Comfort Food: Sausages and Chicken Wings with Shitake Mushrooms

Every winter we go to the Sundance Resort in Utah where my wife runs a feature film program at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute. She stays for most of the month but I go back to LA after a long weekend, then fly back four days later to go to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City.

When we're at the resort, my sons go skiing. I tried it a couple of times and realized it just isn't my thing. I wish I had my sons' athleticism. I don't. But I'm completely happy because Sundance is the perfect setting to cook. The condo has a simple kitchen set-up. No oven and only a 2-burner stove top, but outside the snow covered mountain is postcard perfect and inside it's nice and warm.

I do a lot of cooking at the resort, but I'm not cooking for the time we're here. I'm cooking and then freezing the food so we can have home-cooked meals when we're at the Festival, where watching 3-4 films a day means there's no time to cook. If you're lucky there's the occasional party where you can grab a mini-crab cake or some cheese and crackers.

I wanted to make comfort food. Nourishing, warm dishes that would revive us after a very long day.

Before we came up to the resort, we stopped at Macey's, one of the local supermarkets, and picked up basics: 2 Gold'n Plump organic chickens, a couple of pounds of extra lean ground beef, a package of Italian sweet sausages, and a selection of fresh vegetables.

Since all the dishes had to be able to survive freezing and reheating, everything would have a sauce or be in a soup, that would protect against freezer burn and drying out. That meant the first thing I needed to do was to make chicken stock.

CHICKEN STOCK
Cutting up the 2 chickens, I had the carcasses and wing tips for the stock. Simmered on a low boil with 16 cups of water for 1 hour, then strained to remove the bones, I had 8 cups of stock. I pulled 1 cup of meat off the bones, perfect for chicken soup. Because I needed a lot of stock, I used the now-picked-clean bones for a 2nd boil by covering the bones with water and simmering for 30 minutes. Straining out the bones gave me an additional 2 cups of stock. If possible, refrigerate the stock overnight so the fat can be removed.

Sautéed saUSAGES AND CHICKEN WINGS WITH SHIiTAKE MUSHROOMS
4 wings, washed, cut into pieces, the tips used for stock
2 Italian sweet sausages, cut into ¼” rounds
½ bunch spinach, washed, roughly chopped
1 cup shiitake mushrooms, fresh, or dried, soaked for 2 hours in hot water, stems removed
1 cup chicken stock
½ cup shiitake mushroom soaking water
2 cloves garlic, peeled, finely chopped
2 tablespoon olive oil
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

On a medium flame, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil, season with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Saute the chicken wings until brown on all sides. Remove and sauté the sausage rounds until brown, drain and remove. Pour off the excess oil.

Add the 2^nd tablespoon of olive oil and sauté the shiiake mushrooms and garlic until lightly browned. Deglaze the pan with the 2 stocks, add the spinach, then put back the wings and sausages. Simmer for 30 minutes lightly covered with a sheet of tin foil.

Serve in a bowl with soup spoons and lots of napkins because this is finger-eating food. Or, to make a more substantial entree, add pasta or rice to the bowl.

Serves 2-4. Preparation Time: 20 minutes. Cooking Time: 60 minutes.

For everything going into the freezer, I use an airtight container, like the ones made by Ziploc, and make sure that the liquid covers the meat and vegetables to avoid freezer burn.

Today in Carlsbad

A week's vacation in Carlsbad near Del Mar, along the coast of California, about 90 minutes south of Los Angeles.

My wife Michelle, our teenaged son, Michael, and his two football buddies, Chris and Spencer, we're spending the week in a 2-bedroom time share. Doing nothing more stressful than taking walks along the beach, watching dvds, reading, watching tv, and cooking. Michael and his friends will go surfing, see movies, and work out in the exercise room. Usually our other son, Frank, would come along, but he's backpacking with friends on a five week trip in Southeast Asia, taking a 10 day bus trip up the Vietnamese coast, staying in Tokyo for a couple of days, looking around Cambodia, and ending up in Thailand.

Michelle will spend most of her time reading novels. I'll do some work by email, but mostly I'll be cooking.

Driving south from LA on the 405, we stopped at several places along Bolsa Avenue in Little Saigon, the largest Vietnamese community in the United States, and shopped at two of the local supermarkets: ABC Supermarket and T&K Food Mart, picking up shiitaki mushrooms, shallots, flank steak, raw shrimp, oysters, duck legs, chicken breasts, chicken wings, a live Canadian dungeness crab, persimmons, and pomegranates.

At Lee's Sandwiches, one of a chain of Vietnamese-French sandwich and pastry shops, we picked up baguettes ($1.00/each), large butter croissants ($1.25/each), flaky, delicious large pork pate chaud ($1.25/each), danish pastries with custard and almonds ($1.25/each), and my absolute favorite bao/pork and egg steamed buns ($1.25/each).

Fresh out of the oven, the two foot long baguettes are hot and crusty. Eating a baguette on the way to the car is one of life's great pleasures; and it only cost one dollar.

I love shopping as much as cooking, but only if the ingredients are fresh and affordable. Little Saigon is my favorite place, because the food is great and the prices incredibly cheap. Oysters for sixty-nine cents each. Duck for $2.49/lb. Shiitaki mushrooms, $2.79/lb. Chicken breasts, $1.79/lb. Shallots, $.79/lb. The crab, $5.49/lb. You get the idea....

For lunch today we ate on the balcony overlooking the golf course with 2 large water traps. Enjoying a sunny afternoon in the middle of December reminds us why we love living in Southern California, even if the traffic in LA is grid-locked, the city too noisy and expensive, and the air quality usually "unhealthy". The weather is the best.

For lunch we had appetizers--dry cured black olives stuffed with feta and sauteed baguette rounds, 2 topped with homemade tapenade, 2 with slices of Australian cheddar cheese, 2 with sauteed sausage rounds w/ shallots and chopped mustard greens--and an arugula salad with carrots, home made croutons, pitted oil-cured black olives, French feta, fresh crab meat, and chopped Italian parsley with olive oil and reduced balsamic vinegar. The dessert was a plate with a pomegranate and slices of persimmon.

We watched Monday Night Football (Chicago vs. the Vikings; the Bears lost), while I cooked a dinner of chicken wings with Italian sausage rounds, chopped arugula stems, potatoes, carrots, pearl onions, garlic, and shiitaki mushrooms.

Life's good when you can take some time off. Stop the grind for a few days and sleep when you need to, cook what you want, watch a game on tv, and spend time with people you love.

Tomorrow I'll write the recipes...