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Category: friendly

Surprisingly Tasty Cardamom Chicken

I made surprisingly tasty chicken this weekend. Well, it was a surprise to me.

See, I don’t like cardamom.

Let’s go back to the beginning. It all started with a surfeit of brussel sprouts and a recent encounter with tasty cabbage curry at an indian buffet. But once putting the brussel sprouts to curry (like putting them to pasture, but different) came up, it was mentioned that Nigella Lawson has a really good recipe for Golden Cardamom Chicken that would be the right thing to go with.

Since there was a chicken in the refrigerator, it was all around decided that this was a good plan.

Two hours to dinner, I get out the chicken and the cookbook and find that they are not entirely compatible. See – the golden chicken is actually smaller pieces of chicken that are marinated and then fried. That was not going to happen to this chicken. Therefore, I took that as a starting point, and ended up with a damn tasty bird.

For the sake of this recipe, we are going to pretend I had the allspice that the recipe called for, but in reality I cursed and substituted cinnamon and nutmeg instead.

Step 1: put into a small dry skillet – 2 or 3 whole allspice, 6 black peppercorns, 6 cardamom seeds (or a pod or two, if that’s what you have, but I am not fond), 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon coarse salt, 1/4 teaspoon fennel seeds, 1/4 teaspoon dried rosemary. Dry roast these. After a minute, also add 1/4 teaspoon turmeric and 1/2 teaspoon paprika. Right before the powdered ingredients burn, pour them out of the skillet and into a mortar (or spice grinder) – grind into as fine a powder as you can. Mix with a little bit of olive oil to form a paste.

Step 2: into a large measuring cup (you can use a bowl, but I have a fondness for measuring cups for this) grate the zest of 2 lemons. Squeeze the lemons, remove the seeds, and add the juice to the measuring cup – reserve the leftover lemon bits. Add some soy sauce, olive oil, orange juice, and maybe some white wine until the cups is decently full.

Step 3: Take out the chicken, make sure it is empty and all that. Now dump into the cavity: leftover lemon bits; a medium onion, quartered; as many garlic cloves as you feel like peeling (7ish); and 5 cardamom pods. Separate the skin from the breast meat a bit and rub the paste from step 1 mostly between the skin and the breast meat, but also rub it over the outside of the skin.

Step 4: Put in a roasting pan. Roast as you would a chicken. Every now and then, baste with the stuff in the measuring cup from step 2.

Step 5: eat.

And then in the comments, there was a question about how to convert this recipe to using chicken parts – so I offered up a formula:

Take a casserole dish. Layer the bottom with your onion and garlic and whatever you’d be putting inside the chicken (since I have never tried to deal with stuffing actually cooked inside my meat product). I find the layer tends to make cleaning the pan a little easier afterward.

Then make a layer of chicken that is as close to 1 chicken bit deep as possible.

Then you can treat the skin as the recipe expects you to treat the outside – smear overtop with the paste and feel free to either baste as you go, or cut the amount of liquid until it just comes up to the level of the chicken in the pan, but certainly does not cover the meat. If you are doing a higher proportion of leg bits with skin, you want less liquid because of all the fat that will drain and fill your pan, but if you are doing mostly breast meat, you want more liquid.

If there are any herbs or thing in the rub that you have whole, feel free to just add chunks of them instead, since more flavor tends to get into the chicken with this method of cooking: e.g. just have a handful of cardamom pods, instead of any powdered – or just slice a whole lemon and put that in instead of dealing with rind, juice, and bits.

I usually pop a piece of foil on top for the first bit of cooking and then pull it off for the last bit so that things get brown and juicy.

I tried to phrase this as a general case, but I can re-write it for the specific recipe, if that would please you more.

party at the work place – Spinach Dal

My boss bought us a deli platter for lunch, and I had three tasty half sandwiches.

Now I am all full and I still want another corned beef sandwich because I never get those…

only I have to save my appetite for the amazing indian food a co-worker is cooking for some of us tonight because a woman is leaving on sabbatical. And the woman making the indian food is know as a very good cook – I think she used to own a restaurant.

Such difficult choices for me!

ETA: recipe from the Indian co-worker
Spinach Dal
Take yellow lentils (tur dal or arhar dal)

and boil until they are halfway cooked

Add a box/bag of frozen spinach and continue to cook.

In a separate pan, fry:

* small white “lentils” (gram dal or udad dal)
* fresh shredded coconut
* a couple red chilis
* asofoetida

When cooked, blend smooth with 5 or 6 spoonfuls of the spinach mixture.

Then combine everything together an finish cooking to desired consistency.

Cowboy Chicken Fajitas w/ Mango Salsa, Ma Po Tofu variation, Pumpkin & Lentil Mulligatawny

I am so hungry. Every now and then – two or three times a year, I’ll be at a point where it feels like I can eat infinite quantities of food and still be hungry (or at least able to eat more). It’s a bit weird since just last week, I was getting full at the drop of a hat (or fork, as the case might have been), but I can roll with it.

