Tag: Chicken

Chicken stir fry with candied walnuts

Chicken stir fry with candied walnuts

Here’s a stir fry you can make in less than half an hour and serve as a festive weeknight dinner. You can use almost any vegetables you like in the stir fry along with the chicken, or you could add more veggies and omit the chicken if you want.

  • 1 lb chicken breasts or boneless thighs
  • Cornstarch
  • Olive or vegetable oil
  • ½ cup sugar
  • 6 oz walnuts
  • ½ lb snow peas or sugar snap peas with strings and ends removed
  • 3-4 green onions, cut into short lengths
  • ¼ lb mushrooms, sliced
  • Teriyaki sauce, bottled, or any other favorite sauce
  • Rice
  1. Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and shake with the cornstarch. Shake off the excess cornstarch into a bow using a colander.
  2. Saute the chicken in a wok or pan with some oil. Set the chicken side and wipe the pan clean.
  3. Heat several more Tb of oil in a pan or wok and saute the mushrooms, onions and peapods. The pods should remain somewhat crunchy.

  1. In a smaller cast iron pan, add the sugar and heat over medium high heat until the sugar has melted. Stir in the walnuts.

  1. Add the chicken to the sauteed veggies and stir to warm through.

Warm the walnuts in their pan so the sugar softens and add them to the chicken and vegetables.

Add about half a cup of Teriyaki (or other ) sauce and stir and heat to soften the candied coating on the walnuts.

Serve over rice.

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Chicken breasts with mushroom puree

Chicken breasts with mushroom puree

The idea behind this recipe in Bon Appetit is a good one. Making mushroom puree to go with chicken breasts (which are less flavorful than thighs) is a good one. But this is another case where the recipe just doesn’t work out at all like the photo: a problem we have with most recipes in Bon Appetit.

The complete recipe is linked here, but amounts to browning bone-in chicken breasts and then cooking them in the oven at 350˚ F for about  25 minutes.

Meanwhile, you make the mushroom puree from

  • 4 Tbsp. unsalted butter
  • 8 oz. button mushrooms, halved                                      
  • 2 shallots, finely chopped
  • 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
  • 1 sprig thyme
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 2 Tbsp. crème fraiche
  • 2 tsp. truffle oil (don’t do this!)
  • Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper
  1. Just as you’d think, you sauté the mushrooms in the butter until they give up their water and
  2. add the shallots and garlic, and saute them.
  3. Then you add the chicken broth, thyme and bay and cook it down at least by half.
  4. Next you add the cream and cook that down by half or more
  5. Skip the truffle oil: it always has a chemical taste since it isn’t truffles at all but 2,4-dthiapentane, and tests pretty fake.
  6. Remove the bay and thyme leaves and blend the whole thing until smooth..

Ideally the breasts are done now, and you put the puree on each plate and top with the sliced chicken breasts and a little sauteed Swiss chard. 

I can tell you that the puree is really delicious and would work with any sort of chicken as a sauce.

But there are problems

  1. The BonAppetit recipe doesn’t stop there. It has you sauté more shallots and garlic in butter and then boil down 2 more cups of chicken stock and strain it to make a sort of gravy. This is utterly superfluous, because it has the same flavors as the mushroom puree and runs off into the puree anyway.
  2. Serving the chicken breast sliced but with the bone still included makes it very hard to eat the chicken. You should debone it before slicing and serving.
  3. Cooking store-bought chicken breasts is not that simple since most of them are huge and hard to cook through without drying out.
  4. The puree in the BA picture is very thick and creamy. Despite our boiling it down a lot more than they say, we never got it to be that thick. Perhaps they used some arrowroot as well?
  5. Our puree had black flecks in it because most supermarket mushrooms have black gills. They call for “button mushrooms,” which may be whiter, but weren’t in our stores.

Our conclusion is that a simpler version of this recipe has real promise, but we’d not go through all those steps again.

