Taste&Create: Chicken Creole

It's time for this month's Taste&Create! This month, I was paired with Becky of Baking and Cooking, A Tale of Two Loves. I went through her archives and found that her very first recipe, "Sunday Chicken Creole," is exactly the type of thing I would do if I knew anything about 1-pot cooking, which I don't. But looking over the recipe, I was pretty convinced that I'd love it: peppers, tomatoes, onions and garlic. I mean, that's how I cook. So I'm pretty sure this is at the last minute (or perhaps even late--which I feel bad about, but my classes are INSANE this semester; I think I'll be not doing Taste and Create for the next two months).

So basically, this is an extremely easy meal. And people around me are talking too much for me to type (and I'm in a huge hurry, as usual), so here's a recipe and some pictures!

RECIPE: Chicken Creole

adapted very slightly from Baking and Cooking, A Tale of Two Loves

Ingredients:

-4 large chicken breasts

-3 tbsp olive oil

-2 cups chopped red onion

-2 small green peppers, chopped

-4 sticks celery, chopped

-5 cloves garlic

-2 tbsp chili powder

-2 tbsp paprika

-1/2 tbsp smoked paprika

-2 28-oz cans whole tomatoes in puree (Cento's San Marzano tomatoes are in puree; I found that they generally didn't say what the tomatoes were in unless you looked closely at the ingredients. If you can't find them in puree, drain the liquid and use a can of tomato sauce.)

-1/2 cup white wine

Instructions:

1. Chop the peppers, onions and celery. Put them and the minced garlic in a large stockpot with the olive oil and saute for three minutes.

2. Add the paprika, smoked paprika and chili powder and cook for another three minutes.

3. Put in the wine, tomatos, black pepper and chicken. Simmer for 35 minutes until the chicken is cooked thoroughly.

4. Serve over rice.

Step 2!

Also step 2! This smelled so good. I'm just discovering a love for paprika--it's so exciting!

Step 3: It's almost done! Yay!

You can't even see the rice. I should have made more, but this was delicious! I was happy with how it came out.

I tend to chop everything up and mix it together. It worked pretty well for this. The chicken was super tender and all the flavors had fully permeated everything. It was delicious!

Hah! Simple. Dinner that takes less than an hour, and it's so easy for a weeknight when you don't have a lot of time. Which I don't. And even the blog post didn't take much time! YAY! Mike and I are off to see Cabaret now, so go check out Becky's blog--she's got some great recipes on there! (She's got bacon cupcakes in there somewhere, too!)

I hope everyone has some exciting plans for the weekend! I'll be doing statistics homework and writing papers, so I'm glad I'm at least starting it out on a good note!

PGG's Panzanella

It seems like forever ago that I told you all to buy the Poor Girl Gourmet cookbook. Have you bought it yet? Because if you have, then this post is probably completely unnecessary, but if you HAVEN'T then I'm sharing my new favorite recipe with you. (I'm not quite sure if it's my absolute favorite, but it's definitely up there.)

Panzanella is a bread salad based in the idea of "cucina povera"--poor cooking. This also includes things like Minestrone, so I'm pretty sure Italians are just geniuses when it comes to cooking with not much in the way of funds. This is the recipe that I spent about an hour staring at after I bought Poor Girl Gourmet, trying to figure out exactly how it worked (bread salad? really?) and what "ricotta salata" was (and whether my grocery store would carry it).

There are lots of reasons to make Panzanella for dinner. Have some day-old bread? Excellent. Don't feel like actually cooking? Great! Leftover chicken? Wonderful. Tomato/basil/mint plants going crazy? Perfect. In the mood for a light dinner? Well, here you go! Seriously. Any excuse is good enough and this is the easiest thing in the world to make and toss together. If you don't have day old bread lying around, there's probably a rack of day-old baked goods at your grocery store. There isn't one at mine, of course, but that didn't stop me--I just sliced it up fairly thick and toasted it first. (I mean, toasting is sort of the same thing as making bread go slightly stale really quickly. Sorry if I just ruined toast for you.)

I only have one picture here because it's way too easy to require multiple pictures, though if you really want pictures of bread cut into cubes then I'm sure I can get some to you next time I make this.

Hmm. It doesn't look nearly as completely gorgeous as it tastes, though it looks better in the cookbook. This is also before I figured out the right setting on my camera. Anyway, if this picture doesn't look mouthwatering to you, ignore it and try the recipe.

RECIPE: Panzanella

Adapted very slightly from the Poor Girl Gourmet cookbook

Ingredients:

-1/2 lb day-old bread (the cookbook recommends ciabatta, which my grocery store doesn't sell--I went with a completely different country and used a multigrain boule, and I'm sticking with it)

-3 medium tomatoes (large on the vine tomatoes)

-1 medium shallot

-1/4 pound feta cheese crumbles (book recommends ricotta salata; again, my grocery store doesn't carry it, but I love the feta)

-1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped

-1/4 cup fresh mint, chopped

-2 leftover thin-sliced chicken breasts (or equivalent amount of cooked chicken), shredded (this is completely my addition and therefore you can leave it out for a vegetarian version)

-1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

-1/4 cup white wine vinegar

Instructions:

1. Chop the bread and tomatoes into cubes. Put them in a large bowl. Mince the shallot and add that, along with the feta, basil, mint, and chicken. Let sit for about 20 minutes to half an hour.

2. Mix together the oil and vinegar in a small bowl. Pour it over the bread salad. Stir. Eat.\

It seriously doesn't get any easier than that, and I can't get over how good this is. I added the chicken to make it a more filling meal than just a salad, but it's absolutely not necessary. And I can't help thinking how easy it would be to adapt--tomatoes are out of season now? People are eating squashes? I can add some squash, okay. Cool. The best part? You're serving four people for under $10. If you buy things on sale, it's a lot under $10.

