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Life Lessons and Rotisserie Chicken

Kirsten — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:22:00 +0000

In the spirit of Christmas, I thought I would give you all a few tips on gift-giving. I know this is a food blog and all, but trust me, I have some very important advice to give.

1. Give people puppies. They’re cute, and everybody loves them.

2. Tip number 1 has one very important exception. If you are my brother, give your wife a kitty. Seriously, JUST GET HER A KITTEN ALREADY!

3. Re-gifting is a perfectly acceptable practice. However, if you are going to re-gift, you might not want to re-gift to the daughter of the people who gave you the gift in the first place because she might tell the original gifter about her exciting new gift and the truth will come out. Even if several years have passed since the gift was originally given. I’m talking to you, Grandpa and Grandma! But thanks for the rotisserie (Mom and Dad). I really like it.

I suppose this post is a little more for the purpose of handing out gift-giving tips than for giving you ideas for using your George Foreman Baby George Rotisserie because let’s be honest, I must be one of about 200 people that actually has one of these things. Right? I put it on the same level as the product hawked on my favorite informercial – that cooker that makes anything you could possibly want (Chicken breasts! Pancakes! Corndogs!), as long as you don’t mind all of your meals being in a perfect half-moon shape. I almost made a crack about the Magic Bullet, but if someone re-gifted me a Magic Bullet I would totally use it. And don’t get me wrong, I love my George Foreman Grill. But a rotisserie? A rotisserie?

Anyway, I thought I would show you what you can do with your own rotisserie, should one be re-gifted to you one of these days.

Start with a chicken. The recipe book that came with the rotisserie said that a 4 to 5 pound chicken will feed 4 people. I found this pretty shocking until I remembered the time in college when my friend Justin got drunk and woke up with two chicken carcasses on the floor next to him. Impressive, isn’t it?

Select some sort of seasoning mix, spices or herbs. I used Pluto’s Jerk Seasoning, which is totally awesome.

If you’re interested in ordering your own, refer to the info on the label. Their jerk sauces are really good, too. Easy access to Pluto’s products are one of the worst things about my brother and sister-and-law leaving North Carolina.

Anyway, rub seasoning or spices all over the bird. I’ve always thought chickens look really vulnerable in this position, and I finally figured it out. It’s the wings. This is the exact position we would have to be in during tornado drills elementary school – curled up on the ground with your hands over your head. This leads me to the age-old question: which came first, the chicken or tornado safety?

Truss the ol’ bird, and load it onto the rotisserie rods. I really couldn’t think of a graceful way of saying that. Nor could I get a remotely decent photo. Fire up the grill!

This is what I ended up with 45 minutes to an hour later. It cooked a lot faster than the instructions suggested. More importantly, it was really tasty.

The skin crisped up nicely, and the inside was tender and juicy. Matt and I ate some of whole pieces, and there were a ton of leftovers that we made sandwiches with.

I have a bone to pick with the wishbone, though. My brothers always laid claim to the wishbone when we were growing up, so now that they’re not standing in my way you can be certain that I take advantage of that little bone. I let it dry out for a little bit, and when Matt and I broke it we ended up with two even pieces in our hands and the middle section flying through the air. Whaaaaa? Whose wish comes true if the wishbone ends up in three pieces?

Finally, here is something you can make should you not be one of the select number of individuals who owns a rotisserie. Cut a squash in half (this is a delicata), rub it with a tiny bit of olive oil (at least I think I did that), sprinkle it with salt, cumin, and a little cinnamon, and roast it in a pan with a little water loosely covered with foil at 350-400 until tender. It’s pretty hard to mess up, and it tastes delicious.

Posted in Chicken

Chicken Wings + Mashed Parsnips

Kirsten — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 22:55:00 +0000

Last night for dinner Matt wanted buffalo wings. The last time we tried to make them we failed miserably. I thought it would be ok to use drumsticks instead of wings, and we just baked them and rolled them in buffalo sauce when the came out of the oven. The sauce barely stuck to the meat, and they were just kind of blah. This time around Matt spent a while looking up recipes until he found one that sounded more promising, so we gave wings another shot.

First of all, here is what happens when you send your boyfriend to the grocery store with a shopping list that contains options he can choose from. He buys everything on the list.

Along with our wings we had brussels sprouts and mashed parsnips. I’ve never made parsnips before, so I looked up a few recipes and then kind of made it up as I went.

