Aw, Hey! No Fair!

I wanna go!! Well, not as unfair as tsunamis are, but still. I wish this wasn’t in Georgia. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can spring for a ticket to Georgia for the weekend just now. But if you can, and you’d like to benefit tsunami survivors and spend an evening with Alton Brown, bid away.

Fiber Joe’s

I finally had the opportunity this weekend to visit the fabulousness that is Trader Joe’s. I happened to be on the Cape and stopped in at the Hyannis store. Now I am just jealous. The only one in Western Mass is in Hadley, a town I don’t find myself in very often. As usual, the eastern part of the state is hogging up all the good stuff, as the other fourteen Trader Joe’s locations in the state are east of Worcester. Hmmmph. I brought home two boxes of Kashi Go Lean cereal at only $2.29 a box, and they even took my $1.00-off-two coupon. There’s about 8 servings per box, which works out to about 22 cents after the coupon per bowl of 10 grams of fiber. Ha! Take that Stop & Shop!

A Week In Food

I was recently asked what a typical dinner plan for the week is like at my house. Here’s what the last seven days’ menu has been at Chez Jennifer:

Saturday: Homemade clam chowder, popovers and salad. I make the chowder with lots of canned stuff too but you’d never know. Brown 5 strips of bacon in the bottom of a soup pot. Remove from pan. Saute the following, chopped, in the bacon fat: 1 medium onion, 3 ribs celery, 2 big baking potatoes. When the onions are soft, add one small bottle of Snow’s clam juice and the juices from two small cans of chopped or minced Snow’s clams. (the cans are the same size as tuna cans.) Bring to a simmer and cook partially covered until the potatoes are mostly soft, about 10 minutes. To make the chowder a little thicker, dunk a stick blender in the pot to mash up the potatoes a bit. Then, add a cup of 1% milk, a cup of heavy cream (I never said this was a light recipe!), the chopped clams, and a tablespoon of butter. Bring back to a simmer and then serve with the crumbled bacon on top.

Sunday: Roasted turkey breast, gravy, mashed potatoes, butternut squash, and stuffing.

Monday: Pot roast in the crockpot with potatoes, onions, and baby carrots.

Tuesday: Shepherd’s pie, made ahead on Sunday. I cheat a lot with this one. I brown hamburg along with a small chopped onion and layer that in the bottom of a casserole dish. For the next layer, I mix one can of regular corn and one can of creamed corn and pour just a little milk over that. Then, I make a double batch of Betty Crocker instant four cheese mashed potatoes, layer that on top of the corn, and top it all off with some flavored bread crumbs and parmesan cheese. Don’t knock it till you try it.

Wednesday: Leftovers from Sunday. This didn’t go quite as planned as the kids ended up eating most of the leftover turkey as an afterschool snack on Tuesday. I spread out what was left into little sandwiches and reheated the squash and stuffing & potatoes with the gravy poured over the top.

Thursday: Baked flounder with rice pilaf and snow peas (frozen) on the side.

Friday: Tonight’s dinner will be stir-fried chicken and vegetables, unless my husband talks me into a pizza instead.

I’m not sure exactly how typical this week has been. In general, I tend to make more complicated dishes on the weekend like fried fish and roast chicken. Things I make on the weekend ahead for during the week include lasagna and chicken pot pie. I use the crockpot a lot to make meals like beef stew or meatballs. By mid-week, there is usually some consumption of leftovers, and maybe something more creative but less time consuming than a big weekend meal, like a frittata or the chicken chili. Ham steak is another typical midweek quick meal, and if there are any leftovers they go nicely into something like the frittata. By the end of the week, I am usually hoping to go out to dinner or get take-out, which brings us back to that possible pizza tonight.

Of course, all of this will change come the warmer weather and grilling season. I am a wuss and I don’t like going out in the cold to barbecue, despite the fact that we no longer have the groovy circa-1960 direct gas line grill in the far reaches of the back yard and the new grill is right outside the kitchen door by the deck.

What are some of your favorites in your regular meal rotation? Are you in a dinner time rut? Discuss in the Wine & Dine Forum.

Kicked-Up Cookies

If you love peanut butter cookies, I have a great way to take them to the next level – add a bag of Nestle’s mixed milk chocolate and peanut butter chips to the batter. The recipe I use is from the Jif Peanut Butter website. I just toss in the whole bag of chips as the last addition to the batter and bake as normal. The recipe calls for Crisco shortening. I prefer to use Crisco’s butter flavor shortening for all of my cookies. Here’s a tip – if you like your cookies really thin and flat, use butter for your fat. If you prefer a cookie with more body, use shortening. Whatever you do, for the sake of all that is good and holy, do not use margarine in your cookies or in any of your baking. Any kind of fake buttery-flavored spread is dangerous because of the varying amounts of fat. Baking results are unpredictable and frankly, it just tastes nasty. If you are going to bother to make a cookie, you might as well go for the gusto. Now is not the time to be concerned about fat & calories. Just don’t eat the whole batch yourself!

