Fall

March 2, 2012February 2, 2017

Chicken Pot Pie

I will tell you that while I write this, we are at Jonah’s office recording a cover of The Counting Crows’ “St. Robinson in his Cadillac Dream.” I discovered today that the band is holding a cover contest and if you place in the top three you win 1) a signed guitar, 2) $600 to Guitar Center, and 3) a spot on an EP that they’re distributing to fans, etc. By the time this is published, we will be long finished, but for now, we’re working away. We discovered the contest about 24 hours before the deadline, so we’ve recruited our singer/musician friend Jon to help us create an a cappella infused cover. It’s currently just after 1 am, and one of us (me or Jonah) has to wake up at quarter to 7 tomorrow morning to drive the kids to school, and then we both have to go on our couch-to-5k run… We may have bitten off more than we can chew, but by golly we’re gonna get something in for this contest!

Now onto the food. Yesterday I wanted to make dinner. I wanted to make a dinner that was delicious and wintery, not too difficult, but a little bit impressive. After browsing a few recipes, I settled on Chicken Pot Pie. Relatively easy, but impressive because, you know, it’s a pie. I didn’t use a particular recipe, and also instead of making it in a pie dish, I made it in two little ramekins, so Jonah and I each had our own little servings. Which was cute. So I’m gonna give you the measurements I used, but I suggest doubling it if you’re looking to feed more than 2 people (though we did have leftovers).

Chicken Pot Pie

Makes 2 personal pies

Ingredients

Pie Dough

2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup cold butter
1/2 cup cold shortening
3-5 Tbl of ice water

Chicken Filling

1 boneless skinless chicken breast
1 cup chicken broth
2 tsp vegetable oil
1 small onion, chopped fine
2 carrots, peeled and sliced 1/4 inch thick
2 stalks of celery, washed and sliced 1/4 inch thick
salt and pepper
2 Tbl butter
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup milk
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 cup frozen peas, thawed

Instructions

Pie Dough

Start by making the pie dough, which you can find a recipe for here.

Chicken Filling

Start by putting the chicken and broth in a saucepan and bringing it to a nice simmer. Cook it until the chicken is tender and cooked through. Transfer the chicken to a mixing bowl, and strain the broth into a measuring cup or some other vessel. Don’t bother washing the pot, you’ll reuse it a bunch of times. Heat your oven to 400 degrees.

Heat the oil in the pot and when it’s nice and hot add the onion, carrots, celery, and about 1/8 tsp each of salt and pepper. Cook the veggies till they’re mostly softened (covering them while they cook helps with this by adding some steam). While the veggies cook, take a couple forks or a fork and knife and shred the chicken into bite-size pieces. When the vegetables are done cooking, add them to the bowl with the chicken.

Remove your pie dough from the fridge so it can start warming up. In that same dang pot, melt the butter over medium heat. Then add the flour and stir it up. You’ll have some clumps, but don’t worry about it. After cooking your clumps for a little bit, throw in most of the reserved chicken broth (I probably did about half of it, maybe 3/4), the milk, and the thyme. Whisk it up so the clumps dissolve, and cook it until the sauce thickens. Remove from the heat, and stir in the chicken/veggie mixture, the peas, and season it with salt and pepper to taste.

Now you can roll out your dough. Because we were doing the little ramekins, I split each disc of pie two in two and rolled each half out, laying it gently in the dish and making sure there were no pockets of air in the sides or bottom. Once both had their bottom crust in, I split the filling between the two dishes. Then roll out the second disc (again split in two) and cover the pies, trim the excess dough, and form an edge. Put the ramekins on a baking sheet (foil lined if you so wish), and put them in the oven for 30 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown.

Allow them to cool for at least 10 minutes before digging in and enjoying!

March 1, 2012February 2, 2017

Bread, again, but different

Jonah and I keep a little white board in our apartment next to our refrigerator where we write all kinds of things: items to get at the grocery store, tasks to do (such as getting a watch so we can time our couch-to-5k runs which we’ve just started), occasionally notes to each other, and there are also little magnets so we can put checks to be deposited and notes from our bosses, etc. It’s really a handy little space near the door to remind us of all the little things we need to do.

Anyway, on Monday, Jonah wrote a little grocery list on the board before he went into work. Upon seeing that bread was on the list and I hadn’t baked anything in a couple days and hadn’t made bread in quite some time, I decided to make some instead of just buying some. I had found this incredibly easy looking recipe over at Joy the Baker and had been waiting to try it. I think it’s my last “super easy” recipe before I try making my own sourdough starter. So keep an eye out. The other great thing about the recipe was that it only called for bread flour, and I’m still trying to use up that giant bag, so it was perfect. You’ll only need 4 ingredients, one of which is water, so really, only 3.

