I took the head off a chicken

No pictures, but this is not a post for the super-squeamish.  Just a warning.

Like everyone in the mid-90s, I was a vegetarian teenager, which meant that I ate a lot of grilled cheese and zero beans or nuts.  I didn't eat tofu and had never heard of seitan or tempeh or any other vegan protein.  I was also once so anemic that I had to routinely drink the water spinach was boiled in for the iron (not recommended).  So when vegetarianism wasn't working for me, I went back to meat.  Sort of.

I'm the kind of meat eater who isn't looking to expand my horizons.  I have a friend who loves rabbit and duck, but the cuteness factor gets to me (my mom grew up with a pet duck).  I've never been able to eat anything on a bone, and this means Sous Chef Brian has used a fork to take meat off a chicken wing for me.  

So I don't eat a ton of meat, in overall quantity or in range. 

I'm also pretty upset about factory farming, so I try to buy meat from local farmers and feel like I have a sense of where it came from.  This is easy, with beef, we have great farms we can buy it from.  With chicken, the real limit is that at the farm stands and similar locales, most of the time you're getting a whole chicken.

So in reality, while I say I "make food out of food," what I actually do is make food out of vegetables.  I don't take meat from a non-food state and bring it to the table.  The meat I'm working with has generally been all fooded up before I see it. 

Same Dinner Different Day: Pineapple Fried Rice

Pineapple salsa is good, but it can be a lot of flavor and maybe you don't want it tearing up the inside of your mouth for two consecutive days.  Cooking the pineapple takes out a lot of the sting, and turns yesterday's taco topper into today's one-wok dinner. 

Totally Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup

I'm not posting step-by-step photos on chicken soup.  It's a classic, and I think mine probably looks like the same one you'd find in that old cookbook you inherited or picked up at the thrift store, with a couple of tweaks.  It's chicken soup.  I don't need to tell you it's good. 


Chicken soup is actually not among my top 12 favorite soups, but it's one that comes in handy sometimes.


Here's what I did (it's a two-day process). 

Chipotle Chicken Enchilada Lasagna

Enchiladasagna?


I just hate the word "casserole."  Casserole sounds like a can of cream of something soup with crumbled potato chips on top. Or corn flakes. And I intended to make enchiladas, really I did, but my corn tortillas did not hold up in the freezer, so after I defrosted them, I started rolling, they started crumbling and this was plan B.  And it was delicious, and just like an enchilada, except for the shape.  


Step one: make enchilada sauce.

Thai Green Curry with Vegetables and/or Chicken

Yeah I said and/or.  Because the chicken was good and all, but the veg were spectacular, so you could skip the chicken. 


Tonight was one of those nights where Sous Chef Brian was on top of things, and I was not.  As we finished dinner, he looked to the pile of dishes and said, "Are you going to go blog now?"


Me.  "No.  Tomorrow is the farmshare post and I already have that written."


Him.  "Maybe you want to get this down while it's fresh."


Me. "No."


Him. "How about I get on these dishes, and you start writing."  


Thanks, Mom.  "Honey, have you blogged tonight?" "Are you getting enough blogging in?" "Have you had enough blog?"


The reality is, he's a smart boy and I have a backlog of posts of things I don't quite have recipes for anymore.  Things I just made and set aside.  Like, maybe I made this pasta sauce two weeks ago.  


So hows that for your fourth wall?


Tonight I made a Thai curry dish that we had at the house of friends a couple weeks ago.  A week ago.  In the past.  We were there, and they were cooking and they were making Pina Coladas and suddenly I realized why - there was an open can of coconut milk... there was coconut milk in the dish.  Damnit.  You never want to be the person who doesn't want to eat what they're served, but I can't stand coconut milk (or coconut for that matter) and Brian is even more opposed... the coconut he's fine with but the milk...ugh the milk.  So that's what goes in the Pina Coladas.  The drink I can't drink even though I really like: 1. pineapple and 2. drinks. 

Garlic Scape Pesto Chicken Pasta

Yeah, the title of this one is just a bunch of food words strung together.  I could have used the word tomato too, but I thought that would be pushing it.

I made a ton of garlic scape pesto a few days ago.  I mixed it with red wine vinegar and a bit of oil and called it salad dressing for lunch, and then heated it up with my pasta and chicken and called it sauce for dinner.  

Scallion and Scape Chicken Salad

 

I love chicken salad, and Sous Chef Brian does not.   Every few years I make a new one and he patiently tries it and tells me it's "a texture thing."  He eats tuna salad, and potato salad and coleslaw and everything else you can douse in mayo and call food, but for some reason chicken salad doesn't resonate with him. 