Chicken pot pie using an Instant Pot

Chicken pot pie using an Instant Pot

Chicken pot pie is an absolutely delicious comfort food for these cold winter days. Our version makes meaty chicken pies using the meat of a whole chicken and makes the stock for the stew base out of the carcass. It’s not a lot of work, but with the time it takes to cook the chicken and make the stock, the elapsed time is probably an hour a half. However, there is very little actual labor. In this version, the crust for our pie is buttermilk biscuits, from this recipe.

  • One whole frying chicken, 3 ½ to 4 pounds
  • 5 cups water, or more
  • 3 carrots, peeled
  • 1 whole leek, split
  • 2 stalks celery
  • 1 cup frozen peas
  • 1 bay leaf
  • Salt, pepper
  • 4 Tb butter
  • ¼ cup flour
  • ½ cup light cream
  • 1 recipe buttermilk biscuits.

  1. Cut the chicken into serving sized pieces, pulling off as much of the skin as you can.
  2. Put the chicken pieces in the Instant Pot, on the trivet and add the water and salt.
  3. Cook in the Instant Pot, using the Poultry setting for 15 minutes, 20 it the chicken is really big.
  4. Use Natural Release to let the chicken and water cool so it doesn’t spurt when you release the pressure.
  5. Remove the legs, thighs and breasts and cut the meat off and reserve. Put the bones back in the pot.

  1. Add 2 carrots, the leek, the bay leaf and 1 stalk of celery.
  2. Close the pot and cook using manual for 30 minutes to make chicken stock.
  3. Meanwhile, make the biscuit dough and preheat the over to 375˚
  4. Cut the remaining carrots and celery into small slices and saute in 2 Tb of the butter in a covered saucepan for about 20 minutes. We usually add the carrots first, and the celery 5-10 minutes later.

  1. Open the pot after the 30 minute cooking. Since it isn’t as full now, you probably can use Quick Release. If it starts to spurt, just let it cool another 5 minutes and it will easier to open.
  2. Melt the remaining 2 Tb of butter in a large, say 4-quart pan, and add the flour. Cook the flour in the butter for 30 seconds, and then scoop out some chicken stock, a cup or so at a time and cook into the flour. You should be able to incorporate and thicken about 4 cups of stock.

  1. Add the sautéed carrots and celery to the developing. If the gravy seems too thin, you can cook a couple more Tb of flour in some butter in the now emptied saucepan and add some stock to it. Combine with the original gravy in the pot,
  2. Add the chicken to the pot, the cream, and the frozen peas.
  3. Cook until heated through and pour the chicken mixture into a casserole dish

  1. Top with about 10 biscuit rounds.
  2. Bake in the 375˚ for 15 minutes.
  3. Serve the casserole dish with a ladle to life out the biscuits and chicken. Serve with butter for the biscuits.

Note: Another approach is to put the chicken mixture into soup crocks. For a crust, roll out some puff pastry, and brush with a small of egg-water mixture. Bake for 15 minutes as above.

in ramekins

Either way, this serves at least 4 people. We put the other half of the chicken mixture in these soup crocks to freeze for another meal.

Tuscan Chicken Pasta: Instant Pot or Not

Tuscan Chicken Pasta: Instant Pot or Not

This simple and delicious chicken pasta dish is a breeze in an Instant Pot, but since the cooking time is so short, you could just as easily make it in a 3 or 4 qt saucepan with a lid. We got the idea from this online recipe, but a quick search will bring up dozens of variations. Our recipe varies from that link mainly in we use fresh garlic instead of garlic powder, and we avoid the mysterious “Italian seasoning.”