This bread is delicious with just some butter, toasted with butter and jam. Jonah said it also made a delicious PB+J. And I’m about to go try using it for a grilled cheese. This bread was so supremely simple to make, I think everyone should try it. It’s great for a beginner recipe that still has some of that crispy crust. Enjoy!

Simple Bread

Makes 2 loaves

Ingredients

4 cups bread flour
2 tsp salt
2 tsp active dry yeast
1 1/2 cups warm water

Instructions

Put 3 3/4 cups of the flour into a mixing bowl (electric mixer would be nice). Reserve the other 1/4 cup of the flour for kneading/incorporating later. On one side of the pile of flour in your mixing bowl, put the salt, and on the other side, put the yeast. Not sure why this is so important as everything is about to get mixed together, but whatever. Now pour the water over the flour and mix it until it just comes together (I started with the paddle attachment and then switched to the dough hook once the dough had come together).

Once the dough comes together and you switch to a dough hook, put your mixer on a medium speed and let it knead the dough for 2 minutes. The dough should easily clear the sides of the bowl but stick to the bottom a little bit. If you feel the need, you can add a little flour or water depending on the status of your dough, but mine was pretty spot on, so I didn’t want to mess with it. After mixing it for 2 minutes, let it rest for 5 minutes. After the 5 minute rest, mix it again for 3 minutes. At this point you can flour your counter (with that 1/4 cup of bread flour you reserved) and dump the dough out.

Now you can hand-knead the dough, incorporating the 1/4 cup of the flour reserved. You may not need to incorporate the whole 1/4 cup. I’d say I got about 1/8 cup into the dough, and then stopped. This was the first time in my bread-making experience that I felt like I could tell by the feel of the dough when it was ready. Right when I dumped it onto the counter, it was not as dense as my other doughs have been; instead it was light and easy to work with. I didn’t want to push it, so when it stopped taking the extra flour in, I stopped adding. When the dough seems smooth enough, form it into a ball, lightly oil a bowl (I just used the same mixing bowl) and put the dough in, turning to coat the dough with oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a dish towel, and let rest for 1 1/2 hours.

After the 1 1/2 hours, the dough should have about doubled in size. Remove the dough from the bowl, punch it down, and reform it into a ball, replace it in the bowl and cover it, letting it rise for another half hour.

After this second shorter rest, remove the dough from the bowl onto a lightly floured surface (I just never cleaned my counter till the bread was in the oven) and cut it into two pieces. Form each lump into a smooth and round ball. The best way to do this is to just keep grabbing the edges of the dough and tucking them underneath. Eventually you’ll have a tight, smooth ball. Cover the two balls of dough with a damp cloth and let them rest on the lightly floured surface (aka counter) for 45 minutes to an hour.

Towards the end of this resting period, you can preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Make sure your rack is in the bottom half of your oven because the bread will rise. And put another rack below it. Put a baking sheet (or baking stone if that’s what you’re using) in the oven while it’s heating so it gets hot. Uncover your balls of dough, and slash the tops with 2-4 slashes to guide the expansion of the bread while it’s baking. When your oven is heated, take out the hot baking sheet and carefully put the dough on it, and put it in the oven.

Now it’s time for the steam. A couple minutes after you put the bread in the oven, you can dump 1/4 cup of water onto the oven floor (if you have an electric oven) and immediately close the door, then repeat in a couple minutes. I wasn’t all about dumping water in my oven for some reason, so I did what I’d read in a previous recipe and put half a cup (so I didn’t have to open the oven again and let the heat escape) of water on another baking sheet and put it on the rack beneath the bread. It also works just fine and creates steam. the steam is what helps make the crust nice and crispy, I think.

Anyway, you’ll want to bake the loaves for 20-25 minutes. They’ll be a beautiful golden brown. It’s smart to throw a thermometer in there too, just to make sure. They should register between 190-210 degrees. Now, transfer them to a wire rack to cool (mine were still making crackling/baking noises for a couple minutes, it was kind of cool). Make sure they are completely cool before taking a slice, spreading on some butter, and enjoying.

