poultry – Page 4 – The Kitchen Illiterate

Finally, Arroz con Pollo

I have been thinking about Arroz con Pollo all week, but the madness of the end of the semester has kept me out of the kitchen. I have been subsisting on bad take out sandwiches, jarred spaghetti sauce, and Boboli. Well, tonight I decided that I’ve been out of the kitchen too long. I took a break from my frantic preparations for my presentation tomorrow to finally put together the dinner I’ve been dreaming of since I watched Jorge Ayala beat Bobby Flay’s ass on Throwdown with his delectable-looking Arroz con Pollo.

I’m not sure my version is anywhere near Ayala’s, but I’m pretty satisfied. The texture ended up more creamy and risotto-like than I expected, but is that ever a bad thing? I realized when I was cleaning up and putting away leftovers that I forgot to add the crushed tomatoes, but I don’t think the flavor was lacking anything for that. And I’ve discovered that adobo seasoning may be one of my new kitchen favorites. The only thing that pushed this a little toward the not-so-favorite dinners is that I’m not a huge fan of chicken thighs. I don’t know why I don’t just realize that once and for all and stop cooking them. I think using bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts rather than thighs would have made this just that much more awesome.

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Chicken Florentine, where have you been all my life?

I’ve updated this recipe to make it more streamlined and even more delicious. Check out the updated recipe, and let me know what you think! I’ve also added new photos to this older post.

Who would have thought that the simple combination of spinach, chicken, and cream could create such a glorious dinner? Well, the Italians, obviously, because they are good at that kind of thing. I’m just baffled that it took me so long to realize it. I mean, I love spinach, I love chicken, and I am a sucker for anything in a cream sauce. How has this dish never graced my kitchen? And when can I have it again? It is truly a perfect combination of flavors and textures and all those other things that make food, you know, good. Er. Yes.

I saw the recipe in Giada’s Family Dinners about two weeks ago and it stuck in my head, floating around, taunting me. “You love spinach. You want to cook me!” But I’m a grad student, see, and I don’t have time to be at the beck and call of whatever recipes decide to tempt me. I had to eat frozen veggie burgers (don’t worry, I heat them up first) and macaroni and cheese and pre-made gnocchi from Trader Joe’s while this recipe enticed me and beckoned to my nonexistent free time. Well, finally last night I had some free time. And I only wish I’d made the time earlier, because this is one of my new favorites.

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Chicken Curry Soup with Broccoli and Rice

Broccoli drowning in chicken curry soup

Looking back over the past few months of my bloggity blogging, I am struck by two things: There has been a serious dearth of updates since about September, and most of them have been about soup. I mean, it is kind of excessive and I almost don’t even want to post this, yet another recipe for soup. But it was such a delicious soup, it really doesn’t deserve to be slighted like that. And if I don’t, well, I’ll just be contributing to the lack of posting here. Or would that be not contributing? Ack, my brain is exhausted from my cataloging homework and I can’t really figure out the niceties of language right now, but I can tell you how this lovely bowl of soup came to be.

Ok, it doesn’t look so lovely. The saddest thing about my recent obsession with soup is that the stuff doesn’t really photograph well. All the pictures I took of my soup just kind of look like yellow puddles with overturned broccoli trees sticking out of them. However, do not let the lack of photogenic qualities deter you: This recipe is easy and tasty, is a great use for leftover chicken, if you happen to have roasted one up, and is even better reheated for lunch the next day. This soup deserves to be part of what is quickly becoming the year of the soup.

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Cold Day, Roast Chicken, Raw Vegetables?

These are actually raw

For Christmas this year, I got a digital meat thermometer, the kind with a wire that attaches the probe to a fancy digital read out. I thought, “Finally! I can stop undercooking my roast chickens!” Yes, it’s the sad truth: I am a disaster when it comes to roast chicken. I can never manage to cook them all the way through, no matter how long I leave them in the oven, no matter how clear those thigh juices appear to run when I prick them with a fork. I start cutting them up and realize I have to immediately throw them back in the oven, in their half mutilated state. It’s disappointing, and not very photogenic. This digital thermometer was going to change all that.

A few weeks ago, my good friends over at Festivus Gastronomicus had a little moving sale (because unfortunately for everyone in Boston they are heading back to L.A.), and I ended up with their very lovely and large roasting pan. All of the elements converged, and I decided this was the week to roast a chicken. Well something went horribly, horribly wrong.

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Chicken Marsala at Long Last

Chicken Marsala

I have been thinking about making chicken marsala for a long, long time. I bought a bottle of marsala expressly for that purpose months and months ago. It might have actually been a year ago. But I never got around to making chicken marsala, for reasons I really don’t know or understand. I’ve never actually HAD chicken marsala, so I wasn’t entirely sure what a good recipe would look like, or what it is supposed to taste or smell like, and perhaps that uncertainty prevented experimentation. Who knows? But this week, I finally decided it was time for chicken marsala.

