my pink toes

margarita chicken from smitten kitchen

Some of you are under the impression that I can cook. I was too, until I started eating at my friend Giseli’s house. Then I realized that I can no more cook than drive a space shuttle or loom my own cotton. This woman is amazing. She makes chicken taste like ambrosia dipped in gold, kissed by angels, and served by gorgeous Englishmen. If you were told you had to give up chocolate forever to eat at her enchanted table, you would quickly say “chocolate – who cares?” I’d even give up martinis to eat her food. It’s THAT good. Especially, her meat.

So I am trying to learn how to cook meat. I grew up in a home where there were only two kinds of meat served: ground hamburger, cooked until crispy; and chicken breast baked until it was so dry the oven itself begged for mercy. In the fifteen years I’ve had my own household, I’ve been learning how to cook meat without letting it get to the crispy beef or arid chicken stage. By and large, I have been woefully unsuccessful.

I have compensated by learning how to make a delectable sauce. I can make a cream reduction sauce that will make you weep. You will be tempted to steal sly cups of my maderia gravy and eat it by the teaspoonful at home. You may wish you could smear your body with my tomato-cream-basil sauce. (Don’t worry, I won’t tell.) But all my fancy sauce-cooking grew out of up my mostly atrocious attempts to cook meat. Dry, tasteless chicken is sort of edible, but only when drowned in my sauces.

Giseli, however, makes you want to lock the ketchup away for fear that someone would commit the blasphemous crime of smearing it on her tender fare. My son Henry, who is 6 and VERY PICKY, will eat anything Ms. Giseli makes. ANYTHING: crab cakes (she makes them special for a 6 year old!), salmon, Cornish game hens, filet mignon… He turns his nose up at my sauces, but will eat just the pan drippings from anything Giseli makes. He calls her dishes “juicy meat”. When I tempt him at home with my latest attempt at whatever meat I’m attempting to not dry out, he looks at me skeptically, asks if it’s “juicy meat” and then takes forever to chew one dry, tasteless bite before pronouncing it Not. Juicy. And refusing to eat the rest of it.

Giseli invited us for lunch yesterday and after literally having to stop talking mid-sentence because my eyes were rolling into the back of my head while tasting her Cornish game hens, I decided I had to learn how to cook meat. For real, this time. I begged Giseli to tell me all she knew.

She’s a natural cook –she does everything without a recipe, and without thinking about it. She just knows what’s going to taste good. I have learned enough that I am past the point of detailed recipes (sauté five minutes over med-hi heat, in 2 T of oil is now “sauté until it looks good”) so I was hoping to glean some basic, transforming principles instead of step-by-step directions.

Since she’s from Brazil, sometimes the cooking terms take us a while to translate. First she told me she brines all her meat for two days. I sighed, thinking I did NOT have the time to brine every piece of meat. I brine my Thanksgiving turkey, a process that takes the better part of two days. I sucked it up and asked her what she put in her “brines” and after she said “beer, lime juice, chicken stock” I realized she meant “marinade”, not “brine”. I brightened – I can marinate! We laughed together and she told me some other basics: Use the meat with bones. Cook WHOLE chickens. Leave the skin on. Cut the meat down the middle and butterfly it. Marinate for at least two days. Use an alcohol and a citrus to break down the proteins. Use lots of salt. Use your eyes and fingers to determine done-ness. And your nose.

I was eager to try this advice on Saturday and serve delicious juicy meat to my dinner group. I bought bone-in, skin-on breasts, marinated them about 20 hours (unfortunately, a day shy of the magic), and grilled them to what I hoped was crisp-yet-juicy perfection. Although they were much better than my usual Sahara chicken, they were still not roll-your-eyes-back-in-your-head good.

I’m going to keep trying. Got any tried-and-true general principles for cooking juicy meat? Leave them in the comments!