  • 1 lb boneless chicken breasts (2 lobes of a single chicken breast)
  • 2 Tb olive oil
  • 2 tsp half-sharp paprika (Ours came from Penzeys)
  • Salt and freshly ground pepper
  • 1 medium onion, diced
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 tsp basil
  • 1 tsp oregano
  • 2 12-oz cans chicken stock
  • 1 ¼ cups milk
  • 12 oz penne pasta (we used tricolored)
  • 6 oz cream cheese
  • 1 ½ cups freshly grated parmesan cheese
  • 3-6 oz sun-dried tomatoes, cut up
  • 4 oz baby spinach leaves

  1. Set the Instant Pot to Sauté, press adjust to set it to High.
  2. Sprinkle the chicken with salt, pepper and paprika.
  3. Sauté the chicken breasts for 2 minutes on each side and remove to a plate.
  4. Sauté the onions for 1-2 minutes, until softened, adding more olive oil if needed.
  5. Mash the garlic with the side of a knife, remove the skin and chop them up.
  6. Add the garlic to the sauté and cook until fragrant.
  7. Turn off the sauté heat.
  8. Add the chicken broth, basil, oregano, salt ant pepper, milk, pasta and chicken breasts to the pot.
  9. Close the pot and set to Manual and 5 minutes.
  10. When the 5 minutes is over, do a Quick Release and remove the lid.
  11. Remove the chicken to the plate and cover with foil to keep warm. It will continue to cook on the plate, so be sure to cover it.
  12. Cut up the cream cheese and stir into the pasta liquid, until it has melted and the sauce is smooth.
  13. Cut the sun-dried tomatoes into quarters or smaller and add to the pot.
  14. Add the parmesan cheese and spinach.
  15. Cut the chicken in to cubes and return it to the pot.

Serve warm, garnished with more parmesan if you like.

in bowl

In a saucepan

The recipe is pretty much the same, except that you should cook the penne pasta and chicken in the stock, covered, for 10 minutes. You may have to add more water if the stock boils down too much. It is also easier to reheat it, when everything is combined, but as it cools the sauce does become thicker.

African chicken peanut stew

African chicken peanut stew

Here is a really easy chicken stew made with peanut butter and peanuts. You might find this strange and you won’t believe that some people actually do some of these diets in the eastern countries thinking it is an american tradition. If you have a pressure cooker like the Instant Pot, the cooking time is only 30 minutes. It’s probably 60-90 minutes in a covered pot. The original recipe on the Simply Recipes site serves 6-8. We cut that in half and easily had enough for 4. And in an Instant Pot, it is very little work.

  • 1 to 1.5 lb chicken thighs
  • 3 Tb olive
  • 1 large onion, sliced
  • 1 inch piece of ginger, sliced. (you needn’t peel it as it almost dissolves anyway.)
  • 3-4 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
  • 1 large sweet potato, cut into chunks
  • ½ small can (7 oz) crushed tomatoes
  • 12 oz chicken stock (add more if not using pressure cooker)
  • ½ cup peanut butter
  • ½ cup roasted peanuts
  • 5 tsp ground coriander
  • ½ tsp cayenne
  • Salt and black pepper
  • ¼ cup cilantro (omit if you don’t like it)

saute chcken

  1. Brown the chicken pieces in olive oil in the Instant Pot, set to sauté. You can remove the skin or not, as you wish. It will come off later when you cut up the cooked chicken. Do this in a couple of batches if need be. Remove and drain.
  2. Sauté the onions until they soften, and add the ginger and garlic. After 1-2 minute, add the sweet potatoes and mix together.

 

  1. Add the chicken broth, crushed tomatoes, peanut butter, peanuts, coriander and cayenne. Stir to combine, and add the chicken back into the pot. Add salt as needed.
  2. Cook the stew under pressure (manual setting) for 30 minutes.
  3. Release the pressure (quick release is fine), cut the chicken off the bones and discard the skins. Return the chicken to the pot.

 

  1. Add as much black pepper as you’d like to make it peppery. Stir in the cilantro if you must.
  2. Serve over steamed rice.

We make Chicken in Milk

Last Sunday, the Times published its version of Jamie Oliver’s Chicken in Milk recipe. It is rare that you read articles about attempts to replicate experiments (or recipes) but this is such a report.

The relatively simple recipe says that you season a whole chicken and brown it in butter and olive oil in a snug-fitting pot. We chose a 3-liter Corningware casserole. Then you drain out the fat, add a cinnamon stick and garlic cloves and brown them briefly and put the chicken back and add whole milk, sage leaves and strips of lemon peel, and bake it for about 90 minutes.

