Not-My-Grandma’s Chicken with Lemon, Garlic and Oregano

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Currently cooking from In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

At some point in my life, I decided that I was a chicken breast kind of person, not a drumstick one. Maybe it was that little piece of fatty, chewy gristle that I could never seem to avoid eating, or the fact that there always seemed to be more bone than meat on a drumstick. Whatever it was, I haven’t eaten chicken drumsticks for years, until this recipe came along. Now I’ve made it twice in one week.

The first time I made it, we ate most of the drumsticks before I could get a picture (curse you winter and your early darkness). Since I wanted to try the dish with more lemon and less garlic and it really needed a picture, I made it again, with a few changes.

The recipe begins by having you rub drumsticks with olive oil, salt and pepper, and broiling them until they are lightly browned. While the meat is broiling, you create a paste by mashing up some garlic cloves and stirring in lemon juice. Once the drumsticks are browned, you brush the garlic/lemon juice paste over the chicken, sprinkle it with oregano and bake the dish for 25 to 30 minutes.

Here’s what I learned the two times I’ve made this. I like my drumsticks with less garlic (two or three cloves as opposed to Clark’s five) and more lemon (the juice of two lemons instead of Clark’s one). Make sure you smash the heck out of the garlic (if you have a mortar and pestle, this is the time to use it. I don’t, so I just used a knife to  smear and mash the garlic). I also broiled my chicken until it was very dark brown and baked it for about 20 minutes. Finally, use the smallest dish you can, even if it means you have to wedge the chicken in. If you use too big of a dish, the stuff on the bottom (bits of garlic and chicken and lemon juice) can burn.

The lemon, garlic and oregano make this dish fragrant and tasty. It comes together very, very quickly and is perfect for a weeknight meal. I’d imagine you could use thighs instead of the drumsticks, adjusting for a longer baking period. You could even use chicken breasts, but I wouldn’t use skinless breasts. With the broiling and the baking, I think a skinless chicken breast would dry out before it got cooked all the way through.

Barley with Carrots, Scallions and Maybe Parmesan

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Currently cooking from Cook This Now by Melissa Clark

I was looking for something to serve underneath those lemony, garlicky chicken drumsticks, and I thought this might work well. I was hoping for an alternative that could stand in for brown rice (my go-to grain), but I ended up not liking this very much.

You start off by simmering barley until it is almost tender, then adding grated carrots. Once everything is tender, you drain any remaining water and stir in olive oil, chopped scallions, Parmesan cheese and salt and pepper.

I thought the dish was very, very bland, even with the scallions and the cheese. I ended up adding lemon juice to perk up the flavor, and I could have added more cheese (but I had already washed the grater, and I was feeling too lazy to wash it again).

Garlicky Sesame-Cured Broccoli Salad

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Currently cooking from In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

We are broccoli eaters around here, so I was intrigued by this recipe when I saw it. You cut up a couple heads of broccoli into bite-sized pieces, then toss them with salt and red wine vinegar. While the broccoli marinates, you heat olive oil with garlic and cumin seed, stir in sesame oil and a pinch of red pepper flakes and pour the whole thing over the broccoli and vinegar and let it sit for an hour to so at room temperature. The hot oil softens the florets just enough that they aren’t raw crunchy, and the vinegar adds a welcome acidity, cutting the richness of the oil. Although the broccoli will continue to soften as it sits, it will remain perfectly toothsome for several days in the refrigerator.

This is a nice change from my usual roasting or steaming method. I did have to add about twice as much vinegar as the recipe called for as there wasn’t enough to coat my broccoli, but I found that I liked having a stronger vinegar flavor. I’ve made this twice, and found that the smaller I cut the broccoli, the softer it gets. The second time I made this, I cut down a bit on the amount of cumin called for and still thought there was too much. Don’t leave out the red pepper flakes. They add just a touch of heat that contrasts nicely with the cold broccoli.

Easy Stovetop Macaroni, Peas, Bacon and Cheese a la Jamie Oliver

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Currently cooking from In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with mac and cheese. I love it because it is cheesy pasta. I hate it because I usually eat too much of it. Unfortunately, this recipe isn’t going to help me resolve my dilemma. This was so very, very good and so very, very easy to make. It is “drier” than most mac and cheeses I’ve made, and the only cheese in it is about a half of a cup of Parmesan. Yet, the combination of bacon, parmesan, peas and lemon juice is delightful.

This dish comes together fast. In fact, I had to take the sauce off the heat because the pasta wasn’t quite done. You start out by sauteing a couple of chopped up slices of bacon until they are crispy. Next you stir in frozen peas and cook for a minute to defrost them. Then you add a bit of creme fraiche or heavy cream (I went with the heavy cream), lemon juice and the cooked pasta. After stirring everything together until the pasta is coated, you add the Parmesan and salt and pepper. More stirring until the cheese is melted, and then lots of eating.

