Month 8 day 16: Biscuits and Gravy and Chicken Marsala

Today I made:
Whole Wheat Biscuits with Creamy Sausage Gravy, Food & Wine September 2010
Chicken and Mushrooms with Marsala Wine Sauce, Cooking Light September 2010
Served with steamed green beans and egg noodles

Brunch this morning was biscuits and gravy-- not so photogenic! :-/
I always thought that gravy was the unhealthy part of this dish, but actually it's the biscuits that have tons of buttermilk and butter. The gravy has some whole milk and meat, but is otherwise pretty unoffending. It doesn't really have sausage, just ground turkey and some spices-- I guess that once you remove sausage casing it's basically just that, though. Interestingly, it also contains chipotles in adobo, which doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the ingredients. Taste-wise it definitely sticks out too-- this was pretty spicy! I might just use one next time instead of the two it calls for. G liked the biscuits a lot. It made more than 6 biscuits, but still we had leftover gravy-- too much!

The chicken marsala was good too. It was really juicy-- especially since we used chicken thighs (and pork chops-- I'm trying to go through some of the meat in the freezer). G says, "I just like mushrooms in wine sauce!" We used dried shiitake, dried porcini, and fresh normal mushrooms. The sauce was really good, but I don't think the tomatoes fit that well. Again, I'm not really into cooked tomatoes. Next time I will probably leave them out. But yes, there probably will be a next time for this recipe :) It's not that hard or long, and it packs a lot of umami. It's depicted on a bed of mashed potatoes, and I think that would be delicious with the sauce.

Today a new Dutch oven joined the family!

 I saw an ad for $30 4-qt Dutch ovens at Christmas Tree Shops, so we had a little adventure going over there-- like many places in the Boston area, it's only a few miles away but takes about an hour on public transportation :-P It's a really weird store-- lots of cheap (and cheaply made) items, tons of holiday decorations (including, but not limited to, Christmas), and random other items. G was unhappy because it was generic and there were only two Dutch ovens left on the shelf, and they were both pretty banged up. I figured it was bound to happen eventually though and bought it, but in the next door store (TJ Maxx) we saw Lodge Dutch ovens for $40. We ended up getting it and returning the other. Actually, I'm not sure if it's 3 or 4 quarts though-- we need to measure it still. But anyway, I'm excited to try it out!!