poultry – The Kitchen Illiterate

Classic Curried Chicken Salad

This week Sean is out of town, and I am eating like a total single lady. By that I mean on the couch, surrounded by magazines and watching How I Met Your Mother. By that I also mean I’m eating super easy salads, for which most of the prep work was done Sunday night. This Curried Chicken Salad is a perfect example a of single lady dinner. It took me about 15 minutes to throw together, it’s simple and summery, and its served in endive leaves, for goodness sake.

I love Curried Chicken Salad because it is totally classic, but still a little unexpected. It’s easy, but seems kind of decadent. It can be varied in endless ways, or kept simple and basic. I had originally intended to eat this chicken salad wrapped in lettuce leaves, but I couldn’t find any with that good cup shape. However, the endive was perfect: It added just the right amount of bitter crunch. This salad is also great wrapped in a soft whole wheat or green spinach-y tortilla.
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Not-So-Meaty Meatloaf

Toward the end of March I started realizing that I was eating a lot of sweets. And french fries. And more pizza than usual. My carefully developed healthy habits had taken a nosedive, and I was feeling it. I decided to declare April Health Month. My intention wasn’t to embark on a month of strictness and deprivation, but to remind myself how much better I feel when I’m eating more vegetables, and being thoughtful and conscientious about the amount of sugar, meat, and fried things I’m putting in my body. I re-read Mark Bittman’s Food Matters, and I started planning healthy meals.
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Thai Chicken Satay Pasta

The Midwestern girl in me loves a baked pasta dish. If you spend enough time digging through the archives of this site you’ll probably feel sort of appalled at the number of casseroles and casserole-like dishes I’ve managed to kludge together over the years. Give me a baking dish and a hodgepodge of ingredients, and I’ll make you a casserole. Some people aren’t into those kinds of things, but to those people I say, you are missing out. Unless you don’t like pasta (in which case, who are you?) what could be wrong with pasta baked into a dish with other yummy things?
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Arroz con Pollo

There is something about the combination of chicken and rice that makes me happy. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. In fact, it seems that every culture has its version of a chicken and rice dish, from the cream-of-mushroom chicken rice casseroles of the midwest, to Hainanese Chicken dishes, made in various regions in Southeast Asia, to India’s Chicken Biryani. I just saw a new (to me) recipe for Halal-cart style chicken and rice that I can’t wait to try. Of all these various permutations of chicken and rice, though, arroz con pollo remains my favorite.
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Chicken and Chard Burritos

Sometimes on Sundays I peruse cookbooks and I start getting excited. I start making up grocery lists and weekly menu plans, and I have it all figured out. I know that Thursday, I’m going to make Chicken Escabeche with Carrots and Jalapenos, and wild rice. Then things happen. The market doesn’t have any acceptable carrots, though the shelves are overflowing with beautiful leafy greens. Thursday, which seemed like a perfectly lovely day earlier in the week, turns out to be kind of exhausting, and when work is over and I’m standing in the kitchen, I know I don’t have the patience for wild rice. I have to re-think my plans, so that I can get back on the couch for a little restorative bad television. Sometimes when this happens, I turn to pizza, or bread and cheese. But sometimes when this happens, I get lucky, and something wonderful manages to happen in my own kitchen anyway. This was one of those times.
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Chicken and Dumplings

While a California winter isn’t as wintry as New England, or even Walla Walla, we’ve been getting our fair share of damp chill lately. But unlike the onset of winter in Boston, the Bay Area winter doesn’t fill me with dread. I’m actually loving it: the damp and the fog, the drizzly rain, and the grey chill that suggests a coat, but doesn’t require ankle-length wool overcoats, scarves, and hats. I think it’s just perfect. The best part is that it’s just cool enough to make me crazy cozy winter foods, like chicken and dumplings.
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An Even Better Chicken Florentine

Over three years ago, I made Chicken Florentine for the first time, and ever since then, it’s been the most frequently viewed recipe on this site. By a landslide. The people, they love Chicken Florentine. But I’ve never been entirely happy with that recipe. And let’s not even talk about the photographs in the post; they make me cringe. In the years since, I’ve made Chicken Florentine a handful of times again, and I’ve tweaked the recipe here and there each time. I just knew it could be even better, and I was right. My friends, I think I finally have my best Chicken Florentine recipe, and I knew I had to share it with all of you.
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Chicken in Milk

You know when you bookmark a recipe but don’t get around to trying it for years, and when you finally do, you curse yourself for waiting so long to discover this new, most amazing meal? That’s what happened with this chicken. I saw this recipe on The Kitchn over two years ago, and Faith Durand, the woman who posted the link, was so effusive about its awesomeness I bookmarked it immediately. And then forgot about it completely.
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Rigatoni with Braised Chicken in a Saffron Cream Sauce

I love magazines. I always have. I love the shiny pages and pictures, I even love the ads (yup, natural-born American consumer, right here). I collect them, and have a really hard time letting them go. Just ask my mom about the three years’ worth of Sassy magazines she accidentally got rid of when I was away at college. Right now, I have about five years worth of back issues of Bon Appetit, about a year of Food & Wine, the three issues of Gourmet I received before it went belly up, and a handful of random cooking magazines I’ve picked up over the years at airports and bookstores. A lot of people ask me if I ever actually go back and look at all those magazines, and the truth is, I do. I actually have a system, because, well, I’m a dork.
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Meyer Lemon Glazed Chicken

One of my favorite things about our new apartment is the little gas grill sitting out on our porch. Grilling has always been one of those quintessential California activities in my mind. When I was growing up a good portion of our meals were cooked out on the patio, and whenever we had a party, you could be sure to find Dad standing out back with tongs in one hand and a beer in the other. And sure, charcoal grilling can provide more flavor, but having a gas grill means you can fire it up and have dinner on the table in 20 minutes. We’ve been getting good use our of our little Weber, and one of the best things to come from the grill since we’ve moved here is this Meyer Lemon Glazed chicken.
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