Seems almost too easy to be good, but it was. I did have to add more heavy cream because my pasta seemed too dry, and when I reheated it the next day, I added a bit more. We liked the dish so much, that I made it again, a few days later, and added some leftover flank steak instead of the bacon (and left out the peas because Bryan decided that peas didn’t belong in mac and cheese).

This will definitely become my go-to macaroni and cheese recipe. Forget the blue box.

Dahlia’s Fragrant Chicken Fingers

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Currently cooking from In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

You should have seen Bryan’s face light up when I told him we were having chicken fingers for supper. I’m pretty sure this guy has eaten more chicken strips/fingers than anybody alive. Then his eyes narrowed and he started asking questions.

Bryan: Are they deep-fried?

Me: No, baked.

Bryan: Are they breaded?

Me: No, but there are bread crumbs involved.

Bryan: Are they even chicken?

Me: Well, no. They are ground turkey, but it is all poultry.

Then he walked away, shaking his head and muttering some not-so-very-nice things under his breath.

In the headnotes to this recipe, Clark talks about wanting to make chicken fingers for her daughter that were spicy, nutritious and something that adults would like. So she modeled them after lamb kibbe, a turkish dish that mixes ground lamb with aromatic spices such as cinnamon, cumin and allspice. You take a pound or so of ground chicken (or turkey, if your supermarket doesn’t carry ground chicken), mix in the afore mentioned spices plus green onions, garlic, cilantro, bread crumbs, pepper and a pinch of cayenne and then form the mixture into “fingers.” Those fingers get brushed with olive oil and baked in the oven until cooked through.

The turkey fingers were … interesting. Neither Bryan nor I really liked the spices with the meat, and the texture of the fingers was quite dense and a bit tough. I’m pretty sure I overmixed the turkey mixture and that’s what made the fingers dense and tough. As to the flavor? Well, I prefer my cinnamon be kept with the sweet things. I liked the idea of the recipe, though, and could see making these with different spices and herbs.

Coconut Rice and Peas

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Currently cooking from Cook This Now by Melissa Clark

This was one of the first dishes I marked out of this book. Sometimes you want rice to take a more starring role in your meal, and I thought this recipe might do that. I’ve had coconut rice before, and I’ve always really liked it, especially the versions I’ve had in the Caribbean (although their “peas” usually mean our beans).

Unfortunately, I had problems with this recipe, and those problems were probably just as much my fault as the recipe’s fault, although I do wish Clark had been a little more explicit in some places. I ended up with gummy, clumpy rice that didn’t taste coconutty at all.

This is a pretty straightforward recipe. You cook brown rice in coconut milk and water until tender. During the last few minutes of cooking, you stir in frozen peas. Easy, no? Well, here’s where I ran into problems.

1. Clark calls for brown rice. She doesn’t specify long grain, short grain or medium grain. I went with my favorite short grain brown rice. She also tells you to rinse the rice first, which I forgot to do. That one is my fault and probably contributed to the gumminess.

2. Clark calls for coconut milk, but doesn’t specify regular or lite. I went with lite. I don’t know if that made a difference or not. Clark says to pour the coconut milk into a measuring glass and then add enough water to make two cups. I ended up adding less than 1/4 of a cup of water to equal two cups, and my liquid was quite thick and “saucy.” I ended up adding another 1/4 cup of water because my rice was starting to stick in the pan, but it was still somewhat chewy. I think this was the major culprit in my gumminess; perhaps the type of rice I used needed more than the two cups of liquid. Maybe I should have used less coconut milk and more water.

3. As for the lack of coconut flavor, well, I don’t know. Maybe I should try adding some dried coconut to the rice. Maybe using a blander white rice will let the coconut flavor come through better.

Spicy, Garlicky Cashew Chicken

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Currently cooking from In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

When I started reading through this book, looking for recipes to make, I skipped this dish three or four times. It looked like too much work. I couldn’t imagine the flavors. It just didn’t sound that good. Then Bryan happened to see the recipe; he thought it sounded good.

Maybe I should listen to him more often, because this dish rocked. Seriously, this is one of the best chicken dishes I’ve ever made. And it wasn’t that much work.

You begin by using a food processor to make a paste of salted, roasted cashews, cilantro, olive oil, garlic, soy sauce, brown sugar, lime juice and a jalapeno. Half of the paste gets rubbed over chicken thighs/drumsticks which are then broiled or grilled, and the rest of the paste is served at the table as extra sauce.

I used chicken breasts that I cut into pieces and threaded on metal skewers. I opted for the broiler over the grill, and I let the chicken marinate in the paste for about two hours before I broiled them. At first, I was worried that the paste was too sweet and too spicy (even though I only used half of a seeded jalapeno). But under the broiler, some sort of alchemy took place. Married with the chicken, the sweetness turned into a faint caramel bitterness, the toastiness of the cashews took center stage, and the spiciness of the jalapeno almost disappeared. Unfortunately, the paste that I saved to serve as a sauce (I thinned it down with a little water) was still too sweet. Next time I’ll add extra lime juice or cut the sugar a bit.