New Link

Check out the new blog link to the left for Chef JoAnna. She is a personal chef in Los Angeles and writes with passion about the food she makes. By the way, the last thing I ate or drank was a sandwich made with leftover meat from the turkey breast I roasted last night. It was Thanksgiving In February at the Adams household, with stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and butternut squash on the side. Man, I really need to get to the gym this week!

When Spongebob Calls The Exterminator

Scott posted today about lobster guilt – you know, that feeling that you get just before you throw a live lobster into boiling water. I got over that by watching the Good Eats lobster episode. In it, Alton Brown, helpful sort that he is, explains that lobsters are actually very closely related to cockroaches. If you look at them as the giant, aquatic bugs that they basically are, it might make it easier for you to want to kill them. Of course, thinking about that part might make you want to eat it less. If the bug analogy still doesn’t help, or grosses you out too much, then AB suggests placing them in the freezer for 20 minutes or so to sort of stun them, putting them into a coma-like state before boiling. I have used this technique and have found that when you take them out they are still moving just enough to let you know they aren’t dead but there is no thrashing about when they hit the pot – just a peaceful transition from coma to dinner. Cockroach Thermidor, anyone?

Adaptation

Sometimes when I improvise, it actually works out. Big Y had Perdue chicken thighs on sale this week, buy one package, get two free. I wanted to make something in the crockpot that would be ready when I got home from the gym on Monday night. I looked through my slow cooker cookbooks (yes, I have more than one. It’s a sickness.) but didn’t find one that suited me. So, I adapted and combined and came up with this:

Slow Cooker Chicken With Garlic & Shallots

2 packages Perdue chicken thighs (10 pieces)
8 or so shallots, peeled and split into halves or quarters, depending how big
The rest of the garlic cloves from the bulb I took two from to make the chicken chili (10-15 cloves maybe?), peeled & crushed
One large yellow onion, sliced into 8 chunks
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 sprigs fresh parsley
1 teaspoon dry thyme
1 – 14.5 oz can chicken broth
1/4 cup (or so) leftover white wine
Salt & Pepper

Heat the olive oil in a large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. Sprinkle one side of the chicken thighs with salt & pepper and place that side down in the skillet. Sprinkle the other side with salt & pepper, and cook, 5-10 minutes each side until browned. (I browned in two separate batches, 5 pieces at a time) While the chicken is browning, chop the shallots and crush the garlic and put in bottom of crockpot. (mine is a 6-quart model) Place the first batch of chicken on top of the shallots & garlic after browning. While the second batch browns, chop the onion and place on top of the chicken in crockpot. Place the second batch of chicken on top of the onions. Toss in the parsley sprigs whole and sprinkle with the thyme. Pour in the broth, wine and any leftover pan juices. Cook on low for 6 hours. Enjoy smell when you return home.

To complete the meal, I made fried noodles flavored with the aromatics from the chicken. I boiled a little more than half a bag of wide egg noodles and drained them. I used a slotted spoon to scoop out some shallots, garlic, onion and parsley from the crockpot and liquefied them in the food processor. I dumped the noodles into a non-stick skillet that was heating on medium-high with 2 or 3 more tablespoons of olive oil, then poured the liquefied crockpot goo over the noodles. I stirred it all together and kept the noodles moving for about 3-4 minutes over the heat. Serve the chicken on top or to the side of the noodles.

D’oh!

I am on a quest. The goal – homemade pizza with just the right crust. It should be thin and just a little crispy but a little chewy too. And it has to taste great – the outside edge of the crust shouldn’t just be a disposable handle. So far, I am falling quite short of the goal.

