Chicken Cacciatore

We needed something relatively easy to put together for dinner last night, and we had chicken, peppers, onions and mushrooms that needed to be used, so that looked like Chicken Cacciatore to me. I'm not the biggest fan in the world of tomato sauce dishes in general, but this is a dish that the whole family likes.

When I have made this in the past, I have tended to wing it, with decent but not spectacular results. This time I thought maybe I should actually use a real recipe. I Googled Chicken Cacciatore, and the first link at the top of the list was a Giada De Laurentiis recipe from Food Network. We have made a few dozen Giada recipes and have never had a bad one yet, so this was an obvious choice.

The recipe was simple and straightforward, and the end result was better that I generally think Cacciatore is. I am sure this is because of the sauce. The sauce here was a combination of tomato, white wine and chicken broth, and was lighter than the intensely tomato sauce that I am more accustomed to.

Total prep time was 10-15 minutes, and cooking time was closer to an hour. This is longer than listed, but we made a larger batch, and most of that extra time was the initial browning of chicken in batches.

Which brings us to step 1 - dredging bone-in chicken pieces in flour and browning them in batches. Salt and pepper. Olive oil. Easy. Remove the browned chicken from the pan.

Dredged and browned chicken

Step 2 - Add chopped peppers, onions and garlic to the drippings in the pan. Add some white wine and reduce it a bit.

Onions, peppers and garlic

Step 3 - Add chopped tomatoes and juice, broth, capers and oregano. Bring to a boil. Return the chicken to the pot. Lower to a simmer.

Tomatoes, white wine and chicken broth

Half-cover and Simmer 20-30 minutes until the chicken is cooked through and the sauce has thickened somewhat.

Chicken Cacciatore

This was another good Giada recipe, and better by far than I have made when going without a recipe. The lighter and yet still richer sauce was the difference. The stock added some lightness and took away the overly tomato taste, and the white wine added some depth of flavor.

Yes, I did forget the mushrooms. I was making the recipe by the book, which doesn't call for them. After dinner, I sauteed the mushrooms that needed using, and added them to the leftovers in the pot. Even better...

Chicken Tikka Masala

The kids requested Chicken Tikka Masala for dinner tonight, so who am I to argue. Tikka Masala is our "go to" Indian dish, as it is richly flavored, but not overly spicy, so the kids love it. The recipe we use for this is on page 447 of More Best Recipes (The Editors of Cooks Illustrated, 2009). The New Best Recipe and More Best Recipes are two of our most used cookbooks, containing a wealth of bullet proof recipes on all sorts of classic dishes. Chicken Tikka Masala is a fragrantly spiced dish of chicken in a tomato cream sauce.

But before we get to the CTM, we need to make raita, because you can't have an Indian meal without raita (at least in our house you can't).

Raita prep (Chardonnay optional...)

Raita is the simplest side dish ever, and is especially good when paired with some of the very spicy Indian dishes, as the coolness of the yogurt and cucumber serves as the perfect counterbalance to the heat and spice of the entree. We use the raita recipe from Alford and Duguid's Mangoes and Curry Leaves; Culinary Travels through the Great Subcontinent (Artisan, 2005). This is one of my all-time favorite "travelogue cookbooks", but that is a story for another post.

Suffice it to say, you can make a great raita by simply peeling and dicing a seedless (English) cucumber, adding a sufficient amount of plain yogurt to give a consistency like pictured below, and then adding some salt and chopped cilantro. Make sure it is well chilled. Simple.

Raita

The Tikka Masala begins with dry rubbing the chicken in cumin, coriander, kosher salt and cayenne pepper, and setting it aside for an hour or so to marinate.

When you are ready to cook, a bunch of diced onions go into a pot to soften. After 8-10 minutes, garam masala (a store bought Indian spice blend), tomato paste, fresh grated ginger, garlic and a finely minced jalapeno or two are added.

Onions, spices and tomato paste

After the onion-tomato-spice paste has cooked for a few minutes, crushed tomatoes are added along with some sugar and salt to make a nice fragrant tomato sauce. This simmers for about 15 minutes.

Crushed tomatoes added to spice paste

While the tomato sauce is simmering, the dry rubbed chicken is dredged in a yogurt, garlic, ginger, and oil mixture and then grilled until mostly cooked. It is then set aside to rest while the sauce finishes.

Grilled dry-rubbed and yogurt-coated chicken

After the tomato sauce has simmered for a while, a bunch of heavy cream is added, and the sauce is simmered to bring it to heat.