February 29, 2012February 2, 2017

Korean Marinated Beef

This Korean marinated beef was the second part of our asian dinner the other night. I found this recipe in our Gourmet Today cookbook, which is wonderful. This recipe was crazy good and super quick. The meat was nice and tender and perfectly cooked and the marinade caramelized nicely in the pan. You’re supposed to serve the beef in a lettuce cup with kimchi and rice, but we just served it over rice alongside the Japanese cucumber salad seen in the previous post. Here’s what you’ll need:

Korean Marinated Beef

Ingredients

1/4 cup soy sauce
1 Tbl sugar
2 tsp Asian sesame oil
1 bunch of scallions, minced, with the white and green parts separated
1 Tbl minced garlic
1 Tbl minced peel fresh ginger
3 Tbl sesame seeds, toasted
1 lb flank steak (we did about 3/4 of a pound, just because the cut of meat is a little expensive and the recipe serves 4 people), cut across the grain into very thin slices (the recipe says no more than 1/8 inch thick, but I was like, hell no, so I just sliced it as thin as I could)
1 Tbl vegetable oil for cooking

Instructions

In a medium sized mixing bowl, stir together the soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, the whites of the scallions, the garlic, ginger, and 2 Tbl of the sesame seeds. Whisk this up until the sugar is dissolved. Now add the steak, toss it around to make sure it’s evenly coated, and let it marinate for 15 minutes.

After that 15 minute wait, heat the oil in a pan over high heat. You definitely want the oil to be shimmering, if not smoking. Now add the steak in one layer and cook (ours took 2 batches), turning halfway through. If your heat is high enough, it’ll only take about 4-5 minutes for your meat to be cooked through and even get a nice sear/caramelization from the marinade. When the meat is just cooked through – don’t cook it too long or it will lose some of it’s tenderness – transfer to a plate, sprinkle with the rest of the sesame seeds and the scallion greens. Serve with rice and Japanese cucumber salad (see previous post). Enjoy!

February 26, 2012February 2, 2017

Matcha Green Tea Cookies

A little while ago it was my dear friend Rosie’s birthday. She and I met in college and immediately became close friends. Perhaps one of our favorite things to do together was to go downtown to the Tea Zone in the pearl district and get Green Tea Lattes. They were amazing, so creamy and delicious and this beautiful green color. When Rosie studied abroad, I knew she had missed them and brought her a green tea latte when I went to pick her up at the airport.

So like I said, it was Rosie’s birthday, and a few days beforehand I happened to be surfing some food blogs and stumbled across this recipe for matcha green tea cookies. The timing could not have been better. I immediately knew that I had to make these for her. I walked down the street to Tea Chai Te (another wonderful tea shop in Portland) and picked up a couple ounces of matcha (I wanted extra to send to her along with the cookies) and started baking away.

Matcha Green Tea Cookies

A note about your matcha: the better the quality, the greener it will be! I hope yours is as vividly green as mine was. I’ve never called cookie dough beautiful before. But it was suitable for cookies for Rosie.

Ingredients

3/4 cup confectioner’s sugar
1 1/2 tbsps matcha green tea powder
10 tbsps unsalted butter, room temperature
1 3/4 cup flour
3 egg yolks
1 cup granulated sugar (to roll the cookies in pre-baking)

Instructions

First, mix together the confectioner’s sugar and the matcha powder. Then add in the butter, and mix thoroughly to cream it.

Now, add in the flour and mix just until is it combined. The thing with shortbread-type cookies is the less you handle them, the better. Now toss in the egg yolks and mix until the dough comes together. It will look a wee bit like play dough, but instead of those obnoxious neon colors it will be a beautiful forest green.

Now you can dump the dough out onto a clean surface (aka counter) and make it into a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. When you remove the dough, start preheating your oven to 350 degrees, and dump the sugar into a shallow bowl.

Roll out your dough until it’s about 1/2 an inch thick. Using a cookie cutter that’s about two inches wide, cut out some cookies! This is totally the fun part. Feel free to mash up scraps and re-roll the dough as many times as you wish. The dough actually comes back together really nicely, unlike some other cookies. Anyway, after you’ve cut them out, you can dunk them in sugar and put them on a baking sheet. (If you don’t have awesome baking sheets that everything slides right off of, I might suggest putting parchment paper down.)

Bake them for 12-15 minutes, or until they just start to turn golden at the edges. Transfer them to a wire rack to cool, and then enjoy! (The website also warns to store them in the shade as the color will fade with exposure to the sun…)

February 24, 2012February 2, 2017

Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce

The posting of the recipe is long overdue, as I made this dish quite a while ago. So I may not remember the exact details of everything I did to make this – but here goes. Have I told you about the unprecedented influx of cookbooks in Annie and I’s apartment? I went from owning exactly zero cookbooks before Christmas and my birthday this year (Jan 6) to having 4. That’s a 400% increase in cookbooks within the span of a month! Anyway, Annie’s mom got me this great cookbook called Plenty, that has some fantastically new and different recipes. This is one of them.

