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101 Uses for a Roasted Chicken: #2 & #3

This week, a bit of a no-brainer and a yummy sandwich.

The no-brainer, #2 on the list of 101, is a chicken caesar salad: cubed chicken, romaine, dressing, parmesan cheese, some croutons.  I had this for dinner last night.

The yummy sandwich, #3 on the list, is a spin on the traditional grilled cheese: grilled chicken, swiss, and pesto on whole-grain bread.  This is a to-die-for combination, and if you want to make it even more awesome, you can add a strip or two of bacon.  

I have been eating grilled sandwiches regularly this winter, and I don't really know why.  I usually have a grilled Black Forest ham & swiss, but because I'm avoiding the deli now, the chicken was a very tasty replacement, and it pairs brilliantly with pesto and swiss cheese.

With this one roasted chicken, I got about 4 - 5 meals, and I have saved the carcass to make stock and then soup.  I definitely got my $9 worth from this one bird.

Easter Cookies

Yesterday, trying to get myself into a springy mood, I invested in some Easter-themed cookie cutters. I had an earthy vision in mind, something different from the brightly coloured stuff that is so prevalent at this time of year, so I found a generic sugar cookie recipe and spiced it up with some espresso powder. I have had a bag of organic raw turbinado sugar kicking around, and the granules are large and suitable for decorations. This is what I came up with.

I made royal icing with one egg white (at room temperature) and between 2 - 3 cups of icing sugar, got out the old piping bag and small plain tips (Wilton #2 and #4), and away I went.

The egg-shaped cookies didn't quite turn out the way I'd envisioned them. I'm not sure why, but I think it was a combination of the granules being too large for the size of cookie vis a vis the tips I used. With the flower shapes, I decided to keep it simple and only use the royal icing as decoration. I liked how they turned out far better.

The recipe for the cookies is as follows, adapted from The Cookie Bible's recipe for Butterfly Cookies on page 132. I highly recommend this book; everything I've made from it has turned out fantastically.

2 1/4 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup butter, softened
1 egg
1 tbsp vanilla
2 tsp instant espresso powder (I use Nescafe's and it works just fine)

- 350F oven
- form the dough into two disks and chill until firm, either in the fridge or freezer
- roll out on lightly floured surface
- bake for 12 - 15 minutes, or until just barely golden along the edges

Well, that's about it for my Easter baking, I think. It was never a "baking" holiday in my family the way Christmas was. It was more of a "let the Easter Bunny do all the work" kinda holiday.

However you celebrate, if you celebrate or if you don't, be well this weekend.

Memory Lane: Cadbury's Edition

Recently, my super cool fellow foodblogger, Cakespy, posted an interview she did with a Cadbury's Creme Egg. This inspired me to dig around through my old photos in search of some pictures I took nearly 11 years ago on a visit to Cadbury's World. In celebration of Easter, here are those photos, freshly scanned with my new scanner!

The first photo is of one of the several Cadbury's Creme Egg cars near the entrance to Cadbury's World. Yes, this is a car. With a steering wheel and the whole nine yards.

The second photo is of me with my cousin, posing in front of a Cadbury's Creme Egg car. We have just come from the store, where I bought quite a bit of chocolate that day. And, on our tour through the facility, we got quite a bit of free stuff, too - and I'm not talking about those Halloween-sized chocolate bars, either! I'm talking regular-sized chocolate bars at pretty much every turn!

The third photo is of my cousin in front of a Cadbury's Mini Egg car. It is also a mini car in comparison with the Creme Egg car. Very cool indeed. It was such a fun day, too.

I haven't had any Creme Eggs yet this season, but I'm hopeful either the Easter Bunny will humour me, or that Shoppers Drug Mart, my new favourite place to buy cheap chocolates, will have a whole bunch on sale after Easter is over, because I do love a Creme Egg (or fifty).

101 Uses for a Roasted Chicken: #1

New idea for the old food blog here. We'll see how it goes. I came across a book called Rotisserie Chickens to the Rescue a few months ago, and I thought it was a neat idea. I didn't buy the book in the end, so this is my version.

I can get rotisserie chickens at my local overpriced grocery store, but I don't see the point in spending the money when it's perfectly simple to bung a chicken in the oven and cook it myself. It's ridiculously simple.

I am trying to cut down my meat intake, so I'm going for less meat but better quality cuts instead. So, I'm cutting out deli stuff like Black Forest ham, and I'm going to lay off the bacon and start buying buffalo instead of beef. Having a whole roast chicken around is a convenient way of providing me with decent meat for sandwiches, salads, and a lot of other things, and I always freeze the carcass to make my own homemade stock. So, as you can imagine, it's quite economical for me on my piddly budget.