Tomato sauce with heavy cream added

The cooked chicken (grilled or broiled) is chunked up and added into the sauce. Once everybody is in the pool, simmer for 5 minutes or so just to blend the flavors and make sure everything is nice and hot.

Chicken Tikka Masala

Easy. A little bit fiddly, but not difficult. Flavorful. Pretty inexpensive. A winner all around.

Jacques Pepin's Sweet and Sour Steak Sauce

I have tremendous respect for Jacques Pepin, and have many of his cookbooks. Over the weekend, I made filet mignon (a treat that Grace especially loves - "soft steak" as she calls it). Anytime I make a nice elegant steak like this (as opposed to a dry rubbed Fred Flintstone brontosaurus steak on the grill), there is only one sauce the family wants - Jacques' sweet and sour sauce.

The recipe is a very simple one from Jacques Pepin's Table (KQED Books, 1991, page 289), and is from a recipe called Venison Steaks in Sweet-Sour Sauce. I don't make it with venison, obviously, but it is the perfectly complement to virtually any red meat.

For the indoor (non-grill) version of this, I sear both sides of the steaks in a large skillet, and then put the steaks in a different skillet to finish in the oven (a nice medium rare of course). While the steaks are finishing, a sliced shallot or two are put into the original pan with the drippings, and stirred for half a minute or so. Two tablespoons of red wine vinegar are added to deglaze the pan. This is cooked over high heat until most of the liquid is gone. To this is added a mixture of 1 tablespoon of black current jelly, 1 tablespoon of ketchup, 2 teaspoons soy sauce and 1/4 cup cold water. This is stirred around and brought to a boil (just a minute or two to heat and thicken), then strained into a bowl to remove the solids. Super easy and made entirely from pantry ingredients.

Part of an onion can be substituted for the shallots if necessary, and when we don't have black current jelly (which we usually keep in the fridge just for this), you can use blackberry, blueberry or raspberry instead. All will be a little different in character, but will give the sweet counterpoint to the salty soy and the tangy vinegar.

Make twice as much as listed above. You'll want it...

Beef Saag ("Saag Gosht")

or Beef in a Fragrant Spinach Sauce

It's a Saturday, and I felt like making Indian food, so I decided to try a "saag"; meat in a flavorful green spinach sauce. After perusing the cookbook collection, I settled on the "Saag Gosht" recipe (Beef in Fragrant Spinach Sauce) on page 179 of Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Cooking (William Morrow and Company, 1980). I originally intended to make this with lamb, but I couldn't find a satisfactory piece of lamb shoulder, so I went with beef instead.

The recipe is fairly simple, but as with many Indian recipes, it takes a bunch of spices and cooks for a long time (2.5 hours in the oven, after prep). Not a weekday meal, in other words.

Step 1 is to brown lots of large beef cubes in batches.

Browned beef cubes

While the beef is browning in batches, lots of onions are slowly caramelized. After 25 minutes or so, garlic and fresh grated ginger are added to the browned onions in the pan, followed by cumin, coriander and turmeric. Then comes some diced tomato and 3 chopped jalapeno chilis.

Caramelized onions w/spices, tomatoes and chilis

After the onion mixture has cooked a few minutes more, some yogurt is added for creaminess.

Onion mixture with yogurt added

The onion mixture can be a little chunky, because after it is cooked, it is pureed in a blender. Then it is added into the dutch oven with the beef and more spices. Sahni's recipe called for a tied-up spice packet of cinnamon stick, whole cloves, cardamom  pods and bay leaves. I took the short cut and used ground versions of all but the bay leaves to save time (and I had ground cardamom but not whole...).

Beef with pureed onion mixture and more spices

Lastly, 4 cups of water are added and everything is stirred together before putting a lid on the pot and sticking it in the oven for 2.5 hours.

...add water, then braise for 2.5 hours

To give the saag its trademark green color (and spinach of course), a large amount of spinach is blanched in salted water before being pureed. This spinach paste is added to the pot at the end of the long cooking time, and is put back in the oven for a short time (10 minutes) just to meld the flavors a little.

After adding pureed cooked spinach

The result is a vibrant green richly-flavored dish where the beef just melts in your mouth. The last picture doesn't do the plate justice; the color was much more green, as it should be.

On the plate (color was green, not black...)

We served this with simple steamed white rice and raita (cucumber in yogurt with cilantro). And a nice Chardonnay (just doing our part to aid California wine country in its post-earthquake time of troubles...).