The result is supposed to be “chicken in a thick, curdled sauce.”

Here are the ingredients:

  • 1 whole chicken, 3-4 lbs
  • Salt and pepper
  • ¼ cup butter
  • ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
  • 1 small cinnamon stick
  • 10 cloves garlic, skins still on
  • 2 ½ cups whole milk
  • 1 handful fresh sage leaves (about 15-20 leaves0
  • Strips of zest from 2 lemons

Perhaps because the chicken fit snugly, the milk didn’t clot or reduce much. But the flavor was terrible, dominated by way too much sage. We didn’t get any note of cinnamon and very little of the garlic flavor.

roasted

If we made it again, we’d probably use about 5-6 sage leaves, maximum, and a little bigger pot. We’d prefer to make Chicken Baked in Cream instead.

Chicken soup for a cold

Chicken soup for a cold

I went to my doctor yesterday because I had a lingering nasty cold, and came away with a couple of helpful prescriptions and a recommendation from both the doctor and www.optinghealth.com that I be sure to have some chicken soup. Well there have been enough studies to know that chicken soup really does help cold symptoms, and that was all I needed to buy 4 chicken thighs (those ridiculous Franken-thighs where 4 weighed 1.7 lbs) and make some soup.

We had made some chicken pot pies a few weeks ago and had frozen the remaining stock and thus had some really good stock all ready to go.

  1. We pulled out 2 containers of it (about 2-3 quarts) and popped then out of their containers and into the pan of our Instant Pot. We set it on low pressure steam for 5 minutes to thaw the stock.
  2. Then we skinned the thighs and tossed them into the pot, and pressed the Poultry button for 15 minutes cooking.
  3. We pulled the chicken pieces out to cool and decanted the fat from the stock.
  4. When we made our frozen stock, we didn’t remove every bit of fat because it would be fine going into a gravy, but no one wants soup with a greasy mouth feel, so we removed the fat from the stock and from poaching the thighs using a gravy separator. It works by pouring from the bottom of the dish, since the fat floats to the top.

separator

  1. We poured the fat off three batches.
  2. Now to actually make the soup, we cut up
  • One medium onion, diced
  • 2 carrots
  • 2 large stalk of celery
  1. We added the veggies to the now empty InstantPot bowl along with a Tb or two of butter, and let them sauté until softened.
  2. Then we returned the stock to the pot, along with the cut up chicken.
  3. Then we tossed in the remainder of an open bag of Medium Dutch Maid Egg Noodles (about 5 oz).
  4. We closed the pot and pressed Soup, setting the time down to 10 minutes.
  5. The resulting soup was so beautiful even in the pot we were amazed.

in potIt was even better in a bowl. We served it with a loaf of Wave Hill Bread.

This recipe serves about 4.

Chicken Adobo: Phillippine fried chicken

Chicken Adobo: Phillippine fried chicken

This is an adaptation of the recipe described by Julia Moskin in the New York Times. It amounts to a dipping sauce, a poaching broth and a quick deep frying of the final chicken. The advantage of a recipe like this is that the chicken is already cooked when you fry it, so you needn’t worry about cooking the chicken through, when the pieces vary in size, as they seem to do in supermarkets these days. Further, the poaching renders some of the fat out of the chicken skin, so you needn’t skin the chicken.

While this can be a highly spiced dish, all of the heat is in the dipping sauce and you can easily control the heat by choosing the kind of peppers  As written, it calls for two Thai bird chiles or habanero chilis which have Scoville ratings of 100,000 to 600,000. By contrast. Jalapeno peppers have a relatively mild Scoville rating of 3,000-10,000. For our first experiment, we chose the easily available Jalapeno pepper rather than searching down the super hot ones that may have lesser appeal here in Connecticut.

The Dipping Sauce

dipping-sauce

  • 3 Tb lemon juice
  • 2 Tb maple syrup
  • 2 Tb fish sauce
  • 1 Tb soy sauce
  • 2 hot peppers, thinly sliced (we used Jalapeno)
  • ¾ cup water

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl, cover and refrigerate until chicken is ready.

