Easier Than Falling Off a Log
Archive for April, 2009
April 26, 2009 at 8:55 pm · Filed under food, meals
We got back from our trip on a Saturday. We did this deliberately, so that we could have the Sunday to recover and do laundry and get groceries. So while we now had food in the house, we were in no mood to do anything complicated. I had this recipe, a hunk of frozen pizza dough, a leftover chicken thigh in the freezer from making the chicken giouvetsi, and it really didn’t call for much else – cheese is something we always have around, onions, I added garlic, cayenne pepper… in short, it was pretty much just what the doctor ordered. We used jarred pasta sauce for a dipping sauce, but if you’re a highly motivated person you could make your own. I might also consider putting the sauce inside the calzone next time. I know it can be done either way and it’s still equally as “right,” but I think I might prefer it on the inside. Maybe. We’ll have to see.
It was inspired by this recipe from Foodie With Family, and it’s really not that different, except that I added garlic and made a couple of essentially identical substitutions.
Chicken, Cheese, and Onion Calzones
Ingredients
Half a bag of frozen pizza dough, thawed (this takes a few hours; take it out in the morning)
1 chicken part – I used a thigh, but use what you want
a bunch of cheddar cheese, grated – the original recipe specifies an amount, but I eyeballed it, whatever
1/2 a small onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced (or use more, I think that would have been better)
cayenne pepper
olive oil and cornmeal for the pan
Method
Preheat the oven to 425.
Cut up your piece of chicken and throw it in a pan.
Shake a bit of cayenne pepper over the chicken, in whatever amount suits you.
Cook it over medium heat until done.
Take the chicken out and set aside, and throw your onion and garlic into the pan, and saute them in the chicken grease until softened.
Brush olive oil over a baking sheet and sprinkle with cornmeal.
Roll out your dough to about a 9″ circle.
Put your chicken, onions, garlic, and cheese on half of the circle and fold the other half over, pressing and twisting the dough to seal it.
Now comes the hard part, unless you rolled it out on the baking sheet in the first place, which… hmm. If mine didn’t have a rim, that would’ve been actually a good idea. Anyway, you need to get it from wherever you roll dough onto the baking sheet, and I’m not gonna lie, this is the tough part. It took me two spatulas, one under each half, and a helping hand to hold the baking sheet next to the counter where I’d rolled out the dough (this may not be a problem for you if your counter space accomodates a board and a baking sheet). So basically do what you need to do to transfer the calzone onto the baking sheet without it tearing or breaking.
Right before you pop it in the oven, cut two inch-long slits in the top so the steam can escape.
Bake for 20 – 25 minutes.
Let sit for 5 minutes before serving or you will destroy your mouth with hot lava.
Serve with tomato sauce.
April 23, 2009 at 10:59 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
The weekend before we went to Ireland, Matt took his car down to his mom’s place so it wouldn’t get towed on street-cleaning day while we were away. She drove him back up, and I made this for dinner for all of us. It was a success and not just because we all enjoyed eating it – I also used chicken thighs, because I don’t have anything against them and they’re like a third of the price of breasts. But Matt is against dark meat (
), and I guess I was hoping he wouldn’t notice. And it turned out that he did notice, but he didn’t mind, and he said later that he thinks the reason he had something against thigh meat is because of something his school cafeteria had made or something – basically that it had been used in something he hadn’t liked, not that there was an inherent problem with the meat itself. So that’s a victory, right, because it means we can buy the less expensive meat now.
So! This recipe. It’s from Closet Cooking, and it’s Greek, which I am not. But it doesn’t have feta cheese in it, so we can put our differences behind us. I think I made it a little spicier than I was supposed to, because I three-quartered the recipe but used a whole pepper (what’s the point of having a quarter of a pepper lying around?), but it wasn’t mouth-burning or anything, and in fact made it more interesting than just chicken and pasta in tomato sauce. But yeah, this version of the recipe serves 3 in terms of having chicken, but there’s heaps of pasta left over. Even though, upon reflection, I two-thirded it instead of three-quartering it. My math is wrong but my portioning is right!
Ingredients
2 tsp oil
1 small onion, diced
1 cubanelle pepper (the long skinny wrinkly-looking ones), maybe a smaller-than-average one, minced
a generous cup of orzo (I had just short of a cup and made up the rest with macaroni)
4 cups chicken stock, although I suppose 5 wouldn’t hurt
3/4 cup tomato paste (I actually have no idea how much I used; I just used up the rest of my tube of paste, probably around 6 tbsp)
3 pieces of chicken, whatever part suits you
salt and pepper
Method
Preheat the oven to 375.