A picture of this eggplant with buttermilk sauce recipe is on the cover of the Plenty cookbook, so I decided to make it. It looked like nothing I had ever tasted before, and that’s what it ended up tasting like!

Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce

Ingredients

2 eggplants
1/2 cup olive oil
4-6 thyme sprigs
salt and pepper
1 pomegranate (this is the fun part)
For the sauce:
9 Tbs buttermilk
1/2 cup Greek yogurt
1.5 Tbs olive oil
1 small garlic clove, finely chopped
pinch of salt

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Cut the eggplants in half lengthwise (see photo below). Now cut some lengthwise incisions on each half, but not all the way through to the skin. This is just to let the oil and juices get around. Make some more diagonal incisions (I sort of did this like you would cut an avocado before you scoop the flesh out).

Place the eggplant halves on a baking sheet, and brush them with the 1/2 cup olive oil until it’s all used up. Sprinkle with some thyme leaves and salt and pepper. Roast for 45 minutes, when the eggplant flesh should be soft and browned.

While the eggplant is roasting away, let’s do something fun. To get all the seeds out without digging through the fruit like a raccoon, start by cutting the pomegranate in half. Hold one half over a bowl with the flesh side facing down into your hand (watch out, your fingers are about to get juicy). Use the back of a wooden spoon and start whacking the back of the pomegranate gently, and then with increased force, until the seeds start to fall out into the bowl. Don’t lose faith if seeds don’t start raining down right away: it takes a minute for them to start getting loose. It helps to flip the pomegranate half over once in a while to gently pull the membranes apart and pick them out. Do the same thing with the other half.

Make the sauce by whisking all of the sauce ingredients together in a small bowl. I used Greek yogurt that was honey-flavored, which may have been a mistake.

When the eggplant halves are done, serve by spooning plenty of the sauce over the halves. Sprinkle your expertly-harvested pomegranate seeds on top and garnish with some more thyme and drizzle with a bit of olive oil.

The taste was amazing – a combination of things I have never tasted in combination before!

February 23, 2012February 2, 2017

Pizza Dough (and the pizza to go with it)

It’s been a rough week (and it’s only Thursday). So what do I do when I’m feeling down? I bake. Come on people, at this point you should know this about me. But with not a ton of time yesterday and not a ton of energy, I didn’t feel up to making some fancy bread, and Jonah and I are trying to cut down on sweets, so no cookies. What’s a baking girl to do?

Pizza dough. Not quite bread, but bread like, and can actually be put to use for dinner. So I ran with it. After finding many recipes online, I started up. The recipe calls for all-purpose flour, but I only had bread flour (Jonah bought me a giant bag, so for the time being I’m using it in the place of any all-purpose flour in recipes, which may or may not be altering things). We’ve bought pizza dough at our local grocery store (New Seasons) and it tends to be kind of halfway between thin crust and a puffier crust. The crust I made was definitely a little more on the doughy/puffy side.

Pizza Dough

Makes 1 full pan pizza dough

Ingredients

3 cups flour
2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 cup lukewarm water (may want to add another 1 or 2 tablespoons)
2 tablespoons olive oil

Instructions

I used an electric mixer to combine the ingredients, but did the kneading by hand. Don’t ask me why, I just felt like it. So, in the bowl of the mixer, combine flour, salt, and yeast. Add the water and olive oil and stir until the dough comes together. Lightly flour a surface (kitchen counters work well) and dump the dough out onto it. Knead the dough for a couple minutes into a nice tidy ball. At this point my dough felt super lumpy, more-so than any other dough I’ve made this far, so I started to worry that this whole thing was going to be a failure. But I kept going because otherwise it would’ve been a waste of time and ingredients. What the hell.

Lightly oil the bowl from the mixer (or any bowl, really, just thought I’d save you a dish), put your ball of dough in and turn it so the whole thing is coated in oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave for 1-2 hours, or until it has doubled in size.

After rising, dump the dough back onto the floured surface, punch the air out of it (a great way to take out some aggression, kind of like punching a pillow or pounding chicken), fold it back into a ball, and put it back under the plastic wrap for about 20 minutes. When I hit this point, we still had a couple hours till dinner, so I stuck the dough back in the bowl, covered it, and threw it in the fridge.

When you’re ready to make your pizza, preheat your oven to 475 degrees (or higher), sprinkle a baking sheet (or pizza stone, if you’re one of those people) with cornmeal, and roll/stretch out your dough on the sheet. This was a little tricky for us, as our dough did not want to be stretched. But I let Jonah beat it up a little and eventually it stayed. We covered our pizza with tomato sauce, italian mix cheese, caramelized onions (you know, that obsession I’ve been having lately), and fresh mozzarella. We baked our pizza for about 15 minutes, though it probably could’ve used a couple more. We were getting hungry. Just look for a little puffing up and some golden brown edges. After removing it from the oven, we sprinkled a little fresh basil on top, sliced it up, and ate it. Delicious.