Of course I'm going to tell you again to go buy that cookbook, but also don't forget to check out her blog. It is just as lovable!

And speaking of blog love, you should also go check out Pixie's most recent post. She loved my blog so much that it inspired her to start documenting her food! I'm so flattered! And I must say her stuffed chicken breasts look delicious; she seems to have the "presentation" thing down much better than I do, too.

Pineapple and Red Onion Simmer Sauce, by ME!

I'm excited! I invented this all by myself. It started as a "oh no, what should I do with this chicken" that turned into one dish, and after eating that one I decided I wanted to invent something similar but not quite as cloyingly sweet. It came out really well, so I'm posting the recipe! However. Since I was making this up as I went along, I don't have exact amounts for anything--I just poured in whatever seemed like a good amount and added more later as it developed. I'm going to estimate the amounts that I used (I tried to do this as I was cooking so I could post it), but if it seems like a lot, use less and add more as you feel like it. And if you add the amount that I said and taste it and think it needs more, by all means, add however much you want!

RECIPE: Pineapple and Red Onion Simmer Sauce (for chicken or pork)

Ingredients:

-1 can pineapple (I used chopped so I could decide myself how crushed it was; you can use crushed if you want, and I'm sure it would still be delicious if you left it in chunks)

-1 medium red onion

-2 tbsp soy sauce

-1 tsp sriracha chili sauce ("rooster sauce")

-3 tbsp pineapple preserves (if you can't find these, you could either add another flavor with different preserves or just add some sweetener--it balances the salty and spicy flavors from the previous two ingredients)

-ginger, to taste (more ginger than the other things)

-a large pinch of cumin

-a dash or two of paprika

-2-3 chicken breasts or pork chops (probably 3-4 pork chops? they're smaller), cubed

Instructions:

1. Slice the onion into discs and cut each disc in half so you have half-circles of onion. This way, you'll have strips of onion in the sauce. Yay.

2. Pour the can of pineapple into a medium saucepan. If you want to crush it, use a potato masher to crush it to your desired amount of crushed. Add the onions. Put the pan over medium heat and simmer until the onion softens.

3. Add the soy sauce, sriracha sauce, and spices. Stir to incorporate. Continue to simmer until the onion is completely limp and the liquid has reduced considerably.

4. While that's simmering, chop your chicken or pork and toss it into a large frying pan. Brown lightly.

5. Once the chicken/pork is cooked through, add your sauce. Allow to simmer, infusing the meat with flavor, for 5-10 minutes. If all the liquid simmers off, stop cooking! You don't want to dry out the meat.

6. Serve over brown rice and enjoy!

Step 2: pineapples and onions, simmering away.

Step 3: this is the color that everything was. I didn't notice until now how much the liquid had reduced; I'm so used to reducing things that thicken that I was getting frustrated with it. It worked well, though!

Step 5: I used two pretty large chicken breasts and could easily have used another with the amount of sauce that I had.

Ta-daa! It really was excellent with the brown rice--I know it takes twice as long to cook, but usually if you're cooking a full meal and start the rice at the beginning, it'll be done right around when the rest of your food is done (or way sooner! luckily it retains heat well). Taking the health benefits into consideration (along with the taste), it's definitely worth using brown over white!

The meal that this was based on was mostly made of the pineapple preserves--I used about half a jar, mixed with some pineapple juice and soy sauce (and the rest of the stuff listed up there). It was quite good--tasted a lot like sweet and sour sauce that you'd get at a Chinese restaurant, but better. It had the same sticky-sweet feel to it, though, and that made me want to make a healthier version. If you want to reproduce the original one, use pineapple preserves instead of canned pineapple, dilute it with pineapple juice, and do everything I did here except the simmering it part. Oh, and leave out the onions! I didn't have an onion to put in it, even though I really wanted one. (So you don't have to leave out the onions. Actually, though, if you include the onions, you'll probably want to simmer it for a bit to soften them.)

This version didn't taste anything like sweet and sour sauce. It tasted like fruit and chicken, with a little bit of bite to it. The flavors mixed incredibly well and nothing was too overpowering. The sweetness actually made the leftovers an excellent breakfast--I normally eat leftovers for breakfast, but I felt slightly less weird about it this time since it tasted like something normal people would eat for breakfast. So this is an anytime meal!

And on a really exciting note, I found a setting on my camera that takes much less blurry pictures! So you may notice that I'm less frustrated with blurry pictures in the future. These ones all came out nicely, YAY!

I'll be back on Friday...with THE MOST EXCITING POST OF ALL TIME. I'm serious. (It will probably include people!)

Dinosaur Parmigiano: Why I'm Way More Awesome than Sandra Lee

Have you guys heard of Sandra Lee and her "semi-homemade cooking" phenomenon? I hadn't until just recently, when I read something about her using baby food and muffin mix and trying to pass it off as homemade (well, semi-homemade) and I was slightly disgusted. It's not that I have a problem with taking shortcuts. I can totally understand using a muffin mix. I've done it myself. The problem that I have rests in her tendency to act like her creations take skill and to tell her audience that nobody will know that it's only semi-homemade. Oh, right--and the fact that this somehow has a show on the food network. If you want to be outraged, go to her page on the food network's site and watch the short videos on the bottom. There were one or two that I found acceptable, and the rest were just absurd. Nobody's going to think that a grocery-store cake with melted lemonade concentrate brushed on it, coated with canned frosting with lemon extract mixed in, is anywhere near homemade, yet she finishes every single "recipe" saying "And no one will know that it's semi-homemade!"

Sandra Lee, the gig is up. I'm about to beat you at your own game. LET'S GO.

RECIPE: Dinosaur Parmigiano

I made this up, like, six years ago. Because I love dinosaurs.