I started out by peeling them and chopping off the ends.

Then cut them up so they were relatively the same size.

Then I boiled them, just like you would with potatoes, until they were fork tender.

I stopped taking pictures of the parsnips at this point, but I basically just mashed them up with some skim milk, butter, and light sour cream. I didn’t measure the amounts or anything. Not really my style. I just added stuff until they were an acceptable consistency. And did a little taste testing. And threw in some salt and pepper. That was that.

For the brussies, I chopped them up like so:

Then steamed them until they softened up a bit. As simple as that.

All the while Matt was dealing with the wings. He knows that I usually buy Smart Chicken, so he did the same. Isn’t he nice? I think so.

The wings baked at 375 for 20 minutes with nothing on them, and then they came out for sauce. We had a bottle of buffalo sauce that Matt mixed with some melted butter. I wasn’t paying very close attention, but I think it was about 3/4 cup sauce and 1/4 cup butter. We’re health fiends, can’t you tell? For the first dose of sauce Matt brushed it onto one side, and then stuck them back in the oven for 10 more minutes. They were then flipped over, the other side got a nice dose of sauce, and they went back in for about 5 minutes. Here’s a picture of the very precise sauce application. And I won’t even get into how awesome the shirt is.

Here’s the finished product – buffalo on the left and barbeque on the right.

And here it is all together.

While the wings were much better than the last time, I think we both agreed that there is still room for improvement. The sauce did stick a little better this time and using wings instead of drumsticks was helpful, but I think it might be necessary to deep fry wings to get the full effect. I’m not ready to give up on making wings without the frying part, though. Maybe marinating them overnight would help.

As for the rest of the meal, the barbeque wings were good. I definitely liked those better than the buffalo ones. The mashed parsnips were good, and they were a very easy side dish. Matt really liked them, so I’m sure we’ll be making them again. The brussels sprouts were, of course, fantastic.

Now I have to decide what to eat to warm up on this bitter cold night. The temperature did not get above zero today, and it is currently at -4. If there’s anything I am grateful for, it is the fact that I do not live further north.

Posted in Chicken, Sides

Chicken Pot Pie

Kirsten — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 05:18:00 +0000

Had my blog been up and running two weeks ago I would have posted this then, but football and Thanksgiving got in the way. In case anyone isn’t aware, it was exactly two weeks ago today that the Hawks pounded the Gophers (55-0!) in the Gopher’s last game in the Metrodome. It was an awesome game for all of the Iowa fans, including my family of Iowa grads who converged on the Twin Cities from around the country. Here’s a picture of me and my big bros. That guy in the middle made those hats on our heads with his own two hands. Cool, huh?

By the time Sunday night rolled around and everyone had left, I was anxiously anticipating Thanksgiving, and I was really wanting some comfort food. I’m still unsure of how I could be hungry after all of the food that was consumed throughout the weekend, such as my crab cake benedict from our breakfast at Calhoun Grill.

And these cupcakes from the awesome Magnolia Bakery cookbook that I made for Kyle’s birthday.

And if I had a picture of the giant pretzel with cheese I consumed at the game, I would post that as well. But I don’t. So I will move on to the headliner. The chicken pot pie. I’ve always been a fan of pot pies. I remember when I was little I would always beg my mom to buy those pot pies from the freezer section. It would kill me to have to wait 45 minutes for it to cook. The questionable meat always irked me a little, too, but it was always worth it when you took the first bite of the creamy filling and chased it with a bite of the flaky crust. So, 15 years later, I decided to try my hand at making my own.

I looked up a bunch of recipes and kind of took a little from all of them. Most of them had a lot of cream, butter or whole milk, which I was not about to use after the weekend I had just had. So I improvised.

Chicken Pot Pie

2 cups cooked, cubed/chopped/shredded/whatever chicken*
2 carrots, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
3/4 cup peas
3/4 cup corn
3/4 cup – 1 cup potatoes, cubed
1 small onion, diced
1 clove garlic, smashed/minced
1 can low sodium cream of chicken soup + about 1-1/2 cans of water
2 pieces of pie crust**
1 sheet puff pastry
1 egg, beaten

* For the chicken I didn’t really feel like taking the time to cook it myself, so I just bought one of the whole, cooked chickens at the grocery store. It was a good way to go, and I had a lot of leftover chicken that I used for the chicken chili and I used all of the bones for chicken stock. Buying the whole chicken also reminded me of a time in college when my friend Justin woke up on his couch with 2 chicken carcasses on the floor beside him. He has no idea how he got the chickens, but he definitely devoured them.

