Even though I’m a huge fan of Mexican food, I rarely make it at home because we have a plethora of good restaurants (from fast-food type to mid scale) to go to. But I had a bunch of leftover chicken begging to be made into something. This Sunset Magazine recipe (from May of 2008) was just the ticket. Enchiladas are usually corn tortillas rolled around a filling. Served individually. But this one is a stacked type – with each of these stacks serving 2 people. What you see in the photo above is a stack of 5 corn tortillas (supposed to be 6 but my package of tortillas only contained 11 tortillas – go figure) with the chicken filling and grated Jack cheese in between each layer. Then the top is finely sliced cabbage and cilantro in a light fresh lime juice dressing. Very tasty.

The prep for this dish took longer than I’d anticipated. The recipe said an hour, and yes, that’s true. Maybe even longer. You wouldn’t think so, but it did take awhile. The chicken chile sauce mixture took time – cooking onion, chopping up the chicken, gathering up all the other ingredients needed (raisins, pine nuts, spices, chipotle, tomato paste, brown sugar and white wine vinegar). Then grating the cheese, slicing the cabbage (I didn’t have any radishes called for in the recipe). But once you start assembling the stacked enchilada, it came together in a hurry. While the enchilada baked in the oven I made the cabbage slaw.

We liked it. I won’t say this was a stand-out recipe, but it was good. If you don’t have great Mexican restaurants in your neighborhood this might be very satisfying. The tortillas are dipped in canned Las Palmas chile sauce, and when they bake they don’t get firm or chewy – they stay soft. Actually I didn’t like the tortilla brand – you can see the tortillas were starting to fall apart in the photo. They were too flimsy, I guess. But it didn’t matter at all because the taste was fine. The Sunset recipe indicated a serving was 1/4 of the above stack. Uhm. No. We ate half (so 3 tortillas per person). Next time – I’ll add about 1 1/2 cups of frozen corn to the chicken mixture. I think it would add a nice texture change and a bit more substance.
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A year ago: A list of travel websites
Two years ago: Chocolate Scones (oh yes, these are delish)

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Do you ever have a magazine that gets misplaced? I certainly do. And for whatever reason I had a stack of three Cook’s Illustrated from 2007 in one of our upstairs guestrooms. They went from one place to another before I finally said to myself that I needed to get those three magazines back downstairs nearer the kitchen where they belonged. In doing so I glanced through them, leafing past numerous recipes that I had no recollection reading. And up popped this recipe for chicken and sausage done in an Italian style. With peppers and onions. Sounded perfect for dinner the other night.

First off, I DID read the article from beginning to end, to make sure I understood the instructions (of course, I’m the first one to not do this step under most circumstances). I read about how the recipe developer, Sandra Wu, worked from an old recipe for this chicken dish (in Italian it’s called scarpariello, which means “shoemaker style”). It’s not known whether the shoemaker means it’s a poor-man’s dish, or if it refers to the chicken bones sticking out of your mouth as you eat it, which reminds you of a shoemaker holding nails between his teeth. You choose! In either case, this is an American Italian invention, popularized by some of the early Italian settlers who opened Italian restaurants in New York City.

There is a bit of food prep here, but it’s not overwhelming. While you brown the sausage, you can cut up the chicken. While the chicken browns you can slice up the onion and pepper. And while the onions and pepper brown you can mince up the garlic. While that browns you can bring together the rest of it (some white wine vinegar, some chicken broth, and sugar). The recipe developer was stumped with how to get the chicken skin to stay nice and brown, so she finally resorted to browning the chicken, then once everything is assembled, the pan full of peppers, onion and sausage, with the chicken on top is baked in the oven. While THAT is baking you’ll have time to make a pan of creamy polenta, which makes a perfect bed for the onions and peppers. Once the dish is removed from the oven you do need to thicken the sauce with a bit of cornstarch, then it’s served over polenta (or you can make some orzo or mashed potatoes instead).

One thing this recipe calls for that I didn’t have (and had to buy) was (bottled) hot cherry peppers. They’re essential in this dish, although because I ended up using hot Italian sausage (instead of the sweet called for in the recipe) I used fewer of the cherry peppers. They’re hot little puppies, so be careful. I also didn’t have bone-in chicken breasts, so bought those especially to make this. The breasts were huge. I mean gi-normous, so I cut each breast into thirds (recommended in the recipe). That step also helps the chicken to cook more uniformly.

