Chicken and Dumplings

Since I seem to be coming down with the crud, we decided to make some chicken and dumplings last night. While a bit on the bland side, for a simple throw together soup, it was great. The dumplings were very light and fluffy, and were great with the slightly thickened broth and chicken mixture.

Ingredients
1/2 onion, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
2 stalks of celery, chopped
1 clove of garlic
2 lbs chicken breast, cut into chunks
Broth, to cover

Saute veggies in some olive oil until translucent. Add broth and chicken. Bring to a simmer. Add herbs and pepper as desired. We let this simmer for an hour or so, then made a slurry of water and flour to thicken it a bit before making the dumplings.

Dumpling Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp melted butter
1 egg
2/3 cup milk
Pepper, herbs to taste

Mix dry ingredients. Add butter, egg and milk and bring together. With the soup at a simmer, drop spoonfuls of batter onto the top of the soup. Cover and let cook, undisturbed for 15 minutes. Serve.

Turnip Greens with Sausage

Last night we decided to do some more greens, and when we got to the store, we found that the best looking greens they had were turnip greens. We both loved them. We’ve tried kale and mustard greens, and we do still like both of them quite well, we were surprised at how much we liked the turnip greens.

Ingredients
5 bratwurst (or one package)
1/2 large onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 tbsp olive oil
2 bunches turnip greens (although in the future, we’ll do more-we didn’t have many leftover greens)

Brown the sausage in the pan with a little oil. When browned, pull from the pan, and saute the onion and garlic until translucent, scraping up the browned bits. Add the torn and rinsed greens, and put the brats back in the pan. Cover and let cook for 20-30 minutes, until the brats are done, and the greens cooked.

We served this with potatoes roasted with fennel bulb and red pepper.

Swedish Meatballs.

This was a pantry meal tonight. Katie had never had Swedish Meatballs before, and she was pretty impressed.

We happened to have a bag of frozen meatballs, and an onion on hand. Instead of typical dry egg noodles, we used half a box of Barilla whole wheat linguini that we’d bought on a lark and had otherwise been afraid to use.

Ingredients:
1lb bag of meatballs
1 to 2 tbsp cream
1 14oz can beef broth
1/4 of a jumbo onion, probably a cup or so, sliced.
1/4cup flour (for roux)
3 tbsp butter
Allspice 1/4 tsp
Nutmeg 1/4 tsp
Garlic powder, a pinch (optional)
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
Maggi seasoning (about 1tsp)
Brandy (about 1tbsp)
Parsley, chopped. Fresh or dried.

We started the meatballs off for about 15 minutes at 350 degrees in the oven to get some of the fat out.

We sauteed onion a small amount of butter, and then added more butter when the onion was just turning a little golden. The flour was added to create roux which was cooked a couple of minutes, stirring constantly.

Add the can of stock, reserving a little to avoid it being too thick/thin. Once it thickens reduce heat adjust thickness if needed, and add about a tbsp of cream and stir it in. Add the meatballs in, season the sauce with the herbs and spices to taste. Go easy with the maggi seasoning, as it is strong stuff. If you don’t have maggi, don’t sweat it, it doesn’t make or break the dish, and most recipes don’t call for it. I just happened to have it, and like it.

Simmer gently while you cook your pasta or egg noodles. When the pasta or noodles are done, drain and add them to the meatballs and sauce, and mix them in.

We served it with steamed broccoli.

Tuna Noodle Casserole

So tonight we decided to slum it a little, and I threw together a tuna noodle casserole. We have a bunch of cans of tuna from a Sam’s trip we made when we moved in, so we decided to reclaim some cabinet space, while cooking something that fits the unseasonable cool, rainy day. I started from the Cooking for Engineers recipe (an awesome website, check it out), but quickly deviated into a different creation.

