Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we build a house of lies, and burn your dreams within it. I’m your Architect and Arsonist, Jon O’Guin, and no, even I don’t understand what I’m saying. I’ve kind of lost the thread. Today’s dish is a VERY COMPLICATED RECIPE (wink) and therefore I don’t recommend you follow the link to get to the recipe, but if you must, you must. For those who aren’t must-y, let’s dig in.

Sparkling Thoughts, Feelin’ Good on A Monday

I do NOT know whether it’s the 10 hours of video games I played last week, some sort of change in my medical state, or what, but let me tell you, I am feeling better than I have in WEEKS, maybe months. I’ve got a pep in my step and a pop in my top. It could also be the half-pound of peanut butter pie I ate giving me a sugar high, and I am unwittingly mere minutes from a debilitating crash, but until it takes me, let’s ride this wave!

AS Future Jon: I don’t THINK it was a sugar-high, but it did kind of slowly seep out of me over the next couple hours, until I was back to a sort of “yeah, okay, this is fine” level.

If anything, I’m most saddened now to find myself stumbling to express my relative exuberance: so often have I felt the need to tip out the cup of my sorrows in spilled ink over my ills, that it seems poor recompense to not have some similar similes for smiles and surfeit. As I said, I cannot track from where this gentle glee springs: perhaps it is best assumed as the gestalt of the time. I am, as I don’t know if I’ve mentioned on the site before, happily vaccinated (though for a time not-quite-so-happily, as my vaccine was Johnson and Johnson, administered the DAY before the issue of blood clotting in women led to it being paused, a fact I knew posed functionally no danger to me, but which my medical anxiety tumbled over itself to gnaw at like a hyena pup at a bone), and today marks 2 weeks from the day, meaning if needed/desired, I am now free to meet with other vaccinated friends without masks. And just as I pass something of a corner for the pandemic, the Chauvin trial resolves, adding a step of hope for improvement in our systems and for our citizens. I spent the week, as noted, playing games, reading plays, and celebrating my brother’s birthday with perhaps a few too many drinks.

In short, it is a good time, and thus it falls into that frustrating failure to summarize known as the Anna Karenina principle: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.  So then, if there is nothing new with me, is there something to be said of today’s dish?

Like Trying to Hold a Cloud

If I’m being honest: not much.

Today’s recipe “comes from” the latest issue of Bon Appetit, and is specifically from an article suggesting recipes for people “sick of cooking”. Hence my joke in the opening: this is NOT a complicated recipe, despite its fairly long name. Like, end of the day: this is a 5 minute sauce and a 20 minute chicken recipe. And I couldn’t even be arsed to do THAT MUCH.

“Well, that was a sold 10 minutes of effort. Time for a 2 hour nap.”

Though, in my defense, I have an explanation about that. The BA recipe has you make your own fairly basic za’atar mix for the dish, and as a guy who buys a fair amount of za’atar blends and forgets to use them, I just decided to say “screw that”, and instead tried to doctor the blend I had closer to what the recipe intended. And sure, you guys know…about…are you kidding me?  I’m searching the site right now…Have I NEVER talked about za’atar before? Oh crap, THIS is something worth talking about!

The Za’ Lord

Alright, so za’atar is a spice mix from the Levant…oh, no. Here’s za’atar, in our post on The Levant. Shit. It looks like for some reason the apostrophe in the word makes it unsearchable, so I have no idea if I’ve explained this before. Let me dig a little deeper. OKAY, according to Google, that ONE page is the only reference I’ve made to the spice mix before today, so that’s good, I’m hopefully not repeating myself.

Alright, so za’atar is a fucking mess. Also written as zaatar, zatar, and za’tar, it’s a spice blend from the Levant. It is also an herb from the region. And by “AN Herb”, let me tell you…you remember our Carrot Curry recipe of like, a month ago? Where we bring up that in Latin, there wasn’t a distinction between Carrots and Parsnip? Oh man, are we in a fucking mess on this one. Za’atar is the Romanization of an Arabic word, which is, explicitly, conflated with the Hebrew word ezov, which if you’ve read the Torah would be rather familiar, and if you haven’t, you might recognize better by its English translation, hyssop. It shows up a lot in Leviticus, as an herb important for use in purifying rituals.

“Cool, so Za’atar means “hyssop”,” you say, interrupting me. My response, a slow shaking of my head with a rueful chuckle building into an almost hateful cackle, does not reassure you.