Ingredients:

-1 package Perdue dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets

-1 box spaghetti

-1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

-1 jar pasta sauce

-1/4 lb of the cheapest mozzarella you can buy

-about a teaspoon of Italian seasoning

-about a teaspoon of garlic powder

-freshly grated parmesan or romano cheese

-a couple fresh basil leaves (garnish, optional)

Yeah. This stuff. A good-quality sauce is key to making people think you have mad kitchen skills.

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to the temperature that the package of chicken nuggets says.

2. Get a pot of water boiling.

3. Put the sauce in a pan on medium heat.

4. Shred the cheese.

5. Spread the chicken nuggets out on a cookie sheet. Use your fingers to sprinkle a tiny bit of Italian seasoning and garlic powder over each one. Press down on them (to sort of embed the seasoning into the breading). Flip over and repeat.

6. At this point, the sauce should be bubbling. Spoon a little bit of sauce over each dinosaur, then top with some shredded mozzarella. Stick in the oven for 8 minutes.

7. Your water should be boiling, too. Put the pasta in there and cook it until al dente, also about 8 minutes. When it's done, strain it, put it back in the pan (off the heat) and add the olive oil to keep it from sticking.

8. When the dinosaurs are done, take them out of the oven. You can now assemble your plates. Scoop a pile of the spaghetti onto each plate. Cover with sauce. Add 4-6 dinosaurs. Sprinkle with the freshly grated parmesan/romano and garnish with a basil leaf. POOF! Semi-homemade.

See the seasoning on there? That little added flavor will completely convince your guests that you made this all from scratch. Seriously. They'll have NO IDEA. (At least, that's what Sandra Lee would have you believe.)

You shredded that cheese yourself. What more can your guests possibly ask of you?

And with a gorgeous presentation like this, how could anyone suspect that you pretty much bought everything pre-made at the store?

Okay, that's enough sarcasm for now--I'm starting to feel nauseous just pretending to think like her. Now it's time for the important thing: why I'm better than her. I'll make a list for that, too.

Reasons I'm Better Than Sandra Lee:

1. I'm not actually going to pretend any of this is homemade. In fact, by using the dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets instead of the less-obvious tenders or something, I'm admitting right up front that I put zero effort in. In short, I'm not going to lie to you.

2. I understand that, while sometimes you don't have time to cook an intricate meal for your family, shortcuts like this are neither as healthy or as tasty as what you'd make yourself if you had the time. I therefore don't encourage cooking like this all the time.

3. I would never, ever, EVER feed this (or anything like it) to guests. I mean, maybe if the "guest" were a little kid, sure--but I'm not going to have company over and serve them things I bought pre-made at the store.

4. I actually know how to make every aspect of this meal from scratch--the pasta, the sauce, the breaded chicken...okay, maybe not the cheese. But the rest, yes.

5. I think it bears mentioning twice--I'm not lying to you.

6. Come on. I used friggin' dinosaurs. How much more awesome could it get?

I promise to someday give you guys a real chicken parmesan recipe that isn't making fun of anyone. Someday. But for now...

Yes, we did actually eat this. And honestly? It's actually pretty tasty, as long as you don't expect real homemade flavor. I have no problem with boxed or jarred food items. It's easy and quick. This took about 45 minutes from me leaving to go to the grocery store and get the ingredients to putting dinner on the table, and you just can't do that with real homemade food, and most people don't have a lot of time to cook an intricate meal every day. There are plenty of better options out there for quick meals, but occasionally, this is just fine. The only real problem that I have is with people pretending it's something that it's not.

Oh--and I promise that, someday, I'll give you a real chicken parmesan recipe. It won't involve dinosaurs. But until then, why don't you go read about some awesome new discoveries that paleontologists are making? (I really, really love dinosaurs.)

Sandra Lee, our game is done sir.

Thank you for a lot of fun sir.

pesto 3-in-1

This is another favorite that I discovered on Recipezaar ages ago, "ages" here being defined as "7 or 8 months." It's easy and delicious and I have a bunch of basil plants now because I want to make pesto out of basil I grew myself. This is ambitious and may never happen, but I remain hopeful.

You can buy pesto to make this, but I much prefer to buy a bunch of basil and pine nuts and romano and garlic and olive oil and make it myself. It keeps for about a week in the fridge if you seal it, or you can freeze it in ice cube trays and have little single-portion cubes of frozen pesto to melt whenever you feel is appropriate.

RECIPE: Basic Basil Pesto

Ingredients:

-about 4 cups loosely-packed basil leaves

-about 1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan or romano cheese

-about 1/3 cup pine nuts

-3 or 4 cloves of garlic

-about 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Instructions:

1. Put everything in a blender or food processor and puree. If it's too dry, add small amounts of olive oil until you achieve your desired consistency.

Ooh, yeah--make sure to wash the basil first! I try to avoid including any stems. I'm not sure what the normal protocol on stems is.

You may find it easier to blend the basil before adding everything else, especially if you're using a blender. I used my mini-food processor and did the basil in small batches before putting everything else in the blender, but my blender is pretty lame and doesn't work so you'd probably be fine just putting everything in at once.

Once it's done, put it in a container and refrigerate until you're ready to use it! I love the bright green of a fresh pesto--you don't get that from the jarred varieties.

Okay, so that was pretty much the easiest thing ever, right? If you have the basil, it's absolutely worth it, but basil can get pretty expensive so you might want to skip the 'making pesto' step and buy pesto instead to make this chicken. Because it's SO GOOD. I call it "caprese chicken" because, well, it's tomatoes, basil and mozzarella, but I think "pesto chicken" works just as well.

