Don’t be chicken about using poultry for flavorful dishes

Time to chicken out again. Pretty versatile stuff, chicken, susceptible to all kinds of improvements. I can’t remember where I saw this or heard about it – I jotted it down on a piece of paper and just found it in a pile, so I thought I ought to try that.

The original recipe called for four boneless breasts, which makes it cook very quickly, and you might like that. But I am one of those people who really likes to cook things with the bones in because the flavor is better, and besides, I like to buy locally raised chicken, and it is, of course, less expensive if you buy whole chickens and cut them up yourself. Cutting up a chicken is not hard at all. Kitchen shears make it very simple. So I did a little fryer to try this, and I thought it was very good.

There has been some media noise about avian flu and chickens. I went to the Windsor Fair this year and I saw that the Maine Department of Agriculture is putting out a lot of information for farmers and consumers alike about the avian flu. As it turns out, the very day I tried the recipe, I got a package in the mail from the National Chicken Council (which also includes the turkey people and egg folks.) They all are, of course, scared to death that we all are going to stop eating chicken and poultry because of our fear of bird flu.

The good news is that you can’t catch bird flu by eating properly handled and cooked poultry. The bad news is that the big poultry industry still wants us to approach chicken handling as if we were about to do open heart surgery, what with washing our hands for 20 seconds after handling the chicken and scrubbing all the surfaces that the chicken touched.

Essentially they are passing off to us the responsibility for getting the chicken safely into our systems instead of working to make sure the supply is safe to begin with. Why we put up with this, I am not sure. Well, actually, I do know: We want cheap chicken, so they have to raise chicken in huge numbers and process it quickly with as many shortcuts as they can make, then truck it thousands of miles to Maine.

So I prefer to eat chicken raised fairly close by, by a farmer who can actually count his flock and would actually notice if one fell sick. And who processes them by the hundreds instead of the tens of thousands. What I really want to do is to raise my own chickens or maybe share a flock with a neighbor. That way, I wouldn’t feel like I had to put on scrubs and line my kitchen with stainless steel in order to enjoy chicken. Grumble, grumble.

OK. Enough of that. Here is your recipe. Because mustards vary, by the way, taste the sauce mixture to see if it is snappy or sweet enough for you. Add more mustard or honey accordingly.

Honey Mustard Chicken

4 boneless chicken breasts

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 cup chicken gravy

4 tablespoons Dijon-style mustard

3 teaspoons honey

Salt and pepper to taste

Sear the chicken on both sides in the olive oil over a medium-high heat for about five minutes. Mix together the gravy, mustard and honey, cover the chicken with the sauce, and simmer an additional 8 to 12 minutes until it is done. (If you choose to cook bone-in chicken, plan on simmering or baking it for closer to 40 minutes.)

Looking for … queries! OK, summer’s over, and we need some questions here. What recipe could you use? Send queries or answers to Sandy Oliver, 1061 Main Road, Islesboro 04848. E-mail: tastebuds@prexar.com. For recipes, tell us where they came from. List ingredients, specify number of servings and do not abbreviate measurements. Include name, address and daytime phone number.