Tag Archives: Main Course

Mediterranean Tuna Melts and other recipes

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Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve made a number of recipes out of this book. I’ve been too lazy to hold up dinner to take pictures, so I’ve been reluctant to talk about those dishes. Instead, I thought I’d do a wrap-up post, starting with the one dish I did manage to take a picture of:

Mediterranean Tuna Melts!
Normally, I don’t like tuna. All that fishy taste and fishy-smelling breath and gloopy mayo. But I liked these sandwiches. Water-packed tuna is mixed with mayo, lemon juice, red onion and artichoke hearts and piled onto toasted bread. The tuna mixture is topped with tomatoes and slices of provolone cheese and then broiled until the cheese is bubbly and melty. Melty cheese makes everything taste better.

Polenta with Mushroom Sauce
Polenta is not a fixture in our kitchen. I tried it, once, and found it to be bland in the extreme. But in this dish, browned and served with a creamy mushroom sauce, well, the polenta was still pretty bland. Fortunately, the mushroom sauce was full of flavor thanks to sherry, onions, rosemary and garlic. The recipe takes tubes of prepared polenta, slices them into rounds and cooks the rounds in a skillet until a brown crust forms. I liked the textural difference between the crusty outside of the polenta and the creamy insides. This isn’t my favorite dish by far, but it was warm and filling.

Sausage and Tortellini Soup with Spinach
This broth-based pasta soup was Bryan’s pick for Sunday supper several weeks ago, and he did a great job with this recipe. It was a nice change of pace for me to come home to find supper on the table. The soup starts out by browning sausage (we used hot Italian sausage), onions and garlic. Chicken broth and fresh cheese tortellinis are added to the pot and simmered until the pasta is tender. Right before serving, baby spinach is stirred in and cooked just until wilted. This, along with some homemade bread, made a nice, light supper.

Skillet Chicken Tetrazzini
This was another of Bryan’s Sunday suppers. Using a store-bought rotisserie chicken, Bryan had this casserole-type dish on the table in less than an hour (and most of that time was spent chopping mushrooms and onions and shredding chicken meat). The dish starts off by cooking onions and mushrooms in butter until browned. Egg noodles are then cooked in the same skillet in a mixture of chicken broth and half-and-half until tender. Finally, the chicken, lemon juice, frozen peas and a bit of thyme are added to the skillet, and the whole dish simmers until the chicken and peas are warmed through. Unlike traditional tetrazzinis that use a cheese sauce, this casserole was right, but light. And it was done on the stovetop with one dish. We happily ate leftovers for several days.

Focaccia

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Currently cooking from Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce

I’m back to spelt. I’ve made several recipes from other books that used spelt, and I’ve been pretty successful. Spelt is closely related to wheat, but many people find it milder and sweeter than whole wheat flour. You can substitute spelt flour for whole wheat or all-purpose flour in most recipes with no problems. However, spelt tends to soak up liquid more readily than whole wheat or all-purpose flour, so you may find yourself adding a bit more liquid than you normally would. This is a good flour to start out with if you are curious about baking with whole grain flours.

This is a pretty simple lean yeast dough recipe. It uses a mixture of spelt and all-purpose flour, kosher salt, olive oil and water. The magic of focaccia comes from the toppings you use as well as liberally drenching the dough with olive oil right before baking it.  I used finely chopped rosemary and kosher salt as my toppings, and we ate the focaccia with soup.

The bread was light and springy, with a slight chew. It didn’t have much flavor outside the topping, but that’s to be expected with focaccia. We ate half  of  a pan for dinner, then reheated the rest for lunch the next day. The leftovers were a little dry and the crust wasn’t quite as crispy as it had been, but overall, it was still pretty good.

Boyce says to  make either one big cookie sheet of focaccia or three nine-inch pans of focaccia. When I divided the dough into three portions, the resulting focaccia  was too thin and the edges were pretty dry. I’d suggest dividing the dough in half instead. I did this the second time I made the focaccia and it was much better.