I can’t wait until summer when I can try this out on the grill. I suspect the smokiness of the grill will take this dish over the top.

Spiced Chipotle Honey Chicken Breasts with Sweet Potatoes

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Currently cooking from In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

I’ve had a devil of a time trying to pick my next cookbook. You’d think, with more than 200 cookbooks, that that would be easy. Nope. I’ve been trying to cut down on my processed sugar intake, so I wanted to steer clear of baking cookbooks (at least for a little while). And none of my savory cookbooks looked very appealing. Lately, all I’ve wanted to eat are salads full of cabbage, lettuce and other assorted veggies. Also, I wanted to cook out of one of my newer cookbooks. I kept coming back to this book, but I just couldn’t find more than a handful of recipes that sounded good. I decided to go for it anyway. I’ll probably tagteam this book with another of Melissa Clark’s new cookbooks, Cook This Now.

One of the first things that struck me about In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite was how readable it was. Every recipe comes with a story. Not just headnotes, but a story that tells you how the recipe came about. That’s not surprising, considering Clark writes a regular column for the New York Times dining section, in addition to appearing in just about every food magazine ever published. She’s got an easy way of writing that makes you feel like she’s your best friend. She makes writing look effortless.

Anyway, onto the first dish. This book has exactly one recipe for chicken breasts, and Clark even admits that she originally envisioned using a whole chicken, preferring the dark meat to the white meat, but her editor requested chicken breasts. I don’t know how this would work with a whole chicken, but I can tell you that it works just fine with chicken breasts. Better than fine, actually. This was so good that Bryan even admitted to kind of liking the sweet potatoes.

The dish is pretty simple and perfect for a weeknight. You take a couple of sweet potatoes (okay, yams), cut them into chunks and start roasting them in the oven. Meanwhile, you make a paste of honey, chipotle chilies in adobe sauce, cumin, cinnamon, salt, garlic and vinegar. The paste gets rubbed all over chicken breasts, then the meat gets place on top of the sweet potato chunks and roasted until the chicken is done, about 20 more minutes.

My only gripe is that the paste was very spicy. The recipe calls for 4 chipotle chilies, minced. I hate the seeds (they never soften, and I find their hard texture annoying), so I took all the seeds out, and it was still too spicy. I would cut the chilies in half if you don’t like spice. Other than that, I really liked this dish. The sweet potatoes get soft but not mushy and soak up a lot of the chicken juice. The chicken stays moist, and the paste gives it a lot of flavor. I was a little unsure about the combination of cinnamon and cumin, but here it really works. I love the idea of roasting the chicken breasts over veggies, and I’d like to try it with cauliflower.

As for a picture? Well, I came down with a cold the day I made this, and I was too tired and sneezy to get out the camera. Sorry.

Coconut Granola

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I haven’t been baking much, and I’m still trying to decide on my next cookbook. The one thing that I have been doing is making this granola at least once a week. It’s nutty and toasty and full of crunchy things. I’ve been eating it on yogurt and straight out of the jar by the handful. I liked it so much, that I included it in my Christmas candy packages to friends and family.

The original recipe is from the Tasty Kitchen website. So far, the only change I’ve made is to not include the dried cranberries or chocolate. Honestly, I like it plain. It is plenty sweet from the brown sugar and agave syrup. One of these days, I’d like to try using honey or maple syrup instead of the agave syrup, and I’d like to experiment with different combinations of nuts and seeds. Recipe after the jump.

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Wrap-up — Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams At Home by Jeni Britton Bauer

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Currently cooking out of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer

The last few weeks testing this book’s recipes kind of got away on me. I got wrapped up in sourdough and then the holiday season hit. I’m overdue for my wrap-up post, but here it is.

If ice cream making is your thing, you really need to check this book out. I love this book, and I will probably never make ice creams any other way. Although many of the recipes didn’t appeal to me, the fact that Bauer includes a master recipe (for both ice cream and frozen yogurt) means that I have a formula that I can follow to create my own flavors. Cream cheese in ice cream. Who knew?

My favorite ice creams were:

Salty Caramel Ice Cream — This was the first recipe I tried, and the first spoonful was a revelation. After that first bite, I knew Bauer was onto something.

The Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream in the World — Deep, dark chocolate. Not too sweet, smooth and rich. This is the chocolate ice cream of all chocolate ice creams.

Lemon & Blueberry Frozen Yogurt — Tart and refreshing. There’s no dullness to the lemon flavor here, and if you don’t like blueberries, just about any fruit will work.

Ice creams that weren’t my favorite:

Nectarine Ice Cream — This was my attempt at adapting Bauer’s master recipe to my own flavor. I was hoping for the essence of nectarines in frozen form. I got watery, washed out ice cream that had little resemblance to the fruit. Probably more my fault than Bauer’s.

Brown Butter Almond Brittle Ice Cream — Except for the almond brittle, this ice cream was blah. Life is too short to waste it eating blah ice cream, dontcha think?