RECIPE: Caprese Chicken

Ingredients:

-6 thin-sliced chicken breasts

-3 plum tomatoes

-pesto (above)

-a ball of fresh mozzarella (or a bunch of the tiny ones)

Instructions:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees F. Wash the chicken and trim any excess fat off the edges.

2. Slather the pesto all over each chicken breast and place on a foil-lined baking sheet.

3. Place chicken in the oven for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, slice the tomatoes and grate (or slice) the mozzarella.

4. After 15 minutes, remove the chicken from the oven. Lay slices of tomato on chicken and coat with mozzarella. Return to oven for 3-5 minutes, until cheese has melted.

5. Remove from oven. Serve on a bed of pasta (with pesto!) and with some vegetables. Enjoy.

I scoop some pesto into a bowl and cover about 2 thin chicken breasts with it, then add more. This isn't properly coated--it's just to point out that this recipe does get quite messy at times.

Apparently I didn't get a good picture of how the chicken looked once it was thoroughly coated, and you shouldn't go by this because it looks less coated once it's baked. This is the 'slices of mini mozzarella' version.

The chicken comes out juicy and flavorful. I love trying to get everything in one bite--the chicken, pasta, tomato and cheese. I also tend to always serve this with asparagus, but that's just because I love asparagus!

Okay, so you can clearly see that I made 7 chicken breasts, even though I said 6. The package came with a different amount than usual. The thing here is to make a lot of leftovers--I was serving two people with this, but everything left goes to good use: it makes the best sandwiches ever! Which I'm ALSO going to tell you how to make! (In addition, the sandwiches are why I use thin-sliced breasts. If you don't care to make sandwiches, then you can use thicker breasts if you'd like, but I think this provides an awesome ratio of pesto to chicken.)

To make the sandwich, take your favorite kind of bread--I highly recommend rye in this situation, but your tastes may be different--and slather some of your remaining pesto on each slice, the same way you did the chicken in the first place. Grate some leftover mozzarella onto one side. Heat the leftover chicken, then put it on the inside, wrap in tinfoil, and toast (I use the 'dark toast' setting). Or, if you have a panini press, this would be a great time to bust it out! I, sadly, don't. These are excellent, sandwich-shop quality sandwiches that you make at home with leftovers from a really simple dinner.

Like this.

Holy blurry picture, Batman. Sometimes there's nothing I can do to stabilize my camera. But you can still see this, and just look at all the delicious layers in there. The pesto gives the sandwich a super creamy texture inside, and the bread is nice and toasty.

So, there you have it: how to make pesto, what to do with it once you've made it, and what to do with the leftovers. Now I'm starving! I wish I still had some left.

I also can't help but wonder how this chicken would fare on the grill--has anyone grilled pesto before? Does it work? (Maybe I'll try it and let you know.)

Pesto

Taste&Create: Fried Chicken Point Pizza THINGS

Hi everyone!

This month, I decided to participate in Taste&Create, a food-blogger-community event that pairs you off with another food-blogger and you each have to cook something from each other's blog and blog about it. Sound fun? It is! Interested? Click on the Taste&Create logo to the right to go to the site and learn more. (Okay, wait, nevermind that doesn't work. It just takes you to the picture which you see here and clearly don't need to see again. Click here to go to the site.)

Anyway, I was paired with Dave from My Year on the Grill. At first I was excited because, as you know, I've been looking forward to grilling things. And then I saw that he had to abandon his grill to go live in the Caribbean (U.S. Virgin Islands, to be specific) and I became extremely jealous. Which doesn't really make sense. I hate the sun and I don't swim and I don't like beaches but the Caribbean is just gorgeous. Anyway, this meant that his most recent posts were not about grilling and I was too lazy to go back months and months to find something that was, especially when he had so many delicious-looking posts since he's been there. He even made my life easier (totally not intentionally) by having a recent post that was basically a list (with pictures) of everything that he'd done since he got there, so I looked through that to decide what looked good.

Well, it all looked good, and I was having quite a hard time making a decision--a few different things caught my eye, but they all had ingredients that I didn't have access to because we don't have the same foods around here as he does in the Caribbean. And, though not everyone does this, I wanted to stay fairly true to his recipe and not make something I didn't have the ingredients for. After all, the whole point is to taste something that, in theory, someone else made. (I guess we do this whenever we follow a recipe directly, but I adapt pretty much everything these days. I even ended up adapting this, albeit accidentally.)

Okay, so I was trying to decide whether I should make one recipe and use wine instead of whatever crazy flavor of rum he had used, or another one and just plain leave out the black sesame seeds, when Mike and I went to my grocery store and found a half off bin that had two jars of black sesame seeds in it. My grocery store doesn't normally carry black sesame seeds. Not that I've ever looked for them specifically, but I have spent quite a lot of time staring at the spice shelves wondering why sage is so expensive or what I would do with allspice, and I tend to enjoy oddly-colored variations of normal foods so I would have noticed and remembered black sesame seeds. The point here is that the fates made my decision for me: I would make Dave's Sesame Chicken Points.

He tells an interesting story with these points. He made up the recipe based on something he'd had years ago at a Thai restaurant (ooh, is this asian fusion?), and a couple weeks later got an email from a cook at a Thai restaurant giving him a more accurate recipe, which he then followed to make shrimp points. The cook also mentioned that sales increased drastically when they started calling them "fried pizza," but I agree with Dave--points sounds better.

Anyway, I said above that I adapted the recipe--basically, I took his chicken points post and tried to add a few elements of the shrimp points post (specifically, more chicken and ginger). So! Here's the recipe, along with pictures, and you should all go check out Dave's blog because it's funny and has good recipes and he spends one day a week making all the bread and doughs he'll need for the rest of the week, and that's just cool. (I want to do that someday. When I have one day a week that I can dedicate to making breads. Right now I just try to make homemade pasta whenever I run out so I don't have to eat boxed pasta.) Oh, also? I need to give you two recipes. Because I used his pizza dough, too. (But I didn't take pictures of that because, I mean, it looked like pizza dough. Not really all that exciting.)

