Braised Baby Bok Choy with Leftover Chicken

Wednesday June 4

This year one of my garden experiments was baby bok choy (Mei Qing Choi), and it has been quite a success. The rows of little plants have been coming along so beautifully we decided to thin them out and eat the smallest, tenderest ones (pour encourager les autres).

But we began the night before, by preparing the carcass of yesterday's roast chicken, which was going to provide both protein and seasoning for the next night's dish. We picked all the meat from the bones, and put it on a plate. We put said bones in the unwashed roasting pan, with all its luscious brown bits congealed in the bottom, added a few celery tops, a bay leaf, and enough water to barely cover the layer of bones, and simmered it all very gently on top of the stove for about an hour and a half. Then we lifted out the bones (when they cooled a little, we picked them over again for any precious remaining chicken meat), poured the liquid through a sieve, and let the resultant crockful of broth and plateful of chicken sit in the fridge overnight.

About 15 minutes before dinnertime, Barbara went out and picked a basketful (about a pound) of bok choy, cutting each plant from its root as a single bunch. She rinsed them carefully, getting all the sand out from between the stalks, and where a plant was larger than the others, cut it in half lengthwise.

In the meantime, Holt had skinned a spoonful of luscious chicken fat off the top of the crock of broth. He put it in a big skillet with a couple of tablespoons of butter and a cupful of the chicken broth, brought it to a simmer, then added the baby bok choy. They only took 5 minutes to be tender and done, and we arranged them around the rims of two warmed plates.

Then we threw all the chicken meat into the pan with the remaining sauce. Once it heated up and the sauce reduced, we piled the chicken into the middle of the plates, and anointed it and the bok choy with a drizzle of sesame oil. A sprinkle of salt and white pepper, and it was a perfect dish: fresh, tender, and slightly Asian-fusion.

Of course, you don't need to go through all the steps with the chicken carcass, if you don't happen to have a chicken carcass. You could always use just plain chicken broth, substituting an extra tablespoon of butter for the chicken fat. In fact, you could skip the chicken and substitute, say, sautéed pork strips, or scallops, or whatever other protein appeals to you. In fact, this would have been excellent with the smoked duck, if we'd had any left (which we so totally didn't).