The original recipe has you using a pan to do the stovetop stuff, and then transferring it to a casserole dish to put it in the oven. That is dishwasher-owner thinking. If you have a dutch oven or any other big ol’ pot that is oven-safe, use that. Boom! One-pot meal. So take this pot and heat up the oil in it.
Saute the onion and cubanelle pepper over medium heat until softened – about 5 – 7 minutes.
Throw the orzo in and let it toast for a few minutes. I always get jumpy when I’m doing this and assume it’s going to burn and end the toasting too soon. I don’t think it suffered for it, though.
Anyway, whenever you decide that you’re done toasting, pour in the stock, tomato paste, and salt and pepper.
Bring to a boil.
Drop your pieces of chicken in.
Pick up the pot (carefully!) and just sling the whole thing into the oven, uncovered, for 45 minutes or until the liquid is absorbed and the chicken is cooked through.
When I was eating leftovers one night, I grated some cheese into it before heating it up. Yummmm.
April 20, 2009 at 10:24 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
I made this when Matt was taking his car down to his mom’s place to leave it while we go on our trip – otherwise street cleaning day will happen while we’re gone, and the car will be towed – and having him be in a different state is a lot more certain that he won’t stroll in right when I’m about to start cooking than if it’s just a union meeting!
This dish comes with a sauce, but I burned it. Like, into a lacy black wafer. It was not usable. I’ll give the instructions and the ingredients for the sauce, but altered in such a way that it would still work, because the way I did it… no. Ultimately, I just wound up tossing the finished product with a couple of the constituent parts of the sauce and hoping for the best. It was fine, although I’m sure the sauce would have been better. But as I discovered when eating the leftovers, it was good without sauce too.
The recipe is halved (as it is just for me) from The Good Mood Food Blog, which is from – coincidence fest! – Ireland, the place in which we will be as of 5am Saturday! Let’s see if I get this post finished before we leave for the airport on Friday afternoon. And I’ll be honest with you, it is not looking good. It’s 11:33pm on Wednesday evening right now, and we’ve done fairly little in the way of getting ready – no packing or whatnot – so that’s all for tomorrow and the hour and a half between when I get home from work (early!) and when we have to leave for the airport. Plus I’m going to the gym tomorrow night, as I have every night the past 2 weeks except Friday, when I made this food – see how I brought myself back on topic? Yeahhhh. I am that good.
Oh. But do you know what I’m not good at? Opening my bottle of teriyaki sauce. I just… couldn’t… do it. I tried all the tricks, too. I ran it under hot water. I banged it against the counter. I rapped around the edge of the lid with a knife. I wedged the knife up under the cap. I broke off the little ring thingy that’s attached to the cap. Still no dice. Ultimately, I wound up drilling a hole in it with a corkscrew, and then when I had a sizeable dent, poking the tip of a knife in it and making a slit in the lid. And that’s how I poured my teriyaki sauce. The lid still doesn’t open, by the way. Maybe if I remember, I’ll take a picture so we can all laugh and laugh.
Teriyaki Salmon with Sesame Noodles
Ingredients
1 salmon filet
1 1/2 tsp teriyaki sauce, by hook or by crook
egg noodles
sesame seeds
1/4 tsp cayenne powder (I wasn’t inclined to buy a red chili and use half of it, so I got the heat this way instead)
1 large and 1 small clove garlic, minced
2 1/2 tbsp (that’s 2 tbsp, 1 1/2 tsp) soy sauce
1 1/2 tsp brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp vegetable oil
1 1/2 tsp sesame oil, plus a little more
the juice and zest of 1/2 a lime
Method
Cut up the salmon into bite-sized pieces.
Put it in a bowl and drizzle it with the teriyaki sauce, tossing to coat.
Cover with plastic wrap and put in the fridge to marinate. Duration of marinade: as long as it takes to get the rest of it ready.
Cook the egg noodles according to the package directions.
When they’re done, drain them, then toss with the little extra bit of sesame oil and the sesame seeds.
In a small pan, saute the garlic and cayenne in the vegetable oil over medium-high heat for 2 minutes.
Add the brown sugar, soy sauce, lime juice and zest, and sesame oil, bring to a boil then – this is important – turn the heat down to a simmer and let it go for 6 – 8 minutes.
Now, here is where I diverge from the original recipe. He has you cooking the salmon while this sauce does its thing. That caused my sauce to end its life. Stay with the sauce and keep an eye on it; if it starts to burn, remove it from the heat. Giving it the odd stir might not be a bad idea either. When it’s done, set it aside.
Now cook the salmon. I suppose you could even use the same pan since you’re done with the sauce. Anyway, you want to saute it over medium heat in a little vegetable oil (although if you’re using the same pan, it’s probably got enough residual oil in it that you don’t need to worry about it) until it’s cooked through.