RECIPE: Quite Excellent Pizza Dough

Recipe (indirectly) from The Bread Baker's Apprentice

Ingredients:

-4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, chilled

-1 3/4 tsp salt

-1 tsp instant yeast

-1/4 cup olive oil

-1 3/4 cups cold water

Instructions:

1. Make sure you have cold water and flour. If you don't, flash-chill it in the freezer for about 20 minutes or in the refrigerator for a few hours.

2. Combine flour, salt and yeast in a bowl. Stir thoroughly.

3. Add the olive oil and water in bits (about a quarter of each at a time). Stir until it becomes doughy and you need to knead it. (Dave kneaded his in a gallon ziploc bag, I did mine in a bowl with a quart ziploc bag over my hand because dough feels icky.) Once it forms a ball, continue kneading for about 10 minutes.

4. Flour a surface and put the ball of dough on it. Then flour the ball of dough. Then cut the ball of dough into six pieces. This will make individual pizzas; if you want larger pizzas, then cut it into fewer pieces.

5. Spray the inside of sandwich-sized ziploc bags with oil (hooray for Pam's extra virgin olive oil spray!) and put each small ball of dough into one bag. Refrigerate for at least six hours or overnight.

Woo! Pizza dough! I never made pizza dough before, and it was SO easy. It took about 15-20 minutes total, and from what I found googling pizza dough, this is just about the best you can make. I'll definitely keep some in the freezer for homemade pizza nights! Okay, onto the chicken points.

RECIPE: Sesame Chicken Points

Adapted a tiny bit from My Year on the Grill which I already linked you to

Ingredients:

-two balls of the pizza dough I just told you how to make

-about 1 cup of pulled-apart leftover rotisserie chicken (oh yeah, one of the reasons I liked this was because it meant that I'd have an excuse to get a rotisserie chicken and make soup with it later. I don't care that it's summer, I like chicken soup.)

-3 cloves garlic, sliced thickly (for once I didn't increase the garlic, and I was quite happy with how it came out--then again, my garlic cloves were abnormally huge)

-1 large shallot or tiny onion, also sliced thickly

-about 2 tbsp olive oil

-about 1 tsp powdered ginger

-2-3 green onions, chopped fairly thin

-about 1 tsp black sesame seeds

-about 1 tsp normal sesame seeds

-salt, to taste

-a bunch of oil for the pan (they cook in about 1/8 in. of oil)

Instructions:

1. Combine chicken, garlic, onion/shallot, olive oil and ginger in a food processor. Make the blades spin around until you have a thick chickeny paste. If it seems too dry, drizzle a little more oil in until you reach a good consistency. (I started with 1tbsp but ended up adding at least one more to make it not just minced chicken-garlic-onion-with-ginger.)

2. Flour a work surface (cutting board) and stretch each ball of pizza dough into a roughly 6-inch round. Coat each round with chicken paste. (Use all the chicken paste!)

3. Sprinkle the green onions over the chickeny discs and press them into the paste. Sprinkle half of each sesame seed onto them (about 1/4 tsp on each).

4. In a large skillet, heat about 1/8 inch of oil on high heat (Mike refers to this setting as "LOTS OF FIRE!" The caps are important here.)

5. While the oil is heating, cut the discs into sixths.

6. Once the oil is heated, reduce the heat to medium/medium-high (or "less fire" as Mike is insisting I should tell you, but that doesn't help those of you with electric stoves and it also doesn't tell you how much less fire, so it's not very helpful. But if you have fire, there should be less than there was.)

7. Place each triangle chicken-side down in the oil, trying not to splash the oil all over your skirt. (I did each disc separately, letting one cook while I put the other one together. This might have been a bad idea because the first one sorta burnt, but not really, and that's probably because I didn't reduce the heat. LESS FIRE.) Allow to cook for a few minutes until they reach a nice golden-brownish color.

8. Flip the points over and sprinkle with the remaining sesame seeds (again, a quarter teaspoon per circle, so...1/24th of a teaspoon per point. But you don't have to be that obsessive about it. (If you are, I might recommend making an appointment with a psychologist, who can probably give you some excellent anti-anxiety pills that will quell that OCD.) (Oh, wait, Mike says they'd taze you. Nevermind.) Then sprinkle lightly with salt.

9. Remove the points from the pan and place on a plate. Eat. Enjoy.

So, um...I think I could take any recipe and make it look really complicated with my instructions. Seriously--if you go back through my older posts and look at the recipe I adapted them from, it's usually a few sentences, but I manage to write a million steps. I'm not sure how. The point here is that these are SO EASY to make, and they're delicious.

Step 1: Chicken, garlic, onions, olive oil and powdered ginger in the food processor, ready to go.

Also step 1: A satisfactory paste-like consistency.

Step 5: Wow, I skipped a bunch of steps in the photo-taking. Luckily they were not complicated steps. This is what they'll look like before you put them in the hot oil. (They might have fewer green onions, if you use fewer green onions. Or something like that. They'll look roughly similar to this.)

Step 7: frying chicken-side down.

Step 8: chicken side up, more sesame, a little bit of salt, almost done!

The last step is always "eat."

So these were DELICIOUS, and as I said above, sooooo easy and quick. I was a bit worried about the chicken-paste, but it was great and I'd do it again. The best part is that these seem so easily adaptable--different kinds of meat, different spices, different toppings, completely different dish! I can't wait to play around with it (and see if it works in a pan brushed with oil instead of with a lot of oil). I was happy to be able to get to know another food blogger a little bit and can't wait for next month's Taste&Create. And if you see more posts with recipes originating from My Year on the Grill, don't be surprised!

