Budget cooking: chicken n’ buckwheat

Hello, all,

For my next trick, I will take ordinary chicken legs and transform them into something delicious. I learned this recipe when I was living in Belarus. The lady of the house where I was staying, a utilitarian cook, would rotate five dishes for our weekly menu: chicken n’ buckwheat was one of them.  There’s nothing difficult here at all, in fact, it’s an incredibly lazy way to make a full meal in one pan.  Four ingredients (meal serves 2)!  Add some kind of veggies to round it out.  If you really want to be Belarusian about it, I’ll post a recipe for a Slavic salad below.

Ingredients

2 full chicken legs (that’s drumsticks and thighs, ladies and gentlemen!)

2 cups of buckwheat groats (it’s buckwheat before it’s been turned into flour or soba noodles)

Olive oil (I will NEVER, EVER write EVOO on this blog)

Salt and pepper

Recipe

Heat your olive oil in large pan over medium-high heat.  Liberally season your chicken with salt and pepper.  Once the pan is hot, drop the chicken in skin side down and sear.  Resist the urge to flip it, just let the skin brown for five minutes.  Shake the pan to keep it from sticking. Once the skin is light brown, turn the chicken over and cook for another five to seven minutes.

Add the buckwheat groats to your pan and enough water to cover them, plus another quarter inch.  The idea here is that you don’t want to drown them, but you don’t want to add more water later.  Turn your heat down to medium and let the groats/chicken cook for 12-15 minutes.  Resist the urge to eat directly from the pan (I just did).

The beauty of this recipe is that the fat that rendered off the chicken during the cooking process flavors and salts the buckwheat.  It’s also really convenient as a dish that can be cooked passively – just do the initial cooking and let it finish on its own.

Some things to take away from this recipe:

1.  Try new grains. Buckwheat is not something that’s heavily rotated in the American diet. Yet it’s low in saturated fat, low in sodium, and really high in fiber.  Try it, then try other grains like amaranth, barley, and quinoa.  They’re not so scary, I promise.

2.  If you’re strapped for time, or just lazy, cook everything in one pan.  Do an initial sear on your meat/poultry so that it retains juices, then finish cooking it at a lower temperature.  Add a grain to the pan and water and you’re set.

3.  You don’t need a hundred ingredients to make a good meal. Just use quality, healthful ingredients.  I will harp on this all day.

The quintessential Slavic salad also involves relatively few ingredients and highly depends on what’s available from your dacha (country house).  Here’s one variation that’s particularly good with chicken n’ buckwheat:

Ingredients

1 big, juicy tomato

1 small pickling cucumber

A few sprigs of dill and parsley

1/2 cup of sour cream

Salt and pepper

Recipe

Dice the cucumber, throw into a serving bowl.  Cut the tomato in your hand over the bowl, so that no juices escape on the cutting board.  Mince dill and parsley, toss in.  Bind together with sour cream.  Salt and pepper to taste.

So on a night when you really don’t feel like cooking, but don’t want to pay to go out, throw this meal together.  It’s easy, it’s nutritious, and it’s cheap.  Any interest in learning more about Slavic cuisine?  I have an entire arsenal of recipes if people are interested.

More to come if you want it,

Jen