I have fun food things going on.

I made an amazing dinner last night.

It started off with the acquisition of a mango.

So I looked through my spice rack (which is painfully small due to the amount of space int he apartment) and came up with one of the odd spice blends I have adopted due to my mother’s neglect. Cowboy Barbecue Rub. Who can resist that name? Its ingredients are: chile powder, garlic, onion, black pepper, cilantro, cumin, oregano, basil, cinnamon, clove, cayenne – and it always smells like it has dry mustard in it, but apparently it doesn’t.

So I pulled out one of the packages in my freezer with two chicken breasts and dumped a lot of the seasoning in there – and then left it to thaw/marinate in the fridge for a couple days.

Last night, I started off making a mango salsa by slicing purple onion very thinly, cooking it until caramelized, adding a little bit of the seasoning, and then adding the diced mango to the pan just briefly. Then I poured it into a container and added red wine vinegar (less than a teaspoon, I think) – popped that in the fridge.

Then I cooked the marinated chicken on slow heat because I was worried about the whole breasts cooking through – I put some aluminum foil loosely over the pan to keep some of the moisture in.

I assembled all the other ingredients I had to make the meal – red oak leaf lettuce, sharp cheddar cheese, tortillas, sour cream, and an avocado – and then I had an anguishing decision (and called both my mother and Meghan for advice): do I serve it as a plated meal, a quesadilla/fajita kinda of thing, or as a salad?

Oh, yeah – there was also a random sweet potato that I cut up and turned into french fries while I was making the meal.

Both my advisers agreed that it should be fajita night. Oh, man – great decision! MMmmmm!

There’s some salsa and a breast and a half of chicken left over, so I put them together to co-mingle until I turn them into another meal.

~*~

So tonight, I am thinking of putting together ground beef, mustard greens, and possibly an eggplant. To me, this says spicy chinese food. None of my chinese cookbooks agree with me. I think I just don’t have the right cookbook.

So plan is – clean as much of the greens as I can be bothered to do. Pickle them (cook briefly in boiling brown sugar and rice vinegar). Then brown and drain the beef. Add onion, garlic, and eggplant. Add some five spice powder. Perhaps mix some spicy stir fry sauce with some oyster sauce so that it doesn’t blow my head off. Add greens.

I have a feeling that this will taste more like an experiment than something good, but we’ll see.

~*~

When I start cooking tonight, I shall also be putting a pumpkin in to roast and lentils to soak because I’ll be setting up the soup that [redacted] suggested in the comments to the last entry. I don’t have lemongrass, but other than that, I’m good – limes are even on sale this week.

It sounds like I won’t actually be using a whole can of coconut milk (it’s just a small pumpkin) – so either the rest will go with the chicken and mango somehow (Oooooo) or I can make sweet coconut rice.

Okay, so I need to do a quick inventory of which perishables will not be used up in this clever plan.

produce
1 zucchini
3 apples
2 (peeled!) sweet potatoes (yeah, so either I vastly underestimated the size of a cut up sweet potato or overestimated my capacity – basically I had three potatoes, so that’s how many I peeled) – they might end up wasted… or maybe I’ll make some random mashed potatoes.
probably some of the mustard greens will be left over
1/2 head red lettuce
scallions (can totally go in the chinese food)

meat
1 cup beef stew
duck stock! (duh! So freeze half in the beef stew container once you empty it, and use the rest to make the pumpkin lentil soup)
lots of meat is on sale this week. I need none of it.

bread
breadcrumbs – so these aren’t really perishable, but I have leftover bread I dried to turn into bread crumbs, but my container is all full.

dairy
2% milk
light cream
greek yogurt (which I bought without a plan because it was there!)
sour cream
cream cheese
gorgonzola
italian seasoned cheddar (open!)

Why have a calendar, when you have food?

It’s the end of the season, and I have an abundance of food.

food I have
Not frozen meat
8 or so assorted pieces of Kentucky Fried Chicken
leftover filet mignon (with sauteed peppers and mushrooms on the side)
bacon (this usually is just assumed, but I thought I’d throw it on the list today)

Frozen Meat *means should be used soonish
ground beef
hamburger patties
meatballs
taco seasoned ground beef
london broil marinated for stir fry*
chicken breast
diced roast pork* (only 1 meal’s worth)
chicken backs for stock

sorely tempting meat on sale this week
ground beef $1.69/lb
skinless boneless chicken breast $1.99/lb

bread
tortillas
I have a bread machine!!!
1/2 pound of bread leftover from a loaf