In the photo above you can see the bed of creamy polenta on the left side. And the result? Really delicious. The sauce makes it, to me. I might want to make more of it next time – there really isn’t all that much for all the quantity of chicken and peppers and onions. Just enough to drizzle over the top. The sauce has a piquant taste – meaning it’s a bit of sweet and sour (from the sugar and wine vinegar combo). And the thicker chicken pieces took a lot longer to cook through than expected. So if you have a meat thermometer, cook the thickest piece to 160 degrees F. We also liked the addition of the sausage – it gave the dish a stronger character, I think, than if it was just chicken alone. We enjoyed it with the polenta (I made creamy polenta – half water and half milk – with some butter and a bit of cream cheese and cheddar cheese added). But we liked this very much, and yes, I’ll make it again. Even for guests, although the recipe indicated it was more of a weeknight kind of dish. I didn’t think so. Quite worthy of guests, I thought.
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A year ago: Crockpot Chicken Paprikash
Two years ago: Hot & Spicy Tofu Herb Dip (you’d never know it’s made with tofu)

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Gee, that recipe title is a mouthful, isn’t it? If you’ve been reading my blog for long, you may recall that there’s only one person I know who gives recipes such long names. Because she’s afraid we won’t realize all the tasty goodness and goodies in any recipe. Yup. Phillis Carey. This one’s from a “light and  healthy” cooking class. And it’s delicious. And quick. EASY! It likely will require a trip to the market – specifically for the kale and zucchini – and maybe the chicken sausages – but as long as you’ve got canned cannellini beans and tomatoes on hand, then this recipe comes together in a jiffy. You add the kale – and it will seem like a LOT of kale, but once you put a lid on it, it will reduce down. Just don’t overcook everything – the kale just needs to cook until it’s tender, no further.

Pictured at right is the “soup” when I’d just added the kale – notice the mound. It cooks down, though. This dinner would likely require less than 25 minutes, maybe 20 if you didn’t serve anything else with it. And it’s a one-dish meal (it could be, anyway). Phillis suggested serving this with brown rice. If I were to serve it I think I’d serve it over a very small portion of pasta. But I liked it as-is, just served as a kind of soup with a very little bit of juice to it. Is that called a dry soup? I think so. Or sometimes the broth part is served in a separate bowl in Asian cuisines. That’s not the case here – it’s the chunky stuff that makes up the ragout/soup.

Phillis suggested that if you’d like some other textures and flavors in this, add some raisins during the last bit of heating, and then sprinkle on top some pine nuts (toasted would be best). I’ve included them in this recipe because they added a lot of texture and flavor to this dish when I made it. Delicious, that’s all I have to say. And low calorie too. This may become a real staple in my soup library.
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A year ago: Beef – an informative essay
Two years ago: Brandied Apricot Bars

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The other day I was looking through a cookbook that I’d not cooked from, yet. Actually I’m not sure I remember how I came by this cookbook. There’s no note inside. It’s called Parisian Home Cooking: Conversations, Recipes, And Tips From The Cooks And Food Merchants Of Paris . By Michael Roberts (he’s an American but lived in Paris for some years). Under the chapter for chicken and poultry, there are numerous recipes for simple chicken. Most, either stovetop or oven preparation, and none of them all that complicated.

Starting off, we didn’t have all the specific ingredients. The chicken was boneless – a mistake – but it’s all we had; and I didn’t have any chicken feet, a calf’s foot, or a pig’s tail – I’m not kidding you – that’s also in the recipe. I’ve learned enough over the last 20 years to know that we American’s are just so Victorian, or fastidious, I guess. We don’t like animal odd parts. We don’t like to look at fish heads. Or dead fish eyes on the fish head. And not all that many of us eat offal, the oddball organs and other things that comprise a whole steer, pig, chicken or lamb. I do like foie gras, but I don’t eat organ meat anymore in general because of the high concentration of bad fats. So we miss out, I suppose, on some awfully good flavor.