Tonight, I made a chicken pasta salad for dinner:

1 cup chicken, diced
1 cup small pasta, such as penne or macaroni, etc., (raw measure - then cook it)
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1 cup broccoli florets, chopped small
2 green onions, sliced
1 clove garlic, grated
crumbled feta cheese, to taste (optional)
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup low fat mayo
1/4 cup low fat sour cream
2 tsp dried dill
salt & pepper to taste

Do you really need instructions? It's a pasta salad! You get the picture, right? Just blanch the broccoli in the pasta water for a couple of minutes at the end of boiling, then drop it all into a collander and run it under cold water until completely cool. Mix. Eat. Enjoy.

Brownies...Or Blackies?

I made these this weekend. My friend provided the chocolate, which was 85% cocoa content. The recipe is Jamie Oliver's, and can be found here. This picture is slightly over-exposed; the brownies were so dark they were nearly black.

Although it calls for dried sour cherries, I've had a devil of a time finding any dried cherries period around here. In this case, I substituted with cherry-flavoured dried cranberries. They're not sour, but they were OK. I also used pecans because my friend doesn't like walnuts.

These were so moist and rich I could only eat one or two the entire time I was there...

Good Cookies

I recently added to my already way too big cookbook collection The Good Cookie by Tish Boyle. Ivonne had it featured on her blog for a while and at that point I put the book on my Amazon wishlist. I already have a pretty comprehensive cookie cookbook aptly entitled The Cookie Bible, which I highly recommend because all the recipes I've made from it turn out brilliantly and taste amazing.

I also own Tish Boyle's Chocolate Passion, an absolutely gorgeous book that is well worth the investment if you are a serious chocolate addict.

Today I made two recipes from The Good Cookie, the very first recipe in the book, Soft-baked Chocolate Chunk Cookies, and a cookie that apparently has Italian roots, Lemon Cornmeal Cookies. Both recipes were awesome. Here's a photo.

I am taking most of these cookies on my trip to Vancouver Wednesday the 12th, some for us to eat in the car, and some are for my friend B, with whom I am staying, and who has a sweet tooth just like I do.

If there's any left, that is.

Cookbook Review: Little Cakes from the Whimsical Bakehouse

If you like mini things, or if you are a cake decorator with a load of patience and time, or if you just want to challenge you limits and patience making fiddly little cakes, this may be the book for you.

I'm a bit of all three of the above. Little Cakes from the Whimsical Bakehouse: Cupcakes, Small Cakes, Muffins, and other Mini Treats is a cutesy cookbook and instructional manual on how to make a large variety of the mini treats touted in the subtitle.

It's a very nice-looking book. Each page is full of bright colours and the pictures of the finished products are gorgeous. Apart from the design of the book, there is a good collection of staple-type recipes for muffins, cakes, fillings, and icings - all you need to get yourself started on the road to creating lilliputian delights. There are also a lot of very neat decorating ideas and a handy template section at the back.

Some of the techniques I have seen before, like painting chocolate onto an actual leaf and then peeling the leaf back so you get a perfect chocolate version of the leaf for decors. Other things, like the use of a fine paintbrush to paint details for what the authors term the "Chocolate Method" are quite impressive-looking.

For the purposes of this book review, I selected two muffin recipes to make because I have no special occasion for which to go to the trouble of baking and decorating a batch of cupcakes. The Coffee Chocolate Chip muffins on page 56 were to die for: moist, cakey, and very tasty, they made an excellent dessert one night. The other recipe was the Blueberry Muffins on page 50. These also had an amazing texture and were super yummy. Both of these muffin recipes used the creaming method of combining butter, sugar, and eggs - similar to most cookie recipes - rather than the more common use of a liquid fat. I think this contributed to the wonderful texture. On the downside, however, neither muffin recipe puffed up much during baking. They remained fairly flat on top. While this is advantageous in a cupcake (flatter surface = easier to decorate) it isn't necessarily desirable in a muffin. But, that's minor. (Incidentally, I recently invested in silicone muffin cups and they work great.)

My only real criticism of this book is that apart from the photos illustrating the Chocolate Method, other piping and decorating techniques are only explained with text without the aid of visuals. Although we'd all like to believe that piping easy, it really isn't if you're inexperienced. I think it would have been helpful to have more photo illustrations of the piped decorating techniques, and because of this lack, I wouldn't really classify this as a beginner's manual. Otherwise, a great resource book full of lovely ideas and some killer recipes.