So I make it rarely.  Sometimes, I'll order it out, but I need to be feeling pretty adventurous.  Why's that?  Because I went to graduate school for Public Health.  Public Health people know better than to eat the mayonnaise.  In every epidemiology class, there is an outbreak investigation... 19 people showed up at the ER after a banquet.   At the banquet there was steak, fish, and egg salad.  Here's a table of what everyone ate.  And it's always the mayonnaise people who end up in the hospital.  

There are two big problems that stand out to me from that assignment.  

1) The people in the example who get sick report a sore throat (not a symptom of salmonella, last I checked)

2) Who the hell is catering this banquet and using homemade mayonnaise in the egg salad?

A jar of Hellmans is not going to give you salmonella, because the eggs are pasteurized.  I mean, it might give you salmonella, in the same way that spinach or alfalfa sprouts might, but it's not more likely than spinach to make you sick.  The risk is in homemade mayo with raw egg.  You know I'm not someone to bash homemade foods, right?  Know your farmer.  Know your eggs.  Make mayo and be happy. 

Me, I'm not going to, but there are several things I learned in school that have given me unreasonable fears, and I'm not going to pass all of them on to you.   At least not all at once.

I think chicken salad has a few key components - something crunchy, something onion, something sweet, and something creamy.   Also chicken.  So those are the basic rules I follow.   Here's what I did last night.

Boneless, Skinless Oven Tandoori Chicken, etc

I had a birthday recently. In celebration of that, I received a dutch oven - actually, two of them.  I was excited to use one.  For some reason, I thought I had read a recipe for tandoori chicken using a dutch oven rather than a tandoor. A hard Googling tells me no, that a dutch oven creates a humid environment and is not a substitute. But of course, by the time I had figured this out, I already had chicken marinating and Sous Chef Brian had already told our mystery Sunday night dinner guest that there would be tandoori chicken.

Of course, grilling is an option, particularly in this weather, but it's fairly well-known that we suck at that.  Cook's Illustrated does it in the oven, on a rack. Sous Chef Brian remembered seeing it on America's Test Kitchen. I decided to follow their lead. Their recipe is here, by subscription.   My recipe is very much inspired by theirs, but modified a bit.

Dinner was tandoori chicken, basmati rice, chopped greens and naan.   I'll post the naan tomorrow.

Three Pepper Chicken Kabobs

I know you don't want to read me bitching about chicken again right? Or is that what you come here for? I'll cut to the chase for those of you who like to skip ahead: theres no real recipe here, but you'd like this, it was good, and I'm sure the day you make it, it won't go as badly as it did for me.

Orange Chicken ala Cook's Illustrated

I'm a whore for Cook's Illustrated.  I've discussed it in depth before, and my new favorite bread recipe is theirs and I DVR America's Test Kitchen and I signed up to be a recipe tester - but sigh, they never call - maybe they've seen the blog and have good reasons.

So I went flipping through back issues and found this one: "Rescuing Orange-Flavored Chicken," in the May/June 2005 issue.   I've never had Orange-Flavored Chicken, and thus, did not know it was in need of rescue.   Apparently its an overly-sweet and sticky sauce on fried chicken that folks get via Chinese take-out. 

It looked somewhat fussy, but really wasn't, but here's the thing - it's f-ing delicious.  I suggest you make it.

No recipe, but you can try the website out for free at the link above.   

Also, for those of you who are tracking it, I actually made this last week.  I still have plague and I'm still not cooking.  I can't imagine cooking.  It's like that.

Chicken and Green Beans in Italian Dressing - Revisited

This was a staple in my house growing up.   Sous Chef Brian's house too.   We both grew up with similar genres of food, but they were different.  His mom would put ground beef into Kraft Mac and Cheese, and my mom would put muenster and teriyaki sauce on steak.  But they both would cook chicken breasts in a bottle of Italian dressing, and serve it with green beans over rice. 


I guess because we both were so familiar with it - and I'm not trying to detract from it, we both really liked it, this was a staple in the early days of eating together.   When we were first living in a house with a dozen other people out in the woods, I'd make the foods I grew up with and the foods he grew up with, and cakes.   Terrible, brightly-colored, boxed and frosted cakes.   One roommate once said to me, "I didn't realize you liked dessert so much," and I didn't - I just thought that that's what I was supposed to do.  Make cakes.   There was a lot of meatloaf back then.   Sous Chef Brian misses the meatloaf. 


