Vinegar-braised chicken with farro and watercress

From Alison Roman’s Dining In.

Rarely do I cook something that is virtually unrecognizable as the dish in the (admittedly food-styled) glossy images accompanying the recipe. This isn’t really a humblebrag — for one thing, I cook a lot, and for another, I’m talking about a passing resemblance.

But this dish looked nothing like the cookbook photos, and honestly I’m not sure how one might achieve the result pictured in the cookbook following the recipe as written.

I’ll paint you a word picture: the cookbook photo showed bronzed, bone-in, skin-on chicken parts resting atop a bed of watercress and perfectly toothsome toasted farro. My finished dish: monochrome; chicken parts with shrunken, flabby skin, nearly submerged in the cooking liquid; swollen grains of farro beneath.

The discrepancies were jarring. Why do I care? I don’t know, maybe it is a point of pride, maybe it’s just unsettling when expectations and reality are so mismatched. The recipe wasn’t bad — in fact, it was very good. But I can’t help but think it would have tasted better if it had looked more like the picture (psychoanalysis aside, on a practical level, at least there would have been less cooking liquid to deal with). Next time, I’d use way less water (maybe 2 cups), and simmer it for less time, and I think that’d get me in the realm of resemblance.

Elsewhere in cooking projects, I made chicken in a pan (great title, right? It’s basically this method, which is highly adaptable to whatever flavors you’d like to use), and knock-off Life Alive swami bowls (no need to pay $10 for boiled vegetables with sauce! You can make it yourself!).