February 22, 2012February 2, 2017

Flip-flopping Brown Sugar Cookies

The other night, it was late, and Jonah and I decided on a whim to make some cookies. We figured we’d just make something we’d already made before, so we got out the recipe for the nutmeg maple butter cookies because they were so good. After we started creaming the butter and sugar for half the recipe (we didn’t want that many cookies) we realized “OH NO these cookies are supposed to refrigerate for 2 hours!” At this point it was already about 10:30 and we were not up for that. So we pulled up another recipe that I’d been looking at: Brown Sugar Cookies from Joy the Baker. So what were once nutmeg maple butter cookies became brown sugar cookies, with 1/2 cup of brown sugar replaced by granulated sugar. Jonah said we should call them flip-flopping cookies (he also inserted the name of a certain GOP candidate, but I’m not about to start getting political on my blog). Oh well. You can’t win them all. The cookies were still good. Not amazing, but a good solid cookie. The little bits of ground ginger and cinnamon add a nice touch. I’m going to give you the correct recipe instead of our version.

Brown Sugar Cookies

Ingredients

1 1/2 sticks (6 ounces) unsalted butter, softened
1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 large egg

Instructions

In the bowl of your mixer, cream the butter and sugar until fluffy. While that’s happening, combine the dry ingredients – flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and ginger – in another bowl, mix thoroughly, and set aside. When the butter and sugar are nice and creamy, add the egg and vanilla and mix them in well. Now add the dry ingredients all at once to the butter/sugar mixture. Mix on a low speed until it’s well combined. Now the recipe says to cover and refrigerate for half an hour. We didn’t do that. Maybe we should have. Whatever.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees (while you’re “refrigerating your dough”… ha). Grease your cookie sheet or line with parchment paper, and drop the cookie dough by the Tablespoon onto the sheet. Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes or until they’re just starting to brown around the edges. Take them out of the oven and allow them to cool for a few minutes on the hot cookie sheet before removing them to a cooling rack.

February 19, 2012February 1, 2017

Panko Chicken Tenders with Aioli

Pinterest is kind of a dangerous place. It’s great because there are tons of recipes, DIYs, fashion tips, art, etc. It’s less great because it’s hard to tell which ones, among hundreds of recipes, are good. There are like 500 recipes for muffins… how do I know which one will taste good? So it can be a little bit of a crap shoot when you decide to actually make a recipe you found on Pinterest.

But that’s what I did. I actually found the blog Love and Olive Oil because of a Meyer Lemon and Olive Oil chiffon cake that was going around Pinterest like wildfire. So I clicked. But I found a whole bunch of other lovely looking recipes, including one for Baked Panko Chicken Tenders with Aioli. Sounds delicious to me, and even more so when you actually read the ingredients. We replaced the garlic powder for fresh garlic.

This dinner was wonderfully simple and tasted so good. Both the chicken and aioli had a nice bite to them (but not too spicy, mind you) because of the cayenne, paprika, and garlic. Enjoy!

Panko Chicken Tenders with Aioli

Ingredients

Panko Chicken Tenders

1 1/2 lbs boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 1/2 cups panko breadcrumbs
2 teaspoons dried basil
2 teaspoons garlic, minced
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
2 eggs
1/2 cup flour
oil

Aioli

1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
a squeeze of lemon juice
salt and pepper, to taste

Instructions

Panko Chicken Tenders

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Oil a baking sheet and set aside. In a shallow bowl, combine the flour with a little pinch of salt and pepper. In another shallow bowl, beat the eggs. In a third shallow bowl, mix the panko with the basil, garlic, paprika, cayenne, salt and pepper.

Now for the thinning of the chicken. Put your chicken between 2 layers of plastic wrap or just put it on a cutting board and cover it in the paper it came in from the grocery store. Pound it with either a meat pounder (is that what those things are actually called?) or a rolling pin. You want them to be about 1/2 an inch thick. Slice it into strips.

Now, coat each chicken strip, one at a time, in the flour mixture (shaking off any excess flour), then dip in the egg, and then the panko mixture. Arrange the chicken strips on the oiled baking sheet, and put them in the oven for 12-15 minutes, flipping halfway through. You want the breadcrumb coating to be nicely golden brown.

Aioli

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and stir, and then season to taste with salt and pepper. Not so hard, right?

