Kitchen Zink - Student Work

Sunday night was a proud one in the Zink household.  In just under two hours, from ingredients laid out to plates licked clean, we created a dish that is apparently worthy of scorn by any real chef.  But since I'm not a real chef, I would be happy to be scoffed at if I got to eat that dinner again!  Actually, I'm being a tad bit facetious about the derision for this dish - in fact it's based on one comment from one Chopped contestant on one episode.  In said show, one of the contestants makes a roulade (rolled up meat around a filling, basically), and in the talking-head interview, his or her opponent makes a snarky remark about roulades being "so culinary school."  You hear that?  I can make things culinary school students make!  Woot!

It all began, as these stories so often do, with the downtown Des Moines farmers market.  It's October, but there is still an incredible array of fresh food available.  And amongst the many squashes and potatoes, there were a few other veggies lurking, including what we found at the Grinnell Heritage Farm booth... collard greens!  Prior to this weekend I have had collards on exactly one occasion, in a steamed mass at a Golden Corral.  They were okay but not scintillating, so I had no real reason to be interested, but the greens at the Grinnell stand looked so pretty, we couldn't pass them up.  One bunch of greens, $3 down, and no real plan yet.

Once our heavily laden bags were unpacked at home, I spent a few minutes searching for recipes when one caught my eye - wild rice and collard stuffed chicken, from the Food Network website.  Sounds good, but it involves deboning an entire chicken.  So unless you live near one of these, it's a whole lot of work!

But we did have some leftover chicken breasts in the fridge with no plan and a semi-urgent need to be used before they started to turn, well, unpleasant.  Bingo!  Our super-local ingredient collection included greens from Grinnell, wild rice from Minnesota, and chicken breasts from Nebraska.  Which is great, but we had no recipe.  Time to improvise!

Drawing inspiration from a Chopped episode and a Fine Cooking magazine, we sliced the collards into a chiffonade (which is super fun to do - just try it sometime), and sauteed them in, you guessed it, bacon fat.  Just a minute and pulled from the heat.  The wild rice, meanwhile, was simmering away on low heat for 45 minutes, and Stacia did an expert job slicing the chicken into butterflies and pounding them flat.  Note: I'm not scared of raw meat or anything, but Stacia really likes that part of the prep and does a kick-ass job of it, so I'm not about to try to budge my way in.  Assembly was a bit of a task, piling up the greens and rice on the chicken and rolling them up.  One of the two tore a bit en route, but enough toothpicks held it together.

I wanted to sear the roulades, and had a slightly lousy idea to bread them first.  We rolled them in a beaten egg, then some bread crumbs and put them into my precious (All-Clad pan) over fairly high heat with some oil.  The plan was to sear the outsides in the pan, then finish them in the oven - a great way to go, but probably better without bread crumbs.  The crumbs got crunchy and all, but I think a nice sear on the meat itself would have been just a little tastier.  In the future, that's definitely the way I'd go.

So the roulades got popped into the oven at 400 for about 15-20 minutes, while I made perhaps my most successful pan sauce to date!  With my newfound knowledge from my cooking class, I opted to make a veloute: a chicken stock sauce thickened with roux.  It was so exciting!  Butter/chicken drippings and flour to a roux, cooked to about a blond color, and then whisk in chicken stock and some salt and pepper.  Nearly instant gravy!  Unfortunately my homemade stock hadn't quite defrosted yet, so we had to use boxed stuff, but it came out awesome.  Really great chicken flavor, and the right consistency with the roux.  I felt like a real cook (or at least a culinary student ;).

We had to go a little fancypants with the roulades, so we sliced them and laid the pretty spiral discs on the plate, then drizzled the gravy across the top.  Again, here a bunch of the bread crumbs fell off and looked a little less pretty, so I would opt without for next time, but still, a rather beautiful plate.  Roulades always look nice, with the fun little windows of filling between the spiraled meat, and the collard/wild rice mixture was particularly appealing.  Taste didn't disappoint either!  It all came together in a nice earthy, homey kind of flavor, from the hearty chicken to the slightly chewy, nutty rice, and the mild smooth greens, all bound together with my creamy veloute, or gravy if you don't want to be so hoity-toity.

Now, as I alluded to earlier, it wasn't exactly easy to make.  This meal took about two hours from start to finish, but if you like to cook, that's not really a downside - more time to have fun in the kitchen.  And the cool thing is that now that we've kind of figured out how to do roulades, we can fill them with anything!  Chicken kiev, chicken cordon bleu, or chicken whatever we've got in the fridge are all possibilities now.  Some might call that student work, but if they ever said that about mine, I think I'd take it as a compliment.  After all, in the kitchen, I like to think of myself as a lifelong learner.