Roasted Orange Chicken with Sweet Potatoes

You may recall my roasted lime chicken adventure from last weekend. I decided to ride the coattails of that success. Essentially I repeat the spirit of that recipe but tweak a few details. It turned out alright this time but shows great promise.

I write out the whole recipe here even though it's really similar to last time. There are important differences.

Round 0 Ingredients:

2 lbs (approx)	boneless skinless chicken strips
1 large	orange
1 tsp	ground cinnamon
.25 cups	brown sugar
1.5 inches	fresh ginger

Round 1 Ingredients:

4	sweet potatoes (about 1 lb each)
.5 large	orange
.5 tsp	ground cinnamon
4 tsp	brown sugar
.5 tsp	black pepper

Round 2 Ingredients:

.5 large

orange

Procedure:
Preheat oven to 350F. Using a fine grater, pulp ginger. Zest your orange then cut it in half. Mince orange zest, ginger pulp, cinnamon, and sugar with as much orange juice as necessary to make a paste (it won't take much). Line the bottom of a 9x13 pyrex pan with your chicken strips and cover uniformly with the paste. Juice the rest of the orange over the chicken. Put the orange rind on top, cover the pan with foil, and place in the oven for 20 minutes.



In the meantime, skin your potatoes and cut them into wedges. Boil for 10 to 15 minutes, until they start to be tender, then drain them. Mix dry ingredients together. Once your chicken has finished the first round of cooking, take it out of the oven and peel pack the foil. Put the potatoes over the chicken then sprinkle the sugar mix over them. Squeeze the half orange over that, replace the foil, and return to the oven for 20 more minutes.



Zest the rind from the previous round as well as the remaining unsqueezed half. Chop the zest a little bit to get rid of any particularly long pieces. When the time comes, remove the chicken from oven and discard the foil. Squeeze the last of the orange over the potatoes and sprinkle the zest over them. Return to the oven without foil for 30 minutes (it's probably done after 20 but I don't mess around with chicken). After removing it, check to see that the chicken is done then serve.



There will probably still be quite a bit of liquid in the bottom of the pan when it's done, particularly if you were not thorough in draining your potatoes. In hindsight I believe it would have been appropriate to discard the foil when the potatoes were first added in order for more fluid to boil off.

I also found this dish to be lacking the bite I was hoping for. It's possible that the amount of ginger needs to be increased or dried ginger could be added. It might help to turn some of the orange juice into lemon. Perhaps it would even be appropriate to add some garlic to the rub; this would add the aggression I was hoping for though it might fight with the other flavors.

Compared to the lime rub last week I was disappointed in how little the flavor soaked into the potatoes this time. I would also therefore recommend adding orange juice to the water they boil in, perhaps even put the rinds in there instead of with the chicken.

Internet Spice Cake

Recently Aaron made a spice cake from scratch. Now, I know what you're thinking: "but Charles, haven't we been talking about how cake from a box is so tasty and incomparably easier? And didn't you even undertake the task of figuring out which kind of boxed brownie is best?"

Faithful reader, you are astute. I made this cake from scratch out of curiosity more than practicality. As far as the boxed brownies go, I've tried a few more types. I haven't written them up since it seems that those updates are not particularly interesting. Suffice to say, my handful of trials have indicated that neither Target brand nor Betty can compete with Ghirardelli.

My cake recipe came from the internet. I made only minor changes, though I have some thoughts about what I would change in the future. I also made frosting from a recipe I found here, though I found it to be unsatisfying and added to it substantially.

Cake ingredients:

2.5 cups	unbleached all-purpose flour
.25 cups	corn starch
4 tsp	baking powder
.5 tsp	salt
1 tsp	ground cinnamon
.5 tsp	ground nutmeg
.25 tsp	chili powder
.5 tsp	ground allspice
.5 tsp	ground cloves
4 tsp	fresh ginger, pulped
2 cups	light brown sugar
3 large	eggs
1 cup	milk
2 tsp	vanilla extract
1 cup	softened butter

Frosting Ingredients:

8 oz	softened cream cheese
1 stick	softened butter
1.5 cups	powdered sugar
.25 cups	apple butter
3 tsp	honey
.25 tsp	chili powder

Cake Procedure:
Preheat oven to 350F. Invite Katie and Aaron over for dinner. While cooking something unrelated, have them mix everything together. First they'll combine all the dry ingredients. Then they'll whisk the eggs into the liquid ingredients. Butter is mixed in first, then the liquid ingredients. Brown sugar and ginger, being neither dry nor liquid, go in now... I guess. Get an electric mixer and scramble everything together thoroughly because that probably wasn't the right order.

