Chicken | More Cheese More Chocolate

May 06 2013

2013 Weekends – Week 18

This weekend was fantastic! Two of my best friends and their husbands were in town, and we spent the better part of three days catching up, eating great food and exploring the Twin Cities. Friday might have started out with snow, but by Sunday afternoon it was sunny and almost 70 – great weather for hanging out lakeside and showing out-of-towners how nice Minnesota living can be.

While I’ve been lucky enough to see my friend Lindsey a few times in the last year when she’s been in town for work, neither of us had seen our friend Sarah since we were in Seattle for her wedding a year and a half ago. We’d gotten used to yearly reunions, so we were well overdue for a weekend together. As is the case with most people I choose to associate with, we all love food, so we did our fair share of eating – both at favorite restaurants and at home.

The fun on Friday started with lunch at Cheeky Monkey with Sarah and her husband, and then Matt and I met Lindsey, her husband, and two other friends at Happy Gnome for dinner. Sarah and I were up first thing on Saturday to butcher and brine two chickens for that night’s fried chicken dinner party. Our night started with a round of Moscow Mules and Lindsey’s husband searching our pantry for fry-able things, wanting to take full advantage of two pots of hot oil. The boys ended up walking to the market for pickles and onions, which turned out to be the best idea of the night. Our plates of brown food and coleslaw were completely delicious, as were the desserts from Rustica that we ended the night with.

Sunday began with freshly baked croissants and Dogwood coffee in the Chemex followed by scenic drives through St Paul and Minneapolis. We stopped at Yum! for Sarah’s birthday lunch before taking a walk around Lake Calhoun. After spending part of our walk joking about people that take jumping photos, we found ourselves at the south end of the lake…taking jumping photos. For the record, it was only one jump that was captured in a series of photos, and I think our first and hopefully last attempt was a success. Besides, the stack of people planking photo that we had considered was way too hard to execute with so many people walking by and looking on.

Our next stop involved picking up pints of Graeter’s ice cream, which we all shared on a sunny dock over Lake Harriet before heading to the airport. It’s never fun to see a weekend that you’ve been looking forward to for months come to an end, but I had so much fun that I can’t feel too sad. Hopefully we’ll get together before another year and a half goes by. Linds, how’s fall in Cleveland?

Lemony chicken brine

Early morning chicken butchering

Bagel, egg, swiss, HOT SAUCE

Up close and personal with a lion at Como Park Zoo

Prep

Cornbread muffins and long-awaited sunlight

Moscow Mules

Pickle juice for the soul

Vodka, also for the soul

Men at work

Ladies at work

Batterfingers

Peanut gallery

Onion rings

Sarah, Lindsey, me

Everything but the fried onions and pickles

Fried chicken, fried dill pickles, cornbread, slaw, pinto beans, fried onion rings

Time to eat

Croissants that were frozen last week and freshly baked this week

Chemex practice

Lake Calhoun photo shoot

Kyle, Sarah, ducks, downtown Minneapolis

The girls

Lifting the birthday girl

Uno

Dos

Tres

I’ve still got it.

Feb 11 2013

2013 Weekends – Week 6

Sometimes the meal you set out make just doesn’t work out. The more I cook, the more I tricks I learn to help save a meal gone bad, but every once in a while there’s no escaping it. A couple of weeks ago we made two truly awful pizzas that were decent enough that we ate few slices for dinner, but they were bad enough that the leftovers when directly into the trash. Next time we want pizza in a hurry we’ll order it instead of trying a recipe for supposedly edible pizza dough that requires less than an hour of rising time. Even a Tombstone pizza would have been better.

Another instance of a meal gone wrong is our dinner from Friday night. I picked up a few ingredients on my way home from work so we could make rice/veggie/tofu bowls, but at the last minute we opted to try a recipe for tortellini with mushroom sauce instead. It was terrible. The tortellini itself had an intense mushroom filling, and when it was coupled with a pungent mushroom sauce, all of the lemon juice, parmesan and parsley in the world would not have been enough to save it.

Redemption came on Saturday night when we made homemade egg rolls. I’d always assumed that egg rolls would be a pain to make (I’ll blame it on a history of making overstuffed and poorly crimped empanadas as well as loosely wrapped and torn spring rolls), but these were so simple. I had no problem rolling tight bundles, and while there were a few that tore open slightly in the oil, none of them lost any filling.

We used this crispy chicken egg roll recipe, and the only change we made was to cut the amount of chicken in half and increase the amount of cabbage to compensate. We were a bit nervous about using raw chicken in the rolls, but six minutes in hot oil did the trick, and the filling was perfectly cooked. We dipped them in both the hoison/peanut sauce from the recipe (good, although I would definitely recommend halving or quartering the amounts) and in soy sauce. Even in their reheated state, these were a thousand times better than the frozen ones we’ve tried from Trader Joe’s.

Our main course (but really just the side to the egg rolls) was dan dan mein from Steamy Kitchen’s Healthy Asian Favorites. It was fine, but we both thought it was missing something – maybe something bright or citrusy? Sriracha and a very tart whiskey sour helped.