Serve the salmon over the noodles, drizzled with the sauce.
And yeah, obviously I didn’t get this posted before we left for our trip. Oh well. So I’ve got a little catching up to do. I’ll get it done eventually.
April 7, 2009 at 10:31 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
It’s a good sign when a recipe comes from a site called southernfood.about.com. After all, when you think about southern food, it’s all delicious, right? And it all makes you fat, but whatever. This won’t make you as fat as you might expect. It’s only got a tablespoon and a half of butter in it! Well, if you halve it like I did. But after all, the original recipe serves 6 to 8, so I’d imagine most people would want to cut it down.
There’s a part in this where you make gravy out of the sausage drippings and butter and flour, which I don’t know if it actually amounts to the entity known as “sausage gravy,” because I am about as southern as Santa Claus, but it is a gravy, and sausages are involved, and I think I did it wrong. The recipe said to put the sausages and the butter in the pan at the same time, and then when they’re cooked, to stir the flour into the drippings, but most of the butter had burned off (or been absorbed by the sausages, I suppose) by that point. I don’t usually cook sausages in something – I just chuck ‘em in the pan like that – so what I think I’d do in future would be to cook the sausages by themselves, THEN add butter to the hot pan once I’d taken the sausages out of it, and mix it with the drippings and flour then.
There was actually some confusion surrounding the sausages. I spent a long time in the supermarket staring at different items. The original recipe said “chicken sausage or other smoked sausage” (italics mine). This would imply, I’d think, that the chicken sausage is smoked also, but that you can use other smoked sausage varieties if you’re not into the chicken ones. Fine, except at my store, it was either-or. You could have chicken sausage, which is not smoked, or you could have smoked sausage made of other meats. I ultimately went with the chicken sausage if only for the fact that I didn’t think much would come out of the smoked varieties in order to make gravy. Did I make the right call? I don’t know. The chicken sausage I picked was a roasted garlic and herb flavour, which added something, so I can’t have gone all wrong.
Chicken and Sausage Stew
Ingredients
2 lbs of chicken, whatever parts you like – the original recipe called for a whole chicken, cut into parts, but it didn’t say to cut the parts up, so bear with me and just use the whole pieces for now.
1/2 tbsp butter
1 1/2 tsp olive oil
1 rib celery, sliced
1 small yellow onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
a pinch of thyme
1/4 tsp Cajun seasoning – we have a jar of Tony’s from my friend in Baton Rouge, and I realize that that’s Creole seasoning, but it’s really good, so that’s what we used
a few cranks of pepper
3 cups chicken broth
1 carrot, sliced
2 smallish potatoes, cut into bite-sized pieces – I used red ones and left the skin on
1 tbsp butter for the sausage gravy (or whatever we’re calling it)
4 – 6 oz chicken sausage (be cool like me and use a flavoured kind)
2 tbsp flour
salt and pepper
Method
Heat olive oil and the first 1/2 tbsp of butter in your soup pot.
Add chicken, celery, and onion, and brown the chicken on all sides. Don’t worry about cooking it all the way through, though – it’s going to be boiling away for a while, so no big fuss. The original recipe says to brown it slowly. Brown it at an appropriate speed so that the celery and onion are softening and whatnot when the chicken’s browned, so they’re not turned to mush and not raw.
Add broth, Cajun seasoning, thyme, and pepper and bring to a boil.
Turn it back down to medium-low and allow to simmer, covered, for 45 minutes.
After 45 minutes, take the chicken pieces out.
Put the carrots and potatoes in and cover it again. Leave it to continue simmering while you do the sausage stuff on another burner.
In a small pan, cook the sausage until browned.
Once it’s cooked, remove them to a cutting board. Don’t cut them yet, though, you can’t let the hot pan and hot sausage fat go to waste!
Put the butter in and melt it.
Stir in the flour until well blended with the fat.
Dump this mixture into the soup.
Cut up the sausage and dump it in also.
Remove the chicken from the bones and cut it up into more-or-less bite-sized pieces. I went fairly rough on this. Chuck these back into the stew.
Cover and continue simmering until vegetables are tender and the stew is thickened. I don’t remember how long this was – it was ready before we actually ate it, although simmering it for longer didn’t hurt anything.
Add salt and pepper to taste – it might not need salt, but the pepper’s nice.
In the original recipe, it called for pearl onions, which I couldn’t find in the produce section at the store, but I did find in a jar (in the “Southern” section!). I don’t know that I’ll have a lot of use for them in the future, though, so getting a whole jar would wind up being a waste. You could put some in if you wanted, of course.