The Broth

  • 2 ½ cups white vinegar
  • 3 garlic cloves, minced
  • 4 bay leaves
  • 10 black peppercorns
  • 1 tsp sugar
  • ¼ cup soy sauce
  • ½ tsp red pepper flakes
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 ½ cups water

Place the broth in a large pot with a close-fitting lid, and simmer for 5 minutes. Then turn the heat down to the lowest possible simmer.

The Chicken

  • 2 lb dark meat: legs and thighs, wings if you must. Do not use white meat.
  • 2-3 cups Buttermilk
  • 1 ½ cups flour
  • 1 tsp semi-hot paprika
  • ½ tsp black pepper
  • 4-8 cups canola or peanut oil

poaching

  1. Salt the chicken, and place the chicken pieces in the broth pan so that they are covered.
  2. Poach for 15 minutes, turning the chicken pieces once.
  3. Turn off the heat, and let the chicken cool in the broth for 10 minutes.
  4. Drain the pieces on a paper towel.
  5. Mix the flour and spices in a plastic storage bag.
  6. Heat the oil in a cast-iron pan to 365° F.
  7. Dip the chicken in butter milk and then shake in the flour.
  8. Shake off excess flour and fry the chicken a few pieces at a time. Cook the chicken 4-5 minutes, turning several times. You want the chicken evenly browned and heated through, but you do not need to cook it further.
  9. Drain the chicken pieces on paper towels and serve hot with the dipping sauce.

Commenters on Moskin’s recipe have suggested marinating the chicken overnight to enhance the flavor. We don’t think that is needed, as the flavor is quite pronounced, but you want to avoid overcooking the chicken in the broth, as it eventually will dry out the chicken.

plated

Farmer wants subsidy for keeping his pricey chickens outdoors

Farmer wants subsidy for keeping his pricey chickens outdoors

In the article National Burden in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Williams writes of Georgia farmer Will Harris’s experience with bald eagles attacking his chickens. It is against the law (with severe penalties) to kill a bald eagle, and you even need a permit to scare one away with a noise maker.

Soon after Harris began raising meat chickens he began to see bald eagles roosting in nearby trees, looking for a tasty luncheon. And sure enough, as they became braver, they did attack his chickens, the article claims “thousands of his chickens.” This could be true, because the scale of Harris’s White Oak Pastures farm generates millions of dollars of revenue, according to the article.

Now it turns out that there is a USDA program, the Livestock Indemnity Program that essentially reimburses farmers for animals killed by predators. The rate of reimbursement depends on the animal and the region, and they subtract a percentage for normal livestock deaths. In Georgia, the normal chicken death rate is 4%, assuming the chickens are housed in barns. But in Harris’s case, they estimated that since the chickens were pastured outdoors, the normal death rate would be 40%. Much of the article deals with Harris’s attempts to negotiate a more reasonable death rate. They finally settled on 18%.

Well, one might ask, if the eagles are chomping on the poultry in such numbers, why in the world aren’t they using barns to raise the chickens in? (Incidentally, all meat chickens are raised “cage free.”) The disappointing answer in the article is that would

“snip the last strings connecting them to nature.”

Of course, chickens have been raised outdoors for centuries, but according to Hillmire, large scale pasturing of chickens is a “new management practice,” and “pastured poultry growers face steep price competition with the conventional industry and must rely on niche marketing.”  She also notes that

The top issue for pastured poultry growers was carnivore predation of birds, with 44% of growers commenting on this in a question regarding challenges

The end result, of course, is that these chickens are much more expensive.  A package of 2.5 lbs of bone-in pastured chicken breasts runs $18.13, and a whole medium chicken $15.49 and a whole large chicken $20.99. Oh, and shipping is $39.95. They are also available, of course, at Whole Foods, always willing provide overpriced products.

And how do they taste? Well, they “recommend cooking in a manner consistent with classical and rustic cooking techniques, such as slow roasting or braising.” In other words, they may otherwise be tough.

