Ah, February. A short month, granted, but one riddled with vagaries and inconsistencies. It’s warm and sunny one day, snowy the next. Then it is sunny and cold, then warm and rainy. So many wags have commented on the weather that I can hardly hope to contribute to the compendium in an original (or amusing) way. February: some days are warm, some days are cold.
Several times this month I have been tempted to make a vat of chili, if only for the warming exercise of standing at the stove and stirring the red mixture around and around in the pot. Those are the days when we will do almost anything to stay close to the pilot light. Chili is such a wintery meal; it’s when we pull close together in the candlelight and shrug on another sweater. We hold the chili bowls in our chilly little hands, hoping the radiant heat will warm our little bird-like bones. Brr. It is dark and freezing on chili nights.
But what about the bright, sunny day, when Luke the wonder dog and I have been walking through the neighborhood, lurking and snooping and scoping out other peoples’ gardens? When the sight of the first crocus can buoy my spirit? That is no night for heavy, winter-y chili – it is a night to celebrate the first hint of spring! It is a night for Warm Chicken Salad, with a big nod to the smart folks at Food52.
We enjoy a summertime staple meal of a BLT chicken salad, with bacon, lettuce and tomato and cool lashings of mayonnaise, but in the winter we prefer something less gauzy and breezy. Our warm chicken salad has heft and crispy potatoes, which warm the gullet and speak to the primal essence of survival. Winter is still here, Jon Snow, but spring is not far away.
https://food52.com/recipes/23089-warm-chicken-salad
We have been tinkering with the basic Food52 recipe, which is very grownup and practical. It calls for leftover chicken, from the bird you roasted in a methodical way on Sunday afternoon. And while I would like to marshal my thoughts enough to cook for a few hours every Sunday, I still have other projects which demand my attention. Soon, though.
We played a little fast and loose with the basic recipe, which is only to be expected. Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without. I wanted to be sure that the potatoes were particularly crisp, so I fried up a couple of pieces of bacon and used the bacon fat for frying the potatoes. (I had the perfect excuse for a nice BLT lunch then, too.) We also had some leftover Italian sausage, which I tossed into the mix a few minutes before taking the pan off the stove. The sausage had enough time to reheat and get crispy around the edges, too.
If you want to organize yourself and get prepped for spring I cannot recommend too highly the newest Food52 cookbook: Food52 A New Way to Dinner: A Playbook of Recipes and Strategies for the Week Ahead. It will whip you into top cooking shape, and you will feel so responsible and methodical that it is possible to enjoy some leisure time for guilt-free snooping into your neighbors’ gardens, too. Or reading another murder mystery. Because why else do we strive for efficiency? So we have some time to savor and delight in the mundane. Go find a crocus blooming, and see how uplifted you feel.
“The true harbinger of spring is not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of the bat on the ball.”
-Bill Veeck
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