It all started about 3 years ago when I was registering for wedding gifts. Which, by the way, is one of the coolest inventions ever. You pick out stuff you like, people by it for you. Brilliant! One of the items I registered for was a pizza stone. It came in a cute kit with a peel and a pizza cutter. Shortly after the wedding, I set out to make Alton Brown’s pizza crust recipe. I followed his instructions carefully and compared them with the instructions that came with the stone. Everything agreed and I thought I was all set. Until I tried to shape my dough blob, that is. It refused to stretch out into the nice, thin, doughy membrane AB demonstrated on his show. Instead, each time I stretched it out, it sproinged (technical culinary term) right back to where it started. Eventually, I beat it into submission enough with a rolling pin and topped it. Meanwhile, my new stone was heating up in a ripping hot 500 oven, as directed both by the stone’s instruction book and AB. The instruction book also suggested spreading out some cornmeal right on the stone, which I did. And just before I was ready to put the pizza in the oven…what’s that smell?? Aiiieeee! The corn meal is burning! Great…how am I going to clean this up? I did my best to scrape the black stuff off the stone with a spatula and hoped for the best as I stuck it back in the oven and waited a bit for it to reheat before I put the pizza in. Finally, after a brief struggle getting the pizza off the peel, I got it into the oven. In 5 to 7 minutes, it was supposed to be time to eat. I kept a watchful eye through the cloudy glass door of our groovy circa 1960 oven with the burnt out and unreplaceable light. The thin, crisp crust was not happening. My dough puffed up faster than Grandma’s ankles on a hot summer day. I was not daunted. So, it’s puffy. Doesn’t mean it will taste bad. But…what’s that smell?? I fling open the oven door and sure enough, less than five minutes in and the whole bottom of the pizza is burned and blackened. Sadly, we settled for tearing off the top, puffy layer and calling it dinner.

The next summer, I decided to try something different and grill a pizza with the recipe I got from Gourmet magazine. I still couldn’t get the crust out as thin as I wanted it, but the bigger problem was controlling the heat on our groovy circa 1960 built-in direct gas line grill. The crust cooked before the cheese could melt and I had to finish it inside under the broiler for a few minutes.

Recently, I decided to give Alton’s recipe another shot. I was lucky enough to meet him at a book signing in September 2003 and took the opportunity to fawn over his brownie recipe and ask why my pizza dough might have come out so puffy. He said I probably didn’t knead it enough and not to be afraid of overkneading it. Overkneading is almost impossible to do. I remembered his words when I got his new book for Christmas 2004. It has his crust recipe in it as well as lots of great tips for pizza making. I took out my trusty Kitchenaid and started kneading. I painstakingly checked the dough over and over again, pulling off little pieces and making teeny-tiny Barbie sized pizzas to see if I got the consistency right. Satisfied after a much longer kneading period than the recipe called for, I put it in the fridge for it’s overnight rise.

The next day I got home later than I thought I might. I set about shaping my dough, and it stretched more this time. But something still wasn’t right. As it stretched, big holes opened up. No matter how many times I tried to reshape, I ended up with something that looked not unlike a mask from the movie Scream. I re-read the recipe, searching for answers and aw, crap… I forgot a step. I skipped the one hour bench proof after I took it out of the fridge. Oops. So I did the best I could, patching it together and resorting to the rolling pin once again. Meanwhile, we have recently moved and no longer have the groovy circa 1960 oven. I also can’t even find my pizza stone. Undaunted, I grabbed a cookie sheet and shaped a rectangular pizza to fit it from my Scream mask. The results have improved a little. The pizza is doesn’t puff up huge, but the cookie sheet has created a new problem. My handy dandy “airbake” cookie sheet, which is supposed to keep you from burning your cookies, is now preventing the crust from browning on the bottom. I have tumbled all the way over to the other end of the pizza crust spectrum from burnt to doughy.

I made another attempt this past weekend. I didn’t have quite as much yeast on hand as the recipe calls for but I went ahead anyway. I set the mixer to knead and walked away as we started a pay-per-view of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I set a timer for twice as long as the recipe calls for. After all, I knew it took much longer than what the recipe said last time, and Alton said it’s very hard to overknead. Apparently, it’s not that hard. My dough fell apart into an ooze. I attempted resuscitation by adding a little more flour, and then some more water, and ended up with one lumpy looking dough ball. I flung it in the fridge anyway and hoped some of Harry’s magic would rub off on my dough.

The next morning it didn’t look very hopeful. It hadn’t risen as much as the last batch. By dinner time it had grown some more, so I took it out and at least remembered to bench proof this time. It didn’t matter. The dough came apart into weird shapes that refused to be stuck back together. I couldn’t find a non-airbake cookie sheet that was big enough for my disfigured dough. So, I took a step backwards and ended up even doughier than the last time. More good dough done bad.

I am taking a break for now. I can’t bear to watch myself disrespect the dough again. It deserves better than the shabby treatment I have been giving it. But I am not giving up the quest. Someday soon when I find my pizza stone or get a new one, I pledge to follow every direction, have enough of all the right ingredients, knead enough but not too much, and come up with something that’s actually worth the effort. For now, what’s the number for Domino’s?

