Quick chicken, quick chili, quick St. Patty's, and supposed-to-be-quick-but-I-got-distracted mac & cheese

This week I made:
Quick Vinegar-Braised Chicken with Garlic and Celery Leaves, Food & Wine November 2010
Banana-Flax Bread, Everyday with Rachael Ray March 2014
Black Bean Soup-- Vegetarian Black Bean Chili Variation, Everyday with Rachael Ray April 2014
Soda-Bread Biscuits, Food Network
Slow-Cooker Corned Beef and Cabbage, Food Network Magazine March 2010 (as previously made)
Corned Beef Hash, Food Network Magazine March 2010 (as previously made)
Whole-Grain Pancakes, Everyday with Rachael Ray March 2014
No-Boil Mac & Cheese with Bacon, Everyday with Rachael Ray April 2014


Whaaaaat we're starting to repeat recipes! This weekend I remade the cheesy blintz hotcakes, because they were good and we had extra cottage cheese so why not, and then I also repeated the corned beef and cabbage recipe from last year's St. Patty's day. And later this week the hash! So now I can no longer claim to have repeated no recipes in over a year. I think it was true before, in that everything we made from a recipe was a new recipe. Unless G made like cornbread or something. Oh well.

This chicken dish is supposed to be like chicken cacciatore, but uses vinegar instead of wine because it is fewer calories. Huh? Weird. Anyway, although you could certainly smell the vinegar while cooking, it doesn't have too strong of a vinegar flavor. I guess it mostly burns off. It tasted like something we have made before, but I couldn't figure out what. It seemed like something with mustard in the sauce? Maybe it reminded me of this. Anyway, this was quite fast-- it's just a matter of getting a nice brown on the chicken thighs, then quickly adding garlic, then celery leaves, then broth and vinegar for a few minutes. We had extra pasta left over so I threw that in as the sauce was reducing to get it nice and tasty too. The picture in the magazine shows it looking pretty green, with lots of parsley I guess, so it seemed like it already included vegetables, but really it does not, so this needed a side. Otherwise to eat a filling amount, it was just a lot of meat! I ate a small amount, but then was hungry later.

On Sunday I cleaned out our freezer! I threw away a lot of ham from last Easter along with a few other unidentified objects. We took out a lot of old cookies and put them in the lobby for people to enjoy-- you probably only need one batch in the freezer at a time :-P We also found a bunch of frozen bananas, but G said that we should make banana bread instead of tossing them. Lo-and-behold, there was a recipe in the last issue of Rachael Ray (it was a brunch issue, so I haven't made much else from it yet).

It's secretly "healthy" with flaxseed and whole-wheat flour. G's not big on that kind of thing, and he accidentally saw the recipe and found out! We didn't plan this out well, and didn't finish the batter until midnight. Then it takes an hour to bake (when I looked at the recipe, I had previously noticed the 30 minutes quoted for 6-inch loaf pans)! We took it out and went right to sleep, leaving it out to cool. Unfortunately it was kind of dry in the morning. It's still worth eating, but G had previously said that he hates dry banana bread and would rather have undercooked-but-moist banana bread than done-but-dry. Oh well, he was the one who was in charge of testing the loaf!

 Rachael Ray's magazine always includes a pull-out booklet of like "50 burgers" or "50 cookies" etc. The format is usually a few base recipes with several variations for each, and this month's soup feature was similar. There's chicken, potato, caramelized onion, tomato, and black bean soup bases, each with five variations.
This soup really helped with the freezer cleanup! We had a container of broth with a large amount of chili powder mixed in (and some bits of steak too), sauteed poblanos, the final bit of a can of adobo sauce + chipotle peppers that I've used in a bajillion recipes, and some ground beef that all went into this soup! Since a lot of the flavor comes from things like the adobo sauce and chipotle peppers, it's a very quick chili (~20-30 min total) that still packs a lot of flavor. I used a variety of beans to make it more interesting, and I also skipped blending to speed things along and keep dirty dishes to a minimum. Plus, isn't texture good? This was a fast, filling, and yummy meal. It also has a lot of vegetables of course, so it seems well-rounded and pretty healthy (until you add that sour cream and cheese on top I guess). It was pretty spicy, so I was glad to have the dairy to temper it a bit.