Choose either a 9x13 pan or an 8x8 pan and a cupcake pan. Grease and flour them, even if they're nonstick, before adding batter. Bake until a fork inserted near the middle comes out clean. Cupcakes take about 20 minutes. 8x8 pans take about 40 minutes (supposedly). If you put too much in the 8x8 then hope you have a rack in your oven tall enough for it to rise over the edges of the pan and give it an extra 15 minutes to bake.


The cake came out dry. It was very mellow. I would like to try it again, using ground ginger like I was supposed to do in the first place. I would also use more nutmeg, since it's delicious, and add half a cup of applesauce.

Frosting Procedure:
Mix together cream cheese, butter, apple butter, and most of the sugar because those are the only ingredients in the online recipe. Try it. It's not right. Start throwing things in there. Add the rest of the sugar to give it a more frosting-like consistency then throw in the chili powder and honey to give it a little sass. You can use the cupcakes to test it as you go; your guests only have to know about the cake.

Once you are satisfied with it, spread it thickly on the cake to balance out the dryness. Sprinkle some extra chili powder on top for decoration.



Ideally the cake should be served using Paula's silverware while she is abroad. Then you should accidentally bring the serving utensils home. Oops.

Roasted Lime Chicken with Sweet Potatoes

This recipe is based heavily on one in an Indian cookbook I got for Christmas (India's 500 Best Recipes, ISBN 0-681-37575-2). However, I did some fudging due to some unavailable ingredients (like fresh turmeric) and some personal preferences.

I'm going to describe how we proceeded as opposed to telling you how to do this right. In some places it's clearly not ideal. There was a lot going on in my kitchen at the same time so things got a little confusing. I'm not sure what the proper procedure would be for the same effect.

Ingredients:

1 handful	Cilantro (with stems)
4 cloves	Garlic
2 tsp	Salt
4 tsp	Ground Turmeric
4 half	Limes
1 cup	Broth
5 small	Sweet Potatoes
2 lbs	Chicken Strips
	Black Pepper

Procedure:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees for something that you cooked earlier.



Mince garlic, salt, cilantro, and turmeric; squeeze just enough lime to make a paste, about one half. Cover the bottom of a nine by thirteen pan with a single layer of chicken. Rub with the paste. Squeeze two more lime halves over the rubbed chicken. Throw the squeezed limes in there and cover the pan with foil.



Turn off the oven. Wait five minutes then put the chicken in the oven.

Cut sweet potatoes into wedges after peeling them. Boil them for ten to fifteen minutes until they begin to soften. Remove the chicken (which has now been in a cooling oven for 20 minutes and it starting to cook around the edges) and peel back the foil. Put all those potatoes on there. Squeeze the last lime half over the potatoes and throw the rind in too. Replace foil and return to oven for 20 minutes.



Notice that the oven is off. Turn it back up to 350. Give the chicken 20 more minutes then remove it from the oven. Pour the broth over your potatoes. Sprinkle generously with black pepper. The pan was probably pretty wet even before the broth, so now there's a lot of fluid in there. Return to oven without foil for 25-30 minutes. See if you can boil off some of that liquid as the chicken finishes cooking.



The potatoes should be soft all the way through. And after so much time in the oven the chicken will be quite tender.

Serves... four? We had seven but also a shepherd's pie and a handful of side dishes.

I would repeat this recipe. It was delicious. But next time I will change a few things. I'll use four potatoes instead of 5. And I think the roasting should go something like 20 minutes, add potatoes, 20 minutes, add broth, 20 minutes (all at 350F of course). I'll also decrease the amount of broth to perhaps 3/4 cup or 1/2 cup; there was no shortage of moisture.

The original recipe asks for fresh turmeric which I did not see at the grocery. I arbitrarily substituted 3 tsp ground for 2 inches of minced fresh. I'll bet the fresh turmeric would make it even better (or fresh ginger could perhaps be substituted).