Stir-Fry, part 2

I've finally finished my finals! Now I only have three semesters left...ugh. Oh well.

I feel bad. I haven't been posting at all, but I have an explanation. (Not an excuse, but maybe you'll be sympathetic.) This past week was Finals. Even though my finals weren't all that stressful in and of themselves, the concept of Finals is pretty terrifying and makes me want to do nothing except hide and read, so while I have some...ahh...interesting book recommendations, there wasn't really much time to cook involved. Add to that the fact that my mom's been in Florida for a week and then she packed off to some sort of retreat, and Mike also had some tests (that he actually had to care about), I was on my own. And, actually, for the six weeks before this week, Mike was off on the other fricken' side of the state, leaving only me and my mom. I don't know why I have such a mental block about cooking for just me and my mom--I cook for just me and Mike all the time, right? So I'm not entirely sure why. But a lot of time time I've just been home alone, and that means heating up some Trader Joe's frozen foods in a microwave (or, if I'm feeling energetic, a frying pan). I know I'm not the only one with this problem. I think it's depressing to put a lot of time and effort into something and not be able to share it. (I'm feeling this way right this second, actually. Glad I still have some frozen gyoza left.)

Anyway, I did manage to get some cooking in during the past six weeks, even if it wasn't nearly as much as I would have liked. (I tend to eat much healthier food when I make it myself. Going out is bad for me.) One morning during the last few weeks of the semester, I woke up and did my homework that was due for class that day and checked my school email and class was canceled and for some reason, my first thought was: MARINADE CHICKEN! (Okay, that was my third thought. My first thought was, Dammit, I like that class. My second thought was, WOO DAY OFF! Then I had the chicken thought.) I think there is nothing that pulls together a bunch of somewhat random ingredients better than a good marinade. In this case, I had a roasted garlic marinade waiting in my cabinet. I threw some chicken in and went back to sleep. (Yeah, so what if I went back to sleep at 11? I'm in college. I'm practically nocturnal. Or an insomniac. Or both. Any sleep I can get is precious.)

When I threw the chicken in the marinade, I had no plans for the actual meal. I just hoped to have some delicious chicken with some other also-delicious things for dinner that night. When it came time to actually throw dinner together, I was thrilled to realize that I'd stocked up on vegetables and was able to make this without going to the store at ALL! That's a big deal for me. A softball-sized onion and a bundle of asparagus caught my eye and I just went to town, tossing in whatever seemed like a good idea. The unfortunate thing is that this was probably a month ago and I didn't write anything down, so I'll be re-making-up this recipe as I write it here. On the plus side, it follows the basic rules of electrostirfrydynamics: if you see something that you think would be good in it, toss it in. If you're not sure (especially with spices), hold the potential meal component next to what is, so far, part of the meal. Inhale. (Through your nose.) Do the smells work? Congratulations. Now, for a recipe that I hope tastes as good as the memories in my head.

Roasted Garlic Stir-Fry

An Original Creation

Ingredients:

-About a pound of chicken strips

-A bottle of roasted garlic marinade (I used Hannaford-brand. Well, Hannaford "Taste of Inspirations" brand. Hannaford is a grocery store near me. I was surprised at how delicious it was. Next time I'm there, I'm stocking up on this.)

-A bundle of asparagus

-A really big onion (I used yellow, but I feel like red would have worked better. I'm not really sure what the differences between onions are, but after eating this and thinking a bit, red makes more sense with the flavors.)

-Cumin seeds

-Salt and pepper

-Soy sauce or Tamari

-I might have used a little bit of Worcestershire sauce too but I can't remember.

-1 cup uncooked brown rice

Instructions:

1. Wake up at a reasonable hour in the morning (by which I mean, in the morning. As long as it's before noon, you're good. Unless you eat dinner at, like, 3. Then wake up early.) In a gallon-sized Ziploc-style bag, combine the chicken and marinade. Let sit in the refrigerator all day, until you're ready to cook. (I always squeeze the bag and stir around the contents a little bit a few times during the day. There's always some chicken poking out of the top or something, and I don't want that bite to be less flavorful.)

2. About an hour before you want to eat, start your brown rice. Make it however the directions on the package tell you to. (I usually eat white rice because it cooks so much faster, but I've been trying to get whole grains into my diet more regularly, and the flavors of this dish were PERFECT for brown rice. Use white if you must, but I don't recommend it.)

3. Take the chicken-bag out of the fridge. On a plastic cutting board, cut the strips into cubes. DON'T TOSS THE BAG WITH THE MARINADE. Okay. Throw the chicken and some shakes of cumin seeds into a frying pan on medium-high heat and let it cook for a while, until the chicken is mostly white.

4. As the chicken is cooking, begin to cut your onions and asparagus. Cut them to whatever size you like--I usually keep the onions between 1 square inch and 1/2 square inch. Most people say to cut asparagus into 1-inch segments, but I like them longer than that. Maybe two or three inches.

4.5 You're sort of doing this as you're cutting the vegetables. As the chicken cooks, slowly add small amounts of the marinade from the bag. I hear sometimes that you're not supposed to do this, that it's contaminated from having the chicken in it all day. I don't understand this. If the chicken is okay to cook and eat, then it doesn't make any sense not to cook and eat the marinade, but you have to make sure it stays at a pretty high heat for a while.

5. Throw in the vegetables, along with any remaining marinade and a little bit of water (no more than half a cup). Stir everything together. Add a couple dashes of soy sauce (probably about a tablespoon) and possibly some worcestershire sauce (and like I said, I can't remember if I did this, but I know that if I did it was only a tiny bit), along with a little bit of salt and pepper. (I don't usually add salt while I'm cooking--I like to let people salt to their own tastes, and I don't really do pepper 'in moderation' so I leave that up to everyone else, too.)