We had ceramics class on St. Patrick's Day, so we had corned beef etc. the day after instead. A few friends were able to join us. This was all the same stuff as last year, except the soda bread biscuits and horseradish-sour cream sauce. G doesn't like horseradish, so when it was just the two of us it didn't seem worth making the sauce. But actually it was really good! The rest of us liked it. The biscuits I made because the food kind of cooked down and I had a moment of worry that it might not be enough food. They really just tasted like scones... other than having baking soda, I'm not sure what the difference was! It called for currants, but I used cranberries instead. It got some extra flavor because something was burnt on the bottom of the oven. This always happens-- something spills over and it's too hot to clean up. We forget about it once it's cooled. Then, the next time I bake something, I preheat the oven and when I open it up smoke billows out! So these biscuits tasted like they were smoked (because they were, I guess). If only we had been roasting some meat or something...

Thanks to the slow cooker (which was only big enough to fit the beef, turnip, carrots, and leek), the rest of the meal (cabbage, potatoes, sauce, biscuits) was able to be put together in 30 minutes. Not bad! That's the secret to a weeknight dinner party.

There was enough left over to make hash on Thursday:

Which we basically didn't eat, because we had had extensive hor d'oeuvres at an Amazon networking event (this event didn't make sense. We were invited I guess because G has a job there starting in the fall, but he doesn't know who he'll be working with or under, so we didn't actually meet anyone from there. Instead, there were just a bunch of random mostly-young professionals who weren't working at Amazon. Huh? But the food was 10/10 would eat again). We had it for breakfast the next day instead!

For dinner on Friday we made this no-boil mac & cheese. It's supposed to be "faster" because the noodles cook in the sauce, but then the sauce takes more than the boiling time to make, so... :-P It was really tasty, with leek and bacon in it. It had 1.5 cups of cheese (fontina, gouda, and cheddar), but didn't come out tasting too cheesy. Other than the top, which was a bit cohesive, the inner part was more just like pasta in some sort of white sauce. While it was baking, I got distracted by G watching gravity, so it baked for almost an hour instead of 30 minutes. Oops! Some of the pasta was hard, but I don't know if it was al dente from not being boiled or if it got rehydrated and then redehydrated from being cooked too long. I think if I made this again I would probably parboil the noodles just in case, and then make sure to take it out in time! The leeks managed to create quite a complex flavor. I could've sworn there was onion and garlic, but no... just leeks, bacon, and salt.
 
For breakfast on Saturday we wanted to make pancakes. This recipe was from the same person who made the banana bread recipe from last week, and it has flaxseed too. The picture in the magazine looks like a nice stack of typically-shaped pancakes. But ours looked like:

What happened? At first the batter was super thick, but I realized it's because at one point I was thinking of halving it (that was the point when I defrosted the buttermilk) but ended up making the full recipe of everything except the liquid. But even when I added the rest of the liquid, it was still pretty thick. It went onto the skillet in clumps, but then puffed up a lot to make these biscuit-like cakes. And then since they were so thick, they kind of singed before cooking all the way through. Pfft. We're not keeping this recipe.

Apps from the freezer

Tonight was Open Doors Night, a biannual event at our dorm. The past two times we've gone easy and just put together a cheese platter and some truffles or other chocolate. This time, emboldened by his success with the meatball sliders he made for Superbowl, G wanted us to make some of the other recipes in the group. The theme was appetizers that can be made very quickly from a small number of ingredients, mostly from the frozen food section or pantry. The meatball sliders for example used frozen meatballs.

Today we made:
Chicken 'N' Mini Waffles, Every Day with Rachael Ray November 2013
Lemony-Dill Salmon Cakes, Every Day with Rachael Ray November 2013
Bacon-Tater Bites, Every Day with Rachael Ray November 2013
Ginger-Miso Sweet Pea Spread, Food & Wine December 2010 (not pictured)

