Still energetic from the nice cappuccino that Paul made at breakfast, I made us mushroom risotto for lunch using dried porcini. I don't have too much experience with risotto so it was a good little challenge.
Here are the mushrooms we bought and here they are soaking, along with the vegetable stock I made to add to the rice.
Following are the aromatic vegetables cooking and the finished dish. Overall we really liked it. I am still learning what the optimal texture is for risotto. This may have been a little thick but the flavor was great.
At dinner I made a simple chicken soup, which somehow turned out to be the best one we can remember. We used a half chicken from the Tunisian butcher who has a shop across our piazza. This little halal Italian bird was super flavorful. We have noticed that the chickens sold here are much smaller. Is it because they aren't raised with hormones, they are younger, or they are a different variety? Or a combination of these factors? The nice chicken combined with the fresh tagliatelle made for a very memorable soup.
I wish I had time to cook like this every day. Luckily there are leftovers.
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I would venture a guess that the halal chicken you had was most likely NOT younger despite the fact that it was a lot smaller. The birds in the US that you eat are slaughtered around 6 weeks of age anyway (which is really young) but the reason they're so big is because they've been bred to grow really fast. Also yeah the US birds tend to be plumped with solution to make them juicier and heavier when sold by weight. I'm pretty sure what you tasted was due to a major difference in genetics, perhaps nutrition, and how the meat was handled after the bird was slaughtered.
ReplyDelete-Beth
Also, the difference wouldn't be due to hormones, because one of the few nice things about commercial chicken in the US is that no chicken meat has been raised with hormones. You can't give hormones to poultry to make them grow faster, it's against either USDA or FDA regulations (can't remember which)...due to selection the birds grow too darn fast anyway, so adding hormones is kind of moot at this point.
ReplyDelete-Beth