Tag: carrot

After looking online and not finding a chicken and dumplings recipe I liked, I tried this:

1. Saute an almost-mirepoix of shallots, celery, and carrots in olive oil; add three cubed chicken thighs and chicken stock.

2. Mix 1 1/4 cup flour with 1 tsp salt, 1 tbsp baking powder, and one egg; slowly add milk until it becomes a dough and loses its stickiness.

3. Season your chicken with pepper, tarragon, onion powder, garlic powder, soy sauce, and worcestershire. Add one can cream of celery soup and a bay leaf.

4. Add the dough in teaspoonfuls; cover. After five minutes, remove cover and flip.

Simple, no? This turned out really, really awesome.

After seeing this completely and totally awesome page for minestrone linked off of wikipedia, I felt it was my patriotic duty to make minestrone. After all, I do live in Las Vegas, and anybody who lives here knows that italian restaurants outnumber any other kind of restaurant by a factor of approximately thirty-seven to three. I especially liked the basic assumption- that you can pretty much just buy seasonal vegetables, completely at random, throw them all together, and make some soup. I mean, you basically don't need to know how to do anything. How could this possibly go wrong?

So I went to Sunflower Market, since they sell local produce, and bought twelve of every vegetable they had. If you could screw up minestrone, I was going to figure out how. I came home, got a big stock pot out, and started my soffrito- a fancy word to say I rendered the fat out of some bacon and then threw in some onions, leeks, and shallots.

I also didn't have pig trotters or marrow bones or anything like that, so for thickening I waited until my 'soffrito' was pretty much sweated, then threw in some flour, like a roux. Then I spent TWO. HOURS. cutting up vegetables and throwing them in. I cubed the turnips. I chopped up the zucchini, summer squash, celery root, spinach leaves, potatoes, and carrots. It looked like I was carving up the grisly aftermath of a war against the vegetables, a war which I handily won. All of it drowning in six cans of chicken broth and a pitcher of water, with a sprig of rosemary (I fished that out after everything started smelling like rosemary), a bay leaf, and a parmesan crust. Then, because I was pretty much throwing in everything I had, I put in two cans of kidney beans and a cup of orzo. By this point I was in such a rut that I might have diced my children and thrown them in, had they wandered into the kitchen.

It cooked for HOURS. Three and a half hours. I felt like a witch, sitting there and stirring my massive cauldron of stuff. And then something magical happened. It started to smell like delicious.

So, basically, you'd have to try way harder than I did to screw up minestrone.

I loves my spicy foods. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of my four year old son, so there have to be compromises made.

Or do there? Southeast Asian cooking styles have been around for a long time, balancing capsaicin-induced heat with sweetness.

First, I chopped up a couple of center-cut pork chops into long strips, and seasoned them with black pepper and red pepper. While those sauteed in butter, I put approximately two cups of cranberry juice and one cup of white wine in a saucepan to reduce. Finally, I pulled out the frozen california mix (broccoli, cauliflower, and carrot) and steamed it.

Once the pork got going, I poured some sirracha on it, browned it, and set it off to the side. Then, I cooked the steamed vegetables (with a little more pepper and sirracha) in the same skillet. Finally, I reintroduced the pork, and poured the cranberry reduction (now about 2/3 its original volume) back over the top.

It was like a Taiwanese Thanksgiving. I wholeheartedly endorse this type of cooking- just make sure not to go over the top with either sweet or spicy.

While doing a rush dinner, I decided to take some very basic cooking applications and try to come up with something fast and unique. Here's the cooking method and the result.

First, I sweated a mirepoix (carrots, celery, and onions chopped thin) in butter over low heat while I halved some chicken tenders and flattened them (with a plastic potato masher). After giving them a once-over in pepper, kosher salt, a crushed red pepper, and some garlic and onion powder, I spread them evenly around the skillet (where the onions had gone clear).

Since the tenders had been flattened, I was afraid to lose moisture, so I covered them and let each side cook on low for about seven minutes apiece (until white). Finally, I got out the bear of honey and spread a thin glaze across the tops of the chicken, raised the heat to high, and scorched the honey on both sides. It came out tasty, with a good balance between spicy and sweet; it was a little too spicy for LittleRoq (I actually used three crushed red peppers in my initial run) but can be toned down without losing much flavor.

The balance in this one is between red pepper and honey; it would also work well with a bit of smoky sweet paprika in the initial spice mix. I'll have to delve into honey-pepper-paprika more fully in future unrecipes.