The chicken and waffles sounded really cool, except for the fact that it literally is just a chicken nugget on top of an Eggo mini waffle. There's not too much to it! But luckily there is a sauce, which made it seem like it was something. The sauce is just honey and Sriracha (6:1), but is pretty tasty.
The lemony salmon cakes were a bit more complex. It's smoked salmon on top of a blend of feta, cream cheese, and lemon zest, on top of a mini pancake. The feta/cream cheese mix was kind of odd, but good, and the Aunt Jemima Frozen Lil' Griddles Mini-Pancakes were nice and sweet :)
The bacon-tater bites were just bacon wrapped around tater tots. We didn't make the sour cream + chive dip.
Individually, these were each super easy. But, since they were all frozen things, there wasn't a whole lot of space in the oven! So it was hard to get everything together and be warm at the same time. We baked the waffles and chicken nuggets separately, although I guess you could have baked them as assembled units to save on space if you wanted. The pancakes could be microwaved, but the tater tots and bacon needed to be cooked briefly separately before being wrapped and then baked for longer. That was a sight to be seen. Basically, the bacon and probably the tater tots too were just sweating grease. We poured off a lot after the first bake, but when we checked on them later during the second bake to see if they were crispy, they were just bathed in grease! I guess that's what makes them taste so good....
Almost everything was eaten, except a couple of the salmon pancakes and two waffles which were left behind by someone who just took off the chicken nuggets (!)
Noticing that these three apps all had meat, I wanted to make a veggie option too. I made this ginger-miso sweet pea spread, which is incidentally also from a frozen food. It's thawed frozen peas blended with green onions, ginger, jalapeño, and some miso. It makes for a kind of strange flavor combination. Everyone, upon hearing the ingredients, was really excited to try it. But, I don't think that many people went back for seconds or thirds. It's a little too odd, or maybe everyone was just full from bacon. I wonder if it would be better with edamame or something instead of the green peas.

Month 10 day 1: Pepita-crusted pork and squash puree

Month 10! We're almost out of magazines!
This month I have five issues:

• Food Network Magazine, November 2009
• Food & Wine, November 2010
• Cooking Light, November 2010
• Cooking Light, November 2011
• Every Day with Rachael Ray, November 2011

In general, I thought I was getting better at picking out just the perfect amount of recipes that were actually realistic to make in a month, but this month was difficult! Some of these are "double issues" and they're all FULL of turkey, stuffing, green bean, and pie recipes. It was a little tricky to find recipes to make that weren't all just turkey (which I could eat for a whole month, but I don't know if G could).

Today I made:
Pepita-Crusted Pork, Every Day with Rachael Ray, November 2011
Kabocha Acorn Squash Puree, Cooking Light November 2011

G made a squash heart!

We hadn't yet gone grocery shopping, but we wanted to get started on dinner. I looked through the freezer and the pantry and realized that we had an extra squash and some pork in the freezer, so I made these two dishes. They're both simple-- the pork is just dredged in flour, then egg, then chopped [roasted, hulled] pumpkin seeds before being browned in a skillet and then baked. The squash is supposed to be baked for like an hour, but I sped it up by cutting it in half with some water in a pyrex pan and microwaving it for 10 minutes. After getting steamed in this way, you blend it with some brown sugar, butter, and salt and pepper. I was pretty sure G would like this, and he did. It's like candy! He didn't seem to care too much for the pork, though. We like tenderloin, but this was just a normal pork chop or something, so it came out a little tough. The pumpkin seeds don't really have that special of a flavor either. We won't keep that recipe, but I will keep the squash one.

Month 9 day 9: Chana Masala with Roti and Pumpkin Hot Cocoa

Today I made:
Indian Chana Masala with Roti, Every Day with Rachael Ray October 2011
Pumpkin Pie Cocoa, Every Day with Rachael Ray October 2011

This was a good recipe! It seemed like something you might get at a restaurant, but it's very easy too. I made the garam masala from this recipe since it's not something we have on hand, but we do have all the components on hand. G had to hammer some cardamon seeds in a baggie though, because we didn't have ground. He did a good job though :) I used just one serrano and 1/2 of a leftover jalapeno, and that was a good amount of spice-- you could feel it, but it wasn't bad. The tomatoes we used weren't very juicy, so this ended up being much drier than what was pictured in the magazine. I think you could get away with using canned tomatoes though, and then this would qualify as a from-the-pantry recipe. I love it when I find a good recipe that can be made from the things I always have around! The curry itself is also a really fast recipe, just about 20 minutes. So serving this with store-bought frozen naan instead of making the roti would make this something you could make at any time in no time.

