Monthly Archives: February 2009

Hominy with Shredded Chicken and Peppers

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Hominy with Shredded Chicken and PeppersCurrently cooking from Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way by Lorna Sass.

I like chicken. I like peppers. I like corn of all kinds, including hominy. I liked this dish. I’m not sure whether or not one would consider this a soup. There was a bit of broth, sure, but it was mostly chunks of chicken, corn and peppers. It was hearty and filling and very, very good.

I started off by boiling two chicken breasts until done. While the chicken was cooking, I cut up the rest of the ingredients. Once the chicken was out, I drained the pot and started cooking the onions and peppers in a bit of olive oil until they softened. The recipe called for one red and one green bell pepper, but I only had red, so I just used two red peppers. I prefer red or yellow bell peppers to green ones anyway. 

The rest of the ingredients were fairly straight forward. A minced jalapeno, cumin, oregano and garlic. They all got thrown in the pot once the onion and peppers were softened. Then I added some small grape tomatoes, the shredded chicken, two cans of yellow hominy (I opted for the shortcut method of using canned, rather then making my own) and a handful of frozen corn. This all cooks together for about 10 minutes and it’s done!

I served the dish topped with avocado. One the side, I made some cornmeal biscuits (also from this book – review coming shortly). The meal was filling and healthy and left us with plenty of leftovers. The only criticism I have is that Sass doesn’t include nutrition information. I consider this book sort of a “healthy” cookbook and part of being healthy includes knowing how many calories are in a dish.

Chocolate Madeleines with Toasted Almonds and Coffee

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Chocolate Madeleines with Toasted Almonds and Coffee

Nope, not from the grains cookbook. I. Just. Needed. To. Bake.

When Bryan and I got married, my siblings gave us a gift certificate to Sur la Table, one of my favorite stores. Since it was a gift for both of us, I wanted to spend it on something we both wanted or would use. In all the hours I spent trolling Sur La Table’s website, I was able to find plenty of things I wanted, but nothing Bryan really wanted. Eventually, Bryan graciously allowed me to spend the Sur la Table gift certificate on the things I wanted. And I wanted a madeleine pan.

(Lest you think Bryan was being totally unselfish, let me point out that anything I bought would eventually benefit him in the form of baked goodness.)

Fast forward several months and said madeleine pan was still sitting in my office, untouched and untried. I kept looking at it and thinking that I ought to make some madeleines, but there were always other things I wanted to bake more. Then I stumbled on this recipe from one of my favorite blogs, Orangette, and I finally ran out of excuses. Chocolate madeleines coming up.

I took some shortcuts with this recipe. First of all, I had a bag of almond meal sitting in the refrigerator, so I didn’t bother to toast and grind the almonds. Secondly, I used instant espresso powder instead of finely ground coffee and Kahlua instead of whiskey. And finally, I decided not to make the frosting.

Chocolate Madeleine BatterThe batter was quick and easy to make. I was especially drawn to it because you didn’t need to let it sit overnight like traditional madeleines. I had the first tray in the oven quickly. Then I realized that I had enough batter left over for probably two more trays of the little cakes (if I didn’t eat it all, that is), and with only one pan, that meant I was going to be spending time letting the pan cool, cleaning it and baking another batch. Ummm, yeah. Out came the mini muffin tin. In short order it was greased, filled and ready to bake.

The madeleines baked for about 12 minutes, smelling deliciously chocolately. I already knew I was going to have a problem not eating them all. Once out of the oven, I plopped them out of the pan and onto a cooking rack. I resisted for about 5 minutes, and then I had to have one. They were nubby from the almond meal, and deeply, darkly chocolate. The edges were slightly crispy but the cakes, themselves, were moist and dense. The coffee flavor was faint, enhancing the chocolate without overpowering it.

The mini-muffin cakes didn’t fare so well. They came out of the oven looking like perfect little mini cakes, all demure and easy going. But these little devils stuck something fierce. No amount of banging on the counter could dislodge them. Even running a thin knife around the edge didn’t help much. Finally, I ended up digging them out one by one, leaving most the bottoms still stuck in the pan. Next time I make them (and there is so going to be a next time), I’ll make sure that I grease my nonstick mini-muffin pan really well. Chocolate Madeleines as mini muffins

Bulgur and Beef Kibbe

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Currently cooking from Whole Grains, Every Day, Every Way by Lorna Sass.

My first dish out of the next cookbook, “Whole Grains, Every Day Every Way”, by Lorna Sass, did not start off auspiciously: It was too ugly to take pictures of.

After baking my way through “The Art & Soul of Baking”, I wanted to choose a nonbaking cookbook. And since I’m always trying to eat more grains, I figured this was a good way to get me to cook from this book which has been sitting on my shelf for about a year, untouched.

In this recipe, cooked fine bulgur is mixed with lamb, spices and onions and formed into meatballs or loaves. According to Sass, it is a popular dish in the Middle East. Bulgur has been a favorite grain of mine for a long time. I usually use it like rice, as a bed for something else. Since I don’t like lamb, I decided to go with one of the variations and used beef instead. I also used a coarser grind of bulgur instead of the fine bulgur called for, since it was all I could find.

My plan was to form the bulgur/beef mixture into meatballs, brown them in some oil and then finish cooking them in tomato sauce. The recipe started out easily enough. While the bulgur was cooking, I chopped up an onion in the food processor and added spices (cinnamon, allspice, cumin, cayenne and salt). Once the bulgur was finished, it was added to the food processor and the whole shebang was pulsed a few times. You then mix the bulgur and the meat together and shape it. Here’s where my problems started.

The bulgur/meat mixture was very loose and soft. And very brownish gray. I couldn’t get the meat to hold together, so I added an egg as a binder. It seemed to work, until I started frying the meatballs. They pretty much collapsed. By this time, I was starting to worry that we’d be eating cereal for dinner. In an attempt to rescue the meal, I grabbed the rest of the uncooked meatballs, rescued what I could from the frying pan and pressed the whole thing into a 9×13-inch pan and baked it for about 30 minutes (in fact, this is what Sass says she typically does).

I was still determined to incorporate tomato sauce, so once the dish was out of the oven, I cut slabs and covered them with tomato sauce. Although the dish looked like bleeding dirt (with the tomato sauce) and had the texture of loose dirt, it smelled pretty darn good. And it tasted pretty good as well. We both had seconds. I was a little afraid of using cinnamon and allspice in a savory dish, but they worked. You don’t get a big hit of either spice, just a pleasant backnote, balanced nicely by the onion and pepper.

In trying to figure out what went wrong with the recipe, I think it had to do with substituting the coarser bulgur for the fine. In Sass’ notes about bulgur, she notes that fine bulgur triples in size when cooked, whereas coarser bulgur quadruples in size. I didn’t take that into account when I used coarse bulgur, so I believe I ended up with too much grain versus meat.

The dish had a lot of promise and I’ll probably take another stab at it soon. Maybe it’ll even be pretty enough for pictures.