Jeff, the A.D.D. Chef

This is the perfect A.D.D. recipe. It cooks in the oven for about three hours (so you can hyperfocus on something else for awhile), it requires almost no skills, it requires no more than three ingredients and there are always leftovers that can be used to make another meal.

INGREDIENTS

• One ham such as the Butt Portion. Seven lbs. will feed about four people.
  
• 1 1/4 cups Brown Sugar
• 1/4 cup Dijon Mustard (or other mustard of your choice like Zatarain’s Creole Mustard)
  

DIRECTIONS

1. Remove the ham from its packaging including the little plastic piece that is inserted over the bone (it resembles the little plastic piece used in a pizza box).
2. Place the ham in a baking pan. The pan should have a depth of at least one inch since the cooking process will create juices.
   
3. Heat your oven to 325 degrees F.
4. Cooking time is based on 20 minutes per pound. This ham was 7.5 pounds so total cooking time was 150 minutes, or 2 1/2 hours. To be on the safe side, add an additional 30 minutes. This will assure that the meat closest to the bone gets cooked.
5. Mix all of the glaze ingredients (just brown sugar and mustard) when you are just about ready to put on the glaze. You should have something like this:
   
6. At the 2 1/2 hour mark the glaze goes on.
7. Before putting on the glaze, use a very sharp knife to lightly score the ham. You don’t have to apply much pressure, the ham will split open a bit by itself.
   
8. Now you are ready to put on the glaze. I spoon it on beginning from the top of the ham. Your glazed ham will look like this:
   
9. Put the ham back in the oven for at least 30 minutes.
10. When you take out the ham let it rest for about 10 minutes. You can then transfer it to a platter.
11. If you like, you can pour all of the drippings into a pot to make gravy. I scrape off any caramelized sugar that is in the bottom of the pan and put that in the gravy too. Stir it continually with a whisk while it boils. Do this for about five minutes. To thicken the gravy you can whisk in a few tablespoons of flour.
    

VARIATIONS

You can use these two links to find alternate “glaze” recipes.

1. Mustard and … ??
2. Brown sugar and … ??

This is a simple meal that tastes great every single time. You can vary the ingredients - making it spicy, if you like - and it still comes out great. And you can hyperfocus on other activities for thirty minutes at a time and this meal still comes out great.

INGREDIENTS

• Approximately 3-4 lbs of chicken parts such as breasts and drumsticks. Rinse them off in cold water
• 3 tablespoons of oil (vegetable oil is fine)
• 5 tablespoons of soy sauce (I use low sodium Kikkomann Soy Sauce)
• 2 tablespoons of brown sugar
• 2/3 cup of water
• 2 tablespoons of chopped garlic
• 1 1/2 tablespoons of cornstarch dissolved in water
• Optional: 1 tablespoon of hot chili sauce (I like to use Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce…warning…use sparingly)

DIRECTIONS

1. Heat up the oil in your wok. Add the sugar and stir until it turns into an almost syrupy consistency.
2. Stir in the soy sauce.
3. Using a pair of tongs, grab a piece of chicken, roll it around in the sauce and place it on one side of the wok. Do this with the remaining pieces so that they have a light brown color.
4. Add the water and garlic. If you like, you can add that tablespoon of hot chili sauce.
5. Bring it to a boil and then turn it down to a simmer. Cover and forget.
6. Total cooking time is approximately 1 hour. At least once during the cooking process, move the pieces around in the wok so that they all get a chance to be immersed in the sauce.

NOTES

After about 45 minutes the meat will start to pull away from the drumsticks. That’s good! Keep it cooking…give it the full hour.

Take out the chicken parts and turn the heat back up so that the remaining sauce starts to boil. Let it boil at least 3 minutes. Then add the cornstarch/water mixture, stir till the sauce thickens and pour it over the chicken parts.

You might want to serve this with white rice so that you can pour that sauce all over the rice.

If you ever struggled to make Chinese food that tastes just like the food you eat in your local restaurant and failed at the attempt, then you MUST purchase The Shun Lee Cookbook by Michael Tong. So many of the dishes that we have come to know and love - Dry Sautéed String Beans, Sliced Chicken with Broccoli, Kung Pao Shrimp - are in this book and were created at the Shun Lee restaurants in New York. When I purchased the book, the very first recipe I tried was Sliced Chicken and Broccoli, the ONLY thing my younger daughter will eat in a Chinese restaurant.¹ I had tried numerous times to try to cook this dish and I failed miserably. I could not duplicate the silky melt-in-your-mouth texture of the chicken until I got this book.