But the author cautioned in the write-up that if you don’t have good AGED red wine vinegar, don’t even bother to make this. I don’t know about your local markets, but mine don’t carry anything but the cheapest of red wine vinegars. Stuff that’s most likely mere vinegar with a dollop of red wine, perhaps food coloring to make it look like it’s red wine, it’s bottled and they call it red wine vinegar. If you ever take an honest-to-goodness taste of this stuff, you’ll probably agree with me, it’s awful. I won’t even use it for salad dressings or in cooking. Not having visited any wineries lately where I might have found some good red wine vinegar, a few months ago I resorted to buying a bottle of Cabernet Wine Vinegar at Williams-Sonoma. It’s been aged for 8 months, according to the label. And it’s expensive, I will say, but then I don’t use much of it at any one time. But Williams-Sonoma no longer carries it, I guess (I can’t find it on W-S’s website, anyway). However, several online places carry Banyuls 5-year aged. I’m going to look for that when I’m shopping at some of the high-end markets in our area. Through Amazon it’s $23.95 for a 750ml bottle.

As for chicken feet, a calf’s foot or a pig’s tail . . . uhm . . . I can’t say I’ve seen that at any of my markets, high end or not. Perhaps I could ask for it at one of the few stores I frequent where there’s an honest-to-goodness butcher visible. My guess is they likely won’t have it either. However, the Asian markets near us probably would. I don’t frequent them very often, but next time I’m there I’ll look. So this recipe I/we made didn’t contain any one of those three items. Roberts explained that adding one of those three things would add immeasurably to the flavor in the dish.

This dish was relatively easy to make. As I’ve explained recently, I’ve been under the weather. I AM getting better, but my DH offered to make dinner if I’d coach him. No problem. I sat at our kitchen island with the cookbook at  hand, a chopping board in front of me and was the laid-back director of the cooking theater. Dave said he had fun doing it! The dish was good. Next time I’d make more sauce so I’ve upped the quantity in this recipe below. I’d also add mushrooms at the end (not in the original recipe). We/he served it with French glazed carrots and a nice green salad.

My DH (dear husband, just in case you’re a new reader and don’t know my code) had a good day on Sunday. He was the speaker at a Sunday School class at our church. He gave a 20-25 minute speech about “Hope.” He talked about the fact that he’s been a Type 1 diabetic since his 8th birthday, and mostly about the fact that he’s a double amputee. At the end of his talk numerous people in the audience had questions – mostly about his artificial legs and how they work. He also mentioned that when he was diagnosed as a diabetic in 1947, the doctors told his parents that he likely wouldn’t live past the age of 28. They never told Dave that. He’s 70 now and doing well, thank you! Anyway, I was SO proud of him – Dave is a story-teller and speaks to and with people with ease. He doesn’t often speak to groups, but his speech was very interesting, well prepared and very nicely executed. So he was on a roll on Sunday, as they say, and he was ever-so proud of himself when HE put dinner on the table for us. I’m going to be back at the cooking helm now, I think, since I’m feeling better every day.  But I was grateful that he wanted to make this dish. He did it very well – VEDDY VEDDY well.
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A year ago: Breakfast Egg Muffins
Two years ago: Chicken with Red Wine Vinegar Sauce (oh my goodness, I made this exact dish, different recipe, 2 years ago. Serendipity, I think)

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If you read my post yesterday, about steeping chicken, then you already know I made a chicken & greens salad. I had a recipe in my repertoire that I hadn’t tried before, from Michael Chiarello (Food Network), from 2006, according to my notes. His recipe was an arugula salad, with a citrus vinaigrette, with grilled chicken and a toasted spice rub. Well, I didn’t have time to go through all of that. Didn’t feel like doing the grill thing for just two chicken breasts. So I turned to an old stand-by chicken cooking method I haven’t used in a long time – submerging boneless, skinless chicken breasts in hot, just below boiling water and letting it sit. It’s like steeping tea – where tea takes 5 minutes to come to full flavor – chicken takes about 20-30 minutes to cook all the way through.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Maybe this is old hat for you – if so just delete and move on. But I’m going to talk about a cooking method that I use infrequently, but when I need it, I really need it. This was the case last night. We got home late from our house in the desert. I had nothing on hand to fix for dinner. We were all feeling full and like fat cats. We ate lunch out – really good Mexican food in Riverside – and wanted a light dinner. Salad was just the ticket. Read the rest of this entry »

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With my cousin Gary visiting us for the holidays, I have to re-engineer my cooking since he can’t eat wheat. So this recipe, that I read over at Kalyn’s Kitchen blog, was just the ticket. Healthy and tasty, but using almond flour instead of wheat flour. Kalyn had a glut of sage from her home garden and tried to concoct some new uses for sage. I also had a sage bush this year (now nearly dormant), but the leaves left on the bush are way too tiny for much culinary use. So I did end up buying some fresh sage to make this.