Because remember how I’ve ranted before about how plant species are a bitch and a half, as evinced by the fact that brassica oleracea is like, 8 different vegetables? Well, Here’s a list of plants that have been identified as za’atar by native speakers of Arabic

- Origanum vulgare, aka “normal oregano”, “wild marjoram”, or “wintersweet”

- Thymus vulgaris, aka “Thyme”

- Hyssopus officinalis, aka “actual hyssop” (which, fun fact, does not natively grow as far South as Israel)

-Origanum syriacum, aka “Bible Hyssop”, which, you might note from the Latin, is not actually a Hyssop, but an Oregano.

Is this a big problem? Actually, no. See, most scholars hold that za’atar  is kind of a family name. Like, there are a couple different kinds of oregano, and several plants that are CALLED oregano despite not being oregano. The Origanum family actually has both marjoram and oregano in it, which ARE different plants, despite the fact, as I just told you, normal oregano is sometimes called “wild marjoram”. Sometimes marjoram is sold as “sweet oregano”. And they’re both technically part of the mint family. But then again, so are rosemary, sage, catnip…Hey, I just realized that parsley is literally the ONLY herb in the song that isn’t related to the others.

I have also just discovered that A: there hasn’t been a fair in Scarborough in decades, and B: the original song doesn’t even USE Parsley, it uses Savory, which IS in the same family.

Sorry, I got distracted. The point is that za’atar can mean thyme, oregano, hyssop, and other things, AND mean a specific plant…which people normally pinpoint as origanum syriacum, since it kind of closes the yawning gap of “wait, have we been using the wrong plant?”: “We said it’s the same plant as this other word, here’s the version we say is the one that word is referring to, so boom, same plant.”

THEN, after that level of confusion, we get to where we are today, which is za’atar, the spice blend! Which consists of za’atar mixed with sesame seeds, sumac, sometimes salt, and (INSERT PERSONAL VARIATIONS HERE). Which za’atar? Ask an impertinent question like that again, and I’ll have your family kidnapped and left in a different country. Not life-threatening, just very inconvenient, scary, and expensive to fix.

I hope they enjoy they stay in Latvia. Don’t worry, 46% of the population speaks English, so it’ll be fine as long as they don’t try and oppose the GRC.

The answer to your intrusive inquiry is: most typically thyme, but whichever one the maker of the blend prefers/a mixture. So the blend is based on having some nice dried herbs that give a floral and/or woodsy flavor profile, mixed with sumac (giving an bright acidic flavor as we’ve covered in the past) and sesame seeds (a bit of fattiness/nuttiness, etc). It shows up on a bunch of stuff: roast chicken, potatoes, pitas or other flatbreads. It’s actually a spice blend I mentally connect with my own food explorations fairly deeply, as quite a few years back (probably around a decade at this point), I read about it in a magazine…I think Bon Appetit, to be honest, and was so interested in it I asked my grandmother to find me some for Christmas. At the time, I lived with no car in a semi-rural college town off of very low income, and I wasn’t really into having packages delivered for some reason. (Seriously, I have no idea why, but it’s only over the last like, 2 years that I’ve really gotten the hang of ordering things online) So it’s been something I think about as one of my first big steps into really pushing my own boundaries when cooking. (My grandma actually couldn’t find the blend, so instead she found packages of all the ingredients, and gifted them to me with a tub to store them in, and a smaller container to mix up batches of it.)

Alright, so that’s the deal with the spices. So what exactly did we do?

Riffin’ and Drippin’

The original recipe called for a mix of 1 cup panko and more-than-1-cup homemade-za’atar, made by combining 1/3 cup thyme or oregano, ½ cup sesame seeds, and ¼ cup sumac. Which isn’t a normal ratio for the recipe, but it’s tweaked since it’s supposed to be integrated into the panko, so they want to ensure the flavor of the sumac comes through, and that there’s enough sesame seeds that the breading doesn’t fall apart.

And I didn’t do that, because, honestly…felt like a bit too much work. Well, that and A: while I like Za’atar, I don’t really serve it to my mom and Nate often so I don’t know if they’d like something that strongly seasoned, and B: I couldn’t imagine using 2 cups of breading for 3 chicken cutlets. So I went with ½ cup of panko, 1/3 cup of za’atar. Or, “1/3rd cup pre-made Za’atar mixed with toasted sesame seeds and sumac.”: rather than make entirely my own blend, I just fortified an existing one.

Seen here, pre-fortification.

And other than the za’atar…the chicken portion of the recipe is all pretty straightforward. Especially if like me you cheated, and bought pre ‘thin-sliced’ chicken cutlets rather than cut and pound out your own chicken breast. Set up a flour, egg, and seasoned breading station, flip flop flup your chicken, and pop into 400 degree oil.