The kids loved it, as can be attested to by their final words at the end of the meal: "can you make Indian food again tomorrow?" I bet I can.

Halibut with Pumpkin Seed Mole

Fish Forever by Paul Johnson

We have been eating more than our fair share of meat recently and have burgers on the grill planned for a family get together-tomorrow, so we were looking for a nice light seafood dish today. It was agreed that I should make something with halibut, a wonderful white fish that everyone in the family seems to enjoy. In the past, I have done Giada's "Halibut with White Beans and Radicchio" a few times, but I had the time today to try something new. I pulled Paul Johnson's terrific Fish Forever off the shelf, looked up halibut, and found a fantastic looking recipe. Fish Forever (Wiley & Sons, 2007) is an IACP Cookbook of the Year award winner, and I have used it a few times in the past with good results. I always love trying out new recipes when I have time, and I was looking forward to making this.

The recipe I would be making was "Halibut Baked in a Pumpkin Seed Mole Sauce" (page 152). Moles are Mexican sauces, and can cover a very wide range of flavors. This particular mole was comprised of toasted pumpkin seeds, blanched tomatillos, onion, serrano chiles, cilantro, coriander, cumin and a few other things. Basically, the ingredients were prepped, put into a blender and then pureed into the consistency of a thin salsa.

Mole ingredients

At this point, the recipe said to spread some of the mole on the bottom of a baking dish, put the fish on top, layer the rest of the sauce over the fish, and then bake for 20 minutes or so. After I made the mole, I tasted it and was afraid that it would be too spicy for the kids (specifically the little one). So I changed direction at that point and decided to simmer the mole sauce by itself in a sauce pan while poaching the halibut separately, adding the two together at the end for those who wished.

Pumpkin Seed Mole

The fish was cut into servings and then poached for twelve minutes in a combination of water, a nice Chardonnay, a couple of bay leaves, 12-15 whole peppercorns and a heavy pinch of salt.

I served it with plain white rice (as suggested) and grilled zucchini. The mole sauce seemed to have mellowed quite a bit during the 25 minutes or so that it simmered, and my worry about it being too spicy seems to have been unfounded in the end. The kids loved it. The adults loved it. Even Grace thought it wasn't too spicy. Live and learn, I suppose...

Halibut with Pumpkin Seed Mole

This was a winner of a recipe. It was easy to make, didn't dirty too many pots and pans with regards to clean up, and was absolutely fantastic. Poaching the fish kept it extremely moist and tender, and I really couldn't have asked for a better result. This recipe goes on the short list of fish recipes I would make any time. The only potential downside is that halibut is pricey, but a pound and a half fed all four of us, so it wasn't too bad. And compared to the cost of eating even a mediocre meal out....

(Faux) Red Beans and Rice

Faux Red Beans and Rice

This is one of our most frequently made recipes, dating back to something that I threw together 12 or 15 years ago and have been making ever since. We called it "red beans and rice" although that is somewhat of a misnomer. It has red beans in it, we eat it with rice, and it is Cajun influenced, but anyone familiar with Cajun food will know that there is a specific dish called Red Beans and Rice, and this isn't it. That being said, it is generally evocative of something along those lines, and we have been calling it this for so long that we can't change now. Us, in-laws, family and neighbors all refer to this by that name, so that is what it has become.

The genesis of this recipe was to throw something together quickly that used easy ingredients, didn't take a lot of time, and was cajun-ish in nature. It proved to be easy, remarkably good, adaptable to variations, and cheap. So we've been making it ever since.

The basic recipe goes something like this (sized for either a lot of people or a smaller family meal with leftovers). We make it in big batches because it is one of those dishes that gets even better as it sits.

Ingredients:

• 2.5-3 pounds pre-cooked smoked sausages, cut into bite sized pieces. In our area, Hillshire Farms smoked sausages, kielbasa, etc, are readily available and are good for what they are. We also often use Aidell's andouille sausage. Anything by Aidell's is great. [Three packages in the 12-16 oz range]
• 1 large onion, medium-large dice.
• 2 bell peppers, medium dice. 1 red and 1 green is nice for color.
• 1 or 2 jalapenos, fine dice.
• 1or 2 14oz cans red kidney beans, drained and rinsed. Depends how much you like beans.
• 14oz can diced tomatoes, with juice.
• 14oz can tomato sauce, or a similar amount of crushed tomatoes.
• 3-4 cloves garlic, minced.
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp oregano
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• 1/2 tsp onion powder
• 1/4-1/2 tsp Cayenne pepper

Add the sausage to a very hot dutch oven or other large pot and cook 5-7 minutes over high heat, stirring frequently. The sausages are already cooked, so you are just trying to sear the edges for a little crispiness and color. Don't overdo and burn them.

