When Life Hands You Vinegar, Make Bread Salad

Chard grapes from the Haut Poitou region

I'm broke. Hopefully that goes some way toward answering a question people have been asking.

What happened to all the food posts? The short answer is I haven't been eating. I've also been running my little buns for the show on Saturday, but mostly just haven't had the cash for food or batteries for the camera... Or a Metrocard. Wow.

Anyway, I scraped up some change yesterday and bought a big boneless chicken breast. I diced it then seared the chunks in a a little of Lila's famous hot rosemary oil just to get the kitchen smelling funky. I also had some juice orange peels and cloves boiling. Nice aroma combo.

Then I dumped in maybe a cup of this Haut Poitu Rose that I picked up from Patagonia on the corner of 159 and Amsterdam.

Patagonia opened about a month ago and has been a huge blessing for my wife. Jess hated the old liquor store that was here. It was kind of a dirty, bullet-proof glass encased crack den. It was also pretty dirty and they didn't really have anything there to buy except Hypnotic and Nutcracker, so I kind of see where she was coming from. But I liked the old dude. He had such soulful, wild eyes.

When Patagonia took over they set out a table with everything that was left from the old store for $2 pop. We got a few really nice Pouilly Fuisses and a nice Pouilly Fume. I also bout three bottles of this Poitu rose thinking we'd save them for Spring, but decided to crack one the other night and discovered it was vinegar. Awesome vinegar.

So, I dump a cup of this stuff on the searing chicken, and I throw in some salt and pepper and this salt-pepper-ground rosemary seasoning that Jess made a while back. I slapped in some cream and let it simmer for a while. My original plan was to add garbanzo beans, but the color was so bland, so I tossed in a can of mixed vegetables -- I told you we are broke -- and then hit the whole thing with maybe a tablespoon and a half of King Arthur wheat flour, and it thickened up so nice that I wanted to wrap it in philo and eat it in the bathtub. Instead I made Lila May a burger and adulted up the chicken with a little West African hot pepper.

When I made Lila's burger I made another little patty -- maybe a fifth of a pound and seared that while toasting some potato bread. Hit the toast with hot mustard, slapped on patty, cheese, mounds of yellow pepper rings, top toast then used the mixed-veggies can to cut the whole thing into a perfect circle.

Here's the awesome part. I cubed the left over toast , which was kind of saturated in the burger grease and had some of the cheese and mustard on it. I threw the cubes in a bowl with some diced raw onion, and then I ladled on just a little of the Haut Poitu gravy from the chicken and cracked in some coarsely ground black peppercorns tossed it and served it on a leaf of lettuce. Eat that health-crazed Republicans.

So, to sum up. When life hands you vinegar, make bread salad.