Sunday breakfast: egg + cheddar on a Tartine English muffin, grapefruit, Earl Grey tea latte

Green boost in the afternoon. Not my best work, but it was necessary.

Chocolate heart sandwich cookies for a Valentine’s week treat. They’re so good!

I’m always hesitant to make cut-out cookies because rolling out cold cookie dough makes me a little crazy, but this was the cookie dough of my dreams. You use melted butter instead of softened butter to make the dough, and instead of chilling the dough before rolling it out, you roll it and then chill it. Also, you mix the ingredients by hand. So easy!

The one change that I would make is to leave the granulated sugar out of the frosting. I’m not sure why it’s in there as it only seems to create a grainy texture, so next time I’ll trust my instincts and only use powdered sugar.

Sunday smorgasbord: chicken tikka masala from the freezer (Everest on Grand is the best!), leftover noodles and egg rolls from the night before, broccoli

Jan 14 2013

2 Comments

Bread, Chicken, Salad, Weekend Eats

2013 Weekends – Week 2

The weekend in food, briefly.

I’m not that into chocolate milk, but when it’s made (in Iowa) from whole milk, it’s pretty much like drinking a melted chocolate shake and makes for a great dessert. Thanks for leaving this behind, Mom!

Bachelorette planning brunch at Bryant Lake Bowl after barre class.

Kale, pear, pistachio, and parmesan salad to round out a pizza dinner.

Latte for the road…to work.

Chicken tikka masala. I used a recipe from Food & Wine, and it was good, but it wasn’t our favorite. I’ll continue hunting for something better.

Indian style rice. Sautéed onion and spices added a lot of flavor to plain, brown rice, and it was especially good when eaten with the chicken tikka masala. Next time I’ll double all of the spices to give it even more flavor.

My favorite thing about Indian food is, of course, the naan. When it’s brushed with melted butter, I don’t even need rice or chicken. I’d be happy to eat warm, buttered dough for dinner (or breakfast or lunch). Mark Bittman’s naan recipe is a good one, although I’d like to try cooking it in a cast iron pan instead of on a pizza stone to see if I can get more serious browning.

Sep 10 2012

1 Comment

Chicken, Weekend Eats

Weekend Eats – 9/10/12

This weekend flew by so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to cook anything until noon on Sunday. We more or less finished painting the bathroom on Friday night, and then I spent the better part of Saturday at a bachelorette party, which started with a beer-filled 5K Saturday morning (so fun!) and ended with some cabin time just north of the Cities on Saturday night. I failed to take a single picture because I was so drunk all day. Just kidding, although I did drink some really good beer.

I had intended to run seven or eight miles on Sunday morning to practice for an upcoming half-marathon, but my training style involves me waking up and remembering that someone once told me that on any given day you can run three times your longest (somewhat recent) run, so I then decide that a somewhat shorter run should suffice. In other words, I get lazy, but if lazy is running six miles instead of seven, then I’ll take it. I whipped up a quick post-run breakfast before running a few errands and then returning to the kitchen to for several hours to cook an Indian food feast. Some (er, Matt) might believe that I chose to make chicken tikka masala so I could spend the entire weekend rewriting the lyrics to a certain Iron Butterfly song (chicken tikka masala, baby…), but I will neither confirm nor deny it.

Cheddar and chive omelet, chocolate chip bagel, kiwi, tea

Part of my time in the kitchen was spent turning old bananas into my favorite banana bread, this time without the lemon zest and with a sprinkle of cinnamon sugar on the top.

I made this interpretation of Saveur’s perfect brown rice, and it was the most perfect brown rice I’ve ever made – no mushiness mixed with crunchiness mixed with stickiness. Just perfect. I’ll never make brown rice any other way. It’s especially awesome when you buy rice in bulk and don’t have package instructions to follow. After it was cooked I added a little cumin, coriander, turmeric and fresh cilantro. I usually avoid rice at all costs, but I couldn’t stop eating this.

You can’t have Indian food without naan, and I used this recipe with great success. It was really simple, and I only veered slightly from the recipe. I mixed and kneaded the ingredients in a big bowl instead of making a well of flour, and I also just flipped the naan in the pan to cook the second side rather than holding it over a flame (Too much was happening on the stove to deal with moving a heavy pan around).

I looked at million recipes for the chicken and ultimately pulled elements from two different recipes to make something to my specifications (marinating for just a few hours, cooking under the broiler instead of on a grill, using plenty of cream…). The result was a creamy tomato sauce with a bit of brightness from fresh cilantro and lemon juice. A little more char on the chicken would have been nice, but aside from that I wouldn’t change a thing.

I threw a pan of cauliflower under the broiler at the same time as the chicken, and it was charred to perfection. Nothing photographs quite like Indian food…

More Cheese More Chocolate

Category Archives: Chicken

2013 Weekends – Week 18

2013 Weekends – Week 6

2013 Weekends – Week 2

Weekend Eats – 9/10/12