow, each family member enjoyed their bite of this fish. I think, because it was dominated by salty, buttery, and briny flavors. The fishiness hit last. 

The assembly is rather simple. Season the swordfish with salt and pepper, and sear it in a skillet until golden brown on each side. Then add butter, a smashed garlic clove, an anchovy, and chopped capers. Let the butter melt, then use it to baste the fish, scooping it up and over the steak for several minutes. The whole process takes about 12 minutes. 

The fish was like a salty umami bomb. I’d recommend forgoing the anchovy in this case. It seemed to be what put the fish over the edge in the salt category. Everyone enjoyed their one bite, remarking that that was all they needed to enjoy the fish. 

215 recipes cooked, 10 to go.

Littleneck Clams with Green Garlic and Leftover Wine by Alison Roman

I started this project as a complete clam novice: how to cook them, how to eat them, the fact that there are different kinds of clams — I hadn't the slightest idea. I remember feeling very intimidated by the task of ordering them at the grocery seafood counter. Even more intimidating was the thought of cooking them. And then, after just one attempt, I realized that clams are perhaps the most foolproof seafood I could ever cook. 

As long as you’ve scrubbed their shells (they tend to have gunk stuck to the outside that will come off with a little handling under cold, running water), placed them in a hot pot with a lid and a bit of liquid to create steam, and can physically shake a pot back and forth a few times, clams are a piece of cake. (Cake is better than clams, tbh, but let’s not get into semantics.) 

The parsley butter took more work than the clams in this recipe. I already had my food processor on the counter from making green romesco for Alison’s four-bean salad, so I opted to use it for smashing the butter, parsley and garlic clove together. Some people have asked how I decided when to make certain recipes. One answer is laziness. “You mean I don’t have to dig out my food processor and clean it a second time?”

Once my clams were cleaned and ready, I started by sizzling a finely grated garlic clove in some olive oil in my Dutch oven. After it released its fragrance, I poured in some leftover Sav Blanc (and yes, this was like 6-day old wine from the fridge that honestly tasted just fine for this purpose.) Once the wine had reduced, I placed the clams in the pot and fit the lid so they could steam. I made just a half recipe, which reduced the wine needed to just two Tbsp. But even that little bit of wine was enough to cook the clams and infuse them with plenty of flavor. Once opened, the clams were ready for dollops of parsley butter. It took some coaxing to get the globs to land into each open shell. 

Pro tip: when removing hot clams from a pot, don’t be foolish. Wear an oven mitt or use tongs. You will burn your fingers otherwise. Just ask my thumb and forefinger. 

The remaining melted butter and clam juice provide a nice warming liquid for the can of cannelini beans added at the end. I served it all with lemon wedges and sourdough bread, along with a lemony kale salad. 

Jordan didn’t love this dish — he said it was too salty, which must have come from the clams themselves because I added very little salt myself. I felt that there was a bitterness to the dish, a sort of soft sourness that’s hard to describe otherwise. Maybe the wine was too far gone? Maybe this needed something creamy to balance the bitter? I think I’ll stick with Alison’s other clam recipes in the future, particularly her Clams and Cod in Heavy Cream (minus the cod - just the clams) and her Clam Pasta with Chorizo and Walnuts. 

214 recipes cooked, 11 to go.

Sardines Two Ways: Oil-Roasted with Mayo and Pickled Onions, & Pan-Fried with Fried Lemon by Alison Roman

This is a GUEST POST by the one, the extraordinary, Margaret Winchell. As she will soon note below, we struuuuuggled to find fresh sardines. Calling many fish mongerers in Chicago and Michigan proved fruitless, so Margaret got creative. She went out of her way to find fish and friends to eat it, and wrote about it all with her signature spunk and knowledgeable tips

Margaret, thanks for being a #1 supporter of me and this project, in word and in deed. You’re my true friend.

Let’s get this out of the way: I made two recipes that call for fresh sardines without fresh sardines. If I were a recipe writer, I would roll my eyes at me. But Annie and I both looked high and low for whole, fresh sardines - she, in Chicago, and me, in southwestern Michigan, and we found none. Alison repeatedly notes how oily sardines are, so I planned to sub in a different oily fish. My first choice was mackerel because my research showed them to be similar enough, but that was also not available! So: here we are with rainbow trout. 

While I was working on these dishes, I kept asking myself, how much do you get to deviate from a recipe before you have to acknowledge that you’re making a different dish? I don’t have a strict rule, but this feels like it’s pushing it. I invited two of my best grad school pals over for “Fish Night” on our first day of classes. Here’s what we ate:

Oil-Roasted Sardines with Mayonnaise, Pickled Onions, and Lots of Parsley

*Bonus go-with recipe: Mayo for people who don’t like mayo

Pan-Fried Sardines with Fried and Salted Lemon

Overnight Focaccia, Tonight

Roasted Broccolini

Boiled baby yellow potatoes (they’re great with aioli!)

…and it was a totally fine fish night menu! The win here really was the combination of flavors and textures on the table. Assembling little bites of focaccia-fish-aioli-pickled onion or potato-fish-lemon-broccolini is so satisfying to me because it feels like you get to do an activity while you eat. It’s entertaining to build tiny food towers! 

oil-roasted trout

The oil-roasted fish was nothing to write home about, but with the accoutrements, it didn’t really matter. What made me grumpy is that Alison has you use a whole head of garlic and several sprigs of thyme that never really make their presence known in the fish. She has you cut the garlic head in half lengthwise and put it and the thyme in the pan with the sardines (trout) while they roast, but they only bake for 15-20 minutes. This wasn’t long enough for the garlic to be really roasted (and thus edible as a side), and the garlic and thyme didn’t make enough contact with the oil for it to serve as a useful conduit for the flavors. I wondered why she didn’t have you smash several cloves of garlic and scatter them around the pan, or even give them a head start in the oil in a saucepan before roasting. The skin on my trout also didn’t get very crispy with her method, but that might have been different with sardines.