For dessert we made pumpkin pie hot cocoa. It's basically just hot chocolate with a bit of pumpkin puree and pumpkin pie spice mixed in, topped with whipped cream. Normally I think hot cocoa is too sweet, so I tend to put in less than is called for on the canister. But G said we should follow the proportions called for in the recipe: basically a 1:4 ratio of cocoa mix to milk. That was 3 cocoa packets! It was soooo sweet! The pumpkin and pumpkin pie spice was really good, but next time I will use less cocoa powder. Or just melt in chocolate and adjust the sugar myself.

Month 8 day 25: Apple and Gruyere French Toast

Today we had a bit of a decadent autumn breakfast!
Today I made:
Ciabatta French Toast with Warm Apple Maple Syrup, Cooking Light September 2011

This French toast is topped with shallots and apples that have been simmered in a maple syrup and apple cider (although I, and at least one other reviewer of it, misread it as apple cider vinegar >_<  I think because one of our early recipes in February had apples cooked in apple cider vinegar...). I added a bit of cinnamon too.The toast is stuffed with Gruyere before getting dipped in milk, buttermilk, eggs, and nutmeg. It's supposed to be topped with pecans too, if you like them.

This was a good recipe! Even with the vinegar! Although I did wonder why the vinegar was necessary and decided that next time I would just try to use normal cider :-P At least my instincts are semi-intact. It's not too sweet-- in the magazine, it was suggested as a breakfast-for-dinner recipe, and I think the lack of added sugar (other than maple syrup) and the addition of cheese and shallots keeps it savory, even though it looks like something that would be overly saccharine. G was really impressed when he saw what I was making. It has a lot of rich flavor but only takes ~30 min. We'll definitely keep this recipe.

For dinner I just wanted to use up some things. We didn't have ingredients for any new recipes on hand, but I had a lot of halves of bell peppers after yesterday's stir fry, and for a while we've had some stuffed-pepper filling in our freezer. So that's what we did.

Tomorrow we'll be finally starting on the October recipes! Only ~1 week late :-P Many of them incorporate either apples or pumpkins in some way. Should be delicious!

September's best recipes:

G's pick: it's a tie between oven-fried chicken and spice-rubbed braised beef. Not only can he not choose between them, but he suggests that they might be some of the best from the whole year so far.

My pick: I think I liked the honey-roasted thighs and the okra I served with them too.

Month 8 day 1: Quick chicken parmesan

Month 8! I can't believe it's already September. G will be coming back tomorrow, so I am really excited. I will have to start cooking more! And get to stop doing the dishes!

This month there are 5 issues-- and that will continue for the rest of the year. They are:

• Cooking Light, September 2009
• Cooking Light, September 2010
• Cooking Light, September 2011
• Food & Wine, September 2010
• Every Day with Rachael Ray, September 2011

I think I must have bought the September 2009 issue at the grocery store when I first came to MIT. It's the only magazine I have from 2009. When I was looking through it, everything looked so familiar. I think I had paged through a few times and marked some recipes to try-- but mostly didn't, until now! September 2009 was a long time ago. And September 2010 was around when I first started dating G. Good memories!

Today I made:
Oven-Fried Chicken Parmesan, Cooking Light September 2009
with green beans and vinaigrette, Cooking Light September 2009

I didn't really have any food around, and was mostly snacking on leftover cheese, crackers, and truffles from last night's party. There was an extra serving of pork tortas in lab, but it's getting kind of old, and I stayed home all day. To be honest, I really liked the subletter who was staying with me for the past two months (best subletter ever), but since she left I am relishing walking between our two rooms and rearranging things back to the way they were. I'm just so happy to be at home that I don't want to go outside or do anything else!
But eventually I was getting hungry and felt like eating more chips and hummus was not the answer. So I looked through to see which recipes could be made from the pantry/freezer.

I had a couple little chicken tenderloins in the freezer, panko on the shelf, a jar of pasta sauce (unusual for me to have, but people are moving out and giving away things), and just so happened to have extra fresh mozzarella in the fridge (and Parmigiano-Reggiano as usual). I heated up some frozen green beans (not so great) as a vehicle for the vinaigrette instead of romaine as suggested, and we are out of polenta (and pasta! Our pantry is a bit worthless right now), but I felt like I'd had enough crackers today anyway.

