Our new favorite tool in the kitchen is our deep fryer. There are a ton of recipes for fried chicken in our favorite cookbooks but Edward Lee was the first we tried. He boils his chicken before deep frying it which keeps the meat moist and but allows the skin to be crispy. We tried this with his Adobo Chicken and Waffles but wanted to put our own spin on things. The crust of this chicken is HOT but also has crushed fennel seeds which cools down the mouth. As a dipping sauce we decided to go with one of our favorite sauces. Peruvian green sauce. This stuff is addicting. Not sure we make as well as our favorite Peruvian spot in Port Chester, NY but its pretty good.
Mussels are a great meal because they are cheap, easy to cook, and can be paired with almost anything. Duck and fennel go perfectly with mussels. We cooked our own duck stock then paired it with white wine and vegetable stock. In went the homemade duck sausage and fennel. This was the perfect way to break in our brand new kitchen.
David Chang has a show on PBS called, “The Mind of a Chef”, which we recently discovered. This show inspired us to make chicken soup. Danny’s favorite soup is Progresso’s Chickarina soup which is where we came up with the idea for the chicken meatballs. After collecting and drying all of our herbs we grew this summer we used some of the fresh fennel seed and lemon thyme in these meatballs. Hope you enjoy this on a cold winter day!
We are calling these exploding ribs because we actually almost blew up the back yard while cooking these. We're still hoping the Landlord does not realize what we did. Apparently if concrete gets too hot it explodes. Halfway through cooking these we heard a huge explosion and a boy down the street yell "fireworks!". We ran back and saw that there were chunks of charcoal everywhere. Thankfully the ribs were fine. Oh yeah and the house too. Note to self- don't overheat concrete. We came up with this recipe from two small idea's the first being dehydrating lemon zest in our food dehydrator and the second being a red wine cured sausage we had. Realizing these ideas would be perfect for some slow cooked ribs. These took around 4 and a half hours. They were so moist on the inside and crisp on the outside that I think they were our best ribs yet.