Produce
10 peaches of dubious virtue (these are the least ripe ones from the $5 of peach seconds I got at the farmers’ market and put up and sugared and put in the back of the fridge to ferment. Now my container is full, and I need to think up something different for these last few)
10 pounds of potatoes
5 bell peppers
2 zucchinis
3 long skinny eggplants
carrots
jalepeno peppers
2 apples
garlic (whole and peeled)

Dairy
sour cream
cheddar cheese
2% milk
heavy cream
and end of a blue cheese that should be finished soonish
cream cheese

OMG food!
I looked through all my cookbooks for stuff for peaches and potatoes (separately)

One of my favorite cookbooks, Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen, had a recipe for a frittata that not only included potatoes, but also bell peppers and day old bread! Score. I had that last night, but I put all the stuff on the list, anyway, just so I could brag about finding the perfect recipe. I wonder how well the potato frittata will reheat? I’ll find out eventually, I guess.

Cooking With the Seasons had an exceptionally tasty-looking peach dessert, but I’ll need people over to try that. Hint. Hint.
ETA: I lied. The recipe is in Winterthur’s Cullinary Collection, which also has an interesting recipe for a pie with dates and sesame seeds that I might like to have help trying to create some moot.

Otherwise, it looks like I’ll make a coriander and peach chutney/salsa thing and find a good meat to put it with… my choice would be lamb, but it’s looking like chicken is the available option.

I have separated the chicken into meat, crunchy bits, and refuse. I can’t quite bring myself to toss the crunchy bits. They are so tasty – there must be a way to use them without the hideous gluttony of a meal of chicken skin. Crumb topping for casserole?

I’d been planning to put the filet mignon with peppers and mushrooms either in tortillas or over rice all mexican-y with maybe the zucchini and perhaps a can of beans. I think the starch shall, instead, be diced potatoes. Lots of diced potatoes. And I could probably grill down at least one additional bell pepper. I might be able to put away five or six lunches from that dinner.

Ummmm… eggplant. That could go with potatoes in a curry. With jarred tomatoes (from [redacted]’s mother!). And… ummm… lots of jalepenos. Yeah.

So what else is urgent? I should have a bell pepper left, unless it self destructs before I get to it. More potatoes. Some pork for a small dish. Beef for a stir fry. Wherewithal to make hella tasty mashed potatoes to feed a large army. Bother – peaches still, I can’t imagine the chicken using up more than half what I have. Oh, and cooked chicken. Right.

So I need salad greens. I think a chicken, peach, grilled onion salad with stilton would be kinda tasty. Maybe some toasted almonds in that. But way too early to buy the greens yet.

roasted pork with potatoes and carrots and gravy. *yawn* Boring, but it’ll still be tasty.

And then I thaw the meat for stir fry again and make it right quick. Probably by this time I will need to buy more bell peppers. There can be potatoes in stir fry. Totally.

Ooh, and the Better Homes and Gardens has a recipe for bread machine potato bread that starts from a real potato.

Yeah. That should feed me into next month. And I think I’lll still need brilliant ideas to eat everything.

And I have a hankering to make lots of bread… only no room to eat it.

ARGH! I forgot about the three pounds of dates I bought to stuff for an SCA event and never got around to doing anything with… and the container of feta cheese and the bag of walnuts. Is anyone throwing a party any time soon who wants to join me in making a tasty little finger desserts?

Meanwhile, I am feeling both antisocial and lonely… and not quite sure what to do with that.

Kenyan Collard Greens

Before my lovely and friendly neighbors moved out, they had me over for dinner and served collard greens. The husband, who cooked, told me that it was a traditional recipe from Kenya, but that the spice/spice mix he used was one available at a couple markets around town – available in either powder or a cube.

The resulting greens were smooth and velvety and tasty.

After he left, I tried making it myself with a cube of bouillon from Nigeria hoping that was the seasoning he meant. It was close, but not quite right and too salty.

Last night I tried again, and got something that tastes spot on perfect – Woo!

Kenyan Collard Greens (a version of Sukuma Wiki)
start some nice white rice to cooking (you know whether you like a lot of rice or a little)

(Optional step – his wife was a vegetarian, but he told me meat was traditional – any kind of meat) Cut up two slices of bacon into 1/2 inch strips and scatter them in a pan. Start to cook them.

Dice small on medium onion and add to pan once the bacon is fully cooked and almost crisp. Add garlic when the onion is mostly cooked and you are almost ready to add the other ingredients.

Wash carefully 5-7 leaves. Shake them off, but don’t try to get them perfectly dry. Fold in half and cut out the spine. Slice lengthwise into two or three strips depending on the size of the leaf. Stack the strips. Now cut widthwise into narrow ribbons. Add the ribbons to the pan.

Season with two healthy dashes of 5 spice powder and half a bouillon cube crumbled.

Peel and dice one tomato and add.

Serve over rice.

ETA (11/12/2010): I just found another blogger who discovered this recipe – The Noshery makes Sukuma Wiki