I recently bought panko for a recipe instead of the normal bread crumbs, and there is a pretty big difference. Panko is very cripsy, and makes things seem like they've been deep fried even if they haven't been. It was great here too. This was very quick, but I recall making chicken parm as normally taking a really long time. Is that just because normally I'm making the tomato sauce from scratch? Or pounding the chicken? Or maybe at the age when I first tried to make it I was just not very good at cooking and multitasking in the kitchen.

This was a fine recipe, although it ended up being quite salty. I might have over salted, but I think it might have been from the Parmigiano-Reggiano. In any case, I was using just little tenderloins, so there might not have been as much chicken to stand up to the cheese as there should have been. I think I'll save this recipe, just because it shows how easy chicken parmesan can be.

Month 7 day 18: Pozole

Today I made:
Superfast Chicken Posole, Cooking Light August 2010

Wellll my parents would be quite surprised at this one. When I was growing up they made pork posole for most of their/their friends' birthday parties, and I *hated* it. I usually ended up making myself some nice nachos with all of the add-ins that were set up as a serve-yourself-bar, but not until I had made it quite clear how unsatisfied I was. I think I disapproved of the hominy, but also most of all the pork, which I thought was too gristley. ACTually, I might point out here that this is the *second* time I have cooked posole for myself. The other time was 3 years ago, and it was Chile-Chicken Posole (Food Network Magazine, January/February 2010), which contains 3 6-oz cans of green chiles and a jalapeño for 4 servings. It was so spicy that I could barely eat it. The only way I could was by throwing in a ton of yogurt to cool it down, and even then it was kind of painful, but I made my way through it anyway (strangely, the comments do not indicate that it is spicy-- one even says it's not spicy enough. Are there different kinds of canned chiles?) I think I will just paste this recipe over that one in my recipe book. I'm not sure why I saved that recipe, but I guess I figured as long as I didn't put so many chiles in it it would be better next time.
This one is fast, because it starts with rotisserie chicken breast and some other canned things. The only thing I couldn't find was canned tomatillos. I had some extra pico de gallo, so I threw in a bit of that instead. The rotisserie chicken I had left over in the freezer from earlier this week was more than 2 cups, but it was frozen together as a block so I just put it all in... whomp. Makes for a very filling soup.

Tomorrow is "Open Doors Night," a dorm tradition where ~20 people volunteer to host mini parties in their rooms and anyone can come by. So I made some ganache to roll into truffles tomorrow. I made a batch of orange and a batch of Earl+Lady Grey. I hope they come out well! Other than that I will just go low-key and do a cheese spread like we did in the spring. Classy.

That's it for August! This month's best recipes (it's too hard to pick one, so here is a 3-course meal):

• Eggplant Crostini
• Pulled Chicken Sliders
• Citrus Shortcake

Month 6 day 3: Chicken Satay

Today I got home and was hungry-- I wanted to eat fast. But I haven't been to the grocery store in a while, so there's nothing in the fridge, and I'm leaving tomorrow for California again, so if I bought anything now anything extra would be wasted (same with leftovers). So I went for this chicken satay recipe, which I basically had the ingredients for in the freezer and the pantry. It called for a 1 hour marinating step, which I shortened.

Today I made:
Chicken Satay, Cooking Light July 2011

The marinade is made from peanuts, lime, sesame oil, various spices/aromatics, and coconut milk. The only things I didn't have were a serrano chile (subbed some red pepper flakes) and a shallot (subbed onion). It's very fast to throw everything together in a food processor and mix with the chicken. Since the pieces of chicken are small, they cook pretty quickly too. I used our grill pan instead of going outside.

This was pretty good, especially given how simple it was and most everything was stuff I normally have on hand (the coconut milk was kind of lucky-- that's not a typical staple in our pantry). I will keep this recipe to have on hand as a spur-of-the moment recipe, except it just sucks to have the long marinade. I guess it would be best suited for a lazy, rainy day, when you have time, but you just don't want to go outside so you want to cook with what's on hand.