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!

Taste&Create: 4 Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies

Hi everyone! Look at me, blogging on a Tuesday like I'm supposed to. I was super excited to be paired with Dragon Musings for this month's Taste&Create. She has 3 kids, I believe, and does a lot of cooking with them that results in some pretty awesome things, like stegosaurus shaped calzones (which I can't find right now but I love dinosaur-shaped food so they must be delicious). She also posts a new flash game every Friday, which frequently consumes my weekends if I'm not careful, and menu plans on Monday which cause me to admire her ability to plan out what she's going to eat. I definitely can't do that. So check out her blog, but first look at how AWESOME these cookies are!

She emailed me to ask about my peanut butter and chocolate chip banana cookies, since she lives in Australia and they don't have peanut butter chips there. I, sadly, didn't know how to go about replacing things with peanut butter to get both tastes in there, but I asked her to let me know if she figures it out because I've been looking for a good peanut butter cookie recipe. She responded pointing out that she'd just posted a peanut butter cookie recipe the day before. Apparently I'd been too distracted to check my RSS feed, because I definitely would have noticed that, but I checked and was super excited to see that she had, and that they looked like the peanut butter cookies I remember eating when I was a kid. So here's the recipe! It's the most amazingly easy thing I've ever made. If you screw up every food that you ever cook, you can make these and they will be perfect. Just trust me.

RECIPE: 4-ingredient peanut butter cookies

Ingredients

-1 cup peanut butter (the kind with lots of ingredients, like Skippy or Jif, not the kind that is just peanuts or peanuts and salt)

-1 cup sugar

-1 tsp cinnamon

-1 egg

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix them until they reach an even consistency.

3. Roll them into balls and place them on a cookie sheet lined with wax paper. Squash crisscrossed fork marks in them (as pictured below).

4. Bake for 8 minutes.

Step 2, part 1: put everything in the bowl.

Step 2, part 2: Mix everything until it looks like this.

Step 3: roll into the balls so they look like the balls here, and then squash with a fork so they look like the fork-squashed ones here.

Right out of the oven. Isn't that the most gorgeous peanut butter cookie you've ever seen?

I was SO impressed with this recipe. Not only is it incredibly simple, but it tastes exactly like a peanut butter cookie should. The consistency is very cookie-like, which I didn't expect given the lack of flour--Mike just ate one and asked me how they seem so cookie-like without any flour. So, other bonus: gluten free! (Assuming the peanut butter is gluten free. I'm not sure. I couldn't find anything on the label saying it was, but I couldn't find anything saying it wasn't, either. And I'm sure if it's not there are brands out there that are.) The whole thing took probably 20 minutes, and most of that was fork-squashing because I'm a bit of a perfectionist.

The only problem I had with this recipe was actually the cinnamon. I feel blasphemous even saying that--anyone who knows me knows that I put cinnamon in EVERYTHING and a teaspoon of cinnamon in a pie recipe translates to two tablespoons, but it was sort of weird with the peanut butter flavor. I think, though, that this is my fault--it was only weird for two cookies, so either I got used to it quickly OR I should have mixed the cinnamon and sugar together first so that it was evenly integrated. Whoops. I should know to do things like that by now. I'm pretty sure that the cookies that tasted too strongly of cinnamon just had a higher concentration of cinnamon in them than the others and it would be fixed if I followed normal baking protocol instead of getting excited to take a picture that clearly showed the four ingredients. Oh well.

So go make these! You probably have all the ingredients. I got 17 cookies, so it doesn't even make so many that you'll have to give them away or get sick from eating only cookies for the next few days. And don't forget to stop by Dragon Musings and check out her flash games...er...recipes and such.

Taste&Create: Spare Ribs

You may remember that, last month, I participated in a food-blogging "event" called Taste&Create and really enjoyed searching for recipes from my partner blog, My Year on the Grill. Because I had so much fun, I decided to do Taste&Create again this month. And APPARENTLY because I said I wanted to cook something else from My Year on the Grill, they paired me up with him again! Hah! (Actually, I think they do this randomly. I was happy, though, to have an excuse to cook something else he posted.) And...do you remember how last month I said I was having a hard time deciding between two recipes, but then found an ingredient on major sale and that decided for me? Well, yeah, that sorta happened again. So, deja vu...except it's completely different this time. This time I made spare ribs. And...it's picture heavy, and there's not much of a recipe really (more like instructions), so this post will be mostly pictures that hopefully sort of tell you how to make spare ribs. And you should, because they're delicious and actually quite easy. And if you want BETTER instructions, check out Dave's post. He actually knows what he's doing.