February 15, 2012February 2, 2017

The Best Grilled Cheese

When I was little, I called grilled cheese sandwiches “girl cheese” sandwiches. Makes sense, right? Boys had cooties and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to eat something as crispy and buttery with perfectly melted cheese. I thought it made perfect sense.

Last summer, my friend Corey worked at a food cart here in Portland called the Grilled Cheese Grill. If you haven’t heard of it, they have these really wonderful, creative, goofy grilled cheese sandwiches. My personal favorite is the jalapeno popper: roasted jalapenos, colby jack, cream cheese, and tortilla chips on sourdough.

Sometimes, when lunchtime rolls around in our apartment, I go hunting through our cabinets and fridge shelves and I am just so uninspired. But the other day, that was not the case. We had a fresh loaf of sourdough bread from New Seasons (usually we get whole wheat, but when I have my way, sourdough it is), and all I wanted was a grilled cheese. But I wanted to make it interesting, and the other thing I had been craving? Caramelized onions.

When I told Jonah of this amazing sandwich, he got jealous and made himself one for lunch the next day. The fever is catching…

Grilled Cheese with Caramelized Onions

Makes one sandwich

Ingredients

Two slices of bread (preferably sourdough)
Cheddar cheese, sliced into thin pieces (we buy Tillamook sharp cheddar)
Parmesan cheese, sliced into thin pieces
1 small onion, thinly sliced
1/4-1/2 tsp brown sugar
Salt

Instructions

The first step is to caramelize the onions. Throw your onion slices in a pan over medium-low heat. Cover and let them soften for a few minutes, then sprinkle the brown sugar and a pinch of salt over them and stir to coat evenly. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, allowing the onions to brown and soften all the way. After the onions are softened turn the heat up to medium-high and let them cook for another couple minutes, stirring. This will give them a nice sear on the edges.

While your onions are softening, butter the outsides of your sandwich bread (the side that will hit the pan). Thinly slice the cheddar cheese and put it on BOTH sides of the bread. This is key. Nothing is worse than making a grilled cheese with stuff other than cheese on it and then having the bread slide around because there’s no cheese sticking it in place. I’m serious. I put slices of parmesan on just one side so there wasn’t too much of it: parm is a strong cheese and you don’t want it to overpower anything.

When your onions are ready, lay them on the bed of cheese you have created for them. Put the two sides of the sandwich together, and throw it in the pan over medium heat. Cover it while it cooks (this makes the cheese melt quicker so that you don’t have to burn the bread while you’re waiting for the melting to occur). When the bread is golden brown, flip, and cook until the other side is golden brown too. Put on a plate, cut down the middle, and serve, warm and gooey and cheesy. Enjoy!

February 12, 2012February 2, 2017

Whole Roasted Chicken with Veggies

You may have noticed that roasted chicken was one of our previous blog posts, but this time its different. There’s a couple different veggies, but the biggest difference is that I roasted an entire chicken! I was excited and a little scared to do this. I’ve seen my mom take apart a chicken many times – but for the most part Annie and I buy chicken parts as we need them; thighs and breasts mostly.

I bought a whole free-range fryer chicken at the store, after learning that the only differences between the fryer and roaster birds are their size – in other words, you can roast a fryer or fry a roaster. For the most part, I followed a recipe from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc cookbook, although I tragically left out onions. You can use any combination of root vegetables you want – I used leeks, carrots and potatoes. The best thing about the Ad Hoc cookbook is that it has some great How-To’s with pictures for cutting and trussing a chicken. For this recipe, I learned how to truss (tie up) a chicken! Here’s a video of Thomas Keller himself trussing one up, although he does it in a more fancy way in this video than shows in the book.

We ate this last night for dinner, its a great winter-time meal-in-a-dish, and it makes lots of leftovers!

Whole Roasted Chicken with Root Vegetables

Ingredients

1 small whole chicken (smaller the tastier, mine was 4 lbs.)
2 leeks
3-4 carrots
8 golf-ball sized potatoes
1/4 cup oil (canola, olive)
6 garlic gloves, crushed and peeled
6 thyme sprigs
Herb butter (we used leftover herb butter we had from the salmon)
salt and pepper

Instructions

Let the chicken sit out for 1-2 hours to come to room temperature. Remove anything that’s still in the cavity (neck, heart, etc) and season the cavity with salt and pepper, 3 of the garlic gloves, and 3 thyme sprigs. Cut out the wishbone for better carving later (good luck, I completely failed at this. Look up some videos online). Truss the chicken.

Preheat the oven to 475 degrees. Cut the green tops of the leeks and trim the root end. Slice them in half lengthwise and wash. Cut the potatoes in half. Cut the carrots in half lengthwise and cut into smaller sticks. Combine all the root vegetables in a large mixing bowl with the remaining 3 garlic gloves and remaining 3 thyme sprigs, plus the oil and season with salt + pepper.