Conquering Lasagne

It may sound ridiculous considering all the things I've cooked, baked, served, and decorated in my life, but lasagne has always been intimidating. I know why. When I was growing up, lasagne was always a very special occasion dish that my mother rarely made. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I remember my mom cooking up a lasagne, and I got the clear impression that it was a time-consuming, laborious thing to spend a day doing. When I had lasagne at other people's houses, I was always impressed and felt very honoured that someone would go to the trouble of making it. Sometimes, I got funny looks when I expressed this.

The first ever lasagne I ever made was 10 years ago when I was visiting Italy. I found fresh lasagne noodles at the grocery store, along with mozzarella cheese that looked nothing like the mozzarella cheese I was used to back home. Because we were on a budget, it was a vegetarian lasagne, filled with fresh spinach I found at a local green grocer's. The oven at the apartment I was staying at was gas and had no temperature indicators, and no one in the house had used it for the year they'd been slumming it there.

It was edible. More or less. The mozzarella didn't behave the way I was used to mozzarella behaving; it melted into almost a sauce-like consistency and pooled on the top in large puddles, as opposed to melting and browning and being all gooey-stringy. I should have figured something would be different about it when I tried to grate it. It didn't grate, and seemed more like the texture of raw meat than what I was used to. The spinach had a funny flavour - metallic, almost.

Because we were broke student backpackers, we ate it. But I never made another lasagne until I worked at The Centre nearly three years ago now. We had lasagne pretty regularly, but usually on a day when I was off. I got to eat it, but it only happened that I was on shift once when the lasagnes were actually made. I was surprised at how easily they went together and how quick it was to make enough for 150 people.

Still, I never made it for myself - until today. My roommate frequently makes a veggie version from a Weight Watchers recipe, and she whips it up in no time. I have no idea why I've been so resistant to trying it. Too much lasagne baggage, I suppose.

I happened to have a whole whack of spaghetti sauce I cooked up in the fall, portioned out into 1 cup servings and frozen in small containers. The sauce is made with locally-produced beef sausage seasoned with sundried tomatoes and basil - yum! But for some reason, I'm not interested in eating spaghetti these days. I decided to make a lasagne because I could use up a good amount of the sauce all in one go, and I had some other ingredients already on hand, like ricotta cheese. I marched down to my local overpriced grocery store today and bought oven-ready lasagne noodles and some mozzarella cheese.

Basically following the directions on the back of the box and asking for some advice from my experienced roommate, I assembled and baked the lasagne.

It was absurdly simple.

Apart from needing to bake it twice as long as the box directed, it turned out fantastically! It was a stunning, amazing success! I can't believe I've been afraid of this for so long. And, of course, I now have a week's worth of meals out of it, so I don't have to do much cooking in the coming days. I baked it in a parchment-lined dish to make clean-up easier (we are all familiar with those dish detergent commercials with all the caked on guck...lasagne is frequently the implied culprit).

Here it is...
Not bad, eh?

What's next?

Cookbook Review: Fine Cooking Annual, Volume Two

The flap reads: "Chock full of more than 200 delicious recipes and 300 color photographs, Fine Cooking Annual, Volume 2, is packed with a year's worth of the best recipes, tips, and techniques from Fine Cooking magazine."

Prior to acquiring this book from Random House, I wasn't familiar with the magazine at all, but I am all of a sudden a new fan. The Fine Cooking Annual, Volume 2, is a beautiful, mesmerizing hunk of food porn indeed.

Covering all the usual topics from starters to soups to salads, to poultry to seafood to desserts, the volume also includes very clear instructions on how perform various culinary techniques, like how to cook and pick whole crabs (page 265), how to butterfly a whole chicken (page 167), and to properly dice an onion (page 49). Additionally, there are loads of tips about various ingredients. For instance, page 69 is all about demystifying mesclun mix; page 149 provides an olive guide; and pages 276-277 gives you a step-by-step guide on how to trim baby artichokes.

The three recipes I chose to make for the purpose of this review were the Chopped Shrimp "Waldorf" Salad on page 87, the Grilled Chicken with Tomato, Lime & Cilantro Salsa on page 136 (pictured), and the Double Ginger Pound Cake on page 352.

The "Waldorf" was excellent and very easy to make. I did substitute low fat mayonnaise, however, but that was one of the things I like about the recipes in this book - you can easily make a lower-fat or healthier version of the recipes if you so choose. The same went for the grilled chicken dish; I omitted the olive oil and it was still great. The salsa was very fresh and perfectly complimented the mild spiciness of the chicken. As for the ginger pound cake, it took much longer to bake than the directions indicated, but the cake itself was moist, flavourful, and had a wonderful, velvet crumb.