I have a minor annoyance with the yeast-based recipes in this book. Boyce calls for yeast amounts by package. I buy jars of yeast, so every time I make one of her yeast-based recipes, I have to translate that “package” measurement into teaspoons. As I said, minor yet annoying.

Garlic-Rosemary Pork Chops

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Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

Another simple, basic recipe that gets dinner on the table in less than 30 minutes.

Pork chops are cooked in a skillet until browned and juicy, then set aside. In the now empty pan, garlic, a rosemary sprig and chicken broth are used to build simple pan sauce, finished with a bit of butter and vinegar. We ate these pork chops over brown rice to soak up the flavorful pan sauce.

There’s nothing spectacular here, just a simple, delicious pork chop. On a busy weeknight, that’s usually enough.

Easy Chicken Cacciatore

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Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

My picture doesn’t do this dish justice. We very happily ate this for several meals in a row, and it is a dish I will be coming back to again and again.

Cacciatore is a classic Italian hunter-style stew made with tomatoes, mushrooms, onions and, usually, wine, cooked long and slow. True to this book’s style this is a 30-minute recipe that delivers a hearty meal. It may not be traditional cacciatore, but I, for one, don’t care. If it tastes good and is easy to make, I’m happy.

The dish starts out by browning boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Once the meat is browned, it is transfered to a plate, and onions, red bell pepper and mushrooms are added to the pan and cooked until slightly browned. Garlic, tomatoes and wine are stirred in, then the chicken breasts are added back to the pan, and the whole thing simmers until the chicken is cooked through.

The chicken breasts were very moist and flavorful. The sauce was slightly sweet and had a lot of texture from the red peppers and chunks of mushrooms. My only quibble is that the sauce was quite dry. Next time I’d add more wine or chicken stock. I served this over rice one day and quinoa another. It seemed to pair particularly well with the quinoa, the robust flavors of the stew melding nicely with the grassiness of the quinoa.

Grilled Honey-Mustard Chicken

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Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

I’ve never been a honey-mustard sort of person, preferring ranch to all else. While this recipe isn’t going to persuade me to change camps, it is pretty darn good.

But what else would you expect from this book?

This is nothing more than grilled chicken topped with a sauce made with Dijon mustard, honey and cayenne pepper. The remaining sauce is mixed with sour cream and used as a dip. The recipe also calls for fresh tarragon, but I didn’t have it and didn’t miss it.

Did I mention that the recipe is dead simple, too?

We used this all week on other meats, such as pork chops, and it was just as good. Another winner.

Quick Indian Turkey Curry with Potatoes

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Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

I’m getting tired of coming up with adjectives to describe how good the recipes from this book are. For this one, a tasty curry of chicken (because I couldn’t find turkey cutlets) and potatoes, fill in your own description.

This recipe was ____________ .

Just about anything good you come up with will fit.

You start out by browning chunks of poultry in a large skillet. Once browned, the chicken is set aside while the curry sauce is brought together in the same skillet. An onion is softened first, then a jalapeno, garlic, ginger and curry powder are added. Cubed potatoes and water are stirred into the onion mixture and the whole thing simmers until the potatoes are tender. Finally, the cooked poultry is added back to the pot to warm. To tone down the curry flavor and thicken the sauce a bit, yogurt is stirred in at the end. I followed the recipe recommendation and served the curry over rice.

Besides substituting chicken for the turkey, I made some other slight adjustments. Neither Bryan nor I like fresh ginger very much, so instead of using a tablespoon of the stuff, I only used about a teaspoon. This gave the curry a very, very mild ginger flavor, more of a background note then a punch to the face. I also used half of a jalapeno instead of the whole called for. I’m a wimp when it comes to spicy heat.

While this wasn’t Bryan’s favorite dish out of the book, I really loved it. It was so easy (one skillet!) but really delivered on flavor. You could easily make this vegetarian by leaving out the meat. The dish, served over rice, would still be quite filling. Maybe it was a good thing that Bryan was so-so about the curry; I’ve been happily eating leftovers for lunch all week.

