Tag: chicken

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.

So tart-on wanted me to make her enchiladas, out of Mexicans, for eating. Not having any idea how to make them, I read four or five recipes online for common ingredients (this is how I research all recipes), then promptly forgot everything I read and just started cooking.

I started with some canola oil and about four cloves of garlic, minced. To this I added about two tablespoons of ground chiles (dried red, ancho, and california pods), paprika, chili powder (a lot), cumin, and onion powder. After this started to smell like enchiladas, I browned two chicken thighs on both sides, then poured in two cups of chicken broth and put on the cover for about fifteen minutes (on medium high).

After the chicken was cooked, I shredded it with a fork while the chicken broth reduced on high. Then I pulled the tortillas out of the oven (what? Where did the tortillas come from? I forgot to mention, I put some in the oven at 170 so they wouldn't break when I tried to roll them) and rolled them around the chicken before I put them in a square glass baking dish.

By the time I filled the dish and set the oven for 350 degrees, the chicken broth was reduced to the point where I could start making a sauce. I added two cans of tomato sauce, some garlic powder, some more chili powder, some dried parsley, about two tablespoons of cocoa powder (heck yes), and a little pepper. The chicken broth was salty enough so that I didn't need to add any salt.

After the sauce all came together, I poured it into the baking dish, covered the top with cheddar, and put it into the oven for half an hour. This is awesome. Eat enchiladas. Every day, until you die.

Ingredients:

• 1 pkg of stew meat, browned.
• 2 california chile pods
• 6-10 small red peppers.
• 2 pasilla (dried ancho) chile pods.
• 6-10 small arbol chili pods.
• 3 jalapenos
• 1 can tomato sauce
• white pepper, to taste
• 1 tbsp chili powder
• garlic salt
• onion powder
• celery seed
• cumin
• 2 cans beef consomme
• 1 can chicken broth
• 1 bottle newcastle
• 1 cup ground tortilla strips

After browning the stew meat, I threw it in a crock pot along with all the dried peppers (ground), the tomato sauce, the beef consomme, the chicken broth, and the beer. I ran the jalapenos through the blender, and added them as well as the remainder of the ingredients. Easy, right? Other than running everything through the blender, the only work is browning the stew meat and occasionally stirring (I used a whisk as well). After that, I left it to cook all day- with the occasional taste and spice/salt adjustment. How will it turn out? We'll see, after tonight.

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.

Last night, I decided to do away with a bunch of leeks by whipping up some sort of soup with them, mostly because I'd wanted to try vichysoisse for months. I can now say that, whatever it is I made last night, I ate it and it was fantastic.

 

• 3 leeks, chopped fine
• 6 red potatoes, cut thinly
• 2 cans of chicken broth
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
• 4 pieces bacon
• 1 pint cream
• garlic salt
• pepper to taste
• 1/4 tsp celery seed
• 1/4 cup mild cheddar, shredded
• 1/2 cup romano, grated
• 1/4 cup portobello mushrooms, chopped
• 1/4 cup butter

Of course, I decided to make Chicken Katsu, because it's delicious and wonderful. It all starts with chicken thighs, which I cut into manageable chunks and egg-battered with flour and panko. A few minutes in the deep fryer, and they came out delicious.

Actual people who have lived in Hawaii tell me it's not the chicken, but the sauce that makes things work. The recipe I was using has a pretty complicated sauce, and of course I added random amounts of everything instead of paying attention and got something a little too clovey.

Why did I use a recipe and not invent something myself? This time, it was because I have absolutely no clue about what the Hawaiians eat. But make the chicken part. It's fantastic. Next time, I'm eating it with barbecue sauce.

I was seriously in need of some sour cream yesterday, so I browsed the internet for a couple beef stroganoff recipes and generated something that turned out to be pretty darn fantastic.

After slicing a half-pound sirloin steak into small strips, I dredged them in flour, garlic salt, and pepper, then sauteed them in butter along with a quarter onion (diced). I added a couple dashes of Worcestershire and soy sauce (that combo is my secret weapon for meat dishes). After the onion was transparent, I added some sliced mushrooms, a shot of apple cognac (any brandy would be fine), and half a can of chicken broth. Once the whole mixture thickened, I added half a cup of sour cream, reduced the heat to medium, and let the sauce thicken.

