freySite
the life and times of J T Frey
One discount spice vendor at our local supermarket makes a great blend that's simply called, "chicken seasoning." It's an orangey off-white color, tastes of onion, garlic, and paprika, and it just plain great on — you guessed it — chicken. This is an honorable attempt at their mystery recipe for the blend.
At the Brandywine Arts Festival this year a local caterer was selling tacos. They had various meats and a bar of self-serve condiments. For one of my tacos I chose the chicken tinga, something I'd never heard of before. Adorned with chopped cilantro, pico de gallo, and their house red salsa, it was absolutely delicious. Recipes I've found online seem to call for a base of chipotles in adobo sauce, which is usually just too spicy. The amount of garlic seemed over the top, too. This is a somewhat more tame recipe I developed to turn some leftover roasted chicken into another meal.
This was a riff on Rick Bayless' "Red Chile Pork Tacos" recipe. I had purchased a whole Boston butt and had lopped-off the 5 lbs of it farthest from the chine bone to make sausage. Doing the whole roast with this method would have yielded way too much meat.
One week I got it in my head that I wanted to make baked pork buns. The delicious pork in the filling, char siu, was a recipe from Joshua Weissman. Sadly, the grocery store aisles had no Chinese five spice that the marinade requires. So I went hunting for a homemade recipe for the powder. This is the scaled-back, simple version I arrived at after viewing several variants that made gigantic amounts of the fragrant blend.
Yields 24 cookies.
For about a decade now I've been making barbecue: the real-deal, low-and-slow, smoked over wood sort of stuff. Every pit master needs a few recipes for sauce and sides. Baked beans is a classic.