Great Grandma's Candied Apples

This update is particularly exciting. Over Christmas I learned from my great aunt that great grandma Fyfe used to make apples two ways: candied and as applesauce. One was for eating at breakfast and the other was not to be eaten at breakfast, though nobody could remember which was which. I recently opened my mail to find a recipe card, hand written by great grandma Fyfe who knows how long ago, describing her candied apples technique.



As well as I can tell, here is what it says:

1½ C Water
1 C Sugar

Bring to boil then drop in quartered apples. Cover and cook slowly until they look tender - about 30 min. Remove top and place in preheated oven 350º for approximately 30 min longer or until pink and most of juice absorbed in apples. Pour into bowl immediately then cover with waxed paper, left free. Chill.

Thanks Heidi for help with some of the trickier words!



It also included a note from my great aunt saying that firm tart apples are best.

My apples are pretty small. The recipe doesn't specify but I eyeball that I should use four. It's about as many as I can fit in the pan before I run out of water. The recipe also doesn't specify whether or not to peel the apples. I elect not to, as the changing color of the skin given me some indication of how the cooking is going (and, since apples float, which parts need to be rotated under the water).



Now as you may notice my apples are not so much tender as disintegrated after their time on the stove, even though I took them off after 20 minutes rather than 30. And after half an hour in the oven it was pretty clear that they weren't going to turn pink and soak up all the remaining liquid. So this didn't pan out.

The first bright side is that it's still tasty. It's pretty much like a sweet applesauce. The second bright side is that I only used about a third of my apples (I was planning a big applesauce batch, appropriately enough). I'm going to try this again. I think I know what went wrong.

I ended up with way too much fluid at the end. I had fit as many apples into that sugar water as I could but I think that pan was exactly the wrong shape. With a narrower pan I could push in a bunch of apples and many would be forced below the surface of the water. With a very wide pan I would have been able to arrange the apples in a single layer. I think either of those would have allowed me to use more apples for the same amount of water. I'm inclined to try the wide pan next.

I think I also did not cook the apples slowly enough. I had the water barely boiling, but I think perhaps I should have let it lapse to less than a boil. That will allow the tenderness to get to the center of the apple before the outside becomes mush.

Stay tuned for the next chapter in this adventure.

Tortilla Española aka Spanish Omelet

We're starting the new year off with something exciting and different. At no point is there any stir frying in this recipe! In the near future I hope to try all sorts of exciting things. For Christmas I was gifted a sizable number of fun looking cookbooks.

Ingredients:

2	yukon gold potatoes, cut into half medallions
2	onions, diced
5	eggs
1	tomato
1/2 cup	ham, diced
	olive oil
	milk
	mozzarella cheese, shredded

Procedure:
Place potatoes and onions in a pan and add enough olive oil to cover them. Boil in oil until the potatoes are fork tender, about 20 minutes. Drain off the oil but do not discard it. You have reclaimed most of what should have been a sizable oil investment, but now it's cloudy delicious onion olive oil.

Scramble the eggs with a sploosh of milk. Add the ham. Add drained potatoes and onions. At this point the onions will have cooked down to almost nothing so the potatoes will make up the bulk of the solids. Mix this well, so that everything is well coated in egg but don't accidentally mash the potatoes.

Use a little of that reclaimed olive oil to coat the bottom of a pan. It can be either a ten-inch pan or a particularly tall eight-inch one. It is crucial that the pan have a round bottom.

Add your mixture to the pan. Slice the tomato. Arrange the tomato slices on the top of your omelet then sprinkle generously with cheese. As this cooks, agitate the pan to keep the omelet from sticking, using a rubber spatula to gently loosen any parts that become stuck to the pan. This is why the pan needed to be round; in a square bottomed pan the omelet cannot move and becomes stuck.

Once the omelet is done most of the way through (and firm on the top), flip it. This is most easily done by scooting the omelet, upright, out of the pan and onto a plate. Then invert the pan over the omelet, press it against the plate, and flip the pan and plate together quickly. Let it cook for a few minutes in order to finish cooking and brown the cheese. Invert the omelet again so that the pretty tomatoes are on top and serve.



Now, I'm no expert in tortilla science. However, my research indicates that this can be served either hot or cold, and as either a meal or an appetizer. Additionally I'm told that this dish has a robust shelf life even at room temperature.

The typical tortilla española does not include tomato or ham. You can make this just the same by omitting those ingredients. Equally, you can add other things to make it more exciting. Minced garlic and bell peppers come to mind, for example. What do you think sounds good?