poultry – Page 2 – The Kitchen Illiterate

Mushroom, Chicken, and Spring Pea Penne

Sometimes, when I’m walking home from work in the evening, or sitting on BART heading into San Francisco, or wandering through the Rockridge Market Hall drooling over fresh pasta, I’m overcome by joy that I get to live here, that this is, really and truly, my new home. Two weekends ago Mr. X and I took a trip into the city to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, and I couldn’t stop grinning, despite the crowds and noise and madness. I felt like I was in my own personal version of heaven, surrounded by piles of glorious spring onions and purple carrots and flawless mushrooms of all kinds. I could spend hours wandering through that place, but luckily for Mr. X, I was content to cut the shopping short and sit down to enjoy a glass of cava once I found my new culinary magical ingredient: Umami paste.
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Persian Chicken Stew

It is no secret that I’ve been at a real standstill in the kitchen lately. It isn’t just culinary inspiration that’s been lacking, but the writerly inspiration, too. Even when I do cook something fantastic, I can’t seem to find anything interesting to say about it. For example, this stew. It’s great. It’s full of unique flavors, and I got to use some new ingredients, and I found all kinds of delicious things to do with the leftovers. And I’ve been trying now for weeks to sit down and say something that would make you all want to rush into your kitchens to get cooking. How am I doing?
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Creamy Mushroom and Chicken Pasta

I think for a minute there I started to go into hibernation. The grey and the cold and the snow, well, let’s just say it makes me feel awfully unmotivated. The lure of True Blood and Cougar Town, and of simple dinners consisting of nothing but rice and roasted vegetables, has sadly left this space bereft of anything new. And with holiday travel, and holiday planning, I guess writing has been pushed to the back of my mind. I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t leave you too hungry.

The thing is, too, that I’m starting to feel I’ve outgrown this space. More than a few people have mentioned to me that I’m not exactly a kitchen illiterate anymore. It’s been hard to find a way to write about what I’m doing in the kitchen these days in a way that fits in here. So I’ve been hard at work (ok, when I manage to get off the couch) creating a new site for my new food blogging project. I’ll definitely share it all when it’s ready, but never fear, I’ll still be sharing recipes one the internets, even if it’s not right here.

In the meantime, I wanted to share this delicious pasta dish I’ve been kind of obsessing over lately. I kept my distance from the rich, creamy pastas for most of the last year, but when it started to get really cold again, I was craving heavy cream something serious. And when I came up with this sauce, it was all over. This is really something special.
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Wine and Dine Walla Walla: Braised Chicken with Scarlet Runner Beans

This week I explore the world of the slow cooker on Wine and Dine Walla Walla, with Braised Chicken and Scarlet Runner Beans. This chicken makes my mouth water just thinking about it.

And I promise to post some Kitchen Illiterate content later this week: I made peanut butter chocolate chip cookies that I have to share!
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Cheesy Turkey Manicotti

Lately I’ve had quite a thing for meals I can portion out and freeze in little individual servings. This Turkey Manicotti is exactly that. I thought it was just as delicious defrosted and carried to work in a little plastic container as it was when I first made it. In fact, I thought maybe it was even better. Maybe the flavors had more time to develop and become one, though I’m not entirely sure that can actually happen in a freezer. Either way, this is an excellent meal to make on a weekend and freeze for those evenings when you just don’t want to cook or those mornings when you can’t find anything else in the cupboard to bring for lunch.
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Chicken Piccata Pasta

Man, I love pasta. I eat pasta at least three times a week, and not just with red sauce. I can take anything in my refrigerator and make some kind of pasta-based dinner around it. And recently, while flipping through Giada De Laurentiis’s Everyday Italian, I decided that nearly all of the recipes in this book would be more interesting if they were turned into pasta dishes. So I decided to start with Chicken Piccata.

Giada’s Chicken Piccata recipe is in the chapter on Cutlets. I’m assuming it’s meant to be served as a big slab of meat, maybe with a side of polenta and some kind of vegetable. But as you can probably tell if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, I’m not really a big-slab-of-meat kind of girl. I tend to prefer meals in which all of the important food components can be mixed together and served in a bowl, which is probably why pasta is such a favorite. So I decided to add some zucchini to the mix and turn this big-slab-of-meat meal into a quick, easy, and tasty pasta dinner.
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Updated! Herbed Ricotta-Stuffed Chicken Breasts with Sauce Aurore

When I first started this here blog, I cooked up a fancy dinner for my lady friend Crystal that subsequently stood out in my mind as one of the best things I’d ever made. It was the first time that I had a vision for dinner that didn’t come straight from the pages of a cookbook or a glossy magazine. I mixed tons of fresh herbs into some ricotta, stuffed it inside of some chicken, and topped the chicken with a light, tomato cream sauce that pulled it all together, and this recipe became my go to suggestion whenever anyone asked me for something easy but impressive to serve for dinner. But the original pictures I took for the post? Not so impressive. I always intended to make this again, with more appealing photographs, because I would hate to think this recipe would be shunned because of its seeming unattractiveness. Well finally, last week, I did it.
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Chicken Marbella, Three Ways

I have been saving this recipe to post to my new blog, but setting up the new blog has been taking longer than I anticipated, and this chicken was so good, and so versatile, that I decided I couldn’t wait to share it any longer. The recipe comes from The Silver Palate Cookbook, and was apparently one of the first dishes to be offered at the Silver Palate food store. I discovered it only after reading about the death of Sheila Lukins, one of the founders of The Silver Palate, and I’m glad I did. I had the impression that The Silver Palate Cookbook was a throwback to the 80s and had never thought to pick it up. Now that I know better, I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy and try more.

I also can’t wait to cook more with prunes. I know, sounds crazy, but I was pleasantly surprised by the sweet richness they added to this chicken. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover prunes are nothing more than dried plums. I suspect if they were called dried plums instead of prunes they wouldn’t have such a geriatric reputation.
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Pollo al ajillo

The last month has been crazy. Between finishing graduate school, preparing for a job interview, and traveling to California and to Washington within the space of a week, I hardly had a chance to breathe. Then I came back from Washington (site of aforementioned job interview) and, before I had even unpacked, I was offered the job and was immediately thrown into the reality of moving across the country. So it looks like the next month will be crazy, too.

During all of that craziness, this recipe sat patiently on my desk, just waiting for me to find, not just the time to prepare food of any kind, but an occasion that deserved it. That occasion came last week when Mr. X and I finally had a Saturday evening at home that involved me not doing homework and him not doing work. Amazing. As was this dish.
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Chicken with Green Olives, Orange, and Sherry

At the beginning of every month, I go through my back issues of Bon Appetit for that month and mark recipes that look interesting. I take note of things I want to try, and am always amused to find that something that looked great to me a few years ago no longer seems intriguing, and something I had no interest in the first time through the magazine suddenly stands out. This is one of those recipes: The January 2005 issue featured this Chicken with Green Olives, Orange, and Sherry in the FastEasyFresh column, and I breezed right by it four years ago and never gave it a second thought. And I didn’t know what I was missing.
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