6. Let everything simmer until the sauce has thickened at least back to its previous consistency. If the stir-fry is done before the rice, cover it on very low heat, stirring occasionally, until the rice is finished.

7. Scoop some rice into a bowl. Or onto a plate. Cover with your stir-fry. Enjoy.

Cumin seeds, yum! I'm not sure what that thing that looks like bacon on the bottom is. This was definitely just chicken.

This was wonderful. I was rather proud of myself--it's something really simple to throw together and yet extremely delicious. As I was cooking, I was just opening my fridge and cabinets and seeing if anything caught my eye to toss in--that's how the soy sauce and cumin came about. It's always nice to know that I can just throw something together out of what's already in the house--unfortunately, that means keeping food in the house. I'm not very good at that part.

I love how cameras capture the steam coming out of a pan. I also don't. I need a better camera.

So--woo! I have a few more things to post, and now that it's Summer (according to school), I have time to cook! I'm super excited to start grilling, and I want to take advantage of summer fruits for delicious pies. What are you guys planning on making this summer? Are you excited for any particular aspect of summer cooking?

What does Asian Fusion even mean?

I love stir-fry. It's possibly my favorite way to cook--you don't really need a recipe or even much of a plan, just a stocked refrigerator and some sort of sauce or marinade. When there's no food in the house and I have no idea what to cook, I tend to go to the store and stare at the sauces or marinades until something seems like a good idea, and I build from there--what meat makes sense with this? vegetables? Awesome. Dinner is planned. And, when I get home and start actually cooking, I always end up finding more little things to toss in. It's so much fun.

This dinner was inspired by my favorite restaurant (or, one of them): Fire and Ice. It has six locations over the country--two in Massachusetts, one in Rhode Island, one in New York and two in California. If you live near one, you should definitely try it out. They call it an improvisational grill. Every meal is completely personalized because you pretty much make it yourself. You get a table and order drinks, then you go up to the bars. At the bars, you grab a bowl and fill it with whatever you think sounds good--one bar has bunches of fresh vegetables and different kinds of noodles (from bowties to udon noodles), another has the raw meat (pretty much any kind you'd want). There's a hamburger bar, with bacon and sliced tomatoes and pieces of lettuce and anything else you'd put on a burger; there's also a salad bar (which I usually use as a vegetable bar part 2). You put everything into a bowl, pick a sauce, and bring it to this HUGE circular grill where they cook it right in front of you. Sometimes the chefs try to entertain the hordes of people standing around waiting for their food--it's great (but busy!) on weekends. Then you get to go back to your table. Your drinks are there, along with plain white rice and some tortillas, and you eat your creation. It's also all-you-can-eat, so if you want to try a few different things, you can make as many trips up as possible.

ANYWAY. I love that place. If you live near one, join their email list--they send out coupons with great deals sometimes, and you get free dinner on your birthday!

So when Mike and I went to make a stir fry a while back, I thought of Fire and Ice for inspiration. We got an orange ginger sauce/glaze, some chicken, three(?) red peppers, two onions, and a pound of green beans. By random luck, we found udon noodles in the grocery store--I learned to love Udon from Fire and Ice, so it seemed appropriate. And, honestly? I'm not sure I can write a recipe for a stir-fry, because I'm not sure I want other people following the recipe exactly--the whole point is to play around with it and add things that you think would be great.

I chopped up the vegetables while Mike chopped up the chicken and got it cooking. There were so many vegetables we had to use two huge frying pans, but that means it's HEALTHY! Yay! We mixed up the sauce in another bowl with some lime juice and soy sauce. I like to think it added to the flavor, but I didn't taste it without them, so I don't know--I just know it tasted good! When everything was almost done cooking I noticed we had a few mandarin oranges left. And I don't mean the canned ones in juice. I mean legit you-have-to-peel-this mandarin oranges. We saw them in the store and bought them once and haven't found them again (or if we see something that claims to be mandarin oranges, they usually look much bigger than what we got that time so we assume they're mislabeled clementines).

Once everything cooked and the vegetables had shrunken a bit, we condensed everything into one pan, making sure there was still some sauce in the other one, and fried the udon noodles for a few minutes until they were nice and soft.

Now...I think this is Asian Fusion food. (I'm not going to call it 'cuisine' even though I think that's what people usually say with 'Asian Fusion' because it seems pretentious to call a stir-fry that you cooked yourself cuisine.) I'm not entirely sure, though, because I don't really know what it means. I think it means something along the lines of "uses ingredients that remind you of things you might order at an Asian restaurant," which this definitely did--the orange ginger sauce seemed like a typical "Chinese" food ingredient, and I'm pretty sure Udon noodles are a Japanese invention (though I could be completely making that up) and, well, there was soy sauce. Oh! We also cooked (half of) it in a wok! That must count for something.

Believe it or not, we froze this and just ate the remains last night (with new Udon because we'd only bought enough for about three servings). It had never occurred to me to freeze stir fry before, but it was just as delicious the next time! We re-fried it in the pan again, and this time we added the little spice packets that came with the Udon noodles ("Oriental" flavor--even more Asian Fusion!) and some teriyaki sauce. (Side note--why does my spell check not know the word 'teriyaki' but suggests 'sukiyaki'?)

I'm not going to call this a recipe, because it's not. The most I'm hoping for is inspiration. Maybe you'll read this and one or two things will stick out at you and you'll think, wow, that sounds like it would be really good with this other thing. And maybe you'll try to recreate this exactly, but you'll have a hard time as I didn't include amounts for ANYTHING. Because I don't know. I just tossed some of one thing in, a dash of another, probably some cumin. The whole point was to have fun and eat something delicious, and it worked out perfectly.

Chicken Korma In a...storm-a?

