Chicken Pitas

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Chicken Pitas

Feeds four people.

4 chicken breasts, cut into bite sized cubes or strips
1 medium onion. Or half a big one. Or whatever.
Fresh garlic (4 cloves for normal people, I use 8)
Olive oil
1-2 tbsp crushed rosemary (to taste)
1-2 tbsp marjoram (to taste)
White wine
2 chicken bullion cubes
Nan bread or pocket-less pita bread.
Shredded cheese
Feta cheese
Romain lettuce

Here’s the process. You take a big frying pan. You put enough olive oil in it to coat the bottom. Get it hot. When it starts to smoke a bit, dump in your onion and fry it until it gets translucent. Then, dump in your chicken, the rosemary, the garlic, and the marjoram. Sear the chicken. When the pan starts to glaze (you still have the heat on high, right?), pour a splash of white wine into the pan (1/2 cup maybe? I don’t know..) and reduce the heat. Put the bullion cubes in at this point, allowing them to dissolve in the wine. Stir the whole mess a bit, making sure the wine stays simmering. If your chicken pieces are bigger, you may even want to cover it at this point to make sure the chicken cooks fully before the wine reduces away. If they are smaller, and you’re confident they’ll be done before the wine goes away, then don’t cover. I know, decisions, decisions. If you’re conflicted, cover it for 5 or 6 minutes, then pull the cover off and reduce the wine all the way. Worst case scenario, you overcook the chicken a bit, but over-steaming chicken really doesn’t hurt it that much.

Okay, once the wine is reduced more-or-less completely*, pull that puppy off the heat. You’re done with the chicken.

Steam your pitas in a steamer, or, the redneck way by covering them with a wet paper towel and microwaving them. Either way, if you over-do it, you’ll get rubbery, crappy pita bread, so watch it.

Then, you spoon-a da chicken onto da pita, and then you add-a da cheese (I like feta, but you can use whatever cheese floats your boat) and da lettuce. I also like to add a drizzle of Caesar dressing, but just a little bit, to moisten it up some. Then, you eat it. Mmmmm.

Best served with olives on the side and a Caesar salad with the little shrimpy things in it. And some kind of wine. I’m no connoisseur, but I would suspect that those that know about these things would suggest a dryish white wine, like a chardonnay, but I’ll just drink whatever is laying around the house, including beer.

*I had an idea where I didn’t reduce the wine all the way down, and instead used a strainer spoon to get the chicken out of the wine, and used some cream with a bit of corn starch dissolved in it to thicken up the wine/olive oil/chicken fat/pan glaze mixture left over into a sort of savory sauce/gravy thing that could also go on the pita. Haven’t tried it yet, but I will try to remember to update you when I do to see if it works.

Recipe - Pheasant Leg Soup

This is really the only way I’ve ever eaten pheasant legs and liked them. They are too stringy otherwise. This is a recipe of my own making that I made last night and it was the bomb…

SOUP RECIPE

6 pheasant legs (bone-in) and the ribs and breast bones left over from filleting 3 breasts. Fill a 5-quart stock pot almost full of water and throw the legs and breast bones in. Boil for 2 hours. Take bones/meat out, and pull meat off bones (pick it off into small pieces like shredded beef). Remove tendons in legs (kind of like fish bones). I usually like to do this the day before so I can let the stock sit overnight to cool (in a refrigerator, of course) and then spoon off the coagulated fat on the surface to reduce the fat in the recipe, but this isn’t necessary. The stock will be very clear and watery, but that’s okay, it will broth up really nicely in the next step…

Chop:

One half of a fist-sized onion
3 sticks of celery (I like to remove the strings, too)
2-3 big carrots
3-4 green onions
A half a head of cabbage
6 cloves of garlic

Measure:

2 tbsp salt (I actually just salt to taste as I’m cooking, but estimate that this is how much I add to get the taste right)
1/8 to ¼ tsp cayenne pepper (you can always add more, but can’t take it out!!!)
1.5 tbsp crushed rosemary
1 tbsp marjoram
½ tbsp basil
A couple pinches of thyme
½ tbsp hot sauce of your choice (again, go easy, you can always add more)
A bag of egg noodles (15 ounce, iirc)

Then –

Bring your stock to a boil. Add the salt, pepper, rosemary, marjoram, basil, thyme, and hot sauce. Then, dump in onion, celery, carrots, green onions, and garlic. Do not add the cabbage yet. Add your meat if you haven’t already, and boil/simmer the whole mess for an hour (and a half?) until the carrots are tender. You can literally just walk away, it doesn’t need to be stirred or anything. Add salt if necessary to taste. Then, dump in the egg noodles and boil them until they are done (maybe 12 to 15 minutes?). Take the whole mess off of the heat, then add the cabbage, put the lid back on the pot, and call the family up for dinner. By the time they get there, the cabbage will have cooked.

I know these long cooking times are intimidating, but remember, the stock can be made days in advance (that takes the longest) and the soup, itself, more or less cooks itself once you bring it all to a boil, because you can walk away – it won’t burn or scorch or nothing.