I don’t often take pictures of things AS they fry, because god would I hate to drop my phone in that.

I don’t LOVE deep-frying, and honestly any time I have to do this kind of quasi-deep frying, I get a step closer to buying an airfryer just to stop panicking. But after 4 minutes in the oil, the chicken is…done? I think we ran into another “this stove is old and unreliable” issue, as well as a slight under-cooking problem, where each piece I put in progressively cooked better. None of it was truly dangerous, just the thickest parts of the first batch were closer to say, 150 than 160.  

“Better” in this context also means “darker”.

It’s decent, though the za’atar is surprisingly subtle, so I think my fears about strong seasoning were unfounded, and if/when I make this again, I’ll definitely up the spice to panko ratio. But decent chicken wasn’t the only element of the dish: what about that tahini sauce?

It’s stupidly easy, and yet somehow, I screwed it up…and it still turned out fine. Tahini is, of course, ground sesame paste, and a big component of Levantine and Middle Eastern cuisine. It’s in almost all hummus, for instance. It’s nutty, and like, half oil. For this sauce, you mix it with lemon juice, olive oil, and a grated clove of garlic. It looked great for the first 10 whisks, and then suddenly kind of seized up by the 15th, getting weirdly chunky. Turns out, it’s because I only looked over the listed ingredients, and thus missed that there’s supposed to be WATER in this recipe as well to bind things together. Despite that mistake, the sauce was approved of: the ‘seizing’, while visually weird, wasn’t really something you detected texturally. It really felt (and this may sound weird) almost like a lemon-mayo: the sauce was thick like a mayo or (Kansas city) barbecue sauce, and the predominant flavor was the acidity of the lemon juice with some depth and body. It worked perfectly well as an interesting alternate dip/swipe.

I did that thing where I forgot to get natural lighting.

My overall thoughts were that everything was easy enough and tasty enough that I’d be happy to give it a try again sometime. It’s especially in my mind as an option that would be great at like, an outdoor dinner party: it’s simple enough to not stress, but different enough to draw attention. The original recipe also uses a very simple cabbage salad (consisting of thinly sliced cabbage and red onion, tossed in equal parts olive oil and lemon juice) to further bring some crisp acidity to the table, which sounds like it could be nice to try. It’s a dish that’s deceptively easy: it might FEEL like getting out 3 plates to set up the dredging station, and having to clean up the pint of frying oil later are going to be a big hassle, but really, they’re fairly simple fixes. I hope you give the recipe a try!

THURSDAY: MAYBE I SHOULDN’T HAVE GONE SO HARD TALKING ABOUT ZA’ATAR TODAY. EH, WHATEVER. I GUESS I’LL JUST FIGURE OUT SOMETHING ELSE TO TALK ABOUT. STREAMING SERVICES? I DON’T KNOW. OR…HMMMM….I JUST HAD AN IDEA. IT’S A WEIRD ONE.

MONDAY: LOOK, IF I DON’T COOK THIS BEEF SOON I’LL HAVE TO THROW IT OUT. SO HOPEFULLY KOREAN SPARE RIBS.

Recipe

Za’atar Chicken Cutlets with Tahini Sauce

Serves 3-4

Ingredients

                Tahini Sauce

1 clove garlic, grated

¼ cup lemon juice

½ cup tahini

3 tbsp olive oil

¼ cup water (optional, if you don’t want it to look weird)

                Chicken cutlets

1.25-1.5 lbs boneless skinless chicken cutlets

1 cup flour

2 eggs

½ cup panko breadcrumbs

½ cup augmented Za’atar spice blend ( ½ za’atar, 1/3 white sesame seed, remaining 1/6th sumac)

Kosher salt

3+ cups vegetable oil for frying

Preparation

1. Preheat your oil to 400 degrees in whatever size pan you’re comfortable with. You want about ½” deep oil, and enough space in the pan to be safe for at least 1 or 2 cutlets to fry at a time. While it heats, create the three dredging stations: flour first, then the two eggs, beaten, and lastly, the panko combined with the za’atar mix.  

2. If necessary, pound out the cutlets so no part is thicker than around 1/3” thick. Season with salt and  dredge through the stations, coating in flour and shaking off excess, coat in eggs and allow excess to drip off, and coat in panko, pressing to cover.

3. Fry each cutlet for 4 minutes, turning once, until cutlets are deeply golden brown. Move to paper towel-lined plate and sprinkle with salt. Return oil to 400 degrees between batches.

4. While cutlets lightly cool, make tahini sauce: just whisk together all ingredients, and season with salt.

5. Serve cutlets warm with sauce.