While there was a ton of variety in this cookbook, there seemed to me to be one category glaringly missing: breads! I would love to have had a chapter full of wicked new bread recipes. Not that I don't have enough as it is, but still, this book seems a bit incomplete without that key element of a great meal.

This book is well worth the investment for cooks of any calibre. The recipes are well-written and contain easily-found ingredients. The photography is beautiful, and the information on techniques, ingredients, and cook's tips are well-illustrated and simple to follow.

Braised Chicken Thighs

Only someone like me would get totally excited about a pot.

Canadian Tire's Boxing Week sale boasted a Kitchen Aid cast iron dutch oven, bright shiny red and porcelain-coated, for 70% off. This meant the normally $100 pot was $30. After much convincing, I managed to drag my dad to Trail's Canadian Tire location, a store normally mostly empty. I assumed in this area, not renowned for it cuisine, that I'd have my pick of pots and that it wouldn't be necessary to get there early in order to obtain the pot. Not so. A skid in the kitchen wares section was empty...except for one last pot, sitting out on the skid with its box discarded onto the skid next door containing a pile ridiculously cheap Black & Decker toaster ovens. I inspected the pot and it was fine. I put it in the box and proceeded to the checkout (well, actually, I proceeded to also obtain the last high-backed office chair that was on sale for 50% off, but that's another story). The cashier told me I was lucky to get the last one; she said the pots had been flying out of the store at an alarming rate, some people buying two or three of them.

So what do you do with a cast iron dutch oven? Well, I decided to do some braising to break in my new piece of kitchenware. Chicken thighs were on sale at my local overpriced grocery store. I had half a bottle of white wine kicking around.

Braised Chicken Thighs

10 chicken thighs, bone in, skin removed
2 tbsp flour combined with a bit of salt & pepper
2 large onions, sliced
2 large carrots, peeled & sliced
1 28oz can diced tomatoes
2 cups white wine
2 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
3 large cloves garlic, grated

1. Put the flour, salt & pepper in a plastic bag and add the chicken, in batches, and shake to coat the thighs.

2. Add a bit of oil to the pot and heat to high. Brown the chicken in batches and set aside on a plate.

3. Add onions and carrots and saute in the pan until soft. Add the wine and bring to a boil. Add the tomatoes, lemon juice, and garlic, and bring to a boil. Add the chicken and cilantro and reduce the heat so the liquid just simmers. Cook until the chicken done. Serve over rice.

Voila! Enjoy!

Cookbook Review: Nigella Express

As we all know, I love a good cookbook. As you may not know, I own far too many. But I'm good with that! I wouldn't have it any other way.

Time is something I have in abundance as well, and I have a real admiration for Nigella Lawson and really enjoy her shows on The Food Network. She makes food and look sensuous and sexy and she obviously believes heartily in indulging oneself without the socialized guilt reaction kicking in. So, imagine my pleasure when I was given a copy of Nigella Express!

The subtitle, Good Food Fast, pretty much sums it all up. Divided into 13 chapters with recipes running the gamut from starters to salads to breakfasts and desserts, to meals designed for easy entertaining, Mexican meals and holiday treats, Nigella Express has an impressive variety of quick meals, and some pretty neat time-saving ideas.

Perhaps contradictory to the "express" theme are the rather wordy introductions to the chapters and to each recipe, but Nigella certainly has a writing style as unique as her recipes. Her passion for food jumps off the page at the reader with her descriptions. For example, the directions for "Hokey Pokey" on page 281 say to "watch the syrup turn into a whooshing cloud of aerated pale gold" and, once it's set, "bash at it, so that it splinters into many glinting pieces." The "Sweetcorn Chowder with Toasted Tortillas" on page 235 directs the cook to "blitz" the soup "to a speckled primrose mush." You get the idea.

As for the recipes, I've made three so far. For some reason, I've been craving pancakes lately, so I was delighted to see Nigella include a pancake mix recipe that made beautiful, light, fluffy pancakes. Also, I made another breakfasty dish called "Oeufs en Cocotte." The recipe calls for truffle oil, which I happen to have, believe it or not (I got a deal at a food expo while in culinary school) and the sauce the cream and truffle oil creates over the egg was positively heady. There are many dessert recipes in the book, and for a family dinner I made the "Chocolate Pear Pudding." I was wonderful and a huge hit!

The one drawback to the book that I saw was that, in typical European style, the recipes mostly used weights in metric as opposed to Imperial volume (i.e. cups). An electronic scale that measures in grams is, unfortunately, a necessity for many of the recipes. I have one because I had to buy one for culinary school, so this wasn't a problem for me. But, you will have difficulty if you don't have one. Additionally, you'll have to be able to convert the temperatures given in Celsius and gas marks to Fahrenheit if necessary.

