The Stewed Chicken and Peppers

This was a somewhat impromptu recipe. I had it in my head all afternoon to make a chicken dish with a rich onion and pepper smother. It came out tender, juice, and delicious.

Ingredients:

two to three boneless, skinless chicken breasts

salt

fresh ground pepper

coriander

safflower oil
two bell peppers (green and red), sliced lengthwise into strips
one yellow onion, julienned
a quarter cup of cilantro, roughly chopped
canned diced tomatoes

Season the chicken with salt, pepper, and coriander. Brown the chicken breasts on both sides (approximately six minutes per sie).

Meanwhile, add the peppers, onion, tomatoes (with juice), cilantro, and salt and pepper to a saucepan on high heat with shimmering oil in it.

Pause to drink some leftover kosher wine from Passover. Tishbi has quickly become a favoured brand of mine. I love red wines with a bit of a peppery flavour, and this was no disappointment.

When the chicken has done cooking, add to the saucepan. Reduce heat to medium and continue cooking for 10 - 15 minutes until desired tenderness is reached.

Get a close up picture of the chicken cooking for your blog.

Serve next to a menorah for light and mixed fingerling potatoes (boiled) for your side dish.

Your soundtrack for this entry: The Epoxies - Molded Plastic.

The Spiced Chicken and Green Beans

Today I turn again to Epicurious for this recipe. So yummy was this that I have had it for three days in a row as leftovers. Make sure to drain the chicken before adding the peppers!

This recipe will give you a juicy meat with tangy and spicy overtones that don't overpower.

With this I drank a wine from Canayli.

Your soundtrack for this entry: Helium - Medieval People.

The Chicken Tostadas

Never once have I gone farther in the field of Mexican cooking than tacos. Even though Mexican is my favourite ethnic food. Never made burritos. Never concocted my own flauta. Not once have I ventured a pollo a la mexicana. When our great blizzard of 2010 (I'm calling it Citystopalypse) hit, I was ready with some spicy greatness of my own.

One package of Guerrero tostadas later, I made what the Thrifty Sifter termed one of the "best meals" I've ever made. I have to agree and the leftovers were fantastic.

Unfortunately I forgot to document their creation, though these coriander chicken tostadas are not complex in their creation. Still, you get a photo of them on my new plates with my new Cuisinart 14 cup food processor in the background.

Enjoy!

Your soundtrack for this entry: Bell Biv Devoe - Poison.

The Steak and Hasselback Potatoes

...with a side of lime-jalapeno-spinach salad.

It's time for a new way to do taters and yea I hath found it: hasselback potatoes.

According to a user at AllRecipes (a top search result) this recipe originated in the Hasselbacken Restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden. I have no quibble with that assertion, though pass it on at your own peril. You may just run into a Steven Hasselback, a cyclopean giant of a man who lost his left eye inventing the dish in 1972.

Hasselback Potato Ingredients (for two)
- 4 tablespoons of unsalted butter or Smart Balance Organic Buttery Spread (I used the latter)
- 1 cup panko bread crumbs
- two tablespoons cilantro (roughly chopped)
- salt
- two medium baker potatoes (peeled and kept in a bowl of cool water to prevent browning)

Some versions of this dish include cheese during the final stage. I do not.

Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees and prepare a baking sheet or pie pan with parchment paper on the bottom.

Over low heat, slowly melt the butter. Once it starts giving you a bit of bubble, add the cilantro and cover. Cook another minute or two and remove from heat.

This is the part where you get to create the signature look of this dish. There are a couple of methods of creating this.

1. You can slice a bit off the bottom of the potato to ensure it sits flat, then create slices about 1/8 of an inch apart across the potato, taking care not to cut all the way through.

2. There's also a method where you sit the potato in a large spoon and make the same slices mentioned above. The rim of the spoon keeps your knife going all the way through.

I chose:

3. Take a thin slice off of the bottom as in 1 above. Then place a chop stick to either long side of the potato. Make 1/8 inch slices.

Spread the slices a bit with a paring knife. Then place the potatoes in the baking sheet or pie tin and brush with the cilantro butter mixture.

Make sure some gets in between the slices. Then bake for approximately 45 minutes.

Pull the potatoes out of the oven and pre-heat the broiler. Brush the potatoes with the remaining cilantro-butter mixture, then spread the panko over-top.

Place about 5 inches from broiler for 2 - 3 minutes.
 

Now, should you choose to make the same dishes as I did together, you should season the steak first and let it sit out a room temperature while you take care of the potatoes. While the steaks are actually cooking you should prepare the spinach salad (it's quick).

These were seasoned with salt, pepper, and a bit of coriander (I'm on a kick lately). Pass on the coriander here as it didn't add anything to the dish. I pre-heat my iron skillet and place the meat directly on.

As I've mentioned before that I like my steak rare, it should come as no surprise that I basically sear it for 2 - 3 minutes a side and that's it. And if you read that previous entry, yes, my skillet is finally properly seasoned. The Thrifty Sifter, for whom I created this wonderful meal, prefers hers medium rare, so she got the five minute treatment.

I forgot to take a good shot of the salad which accompanied dinner, but it's very easy.

Baby Spinach and Jalapeno Salad with Lime Vinagrette
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
- the juice of 1 lime
- salt
- pepper
- baby spinach greens (use as much or as little as you want)
- 1 jalapeno (seeded, and roughly chopped)

Once you have all the above ingredients, mix them up in a bowl and enjoy.