So the other day, we were doing some menu planning and Sous Chef Brian said, "How about chicken in Italian dressing," and I got all self-righteous and horrified for a second, and then I realized it could be awesome. 

Chicken Saltimbocca

I wish dinner wasn't delicious.

What's my point here?  I guess if it wasn't delicious, I could post this as a fail and move on.  Big picture?  This blog is not about "check out my innovative new recipe you've never heard of" or "look at my impeccable technique."  It's about "look what I made for dinner."  Sure, I want it to say, "you too can make awesome sandwich bread/crackers/sweet and sour seitan," but I guess the part that follows that is "since I did it, and I'm not good at this sometimes."  I just posted a fail (there was the invisible cashew cream sauce with the chicken and black bean egg rolls) and I hate to do it again...  but this is about what I made for dinner.

Some nights I don't want to cook.  I don't know why I can't just take the tortilla soup out of the freezer and go with that, but I make something new instead.   Tonight, I didn't even have to think of something to make - it came from the comments, when I asked what to do with the leftover prosciutto from the spaghetti squash, Cheryl said "saltimbocca."  I've stuffed chicken before.  This is not a technique that I'm unable to handle.  But somehow, everything about it was.

Black Bean and Chicken Egg Rolls

This is, apparently, the only pose I can imagine for the egg rolls -I used it last week too. 

A week ago I made Red Cabbage Egg Rolls, and I had about half* the wrappers left over, so here's what happened with that. These are much like some Southwestern Egg Rolls we've had in chain restaurants, but made of food and baked.

Tortilla Soup with Kale and Chicken

I don't really make soups.  I'm not good at viewing a soup as "dinner."  Put a grilled cheese sandwich next to it, and I'm all set, but just soup sounds like a beverage.   But this is different.  This is borderline stewlike.  This has stuff it it, and if you want to put different stuff in it, that's ok too.  Like pizza, pretty much, you can clean out your fridge into tortilla soup.

Pulled Chicken on Cheddar Biscuits

I'm new to the blogging thing, and along with it, the twittering thing.  Seriously, I feel like somebody's Grandma, new to the internets.   But through the twittering thing, because we both use office supplies in the kitchen, I found On Blank.  I actually just looked at it for real for the first time yesterday, and it's awesome.   It's about food made of food, and about freezing things.  It looks like we have a lot in common, but she's more hardcore than I am - like, she goes on about how it's not a big deal to make your own bread.  (um, it IS a big deal.  Sure we should do it, but it's a thing.  It takes time.  You do it wrong, and you've lost all that time and have no bread.)   But anyhow, her blog looks awesome, and so when looking for dinner ideas today, I came across her herb and cheese biscuits.

Roasted Bok Choy, Hoisin Chicken, Etc

Sunday was one of those days.  A lot of days are those days, but Sunday was much more of one.  I was tired and weird, and I took a nap and woke up from the sort of low-grade anxiety dream that has my heart racing over laundry and shopping and neglect.  So at 3pm on Sunday I stumbled downstairs and said, "Don't we normally have someone over for dinner on Sundays?  I don't have any food.  I'll call her."  And I did and I picked her up and we headed to Whole Foods, me with a lame weekly shopping list and her with a plan for dinner.  "Asian." 

Chicken Fajitas

 I've been making this for years and years, and still whenever I eat it, I'm like, "Why don't I do this more often?"  It's quick, it doesn't take a lot of ingredients, and it's cheap* and healthy.  And you could totally make it vegetarian with either fake meat or no meat.  And you could totally add more vegetables (zucchini and eggplant would be rad).  

The requirements, as far as I'm concerned, are onions, peppers, and tortillas.  The rest is flexible.

Same Dinner Different Day: Chicken Avocado Tequila Salad

Tonight I faced a tired avocado and already wilted cilantro, leftover from Sunday's dinner.  So I made the same salad, but with chicken.  It's a chicken breast, coated in the same stuff I'd use for fajitas (cayenne, paprika, onion, garlic, salt, pepper) and grilled.

Same dinner, different day.  My avocado was softer, making it more a part of the dressing than the salad, which we both appreciated.

Spinach and Bacon Stuffed Chicken

Chicken.


Chicken scares the hell out of me.  Everything that's been within a foot of raw chicken needs to be boiled immediately.  I was a vegetarian as a teenager and I blame that for why I'm afraid of meat, but chicken takes top prize*. 


So, ready for a "recipe"?  It's not scary once it's cooked. In fact it's delicious.