Sliced Chicken and Broccoli Cooking in the Wok

If you’ve ever wondered how to create this seemingly simple dish or something a bit more exotic, like Kung Pao Shrimp, then you need this book!

1. To be accurate, she eats only the chicken…not the broccoli. [↩]

I’m not sure if the first Chinese chefs were A.D.D. but I can tell you that nothing satisfies my A.D.D.ness like cooking Chinese food. First, it has many small, manageable tasks: chop up this, cut up that, measure out a quantity of that liquid. Second, it uses some special tools: wok and cover, cleaver, special serving plates. Third, it requires some esoteric knowledge: where to purchase ingredients like Shao Shing Cooking Wine and how to stir fry vegetables so that they are soft and firm.¹ The best part is that all of these ingredients and tools come together in a three-minute lightning round that is centered on the all-mighty wok.

Heat up the wok. Add the oil. Is it hot? Good! Add minced garlic. Do you smell the aroma? Beautiful! Now add your cooking wine/salt/sugar mixture. Listen to that sizzle! Can you detect the wine’s fragrance? Excellent! Add more ingredients. Grab the bowl of marinating chicken. Scan the kitchen for the broccoli. There it is. Toss it in. Stir it together. Watch the sauce thicken and the broccoli turn bright green. One more minute and….that’s it! Three minutes have passed and you are done! You’ve created order out of chaos,² a/k/a Sliced Chicken and Broccoli. You’ve satisfied your A.D.D. need for multiple activities while fulfilling your other A.D.D. need: sharing the food - and fun - with friends and family.

1. That only seems like a contradiction but if you’ve eaten broccoli or snow peas that still retain a small crunch and are deliciously soft as you chew them, then you know that this is not a contradiction after all. [↩]
2. However, see: Conservation of Chaos [↩]

The first time I discovered this chicken - a Perdue Oven Stuff Roaster - I had three work-related deadlines hanging over me which propelled me into a state of inaction¹, a sort of paralysis that afflicts A.D.D.ers. (See: Getting Beyond A.D.D. Paralysis.)

I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with this chicken. I kind of looked at the instructions, scratched my head and then grabbed the garlic salt. I figured you can’t get healthier than that. Garlic - keeps away polio and vampires² - and salt - brings out the best of most any food item³ In addition, both of these are part of that all important spice pyramid (analogous to the Food Pyramid). The other members of the spice pyramid are pepper, ketchup and hot sauce.)

After removing the wrapper, I found that the chicken’s innards were inside all nicely wrapped. I took that and tossed it. I then rinsed the bird with cold water and placed it on a platter for a moment so some of the water could drip off. Then I sprinkled garlic salt all over it. Actually, it was more like a blizzard. I turned the chicken this way and that way to cover as much of the outside with the garlic salt.

I then heated up my 3-burner Weber grill. After I pinned the needle on the grill thermometer, I turned off the middle burner, placed the chicken in the middle with the temperature pop-up thingie facing up, and then adjusted the temperature to bring it to about 325 degrees F. Then I basically ignored it and just checked periodically that the temperature remained kind of steady. About one and a half hours later, the result was this browned chicken with an extraordinarily crunchy skin. When I sliced it open, the meat was so moist that even the breast meat tasted good. (I prefer dark meat.) The kids loved it and I now had the perfect A.D.D. zone-out dinner to make. Garlic-salt it, bake it and forget it! A.D.D. nirvana…available in the poultry department of your local supermarket!

1. Hmmm….can you be “propelled” into “inaction”, i.e., an action to get into non-action? Sheesh…talk about logical conundrums. [↩]
2. Note this interesting snippet from Wikipedia: “A Christian myth considers that after Satan left the Garden of Eden, garlic arose in his left footprint, and onion in the right.” I can ignore this myth. I’m Jewish. See: Garlic [↩]
3. There are exceptions. It’s terrible with milk. Yecch. [↩]