Lay out the veggies in a large baking dish, making a nest in the middle in which to nestle the chicken. Place the trussed chicken in the bed of veggies, and rub/pour the herb butter on top of the chicken.

Bake for 25 minutes, then turn the heat down to 400 and bake for another 45 minutes. The internal temp of the bird should reach 160 degrees when its done…I had to put it in a bit longer.

February 10, 2012February 2, 2017

Indian Dinner: Chicken Makhani and Spiced Cauliflower

Indian Dinner: Chicken Makhani and Indian Spiced Cauliflower and Potatoes

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to cook an Indian dinner. But I don’t have a cookbook with the kind of curry I wanted to make, so I took to the internet. After much hunting, I found many websites with the same Chicken Makhani recipe, so I decided to try it. If you’ve never had Chicken Makhani, you should. It’s a very creamy, mild curry that is this beautiful orange color. And I’ve been wanting to make it forever. Let me say before you jump in here that this recipe did not taste like the dish I get at our favorite Indian restaurant. Not at all. It was still good, just not what I was expecting. So if you have had Chicken Makhani before, just know that this won’t taste like the dish you’re thinking of. (My grandmother would kill me for ending that sentence with a preposition, but whatever.) Also, I will say that I forgot the step with the cornstarch and water at the end… So maybe it would have turned out different, but I don’t think the taste would have been affected at all. So there you go.

Now, when I was at the grocery store, shopping for this lovely meal, I thought to myself, “Gee, I really should cook a vegetable too.” So I quickly looked up a recipe on Smitten Kitchen (have I made it clear that I love this site yet?) for Indian spiced cauliflower and potatoes. I adapted this so that I wouldn’t have to buy too many more ingredients. I also didn’t do the full recipe; I probably ended up making 3/4 of the original, which yielded plenty for both of us plus leftovers.

Chicken Makhani and Spiced Cauliflower

Ingredients

Chicken Makhani

2 Tbl peanut oil
1 shallot, finely chopped
1/4 white onion, chopped
2 Tbl butter
2 tsp lemon juice
1 Tbl garlic-ginger paste (I wasn’t sure what this was, so I just minced one Tbl worth of ginger and garlic and called it good)
2 tsp garam masala
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp ground cumin
1 bay leaf
1/4 cup plain yogurt
1 cup half and half
1 cup tomato puree
1/4 tsp plus a pinch cayenne pepper
1 pinch each of salt and pepper
1 lb boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into bite size pieces
1 Tbl cornstarch
1/4 cup water

Spiced Cauliflower

1 (1 3/4-lb) head cauliflower, cut into 3/4-inch-wide florets
1 1/4 lb potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes (the recipe called for Yukon Golds, but I just used Russets)
5 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 1/2 teaspoon cumin
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 teaspoons minced peeled fresh ginger
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 cup water

Instructions

Chicken Makhani

In a large saucepan, heat 1 Tbl peanut oil over medium-high heat. Add the shallot and the onion and cook them until they’re soft and translucent. Add the butter, lemon juice, ginger-garlic paste, 1 teaspoon of the garam masala, chili powder, cumin, and bay leaf. Phew. Cook for a minute, stirring to combine everything thoroughly. Add the tomato sauce and cook for a couple minutes, stirring frequently. Now stir in the the half and half and the yogurt. Bring the heat down to low, and allow the curry to simmer for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Season with salt and pepper to taste, remove the curry from heat, and set it aside (preferably covered).

In a skillet, heat the rest of the oil over medium heat. Add the chicken, and cook until lightly browned. Reduce the heat, and add the rest of the garam masala and the cayenne, mixing around until the chicken is evenly coated with the spices. Add a few spoonfuls of the curry to the chicken, and simmer until the liquid has reduced and the chicken is cooked through. Then stir the chicken into the sauce. (Now is when you’re supposed to do the cornstarch: mix together the cornstarch and water in a bowl, then add to the sauce. Stir in thoroughly and cook for 5-10 minutes, or until the sauce is thickened.)

Spiced Cauliflower

Preheat your oven to 475 degrees. In a bowl, toss the cauliflower and potatoes with 3 Tbl of oil, 1/2 tsp of the cumin, and 1/4 tsp of salt. Spread the veggies onto a rimmed baking sheet and bake for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. You want the cauliflower tender and browned in spots.

