Fry Vegetables in a Dirty Skillet
I fried some delicious chicken thighs last Friday. By noon Saturday they were gone. My boyfriend and I ripped the last two straight from their brazier in the refrigerator and ate them barefoot in the kitchen without plates or cutlery. A couple of hours later, I opened the refrigerator and found the pan we had left behind.
By any measure, it was a dirty frying pan. This was the “before” in the Cascade ad: what had to be dealt with, cleaned up, disinfected. But when I looked at the frying pan, which I forgot to put cold chicken in my mouth in a hurry, I did not see anything that needed to be cleaned. I saw the potential.
When you fry a piece of meat, a certain amount of food remains. This material usually consists of highly flavored fat, collagen and a small amount of water, collectively referred to as “droplets”. Drippings taste very good, so some people use them to make sauces and gravies, while others tuck a bunch of vegetables underneath particularly wet pieces of poultry. Wiping and rinsing the contents of this skillet would be a waste of fat and flavor, but separating the schmalts from the cold collagen and storing it for later use would be a pain in my ass.
Instead of doing something out of this, I heated the skillet to get the drops moving, then doused them with a little asparagus and toasted the stems until they were tender crunchy. It turned out to be very good, perfectly seasoned and seasoned asparagus. The remaining chicken stacks acted as both cooking oil and sauce, coating each stem with a rich, meaty and roasted flavor.
The same maneuver can be done with any vegetable. Potatoes are an obvious choice, but asparagus surprised me with how good they are, so don’t underestimate the long green guys. (I bet the onion cut into quarters will do.) To make vegetables baked in a dirty skillet, you will need:
- Frying pan with a fair amount of food leftovers.
- One or more cooked vegetables are enough to fill the frypot (see this guide for how to cook them ).
Remove the skillet from the refrigerator and remove any pieces that might burn, such as greens, meat, or cooked vegetables. Set the oven to 425 ℉ and place a dirty baking sheet inside to warm up while the oven preheats. After about five minutes, stir the drops to see if they have melted, and once they have melted, remove the pan from the oven and toss the cooked vegetables into the water. Return the dish to the preheated oven and bake the vegetables until tender and crisp around the edges (see this post for approximate times). Eat the vegetables and repeat on another part of the plant until the drops run out of the pan, or wipe them off with bread. (The droplets are especially tasty when spread over toast.) Then – and only then – should the brazier be washed.