Big. Plate. Chicken. (Da Pan Ji)

‘What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet’.

Shakespeare aside, I love a dish that tells you exactly what it is: Large platter fowl. Da Pan Ji. Gran plato de pollo. Enormous Dish Poultry. Perhaps by any other name the dish would smell as fragrant. Would taste as wonderfully spicy and savory. But the simplicity of the name here underlines the dishes inherent confidence: it's a big plate of chicken and I dare you not to love it. 

But the simple name also belies what this dish represents for us! For one, it speaks to Chef's plethora of new cooking skills, which include but are by no means limited to: slicing and dicing a whole chicken in a matter of a few well-placed cleaver strikes; searing meat to a golden-brown and juice-sealing perfection; and synthesizing multiple recipes into the perfect preparation for our palettes (almost always heavier on the spicy peppers, almost always lighter on the sugar). 

What the dish belies for me is much more passive and less impressive. As an American, convenience in eating is paramount: I've always liked my chicken de-boned, de-skinned, and preferably cut up into bite size pieces. The further I could be removed from the chicken as animal the better. However, as we've forayed into chicken dishes of all types, the beauty-of-the-bone has become clear. Cooking with bone-in essentially stews your chicken in a cost-free, impossibly fresh, marrow-filled broth of its own creation. While previously I might have lied to myself here, telling myself the manicured chicken did in fact taste better and was easier to eat, our (I mean Chef's) cooking journey has allowed me to put flavor, authenticity, and interactivity above all else! I've begun to revel in the challenge of eating around a sizeable joint, sifting through tinier bones in my mouth, and plucking the tiny bit of tender meat off of a wing tip. 

Without Chef's amazing cooking, and her loving support (she still takes the more cumbersome pieces, and debones a lot of fish for me), I'd be missing out on a whole other category of Chinese cooking and with it denying Chef many of the food preparations of her culture and childhood. It makes me so happy to be able to celebrate and, more importantly, enjoy with her these more challenging but altogether more rewarding dishes.