I’m not sure what my expectations were, not having had any previous experiences with said dish, but it was kind of not what I expected. I wanted the sauce to thicken up a little more. But honestly, other than that it was pretty delicious so I don’t have any real complaints. And it was easy peasy, so I’m not sure what took me so long. It’s actually a pretty fancy-seeming dinner requiring very little effort, which meant it was perfect for movie night with Mr. X. I love it when I can cook things that seem so much more impressive than they are.

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Guest Bloggity Blogger: Christa’s Turkey Chili Rice

Turkey Chili Rice

Don’t worry readers, Laura will return shortly for the next posting! This is the roommate, Christa, coming at you to report on my culinary undertakings this week. We eat well around here.

My story begins on a lazy Saturday afternoon when I had nothing to do and realized my love affair with the Food Network has been grossly neglected. I flipped the television on and settled in for an episode of Guy’s Big Bite (for you FN devotees, he’s the dude who won the Next Food Network Star Challenge a while back). He was doing a bunch of stuff with turkey, and one recipe in particular caught my eye and called to my growling stomach. I’ve been known to enjoy both chili and rice on their own, so how could a meal that combines the two be bad, I thought? Well, as we all soon discovered, it can’t.

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Classic Chicken Enchiladas

Update: I re-made Chicken Enchiladas last week (October 2008) and with the aid of my new camera ended up with MUCH better pictures. So I decided to swap them out. Enchiladas are still hard to photograph, but if you’re looking at this post for the first time, I promise you these pictures are much more appealing than those that originally appeared.

Monday night I made perhaps the best enchiladas I’ve ever made. I have to credit Dmitri for this. Every time I’ve made enchiladas before, I couldn’t figure out how to roll them without breaking the tortillas, so I went for a layered, lasagna style of enchiladas. Tasty, certainly, but I was never completely taken in and filled with the love that I suspected enchiladas were supposed to instill in one’s soul. Until now.

Dmitri’s trick involves dipping each tortilla, briefly, into hot oil. Just the slightest oily kiss renders frigid corn tortillas pliable and loving. Er. Sorry for the dip into sordid prose, but it was kind of a revelation for me. I had my suspicions when I saw him doing it, and even when I started working the process myself. But these really were the best enchiladas I’ve ever made.

Of course, it could also have to do with the fact that I finally figured out how to spice my shredded chicken properly. And that I put a nice sized bit of lard in my beans, and really let them cook, slowly, over low heat, until they were really thick and creamy. And that I didn’t overdo it with the cheese, but instead allowed everything to come together in some kind of happy enchilada harmony. Whatever it was, it made me so happy, I could easily have eaten the whole pan myself. Which would have been a very, very bad idea.
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Chicken in Creamy Chive Sauce and Some More Pork

Creamy Chive Chicken

Oy. Once again, time has gotten away from me and I find myself sharing something I cooked a week and a half ago. It was so delicious, though, that I can’t just relegate it to the files of the never posted. And look, Ma, a balanced dinner! I made this for Mr. X and was all worried that it wasn’t going to be that good: I got the recipe from Eating Well, and have found it to be a little hit or miss (my Mediterranean Pasta Bake was kind of bland, even after I added seasoning to the original recipe). This recipe, for Sauteed Chicken Breasts with Creamy Chive Sauce, was a winner.

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Stuffed Squash is Stuffed Goodness

Stuffed Squash

The day after I made this, I brought leftovers to work for lunch. One of my co-workers took one look at it and said “Eating Well magazine?” She had, apparently, made the same thing earlier in the week. But of course, how could anyone not be tempted by acorn squash stuffed with beans and sausage? I am certainly glad I was tempted because this was amazing. It was one of those great dinners, too, that looks incredibly impressive but doesn’t really take much effort.

I’m sorry Miss Crystal wasn’t here to enjoy this. I thought of her and her risotto-stuffed pumpkin the whole time I was eating it. As she would say, stuffed squash is a quintessentially Laura kind of dinner. And yeah, anything with beans and sausage is a pretty Laura kind of dinner, too.

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Herbed Ricotta-stuffed Chicken Breasts with Sauce Aurore

Stuffed Chicken

I have a newfound respect for those 1950s housewives. How they managed to have dinner ready and on the table when hubby walked through the door and still clean the house, clean the kids, and make sure there was a cocktail waiting for the mister is something I will perhaps never understand. I find it difficult enough to time dinner so it’s ready when Crystal gets home, and last night was certainly a challenge in that area. It was also a challenge in the dish-doing area, because I used almost every saucepan and skillet I have. But it was so worth it.

I wanted to do something kind of fancy, in honor of Crystal’s return (and this after yesterday’s screed about simplicity in the kitchen). She spent ten days in California, and is only here for two weeks before her departure for Spain, and graduate school. I am trying not to cry here, thinking about it. This was certainly fancy, and perhaps one of the best things to come out of the kitchen all summer. Crystal thinks so, at least, and I have to say for once I could find nothing I would improve or fix or change next time. It all worked out quite well, which is shocking considering I was kind of making it up as I went along. And struggling to make sure it was all finished by the time Crystal got home from work.

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