Spare ribs were on sale for $1.99/lb. There was no way I was not going for that. This was a pretty small rack, around 10 dollars for the whole thing--there were some that were almost 30!

The first step, once you get the package open (which was actually sort of difficult), is to remove the membrane. I had no idea that ribs even had membranes, nevermind that I would have to remove one, but hey--I did. But, do you see that big slice in the middle of the rack? I didn't do that. They came with that. And it made the membrane-removal WAY more difficult than it had to be. Anyway, this step is super important (the membrane is tough and tastes gross and prevents your rubs from getting in), so do it right.

If you read Dave's post, you'll notice how he talks about "St Louis Style" and "Removing the Flap Meat." This picture here documents how I failed at that--my knife just wouldn't cut through the bones that were attached to the breast bone. And...

One random rib was really really long. I couldn't cut that off, either. I guess these weren't St Louis style at all, but I did get a good amount of flap meat cut off. (I don't know what the remedy for randomly long bones is except maybe a knife that cuts through bones.)

This was the other weird thing, except that I'm not actually sure it's weird at all. Some of the meat was just sorta hanging there and once I removed the membrane had big holes in it. Regardless of whether it's supposed to be there, it was pretty tasty, so I'd say leave this on. And, at this point, start removing all the unnecessary-looking pieces of fat. I ended up with a little bigger than a golf ball sized ball of fat. I took a picture but it grossed me out too much to post it, and I'd apologize, but it was gross.

Time for rubs! Rubs are important. You have a wet rub (the honey mustard) and a dry rub (the barbecue seasoning). You could use whatever you want, depending on what flavor you want your ribs to be--Dave explains more about different rubs and flavors in his post. For now, a spicy honey mustard and barbecue seasoning worked great, so I highly recommend them.

Apply your wet rub! I used about half the jar of honey mustard to cover these. And remember, it's a rub, not a sauce, so pretend you're putting sunscreen on or something and actually rub it in. Obviously it doesn't all rub in (and hey, I could be completely wrong about this rubbing thing) but I think that gets the flavor into the meat a little bit more. And yes, wet rub goes first.

Now apply your dry rub! This is pretty much the same principle. Sprinkle generously, rub until covered completely. Again, I used half the container here. I used the same two rubs on the flap meat that I'd cut off, too--if you're adventurous, you could try with different things, but I was more concerned with "oh no it's later than I realized get this in the oven" than "have some cool leftovers." (These were pretty cool anyway.)

Now it's time to bake them! Perhaps you're confused--"bake ribs? why would I do that?" Well, it's either bake them or smoke them, and I don't have a smoker. So I baked them. You can bake them for a fairly short time at a high temperature, but a low temperature for a long time will give you super tender, fall-off-the-bone ribs like you're dreaming of. Dave's advice was 225 degrees for about 6 hours, and don't open the oven door no matter how tempted you are. My oven is kind of a jerk and doesn't really do anything below 250 (it has the setting, but I think it turns off) so they were done after about 5 hours. A meat thermometer should read 170 degrees, but you'll be hard-pressed to find a good place to put a standard meat thermometer in these. When they finish, take them out, baste them with barbecue sauce (I used Sweet Baby Ray's Hickory and Brown Sugar) and bake them for another 20 or so minutes. They'll be less messy to eat and the barbecue sauce will be much nicer after some time in the oven. (OH! The other thing is to coil them up and skewer them and stand them up in a pie plate for better air flow while baking. It's a good idea!)

Mine sort of broke when uncoiled, but after hours of waiting, I felt victorious to take them out of the oven and prepare to serve them. This rack served 3 people with the flap meat as leftovers, and we were all very full.

Four ribs for me! These were the meatiest ribs I'd ever eaten--whenever I've gotten them at a restaurant, I've been fully capable of eating a whole rack (maybe only a half rack? I don't remember) but this was PLENTY of food. Dave says that if you're not used to leftovers from ribs, you're probably eating baby back ribs and not spare ribs. This is possible. Dave also says to cut between each rib before serving to be nice to the people who are eating, but when I tried to do that the meat sort of dissolved. Plus, part of the whole ribs experience is to cut them apart and wrestle with them, right?

So, there is my spare rib adventure! Remember that they take a long time to cook, and give yourself about an hour to prepare them before putting them in the oven (it probably won't take that long, but I'm slow), so if you want to eat at 7, you want to start these around noon or 1. If you eat at 5, you'll have to start around 10. Give yourself lots of time.

And, really, if you want to make them, take a look at Dave's post, because I'm pretty sure he's an expert on this and I'm just figuring out how it works. I'll be looking for an excuse to make them again (such as "oh hey they're on sale again!") and maybe play with some different rubs and perhaps get the St Louis Style right next time.

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

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!