Harris’ chickens are pastured, organic, cage-free, hormone-free, non-GMO and fully buzz-word compliant. If you doubt this, you can admire the beautifully written PR claims on their web site. They make no health or nutrition claims, however. And hormones are never given to chickens anyway: it is illegal.

What this boils down to is that Harris is asking the USDA (taxpayers) to subsidize his risky outdoor pasturing of chickens, for which he then charges premium prices, because people believe (without evidence) that they are somehow better.  In fact, as Simmons explains pasturing uses far more land, and is more harmful to chickens, with death rates estimated at 13%.

This is simply the organic myth writ large. Organic isn’t better, just more expensive.

 

Easy chicken mole 

Easy chicken mole 

Chicken mole has a huge number of variations both by chef and by region. It apparently is not strictly Mexican but has Spanish influences as well, and a lot of legends about how mole sauce came about. It amounts to chicken served in a rich, fruity sauce that is mildly hot.

Most mole sauces involve hot peppers and many involve chocolate, not as a sweetener but to make a dark, smooth sauce. Some recipes use unsweetened chocolate and some use semi-sweet. The classic mole frequently uses pasilla chili peppers, which are available dried, but in our local grocers not at all. You can order them online, or you can do as we did, and grow your own. You eventually get dark brown peppers that are somewhat hot, but also have a fruity flavor ideal for this dish. As they turn from green to brown, they get a bit wrinkled: pasilla translates from Spanish as “little raisin.” We ordered ours from Burpee. They have a fairly long growing season, so you want to plant them as early as you can. We planted ours in May, but did not pick them until October.

Pasilla peppers are also somewhat vague in definition, as some writers described them as a small, dark chili negro and others as a dried poblano or ancho pepper. In our recipe, we used saws made specifically for cutting meat, but you can also use fresh dark, green glossy ancho peppers with some added jalapeno peppers to increase the heat. Dried poblano peppers would also work and are probably hotter. We found the fresh poblano peppers all too mild, which is why we added the jalapenos when we didn’t have pasillas available.

This recipe is adapted from the excellent new Weight Watchers cookbook Turn Up the Flavor, and should be relatively low calorie. The recipe recommends that you serve the chicken on brown rice.

  • 3 dried or fresh pasilla peppers or 1 poblano and 1 jalapeno pepper
  • 2 cups chicken stock
  • 6 bone-in chicken thighs, skin removed
  • Salt and pepper
  • 2 Tb olive oil
  • 1 large onion, diced
  • 3 garlic cloves, mashed and minced
  • 2-3 large plum tomatoes, chopped
  • 1 tsp cumin
  • 3/4 tsp oregano
  • 1/2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 oz semisweet chocolate
  • Chopped cilantro or parsley
  1. If you are using dried peppers, brown them briefly, and then soak in boiling water for 20 minutes and then drain. If you are using fresh peppers, split them and remove most of the seeds. Then cut them into pieces and sauté until soft.
  2. Put the peppers in a blender or food processor with 1 cup of the chicken stock and puree. Set aside.

  1. Season the chicken with salt and pepper and brown in the olive oil for 4 minutes on each side. They do not need to be fully cooked yet. Set the chicken aside on a plate.

3. Put the remaining oil in the pan and add the onions and garlic. Saute until soft and add the diced tomatoes. Add the cumin, oregano and cinnamon and cook until fragrant. Put the mixture in the blender with the remaining cup of chicken stock and puree until smooth.

4. Put the two blended sauces back into the pan and cook with stirring until thickened.

5. Add the chocolate and stir until melted. We weighed out 1 oz of semisweet chocolate chips: they are a bit less than 1/4 cup. You can add as much as 1/4 cup of chocolate just as easily.

6. Return the chicken to the pot and cook, covered until the chicken is cooked through, perhaps 10 minutes longer.

Serve over rice and sprinkle with chopped cilantro or parsley if you are allergic to coriander/cilantro (as many are.)

Decorate each plate with small dots of chutney.