Tuna Noodle Casserole
Sauce:
4 tbsp butter
1/4 cup flour
2 1/2 cups milk
Casserole Base:
1 tbsp butter
1/2 white onion
1 bunch green onions
2 stalks celery
6 oz mushrooms
1 tsp dried thyme (3 tsp fresh, if you have it)
1 tsp dried rosemary
1 tsp garlic powder (only if it’s decent, otherwise mince a garlic clove, and add to aromatics)
24 oz egg noodles (yep, from the freezer section)
4 cans tuna (20 oz), drained
1 cup shredded cheese (we had cheddar, so we used it)
Bread Crumbs, to top
Method:
Use a standard white sauce method for the sauce (melt 4 tbsp butter, add flour, make roux, add milk, stir until thick).
Melt remaining butter in saute pan. Finely dice the veggies, and add them to the butter. Saute until limp (if you can get some gold on them, so much the better, but I was getting impatient). Cook noodles according to package instructions (I pulled them a little early, so they wouldn’t turn too mushy). Add veggies to thickened sauce. In a large bowl, dump the tuna, sauce, and noodles, and stir to combine. Add half of the cheese. Adjust seasoning. Pour into greased baking dish, and top with remaining cheese and breadcrumbs. If you are so inclined, you can melt some more butter and toast the breadcrumbs first, but we were just not motivated to do that tonight.
Bake in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes, until bubbly around the edges and toasty on top.

Now, for full disclosure, we only used 3 cans of tuna, but we both think that an additional can would have been a good idea. Far better than the typical “cream of ____” base for a casserole-much less salt, and a much cleaner flavor.

St. Louis style Pizza

If you’ve ever had a St. Louis style pizza, you know they’re different. Generally, people either love it, or hate it, without much middle ground. I’ve only had St. Louis style pizza at Imo’s, a St. Louis chain that has a location in the KC area.

What is St. Louis style pizza? Basically, its a thin crust pizza, very crunchy, that utilizes a pasteurized-process cheese known as Provel. Yes. Process cheese. I know. Ick. Well, actually, Provel is pretty good for processed cheese, a darn sight better than the typical American cheese slices.

Provel is essentially a mixture of Swiss, Provolone, and white Cheddar, with a slight smoke flavoring.

St. Louis style pizza sauce is generally pretty sweet, but in this case I used sauce I had in the freezer. It was made with a 28 oz can of tomato puree, a couple tbsp of double strength tomato paste, 1 onion minced, and Penzey’s pizza seasoning – and possibly a couple pinches of sugar. If you don’t have a pizza sauce seasoning blend, basically you’ll want to start with a pinch of salt, 1/2tbsp dried crushed oregano, a pinch of time, and and pinch of basil.

The interesting thing about St. Louis pizza is that the pizza crust is unleavened, which means there’s no yeast, no rising time, no waiting.

Dough:
2 cups + 2tbsp AP flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp oil (olive, canola)
2 tsp corn syrup (I used dark)
1/2 cup + 2tbsp water.

Mix ingredients until a stiff dough is formed. I found I needed more water, but not much.

Roll it out on a floured board, as thin as you can without breaking it.

Put it on a pizza stone or pan. I think ours is 18″ or so.

Preheat oven to 450.

Top the dough with around 1/4 cup sauce, and about 2 cups of Provel (I think I used around 1 cup of Provel, and 1 cup of mozzarella, since Katie isn’t a big fan of the Provel). Other toppings included fresh basil, oregano and thyme, as well as about 15 or 20 slices of turkey pepperoni.

Bake at 450 for about 10-13 minutes, so that the crust browns on the bottom.

Oh, and unless you want to be a St. Louis pizza pretender, cut it into squares, not those wedge shapes everyone else uses.

Our St. Louis style pizza

Pizza dough, take 2

For lunch today we made some pizza-mozzarella, mushroom and fresh basil. We’ve been tinkering with the dough for a while, and I think this finally hit it.

Ingredients
8 oz bread flour
8 oz AP flour
1.25 cups warm water
1 tablespoon yeast
1.5 tsp sugar
1 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoons butter

Proof the yeast with the water and sugar. For this batch, I decided to try the dough blade of the food processor, and it worked fabulously. The dough was silky and smooth. Let it rise twice, then shape into a round. This amount was more than sufficient for the large pizza pan we bought, so in the future, I’ll cut a little off for breadsticks. Once shaped and topped, bake for about 10-15 minutes, or until the crust is browned and the cheese is bubbly and brown at 450-500 degrees. We found that we need to bake the pizza on the lowest rack to get the bottom of the crust cooked at the same time as the top.

This pizza was great, and is even good cold (always a good test for pizza quality).

Grilled Swordfish with Pesto, Lemon capellini, and Sauteed Asparagus with Shallots

Tonight we wanted something different and fun, and since the weather was good, we decided to grill.