Crumbs

Some ‘splaining to do:

-Over to the right under ‘Favorite Weblogs,’ one of the links is for the Julie/Julia Project. If you go there, you will notice that it hasn’t been updated since August of last year. The project was actually completed long ago, but I put the link there anyway because it’s worth checking out the archives if you haven’t read it already. This blog was inspired by Julie, and while I won’t be endeavoring to cook over 500 hundred French recipes in one year, if I can be at least a fraction as entertaining while describing my kitchen trials and tribulations, I’ll feel like I am doing my job here.

-By popular demand; my actual recipe for the chicken chili:
2 – 12.5 oz cans Kirkland white chicken meat
2 racquet ball-sized yellow onions, chopped fine and rinsed of any blood after I chopped my finger
2 of the bigger garlic cloves from the outside the bulb, minced fine
2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground oregano
1 tsp ground coriander
2 – 4.5 oz cans chopped green chiles, undrained (I used Ortega in the blue can)
2 – 15.5 oz cans Goya Alooooooobias (cannellini beans), rinsed and drained
1 – 14 oz can College Inn chicken broth (also purchased in bulk at Costco)
1/2 a can of water – I rinse the sides of the broth can as I refill it halfway to get the extra chickeny goodness out of it
2 or 3 scallion stalks chopped
A sprinkling of shredded cheese. This time I used mozzarella because it was what I had, but I liked Monterey Jack better the last time.
Cooking spray (At the moment, I have Stop & Shop brand canola spray)
Goldfish crackers (cheddar)
Beano – chewable tablets

Spray the bottom of a soup pot with cooking spray. Add the chopped onions and cook over medium-ish heat until the onions are clear and soft. Add the garlic and saute two minutes. Add the cumin, oregano, and coriander and saute 1 more minute. Add the chiles, stir, reduce heat to low and cook partially covered for 10 minutes. Snack on Goldfish crackers while waiting, if desired. Add the chicken, mushing it a bit with a fork against the sides of the can before dumping it out to break it up a little more. Add the broth, water, and beans and stir. Cover and simmer 10 minutes. Serve topped with the cheese and scallions, and the Beano on the side. (I like 2-3 tablets – there’s a lot of beans in there!)

– If you didn’t see the latest Good Eats on Wednesday night at 10:00, the same episode is on again tonight at 7:00. AB is making coq au vin, there’s a live rooster involved, and it is freakin’ hilarious.

Dinner… From A Can!

No, not Chef Boyardee. I got this recipe awhile back from Cooking Light for White Chicken Chili. It’s amazing how yummy it tastes despite a lot of the ingredients coming from cans – cannellini beans (or “alubias” as it says on the Goya can, which is way more fun to say), chopped green chilis & chicken broth. It also calls for chopped fresh onions, garlic, cumin, coriander, oregano, and chopped green onions and some shredded cheese to top it, and of course, chicken. The original recipe called for skinless, boneless chicken breast cut into bite sized pieces and browned. I did that the first time I made it. Then Jennifer Boyle told me that her recipe called for the chicken to be shredded. That sounded like it would create a better texture than the chunks, so for the double batch I made for work for the Christmas luncheon, I painstakingly shredded 4 pounds of poached chicken by hand. Actually, it started out by fork and then went quickly to by hand after I decided that the pain of tearing hot chicken with my bare hands was less than the pain of the forks digging into my poor hands as I shredded.

But last night, I got lazy. Or was it clever? Yes, I upped the can quotient even higher and made it with… Canned chicken!! Yes, it sounds gross. Yes, it looks suspiciously like tuna when you open the can. But no, it is not just some mashed up parts-is-parts and chicken by-products. If you read the label, you can buy just plain ole white chicken breast meat packed in water. The last time I was at Costco, I bought an eight-pack of 12.5 ounce cans of their Kirkland brand for some instant chicken insurance! Forget to thaw some chicken for a recipe? Chicken in a can to the rescue! Eat most the meat off of that carcass you want to make stock and then soup with? Chicken in a can to the rescue! Not to mention, it is far less scary than say, potted meat. Potted meat! This is an actual product. I want to know who decided to put those two words together and market them.

But I digress. The canned chicken did the trick quite nicely, falling apart into chili-appropriate little shreds with little effort and no hand pain. The hearty concoction made a filling meal with just some crusty bread and a few Beano on the side. The one caveat: watch out for little tiny bones. I found two in my serving, but my husband didn’t mention any in his, nor did I have to perform any Heimlich maneuvers. Maybe it’s time to upgrade my canned chicken brand.