My only other beef about the book is that some of the pictures in it were, if not somewhat unappetizing, a little dated-looking. For instance, the picture of "Turkey Tonnato" on page 335 looked a little swamped with sauce and reminded me of something out of a 1970s-era Betty Crocker cookbook. The duck breast platter on page 211, though vividly coloured with greens and reds, looked like an demonstration I had in one of my jobs on how not to plate.

This definitely isn't a diet book by any stretch of the imagination, but if you're looking for ways to feel like you're making hearty, higher-end food without loads of effort, this might be a good investment for you.

Ravioli Caprese

I really enjoy Giada de Laurentiis's Everyday Italian on the Food Network. Last week, I saw her make these yummy-looking Ravioli Caprese, got ambitious, and made the recipe yesterday for a family dinner. It was a huge hit! The ravioli themselves were not terribly difficult to make, and the simple dressing was light and perfect. This is definitely a keeper.

Ravioli Caprese recipe here. The only issue I had was that there was more pasta dough than filling. I could probably have made an other half a recipe of the filling at least to use up the extra dough I had, and I even used a special scoop I have that measures exactly 1tsp, so my fillings were equal. Also, fresh basil is a must. This won't be the same without it.

Yum!

Old Fashioned Cinnamon Swirl Loaf

For some reason, I had a hankering for French Toast. I have no idea why. I knew I didn't want to make it from the Country Seed Bread (see post below) because seedy French Toast is no fun. So, I decided to make this recipe, which comes from my trusty Fleischmann's recipe book. I made it last night and used it for my French Toast this morning - it was awesome!

Now, I halved the recipe because I only wanted one loaf of this hanging around to tempt me, and it halves fine. I also didn't put the crumb topping on it because I didn't think it was necessary for French Toast purposes, but if you're just going to toast this for breakfast (or, as I also did, cut into it shortly after taking it from the oven and smearing it with butter) I would probably put the topping on. I also added the raisins to the dough rather than rolling them up in the middle with the filling. I won't do that again; the raisins on the top of the loaf burned, so next time I'll add them to the filling. Also, I discovered that you should probably put the loaf pan on a lined baking sheet (foil, parchment, or a silicone baking mat) because as the loaf rose during the baking process, the filling dribbled out and onto the floor of my oven, creating a bit of a mess.

Old Fashioned Cinnamon Swirl Loaf (makes 2 loaves)

5 to 5 1/2 cups bread or all purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
2 packages (4 1/2 tsp) yeast
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 cup milk (had 10% kicking around from another project - it worked fine)
1/2 cup water
1/3 cup margarine or butter, cut into small pieces
2 eggs

Filling

3 tbsp melted butter
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1 cup raisins
1 egg white (or whole egg if you don't anticipate using the yolk for another purpose), lightly beaten
Crumb Topping (recipe follows)

OK - for the bread, see the bread baking tutorial.

To fill and shape the loaves, divide the dough in half. Roll each half into a 16x7" rectangle (keeping the other half covered while doing this so it doesn't dry out). Brush the rectangles with the melted butter to within an inch of the edges. Evenly sprinkle on the sugar, cinnamon, and raisins. Beginning at the short end of each rectangle, roll up tightly as you would a jelly roll; pinch seams tightly - both the middle seam and the end seams - to seal. Place, seam side down, in a well greased or parchment-lined loaf pan. Cover and let rise until doubled.

Brush the loaves with egg and sprinkle with Crumb Topping. Bake at 375F for 35 - 40 minutes until done. Remove from pans and let cool on wire racks.

Crumb Topping: In a small bowl, combine 1/3 cup all purpose flour, 1/3 cup firmly packed brown sugar, and 1 tsp cinnamon. Cut in 3 tbsp cold butter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

Yummy, irresistible comfort food on a chilly morning - and it makes great French Toast, accompanied by maple syrup!

Country Seed Bread

You cannot beat Canadian Living for reliable recipes. I made this the other day and it's great!

Country Seed Bread

2 cups bread flour (or, all purpose will work, too)
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup flax seeds
2 tbsp sesame seeds
1 tbsp poppy seeds
2 tsp yeast
1 1/4 cups water (approx.)
2 tbsp liquid honey
2 tbsp veg oil (or melted butter)
1 1/2 tsp salt

Directions here, adding the seeds with the dry ingredients. I used an egg wash on the top to both provide shine and to adhere the additional sesame seeds to, solely for appearances' sake.