Now about the mayo: this is aioli. They are the same thing, but if your goal is to make a “mayo for people who don’t like mayo,” you bypass so many obstacles by calling it “aioli.” But whatever you call it, it’s a little tricky! There was a span of a few weeks early in high school when I encountered several recipes for mayo or aioli that came with a disclaimer of “people think this is hard, but my method is foolproof!” (Often said about making mayo in a blender.) Yeah, OK. They were not foolproof. But this mayo went just fine! She has you use two egg yolks, which is more than you need for this amount of oil, but I described it to Annie over the phone as an insurance policy.

Let’s take a detour for a primer on emulsions! Mayo, aioli, creamy salad dressings, and many other sauces are emulsions. This just means it’s a homogeneous mixture of oil and water. In order to get oil and water to combine and not separate, you need an emulsifier (like an egg yolk) to serve as a mediator between oil and water and help them get along. In making mayo, you start with an egg yolk, often with a little mustard and some lemon juice, and very gradually whisk in oil. The first time I made it successfully, I got my station set up, called my friend Amy, and put her on speaker so I could have both hands free for drizzling and whisking. I was so paranoid about going too fast with the oil integration that I paced it out over the course of a whole hour. This time, I called Annie and did it in about 15 minutes. This is growth!

Last thoughts on aioli: it’s tough to gauge seasoning on a condiment. I tasted the aioli on its own a few times and kept wanting more acid and more salt, so I added them, and I’m glad I did. But when I put the aioli in the fridge for a bit while I worked on the other dishes, I wasn’t convinced it was going to have enough spunk. It’s just so unctuous! It’s hard to ever taste it and say, “I want a big spoonful of that in my mouth NOW.” So, if you make aioli, go farther than you think you should on acid and salt, but also bear in mind what it will accompany. The lemon slices and pickled onions did a lot of work here in balancing out the creamy aioli, but if I were serving it with something less zippy, I would want the aioli to be more assertive.

pan-fried trout

For fish on its own, we all preferred the pan-fried fish with fried and salted lemon. I took a bite and said, “This tastes like dessert fish!” I know this sounds weird. But! Alison has you fry lemon slices in some browned butter until the whole thing is deep and caramelly. The skin on the fish gets crackly in the pan-frying. And the other lemon slices are quick-cured in salt and sumac. When you put it all together, you have caramel notes from the brown butter, a salty-acidic pop from the sumac lemons, and crispiness from the fish skin. It could so be a lemon pastry. 

212 and 213 recipes cooked, 12 to go.

Four-Bean Salad with Green Romesco by Alison Roman

I had several plans to make this bean salad throughout the course of this past summer. Every time I went to make it, something distracted me or set me on a different course. Maybe I couldn’t find a can of butter beans in the store that day. Maybe that gathering we were supposed to attend got canceled. Maybe the last thing I felt like doing was pulling out my food processor. This salad is, no doubt, a dish meant for the summertime — warmer weather, perhaps an outdoor setting to eat it in. But I finally found myself, in the middle of snowy January making a four bean salad for a group of people in need of some summertime cheer. 

I threw together this salad on Wednesday night. I started by rinsing and draining the three canned bean varieties: butter, cannellini, and black eyed. I try to drain beans as far in advance of using them as I can so they don’t bring extra water/moisture with them. Though a bit harder to find, particularly the black eyed and butter beans, this combination works really well together — especially with their different sizes. 

While the beans dried out, I put together the romesco in my food processor, which eliminated much of the required chopping. I first wrote about this romesco when I made Alison’s Crispy Skinned Salmon (a top recipe from the project). Last time, I used almonds. This time, I tried walnuts, and didn’t notice a major difference. 

I then cut up the fresh green beans and lemon slices and tossed them in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag with salt and pepper. Using the bottom of my non-stick skillet, I set about bruising the beans and lemons by whacking the skillet over them with force (but not too much — last time I used this method for a recipe, the bag broke and it made a whole mess.) I didn’t aim for mashed beans, but mildly dented. 

I tossed all of these ingredients together with more lemon juice, salt, pepper, and dill, and put the bowl in the fridge. 

On Thursday, January 13, my parents, two siblings, and husband, gathered in the cold to commemorate my grandmother’s beautiful life by her graveside. She lived 93 years packed with authentic joy, weathered loss, and radical authenticity. I loved my grandmother so much. She was and still will be a lifelong role model for me. Her funeral was an intimate and meaningful time of sharing stories and remembering her life. We went to lunch at her favorite restaurant afterward and I ordered salmon, just like she always did. 

That night, my family came to my apartment to unwind from the long, emotional day. I served them this salad. It was perfect. They each remarked how fresh and lemony it tasted. They liked the crunchy texture of the beans and pops of dill. Each person dressed it up differently, adding Cholula or tortilla chips or feta cheese. The bowl was pretty much gone by the end of the night. I’m glad I inadvertently waited so long to make this salad. 

211 recipes cooked, 14 to go.