While the veggies are roasting, cook the onion, garlic, and ginger in the rest of the oil in a heavy skillet over medium heat. Stir frequently, and cook until the onions and garlic are soft and starting to brown. Add the rest of the cumin (1 tsp), the turmeric, cayenne, and remaining 1/2 tsp salt, and cook for a couple of minutes, stirring to evenly coat the onions in the spices. Add the water, being sure to scrape up any brown bits from the bottom of the pan, and stir in the veggies. Cover and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, or until the potatoes are tender.

Serve curry and cauliflower with rice (I like to add a capful of rice cooking vinegar with the water to give it a little extra flavor), and enjoy!

February 9, 2012February 2, 2017

Polenta Torta with Eggplant Sauce

Last weekend, our friends (and newlyweds) Sophie and Johnny were in town. Sophie and Jonah were housemates senior year of college, along with the lovely Maureen (Mo). So we invited the three of them (Mo, Sophie, and Johnny) over for dinner for a little reunion. Mo is a vegetarian, so I immediately went to “Plenty,” that vegetarian cookbook that we are quickly falling in love with. I found a recipe for some eggplant sauce, to be served on top of sweet corn polenta. Alas, it is not corn season, so I decided to use the eggplant sauce to make a polenta torta (recipe found in Alice Waters’ “The Art of Simple Food”). It was a really simple dish, and while we didn’t execute it to the best of our abilities (our dish was too big which made the layering hard) it was still very good. The mozzarella brought a nice pop to the dish, and was really stringy which I love. The eggplant sauce, as I said above, was nice and creamy. It was kind of like a layered pizza, except no crust, just polenta.

Polenta Torta with Eggplant Sauce

Ingredients

Eggplant Sauce

2/3 cup vegetable oil
1 medium eggplant, cut into 3/4 inch pieces
2 tsp tomato paste
1/4 cup white wine
1 cup chopped peeled tomatoes (we used canned, and I ended up using the whole can just to yield a little more sauce)
6 1/2 Tbl water
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp sugar
1 Tbl chopped oregano

Polenta

4 cups water
1 cup corn grits (polenta)
1 tsp salt
3 Tbl olive oil
1/2 cup parmesan cheese (freshly grated)

Polenta Torta

4 cups polenta (hopefully the above recipe yields 4 cups… we didn’t end up measuring)
2 cups tomato sauce (or in this case, Eggplant sauce)
1 cup parmesan cheese (freshly grated)
1/2 pound (2 medium balls) fresh mozzarella

Instructions

Eggplant Sauce

Heat the oil in a large saucepan, add the eggplant. Cook the eggplant on medium heat for ~15 minutes, or until it’s soft and nicely brown. When the eggplant is cooked, drain as much oil from the pan and discard it. Now add the tomato paste and stir it into the eggplant. Cook for about 2 minutes, then add the wine and cook for another minute or so. Now add everything else (tomatoes, water, salt, sugar, and oregano) and cook for another 5-10 minutes to let the flavors deepen. You probably want to keep the pot covered so the sauce doesn’t cook down too much. On the other hand, if it’s looking a little too liquid for your liking, cook it uncovered so it can cook down a little bit. At this point, you can set this aside until you are ready to use the sauce. I made this sauce the morning of the meal, and actually left it on the stove, covered, for many hours.

The great thing about this sauce is the creaminess that the eggplant brings to it. When eggplant has been cooked this long, it kind of falls apart, and I love it when that happens.

Polenta

Now, I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t cook the polenta. Jonah did while I was getting in my workout at the bouldering gym. So I’ll relay what he did to you, but I don’t have any insider tips because I wasn’t there. But here’s what he did: Boil the 4 cups of water in a saucepan. When it’s boiling, whisk in the corn grits and the salt. Now, turn down the heat and whisk until the polenta is suspended in the water and no longer sitting on the bottom of the pan. Cook for 30 minutes – 1 hour (the longer the better, according to Alice Waters), stirring occasionally. Don’t let the polenta get above a low simmer. If at any point the polenta seems to be getting too dry, add a little water. Once the polenta is all cooked, add the olive oil and parmesan cheese.

Polenta Torta

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Oil a baking dish (like I said, ours was too big, so keep this in mind when picking what dish to use), and spread 1 1/3 cups of polenta out over the bottom of the dish. Over the polenta, spread half of the eggplant tomato sauce, then half the mozzarella cheese, and sprinkle half the parmesan cheese. Repeat: spread 1 1/3 cups polenta, the other half of the sauce, mozzarella, and parmesan cheese over the dish. End with a layer of the polenta. Because our dish was too big, we only did one layer, which was ok, but it didn’t look as nice as it could/would have if we’d done it right.

Once it’s all layered up, you can put it in the oven for 30 minutes, or until it’s hot and bubbling. Allow to cool for a bit before serving and eating. Enjoy!