** I made this pie in a 9″ glass pan, so I just kind of messed around with the two pie crusts – cutting and splicing – until the whole pan was covered. There are probably better methods to this, but I’m certain they all end up with a tasty pot pie. And I had a sheet of puff pastry in the freezer that I wanted to use up, so I used that for the lattice top.

Preheat oven to 375
Arrange your pie crust in the pan you’re using. You may want to throw it in the oven for 5 minutes or so, but I don’t think it’s necessary
Saute the onions & garlic in a large pan until the onions are barely brown.
Throw in the carrots & celery, and cook for a couple more minutes.
Add in the soup and water, stir it, and bring it to a boil. Once it’s boiling throw in the potatoes, and continue cooking them until they’re fairly tender. Then add the peas, corn, and chicken, and continue cooking until it thickens. Season with salt & pepper and any other spices you might want to throw in.
Once it’s thick, dump all of it into the pie crust.
Cover the pie with either a solid top with some slits or a lattice top.
Brush the top crust with the beaten egg and bake it for 40-45 minutes. Let it cool for 10 minutes or so before slicing into it.

Posted in Chicken, Main

Chicken Chili a la Willy

Kirsten — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:30:00 +0000

Once I got over the sting from the poms, I turned to the important task of making dinner. I had a bunch of odds & ends laying around that were just asking to be thrown into the Crockpot – a few orange & yellow carrots, some celery that had lost most of its crunch, and some chicken that had been hanging out in the freezer since it didn’t make the cut into last week’s pot pie. Here’s the whole cast, more or less:

Everything pictured ended up in the crock except about a quarter of the onion, one of the jalepenos, and most of the jar of white beans. I was really excited to do something with the white beans because we’ve had quite the history together. I remember buying it while I was living in Chicago because I wanted to try to recreate a cassoulet-like dish I had on one of my last days in Barcelona. Two or so years and a move to Minnesota later, the white beans and I were still together. Whenever I thought about cooking with them I would get grossed out by the gelatinous non-bean content of the jar, and I would put them back on the shelf. For some reason I could never pitch them or donate them to a food drive. Until yesterday. I was pretty excited to not have to look at them anymore, but when it came time to dumping them in the crock they were extremely reluctant to leave the jar. My attachment to the jar of beans was easily trumped by their attachment to that jar. The bottom line is the majority of the jar did not make it into the chili. And the not-yet-empty jar is still residing in my sink.

Moving on, I would like to give a shout out to my helpers in the kitchen…

The free Yum coffee and the homemade chocolate chip cookies courtesy of my immigration professor really made the experience enjoyable. Thanks, guys.

Now onto the cooking… I started by chopping up all the veggies.

Then I started to think about how I should be studying for finals. I glanced at my immigration book…

And quickly turned away and continued cooking. Everybody has to eat, right?

Once the veggies were all chopped I threw a little oil in the skillet.

Dumped in the onion, pepper, chili powder, cumin, and another kind of chili powder that I had just bought.

I let the onions get translucent.

And I flipped one of the pieces of onion out of the pan to feed the mouse that lives in the stove.

Just kidding. There’s no mouse in my stove. But at lunch we were discussing mouse problems (ahem, Matt & Sam), and Hanna mentioned knowing someone who had a mouse that lived in the stove and would periodically crawl out through the burner. So I thought I would be nice and consider the needs of mice, should one live in my stove.

After feeding the imaginary mouse, I dumped the onions into the Crockpot.

Then a big can of diced tomatoes.

Then some beans.

Some chicken (which was still mostly frozen)

The carrots, celery, and more beans.

More chili powder. I’m not too into measuring things out in cooking. I go more for what looks acceptable and what smells good.

I added a little water because I thought I needed some more liquid in there. Sometimes I use broth, but I only had a giant thing of it that I didn’t really want open at the time. So I stuck with water. And got this cool picture:

And this one:

Then I gave it a stir, threw on the lid, and turned the dial to “high.”

I spent the next 4 hours or so studying constitutional law.

Until the chili looked like this:

We threw on some cheese & some of the remaining onion and had a feast.

And don’t forget the pb sandwich!

Posted in Soup