It’s easy to make – an untypical pesto with sage and pecans (instead of basil and pine nuts). It also contained some garlic, freshly grated Parmesan, and the filling also contained some Feta cheese too. I enlisted my cousin’s help with the chicken – the pounded chicken breast halves are filled, then secured with toothpicks and lightly dipped in an egg batter, then in the almond flour (available at some specialty markets or health food stores). Don’t confuse almond meal with almond flour. The meal is more like finely ground nuts. The almond flour is milled (well, maybe not actually milled since this isn’t a grain) is a much finer mixture – it actually looks more like a flour.

The chicken was roasted in the oven just until cooked through. I should have used a meat thermometer in a thicker part of the chicken; I didn’t, so at the 35 minute mark, they were definitely already done. Kalyn’s recipe indicated 40 minutes, and maybe checking on it earlier. I should have looked at 30 minutes. Of course, it does depend on how thin you pound the chicken, too. The flavor was good. It’s very low carb, and delicious. This would make a nice company dinner, although I might serve it with a side or a drizzle of chicken gravy (if making gluten-free, just thicken with cornstarch instead of flour) – just in case it’s not juicy-tender when removed from the oven. Just do watch it carefully during baking (maybe cut one open to make sure it’s not pink) and remove from the oven immediately!
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A year ago: Yams, Carrots & Ginger (veggie side dish)

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This recipe may be coming your way just a few days too late. But here at my house I still had a whole wad of turkey left over and hadn’t done anything with it. I saw on somebody else’s blog that they’d made pot pie. What a thought! Hadn’t made it in years.

Back in my youth (my 20’s), turkey a la king was my go-to entree for entertaining. I even baked a turkey just so I could make it. With those little puff pastry shells. Some of you are probably turning your nose up in disdain. Guess that tells you how old I am! I had a hand-me-down copper chafing dish, from my mother. She’d rarely used it. I can’t say that I did either, but it did look pretty with the pile of turkey a la king in it. I gave it away years ago. And haven’t made turkey a la king since.

Really, I didn’t have a recipe for this. I just made it up as I went along, though I made mental notes about what I did. And turkey (or chicken) pot pie is quite versatile. If you don’t have mushrooms, that’s fine. Eliminate them. Same with the zucchini. It happened to be what I had on hand. Onions, carrots and celery, though, are a must. Because I didn’t feel like making a piecrust from scratch, I used Trader Joe’s canned (fresh) biscuits. They were pretty good, although like the Pillsbury counterpart, they don’t taste like much the next day. Plan on eating them up when they’re fresh baked. And you’ll want to bake them separately so the bottoms don’t get soggy in the creamed turkey mixture.

When I finished making the turkey mixture, I tasted. And tasted. Something was missing. More thyme. Finally I tried some lime juice. That was it. And fairly copious amounts of pepper and salt too. I was surprised how much it took to brighten up the flavor. So if you have some turkey lurking in your freezer, maybe this is the ticket. Here’s what I did with it: after serving up the two portions (top photo) I lined with plastic wrap a bunch of larger-sized ramekins. Poured the turkey mixture into them. Carefully folded over the plastic wrap to cover the turkey mixture. Refrigerated them overnight, then they went in the freezer. After they were completely frozen I removed the plastic-wrapped big coins, wrapped them in foil, then those went into large freezer-style plastic bags and into the freezer where they will reside until one night when I don’t feel like cooking. I’ll remove the plastic wrap and just plop them right into the ramekins. I ended up with servings for about 10 or 11. In the picture at right you can see the frozen “coins,” I call them. My DH thought the turkey pot pies were excellent, and he doesn’t say that lightly when it comes to turkey. Turkey is not his favorite thing, although he eats it. He tried to talk me into making a completely different meal for Thanksgiving (like a rib roast). I put the damper on that idea right then and there. We eat it only one time a year, for goodness’ sake!
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A year ago: Swiss Chard with Cranberries
Two years ago: Cauliflower Soup with Scallops

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Turkey day has long passed, and I should be moving on with holiday cooking, but I just have to share this recipe with you. Because this is the turkey I’ll be making next year. And the year after, and the year after that. My friend Cherrie and I went to a cooking class about 10 days before Thanksgiving, and were blown away by how delicious this turkey tasted. It did require some advance work. Actually I bought a Kosher turkey, which is already brined, but if you didn’t have a Kosher bird, you’d want to brine it for a day or two before starting this process.