Skillet Goulash

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Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

Meet home run #84,612 from this book.

This one-pot dish features tender strips of steak and egg noodles in a flavorful sauce of onions, paprika, bell pepper, tomato paste, beef stock and sour cream. The sauce is mildly spicy from the paprika with a creamy tang from the sour cream. I had this on the table in less than 30 minutes after turning on the stove. And the leftovers were just as good as the first night’s meal. How can you beat that?

The dish starts of by browning a couple of strip steaks. Once they’ve gotten a nice crust on them, you set the steaks aside while you build the sauce in the same pan. An onion and a red bell pepper are sauteed until softened. Paprika and tomato paste are added and cooked briefly. Finally, beef stock and egg noodles are stirred into the pan and simmered until the noodles are tender. Just before serving, the steaks are thinly sliced and added to the pan, along with the sour cream.

Skillet Chicken Tikka Masala

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Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

Here’s another fast, easy recipe from “the best cookbook I’ve ever bought” that delivers on flavor without a huge amount of work. It doesn’t look all that appetizing, but it is good.

You start out by browning chunks of chicken breast. Next, you cook an onion until soft, then stir in garam masala (an Indian spice mix), garlic, ginger and diced tomatoes. To finish the dish, a bit of cream is stirred into the skillet, along with the chicken, and the whole thing simmers for about 5 minutes.

Tasted by itself, this dish was almost too gingery, but it calmed down when eaten with rice. The chicken was very moist and flavorful, and leftovers were just as good.

Chipotle-Grilled Pork Tacos

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Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

See? I told you I’d be back.

If this book has taught me anything, it is that I kind of like coleslaw. Nominally, this post is about pork tenderloins, halved and slathered with a mayo-pineapple juice-chipotle chiles-garlic sauce and grilled. But I really want to talk about the coleslaw that is included in the recipe. It was good. No. It was fantastic.

You take a bag of coleslaw mix, add in pineapple chunks and mix it all together with some of the mayo mixture from above. The recipe tells you to top the now-sliced pork tenderloin with this slaw and use a warmed corn tortilla to deliver it to your mouth. Okay, if you really want to bother with corn tortillas. If you don’t, may I humbly suggest that you place a heaping scoop of slaw on your plate and top that with the pork? Either way (and I tried both, several times), you won’t be disappointed.

The mayo mixture is sweet and tangy from the pineapple juice and a little spicy from the chipotle chiles (it is easy to adjust the heat here-just add more or less of the chiles). The pork is tender and smoky from the grill, while the coleslaw adds a nice crunch with the unexpected, but very nice, sweetness of the pineapple. My only complaint, and it is a very minor one, was that my mayo mixture was very thin and didn’t really stay on the pork (it mostly ran off and caused flare-ups on the grill). I might add more mayo next time (or less pineapple juice) to keep it thicker.

Grilled Spicy Lime Chicken with Black Bean Salad

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Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

Bored with chicken? Then you need to make this recipe. Boneless, skinless chicken thighs are marinated in a mixture of lime juice, oil, chipotle chiles, honey, garlic and cumin, then grilled. That same marinade is also used to dress a salad of black beans, bell peppers and avocado. The flavors are fresh and vibrant, perfect for a late summer dinner.

While this is the last recipe out of this book, I expect to come back to it often, especially during the summer when grilling is my preferred method of cooking. I really on scratched the surface of the grilling chapter, and there are at least four more recipes that I want to try out.

From the first recipe that I made out of this book, I knew it would become one of my favorite go-to books for quick dinners, and I’ve already made several of the recipes more than once, such as the quick beef and chili recipe.

Besides really great dishes, The Best Simple Recipes also includes little tips and tricks. In true Cooks Illustrated style, the authors talk about taste test results (the best Dijon mustard? The best ketchup?) as well as tips for keeping basil fresh longer. And most of the recipes have simple sides that can be prepared while the main dish cooks.

I love this book.