We found frozen swordfish that looked better than anything in the fresh fish section of the local megamart.
They got thawed and grilled over medium heat, after being seasoned with salt and pepper. Put on grill, close lid. After two minutes rotate 90 degrees, after two more minutes, flip. Two minutes later, rotate 90 degrees. Cook a final 2 minutes. Put on plate, top with about 1 tsp of pesto each, spread it out, tent with foil, let rest. Swordfish – done.
Obviously, you’ll hold off on cooking the swordfish until the capellini and asparagus is nearly finished, so it stays hot.

Asparagus with Shallots.
Trim 1 bunch asparagus as needed
Mince one shallot.
Melt 1 tbsp butter in a sautee pan and sautee the shallots a bit, then add the asparagus.
Salt and pepper it lightly. We used a bit of Penzey’s shallot salt as well.
Add a little water so that it’ll steam the asparagus a little and not burn the shallots once they have developed some color. We didn’t put a lid on to trap steam, just avoid burning the finely minced shallots. All told, this sauté takes probably 15 minutes – 3 to 5 for the shallots and 10-12 for the asparagus.

Serve with lemon capellini. Obvously, the cook time for capellini is shorter than spaghetti. We use somewhat more lemon juice and cheese, and about half the oil that Giada’s recipe calls for.

Pot Roast…er…braise.

This really isn’t a roast, since it isn’t dry roasted, but rather braised very much like osso buco. The Professional Chef calls this “Yankee Pot Roast” in spite of the fact that it’s a braise. Anyway, it does yield a very nice roast, and a wonderful gravy. We served it with mashed potatoes, peas, and the rolls in the prior post.

We bought a 2lb bottom round roast, and a package of raw, plain bratwurst.

You’ll also need:
1 white onion finely chopped
3 oz or so of tomato paste
8 oz red wine (we had a Rosemount Shiraz on hand)
2 carrots finely chopped
1 parsnip finely chopped (or not, we happened to have one on hand)
3 to 4 cans of low sodium beef broth (or your own homemade stock, but we’re currently out of that)
Pepper – no salt – there is salt enough in the low sodium broth to get things started.
Veg. Oil (2 tbsp or so).
Fresh herbs such as parsley, thyme and rosemary. A couple of sprigs of each.
1 dry bay leaf.

Pepper the roast lightly.
Over medium high heat, sear the meat on all sides in the hot oil, in a roasting pan (or other pan, but you may have to play the transfer game to get things where you want them in the end) until it is a dark brown all over, then set it aside, and add the onion, carrot, and parsnip. Sautee it until nicely browned, about 10 minutes. Add the tomato paste and let it cook a minute or so, stirring it, until it gives off a sweet smell. Add the wine, and reduce it by at least half. Then put the roast back in the pan and add 2 to 3 cans of the broth (or enough to come halfway up the roast). Add the raw brats (or german rope sausage, or whatever you like – a small pork roast, also seared, would be fine as well – I find that having a beef and pork mixture of some sort makes for more interesting gravy in the end.)
Put the lid on it, and put it in a 350 to 375 degree oven for about 2.5 hours. Turn it now and then to keep it moist, and make sure you’ve got a decent level of liquid in the pan. Add the herbs, and perhaps a bit of garlic powder or a clove of garlic.

We also made a carrot cake and the hot rolls, so there were times it came out of the oven and went onto two burners over medium heat on the stove for a while. It’s a covered roasting pan, it really doesn’t matter – it isn’t as though with a braise we’re trying to take advantage of dry heat on all sides, instead we’ve got moist heat in a more or less sealed environment. With a heavy enough roasting pan, you could easily do this on the stove top the whole time and probably never notice a difference.

When the roast is done, the brats will have taken on a nice color as well, and will be well cooked. The cooking liquid will be nice and thick – in fact, I added a cup of water during cooking to keep the liquid level up where it needs to be.