Brined birds are soaked, obviously, so a day before baking, you’ll want to remove it from the brine and allow it to dry off. A spatchcocked bird is merely one that’s had the backbone removed. So instead of a round mound, you have a flat turkey. So much easier to handle, and faster to cook too. Phillis Carey recommended that we buy a pair of Joyce Chen scissors (I did). They’re quite small – amazingly small – scissors, but they have a lot of strength. I did have trouble cutting the neck off – at the neck. Finally had to enlist my hubby to help. He used another pair of kitchen shears to pry, but I finally was able to cut the last connection with the other scissors. We had a 16-pound turkey, and she had a really strong neck! But once that was removed, it wasn’t difficult from there.

You splay the turkey and then you have to break the breastbone. I don’t know that I did such a great job of that – once I saw the finished turkey, I think maybe I hadn’t flattened it enough. I pressed and pressed on the bone and it finally gave a crack, so I assumed it was done. If you look at the photo below, you’d think it was flattened, right? It was, but I’d try harder next time!

You prepare a paste of fresh herbs, mustard, lemon juice and olive oil, which gets pressed underneath the skin (breast and legs). To give it added flavor and moisture. Then the whole bird is turned over, skin side up and I spread the remaining herbs all over the outside.

Then the flattened bird is placed in a large roasting pan – on a rack – along with a chopped onion and some celery leaves in the bottom of the pan, and roasted in the oven for just a couple of hours. The recipe indicated 2 1/4 to 2 3/4 hours. Mine, at 16 pounds, larger than Phillis’ recipe indicated, took just a hair over 2 hours. So next time I might reduce the temp by 15 degrees.

Once out of the oven, you salvage the drippings. And you add the fat-skimmed mixture to the turkey stock you’ve made (from the neck, backbone, gizzard and heart – NOT the liver), with a moderate amount of shiitake mushrooms. This was, by far, the BEST turkey gravy I’ve ever made, and we even forgot to add the heavy cream. We still have a bit left over and I’ll be hoarding it for leftover dinners.

So, I know this recipe is tediously long. Get someone else to help you with some of the steps, perhaps. But you’ll find that it’s mighty fine food when all is said and done!
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A year ago: Banana Bread
Two years ago: Cranberry Vinaigrette (hmmm, sounded better than it turned out, but it was festive)

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This is one of those quick and easy recipes. I posted this a little over a year ago; a recipe from Gourmet. And it looked very simple and since my DH really enjoys cooked cabbage, I made it that day. I’ve made it once since, and when I was writing up a blog post the other day – and, you know, down at the bottom of my posts I insert what recipes I posted a year ago and 2 years ago? And there was this recipe. A reminder to make this again because we liked it a LOT.

So, I decided to update it with turkey instead of ground beef and ground pork. Healthier for us, for sure. I had a package of ground turkey in the freezer, and a head of cabbage. I always have canned tomatoes on hand. Now certainly, making this with the beef and pork has more flavor. More texture, too. But interestingly enough, the tomatoes, onions and more importantly the sweet/sour aspect of this recipe is what you taste. The dried cranberries add a bit of sweet too, so I didn’t miss the red meat in this version at all.

I’m reprinting the recipe below, made with turkey. And with just one slight modification in the cooking instructions. I don’t know about you, but I’m never very happy with the way ground turkey and chicken break up into tiny, tiny pieces. So I took advice from my cousin Gary, in a technique he uses for cooking ground turkey – just place the brick of ground turkey on top of the sauce (or whatever you’re cooking – as long as it’s got some kind of bed to sit on and some fluid to help steam it – add a lid to the pan and let it simmer as is for about 10-15 minutes. Don’t stir. Don’t touch. When you unveil the meat, use a spatula or spoon and break the pieces into smaller pieces to suit you. You can see in the photo above, the turkey pieces are modest size – and when you chew it, there’s just more texture, which I like. Do note the low calorie of this dish now, using turkey.
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A year ago: Swiss Chard Tart with Goat Cheese
Two years ago: Brownie Thins (a super-thin chocolate cookie)

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