Add the onions and garlic and cook 5 more minutes to soften and get a little color.

Smoked sausage and onions

Add peppers and spices, stirring to mix well, and cook for 2-3 minutes to open up the spices before adding the liquid.

Add bell peppers and hot peppers

Add diced tomatoes and tomato sauce/crushed tomatoes. Bring to a boil and then immediately reduce heat to medium (or whatever it takes to get a nice simmer going). Add the beans. Partially cover and simmer for 20 minutes (or more).

Add crushed tomatoes and diced tomatoes

Serve with rice and/or crusty bread. Amp thinks everything goes with rice. I believe the same about a good crusty bread.

This can be made further ahead and simmered longer, but if you do a longer cooking time be careful to keep it mostly covered or you will evaporate too much liquid and dry it out. If it does start to dry out, I would add a little water or chicken broth to thin it out. If you add more crushed tomato or tomato sauce it becomes more strongly tomato flavored (although you might like that).

The heat can be adjusted by deleting or reducing the cayenne for a milder version, or adding more hot peppers (of whatever variety) or cayenne, or even a hot chili powder, for a spicier version.

Turkey Chili

Turkey Chili

I'll start out by saying that a turkey chili recipe is not something that I would have chosen to make on my own. However, a request came home from Grace's school for people to sign up for various food items to bring to school for a teacher appreciation week lunch. One of the main course items on the list was turkey chili. We'd never made one before, but had time on Sunday to do this, so that's what we did.

We routinely make a Texas Red chili (no beans of course) and a White Chicken Chili, but didn't have a handy recipe for a turkey chili. A little quick Googling allowed us to synthesize the following recipe by blending a few different simple recipes together. We made it, tasted it (it was really good!) and sent it off to school. No leftovers came home, but the kids, having tasted it while I was making it, asked that we make it again for ourselves at home. So we did, and had it for dinner tonight.

Ingredients:

• A few glugs of olive oil
• 2 pounds of ground turkey (I used 1 lb each of ground breast and ground thigh for a mix of light and dark meat)
• 2 medium onions, medium dice
• 2.5-3 cups chicken broth (or a 32 oz package if you've gone heavy-handed on the other ingredients)
• 1 large (28 oz) can crushed tomatoes
• 2 regular (14 oz) cans pinto beans, drained and rinsed (white beans or kidneys would be fine)
• 1-2 Anaheim or other mild/medium heat green chili pepper, fine dice
• 3 cloves garlic, minced

Spice Mix:

• 1 tsp granulated garlic
• 1-2 TB chili powder (I used half chipotle and half store bought generic "chili powder"...in deference to the kids we do this on the lighter end and season again for ourselves at the end)
• 1 tsp smoked paprika (the chipotle and the smoked paprika combine to give a very nice smoky flavor)
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tsp ground cumin, plus a little more
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp fresh ground black pepper
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• a dash of dried mustard
• a dash of ground coriander

Steps:

1. Heat some olive oil in a dutch oven or other heavy large pot over high heat. When shimmering, add the turkey, breaking it up, stirring and cooking it until it is mostly cooked (5 or 6 minutes).
2. Add the onion, minced garlic and green chili pepper and cook for another 5 minutes.
3. Add the spice mix and stir to distribute. Cook for a minute or two.
4. Add the remaining ingredients (broth, tomatoes and beans). Bring to a boil. Partly cover, reduce to a low simmer and cook for an hour.
5. Check periodically while the dish simmers and add a little more chicken broth if needed (I didn't). You want a good chili consistency, not too thick and not too soupy.

...and a beverage

Some recipes of this type call for the beans to be mashed before adding them, which will serve to thicken the sauce, but I have found that a longer cooking time combined with a routine stirring will cause the beans to begin to break down, giving much the same effect with a slight bit less trouble.

This ended up being a surprisingly good recipe. I would make it (significantly) hotter if it was just for me, but in deference to the kids the above is a manageable amount of heat. This could also prove to be a versatile recipe, as there are a number of other variations on this that come to mind (more fresh peppers, a few nuggets of a spicy sausage, etc).

I would give this high marks for combination of little effort (we made it again on a week night), minimal cleanup, low cost and good flavor. Making this amount for a family of four will also do 2-3 meals, so this is a good recipe to make on a weekend and then have for an easy dinner or two during the following week.