Take the roast and sausages out and tent with foil on a cutting board. The juices need to be strained to get the herb stems and so on out. I have a chinois, so I poured everything through the chinois, and then worked it through, which served to puree the vegetables in the cooking liquid and force them through. Scrape the outside of the chinois down and stir the pureed veggies into the liquid. If you don’t have too much salt, and don’t mind it a little thin, you probably have gravy at this point. Gordon Ramsay did basically this with the gravy at the Fenwick Arms in a Kitchen Nightmares episode. I decided I wanted a little more volume, and wanted to dilute the salt just a bit as well. Had I had homemade beef stock on hand, I would not have had any salt problem at all, but let’s face it, even the low sodium beef broth by Swanson has more salt than is needed for most recipes. I added about 1 cup of water to the strained liquid to dilute the braising liquid, and then made a flour and butter roux about 3 tbsp flour to 3 tbsp butter, cooked that for a couple of minutes (stirring constantly), and then added the braising liquid to the roux and cooked it for several minutes at a low boil, stirring constantly.

The red wine, broth, carrot and tomato paste all gave their best to create a really nice, beefy, and very dark colored gravy, with the veggies in it providing a slight sweetness, nice body and texture that is often missing from gravy. Adjust seasoning – you’ll probably want more pepper, but with as salty as even low salt beef broth is, I can’t imagine wanting more salt.

If you’re following along in the Big Book of Braising, you’ll note that this method really isn’t any different than what you’d do to braise lamb shanks, soup bones, oxtail, short ribs, or beef/veal shanks.

Where we varied from the Professional Chef’s method is that in the last 30 minutes of simmering, they would have you add peeled turnips, potatoes, and pearl onions, which would be lovely, but we wanted mashed potatoes instead, so we omitted that step. If you added the root veggies, their starch would serve to thicken the braising liquid, and might make a roux unnecessary. It would still benefit from being run through a chinois or strainer to really even out the texture prior to serving, unless you don’t mind chunky veggies and wanted to de-stem your fresh herbs prior to adding them to the pot.

Roast Goose

For New Years, Chris and I decided to try our hand at roasting a goose. We opted for something simple, and the results were quite good.

Ingredients
1 10 lb goose
1 medium onion
1 large bunch of sage
Salt and Pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remove any giblet pack from inside the cavity and rub the inside with some salt and freshly ground black pepper. Roughly chop or quarter onion, and put them in the cavity, along with the lightly crushed sage leaves. Rub the outside with salt and pepper, and puncture the skin liberally all over the bird. Place on a rack on a tray, or a roasting pan (put some water in the bottom of the tray so the lovely goose fat doesn’t burn. Roast for 1 hour, then repuncture the skin. After about another half hour, or when the goose is golden brown, flip the goose over and continue baking until the internal temperature reaches 175 degrees. Remove and let rest 5 minutes. Carve carefully-the breasts are much shallower than you may be used to on chickens or turkeys. The resulting bird was wonderfully flavorful-similar to the dark meat of turkey, but better. We also were able to liberate about 3 cups worth of goose fat, which is now sitting in our freezer to use at a later date.

With the goose, we had a wild mushroom and wild rice pilaf, and some asparagus sauteed with shallots, both of which complemented the flavor of the goose magnificently.

Roast beef and sausage with root vegetables and yorkies

Ok, so if you haven’t caught on, the yorkies in question are puddings rather than the dogs of the same nickname. We’ve used this roast method before, and I am always pleased with the results.

Ingredients
Roast:
2.5 bottom round roast
1 lb rope-style German sausage
4 carrots peeled and cut in half
1 lg onion, quartered
4 stalks of celery
5-6 white or red skinned potatoes (we peeled these, but you certainly don’t have to)
Herbs (we used thyme, sage, parsley and some of the krakow nights seasoning from Penzey’s)
Salt and pepper
3 cups stock (we used the homemade brodo di carne we made the week before-awesome stuff)

Method
Brown the roast in a roasting pan on the stovetop before cooking. Cut the celery in to about 4 inch pieces, and make a kind of raft for the roast to sit on in the pan. Coil the sausage around the roast, and scatter the cleaned veggies in the pan. Pour in the stock, and then put, covered, in a 350 degree oven. Our roast cooked for about 2.5-3 hours, but your mileage may vary.

When the roast was done, we removed the meats and veggie, and I stole some drippings for the yorkies while Chris worked on the gravy (and what a tasty gravy it was). We just used Emeril’s yorkshire pudding recipe, and they turned out pretty well. They were really amazing with the gravy (much better than mashed potatoes, in my opinion).

All in all, a really nice cold weather meal that I think will be making a spectacular return during the winter months.