Over buttered egg noodles, this one was pretty fantastic. There was just a hint of the apple flavor from the cognac. If I do this again, I will wait to add the steak until after the onions are done; it certainly wasn't overcooked, but I would have liked it to be a little less cooked anyways.

Normally, when I cook, I like to find a recipe online, then cook something completely different. That way, every time I make something, it's an organic, unique recipe, and different whenever I make it. The few times a recipe comes out perfect, of course, I prepare it the same way; however, usually I'm trying to find a new way to make food.

And so today's recipe comes into play. I'd been browsing the chicken recipes in the wikibooks cookbook, and found my way to a recipe for Garlic Lemon Chicken. The thing that drew my attention was a Lebanese sauce named toum. So, after glancing at both recipes for about half a second, I was off.

The first goal was to make the toum. I knew that it involved garlic, olive oil, salt, and lemon juice; it was only about halfway through the recipe that I realized it required the oil and lemon juice to be added to the macerated garlic-salt mixture in small doses, to increase the volume. I'd also added cayenne to the recipe; the first taste, before I thinned it out with the garlic and oil, was like a garlic nuclear bomb.

I started by shucking two full bulbs of garlic and running them through the processor, then adding salt, pepper, cayenne, sesame oil (I was out of olive), and lemon juice, until I had a mighty bowl of deadly garlic paste. At this point in the recipe, my plan was to saute the chicken breasts, slather them with this liquid kryptonite, and then braise them for a scary long time.

Things changed when I noticed that the original chicken recipe called for a completely different marinade, and for the toum to be used as a dipping sauce for something else entirely. Funny how the little details kick in at the last minute. To make up for the lack of moisture (I doubted that the toum would keep the chicken moist during a long cooking time), I deglazed the skillet I cooked the chicken in with a can of chicken broth and some gin. I didn't bother reducing because (1) I needed moisture, and (2) I wanted to find a way to weaken the gargantuan garlic heat in the toum. In order to justify my decision, I found a recipe online labeled Shish Taouk Toum, which involves making chicken kebabs after marinating in a liquid that included (a tiny amount of) toum. Alright. Somebody made chicken and let it touch the Garlic Death. I was treading in somewhat charted territory. Onwards.

I put the chicken breasts into the oven, slathered with toum, and poured in my deglazing liquid, setting the temperature to 250 degrees. My plan was to make the chicken, taste it, and see if it was too strong to eat. At this point, if it were indeed too strong, I'm pretty sure my plans to fix it involved making rice.

After a couple hours on low heat, I opened the oven. The house smelled like garlic for three days. We eventually served it over orzo. Not the best garlic chicken ever, but not bad either.

One of the most interesting things one will find on an internet bender is that throughout the world one will find poultry to be pretty much canonical wherever Christmas is celebrated.

In most of the western world, poultry is defined as turkey. However, children in Japan apparently wait in long lines outside of their local KFC in order to get a bucket of fried chicken. Ukraine families celebrate with a gigantic, twelve course meal in the name of the twelve apostles, devoid of any meat except for fish, while children wait for Father Frost to visit their homes. In the United Kingdom, duck or goose may replace roast turkey, depending on the number of guests.

Before the turkey was introduced to the UK in the 1700s, the traditional medieval dish was either peacock or boar. In modern Hawaii, it isn't uncommon to see Japanese influences such as turkey teriyaki. The Christmas chook, meaning chicken or fowl, is a common sight in Australia.

Obviously, one of the things we're going to have to delve into during this month is the preparation of poultry dishes, in celebration of Christmas tradition and fantastic cuisine. We're looking forward to it.

We've known for bazillions of years that wine is subjective, but it's interesting to learn that white chocolate goes well with caviar, that Slim Jims are made of mechanically separated chicken, that there's a drink made of bird's nest, or that you can eat fish poop. I feel a bit patriotic about my regional specialty, but then again, that's pretty normal, in a world where disgusting vegetarian clones of the already amorphous chicken nugget is sold outside of the endless army of chicken restaurants that all want to look the same. It can be cheaper to make your own breakfast foods, not to mention healthier in a day and age where butter flavoring gets abused and trans fats take all the blame.