Sorry about the title. But everyone's heard of Chicken Curry In a Hurry, right? So, when I made Chicken Korma and there was a blizzard, since it, like curry, is Indian food, my brain started rhyming things until I came up with...well, that. (The blizzard was last week. The town next to me was reported to have 15 inches of snow. I think we only got a foot, but still, a foot of snow at the end of February is quite a lot.)

I love Indian food. It's delicious. At some point, I realized I could make Indian food all by myself and not have to go out for dinner. When I first went to do so and walked into an Indian grocery store and discovered how cheap everything was, all I could think was, Why do I not do this ALL THE TIME?! Seriously--you're probably used to buying spices in a normal grocery store. Don't. Usually, an average-sized bottle of average-quality spices (and I'm thinking powder spices here, not dried herbs) is around 2 ounces and 6 dollars. At the Indian grocery, the containers are 7 ounces and under 3 dollars and they're much better quality. And it's not like they only have really weird things like asafetida. They carry pretty much anything. So, next time you need spices, check an Indian grocery store first. (I understand that most 'ethnic' grocers are like this, but I don't have experience with the other ones, especially the ones that sell spices. It's probably worth checking out anyway.)

My favorite Indian food is Palak Paneer. I get it every time I go out to eat. (Okay, I'm exaggerating a little, sometimes I go to a restaurant that is not Indian food.) I promise next time I make that I'll post it, because it's really cool. But one day I was out with someone and they didn't know what to get and I saw 'almonds' in one of the descriptions and told them to get that because it was delicious. I hadn't ever eaten it before, but if it involves almonds it's bound to be tasty. I was right, of course, and once I realized that I could cook Indian food I started prowling the internet for a good recipe. Most of them didn't use almonds; they used walnuts or something and that just felt wrong to me. Finally Mike said, "Why don't you google 'chicken korma almond recipe?'" and there were a lot of them, so I picked one and made it and it was amazing. So I made it again later and took pictures so I could post it here.

CHICKEN KORMA RECIPE

Adapted from Indobase

Ingredients:

-4 boneless chicken breasts (you could probably use dark meat if you want, but get 4 breasts worth of meat)

-1 large onion (I used yellow)

-4 cardamom pods (you could probably get away with using up to 6, but I wouldn't go higher than that)

-4 whole cloves

-3 cloves of garlic (this is one situation where I didn't vastly increase the amount--just used large cloves. There's plenty of flavor without extra garlic.)

-a piece of fresh ginger about 1 inch long

-a handful of flaked almonds

-1/2 tsp turmeric powder

-1 tsp ground coriander

-1 tbsp ground cumin

-1 tsp garam masala

-1 tsp mild chili powder

-1/4 tsp ground allspice

-1-2 tbsp tomato paste

-1 cup chicken broth

-1 cup coconut milk

-vegetable oil for the pan (if you want to be really authentic, use ghee)

Instructions:

1. Prepare everything--it'll be way easier later if you do all this now. Cube the chicken (you want cubes around 1 inch, but they don't have to be perfect.) Dice the onion (here I try for squares a little under an inch, it doesn't need to be finely diced.) Dice or crush the garlic. Peel and grate the ginger. Mix together the turmeric, coriander, cumin, garam masala, chili powder, and allspice in a small bowl (you add them all at once; I find it's much easier to just pour one bowl of spices in than to frantically measure each one. Also, please note that spice amounts are approximate. Play with them as you like). Lastly, grind the almonds. It's easiest to do this in a small food processor (I have a mini one that is perfect for this sort of thing, a larger one might not work as well.) A mortar and pestle works too but takes FOREVER. You might not want all of them ground--some people prefer some flakes remaining. The coarseness and amount of flakes is up to you. Keep the ground almonds (and flaked almonds) in a bowl for later.

2. Crush the cardamom pods. Throw them, the onion and the cloves into a large frying pan (or wok) with some oil. Cook until the onion softens a little.

3. Add the chicken, garlic and ginger. Stir-fry for a few minutes, then dump your bowl of spices in (see? wasn't that handy?). Stir together and allow to cook for a little while so the flavor of the spices can permeate the chicken.

4. Add the almonds, tomato paste, chicken broth and coconut milk. (The original recipe calls for tomato puree, and a smaller amount, but I found that this came out better. Unfortunately, it's a bit harder to mix in because it's so thick.) Stir everything together and simmer for a while, until it's reduced to a thickness you like. It should be thick and creamy.

5. Serve over rice (again, if you're going for authentic, use basmati, but white will do) with some naan if you have it. Enjoy!

Ground Almonds

This smells so good. All the spice smells fill your kitchen. The dish is worth it just for this.

Reducing--almost done! Yay!

On a plate, mixed with rice, ready to be devoured. So glad there are always leftovers :)

I love this recipe as it is (well, as I've adapted it). My mom thinks it should have more vegetables in it. I think peas would be a good addition--they're pretty common in indian food, and you could toss a small bag of frozen peas in when you add the liquids. The original recipe at Indobase calls for whipping cream instead of coconut milk, but I think this is much more flavorful and possibly healthier (I don't really know the caloric content of coconut milk). But if you want to use cream instead, I'm sure it would be delicious.

Naan is really easy to make but takes forever, so I recommend buying some frozen at the Indian grocery while you're there. It usually only needs to be tossed into the oven for a minute or two to heat up. Other grocery stores sometimes have it, but you have to know where to look and I don't. Except at Trader Joe's, where it's in the bread section. (Hmmm, I have a jar of Trader Joe's Korma sauce. I should see how that is sometime when I don't have time to actually cook.)

This is a recipe you should definitely try out. The ingredients list is sorta long, but you pretty much just toss everything into a pan and cook it. It's low-maintenance. And amazing. I'm gonna go study for my midterm now and wish I had Indian food for dinner.