This meal was Thrifty Sifter approved.

 Not even that spinach leaf was left.

 Served with a bottle of Carchelo red wine. It's a blend and Spanish.

Your soundtrack for this entry: Veruca Salt - 25

The Moroccan Beef Stew

Damn I love meat. It makes me happy when the Thrifty Sifter throws a recipe my way for dinner which includes some lovely stewed beef. This Moroccan beef stew recipe came from Epicurious and it's quite novel to my palate. Golden raisins, dates, and cinnamon are not ingredients I expected to taste with meat, but this stew is a complete winner. Leftovers didn't last long.

Prepping the various ingredients pre-cooking. 

Browning the beef. You'll notice we used stew meat instead of a beef tenderloin. Unfortunately Key Food never has beef tenderloin. 

Cooking up the onions, carrots, and garlic. Sort of reminds me of mirepoix. 

Bringing everything together for a nice simmer.

Simmer it!

Served with some Magic Hat #9. 

Your soundtrack for this entry: The Cure - A Short Term Effect

The Coriander Tuna with Cabbage Salad

As you probably noticed in my previous entry I've rearranged the kitchen once again. It does cramp the sink a tiny bit and make one of my undersink doors unusable. However, I never keep much under the sink, so we're good there.

The plusses are numerous, including making it easier to transfer from work surface to stove to sink in any combination. I've also freed up space on the other side of the kitchen for my bicycle, my two spare dinner chairs, and the trash and recycling are closer to the work station.

Chronologically this meal took place before the chicken in my previous entry, but that Dragon's-wort chicken was too much on my mind to avoid writing about first.

Tuna's been absent from the menu for a while and I wanted to bring it back to the table with a bit of something different. Usually I sear it on either side and season with pepper and salt. For this version I also added a nice coating of ground coriander.

I also created a very easy cabbage salad by shredding the cabbage, adding fresh ground pepper and salt, and mixing in some spicy rice vinegar. Let that sit in the fridge for a half hour or so.

Firing up the mandolin here. I've not yet used it to simply slice things and I'll have to wait until I do that before trashing this piece of equipment. It's definitely not good for shredding or julienne. 

Add the rice vinegar. 

Mix. 

Fire up the pan! I like my tuna on the well-done side sometimes and that's the case here.

 This piece was thick and cooked approximately five minutes a side. 

Served with a sprig of cilantro. 

Your soundtrack for this entry: Parry Gripp - Do You Like Waffles.

The Beef Udon

Udon is one of my favourite dishes. I've still never eaten an authentic dish, but a Manhattan lunch joint I frequent taught me to love the firm, square noodle.

It wasn't until last week that I decided to take a shot at making an udon dish myself. First stop: epicurious. I'll admit I've leaned a bit too heavily on them recently for recipes, but they have a great iPhone app, thousands of recipes I can search easily, and valuable user ratings for each.

Today: Udon with Grilled Flank Steak.

Unfolding the meat and applying the mixed marinade was the best part of this recipe. Were I to make this recipe again, I would let the meat marinate at least two hours. 10 minutes is enough to add a hint of flavour, but not enough to add to the overall taste of the final dish.

Yes, that's my new acacia cutting board. After 12 years of only having a tiny plastic one that slides everywhere, it's a welcome addition to my kitchen.

Of course there's nothing quite like the crackling of fresh, garlic-covered meat in the pan. Pre-heat those suckers, drop some olive oil in, and let them go to town.

Yes, those are peas next to the handle, and we've got more to say about them.

Hey, there's those peas again. There's something sexual about pea pods. That thing is that they're part of the pea plant's reproductive cycle.

This recipe actually calls for sugar snap peas, which weren't available at United Bros. the day I made this recipe. Instead I substituted some flat peas.

These definitely should have been prepared for cooking much better. For instance I only removed the stem, but forgot to remove the tough, stringy bit that runs the length of the pod. This was my first mistake with the peas.

My second mistake was putting the peas in at this point. I made a rookie error and didn't read ahead in the recipe. These were only supposed to go in the last minute of the udon boil.

As you can see I left a single pea in the boiling udon to remind me of my human imperfection.

At this point I also flipped the flank steak its single flipping time. After a few more minutes of cooking, I placed it on my small cutting board to rest.

This meat was too well-done with me, which I should have recognized from the recipe. Meat that I prepare for myself is usually seared and very rare.

I sliced this up across the grain and took a couple of test bites. Can't say as I was terribly impressed with the marinade. Like many "Asian" recipes aimed at a Western audience, it seemed too full of ginger.

Most Chinese and Japanese dishes I've tried containing ginger use it much more subtly.

Now, judging by the amount of broth I'm going to guess this is a bastardized form of yaki udon (at least according to my minimal reading on the subject). The broth-to-noodles ratio was pretty low.

If you read the recipe you've probably just noticed an anomaly. Yes, those are carrots, which are not called for. I have a strong propensity to have a good colour-balance in my meals. In this case there was an awful lot of brown and green in the recipe, but nothing on the red end of the spectrum.

And with the broth finished, I apportioned half the udon to a nice-sized bowl, put one sliced steak in, and poured the broth away. Topped with cilantro it looks cute.

In the end it actually looked better than it tasted. The recipe seemed too tangy on the broth side and not flavourful-enough on the meat side. Fresh cilantro is a plus, but the peas ended up being tough to eat.

It's always the damn peas...

Your soundtrack for this entry is Grand Magus' album Hammer of the North.