Spanish Chicken

This recipe comes from 500 Best-Ever Recipes: Mediterranean (ISBN 0-681-63051-5). At times the recipe was unclear about which things were in which pan and what was being cooked versus set aside. I'm fairly sure that I ended up doing more or less what they wanted. In any case it ended up great so I'll write up what I did.

Ingredients:

1/2 lb	chicken
1/3 lb	bacon, diced
1 lb	tomatoes, chopped
1	red bell pepper, chopped
1	green bell pepper, chopped
1	large onion, chopped
3	garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp	ground paprika
3 tsp	parsley, chopped
	salt
	black pepper
	olive oil

Procedure:


Mix the paprika with salt to taste, about 1 tsp, and rub on chicken. Begin frying it slowly in a bit of olive oil. Meanwhile, start the bacon in another pan.



When the bacon starts to brown (and has given off fat) add the onions and garlic. Fry until the onions are browning and soft. Then add the tomatoes to the bacon mixture. This is the sauce. Season to taste with salt and pepper.



Add the bell peppers to the chicken pan (it doesn't matter if they don't really fit) and let the chicken finish cooking. Then mix the chicken and peppers into the sauce. Cover and simmer for 15 minutes.



Add parsley. Makes four servings over rice.

This worked out really well despite ambiguities in the recipe. It's not spicy at all, which is something I would typically want in a chicken dish over rice, but it's plenty well flavored. I think making a sauce by starting with bacon is a strong idea but it was a little strange for me after not having eaten bacon in so long. In the future I may replace the bacon with a small amount of the co-op's wonderful greasy chorizo (which is also frequently used in this Mediterranean cookbook). That would add a bit of spice and perhaps trump a lot of the vegetables, though.

The recipe called for skin-on, bone-in chicken. I used skinless boneless chicken breast strips. It worked great. If I repeat this recipe I'll go even further and and use pieces of chicken cut into chunks.

Despite similarities to a pasta sauce, I think this would be really strange over noodles. Rice was for sure the correct choice.

Red Eyes

Hey all,

I invented these little guys over the weekend while in South Dakota for Taylor's wedding. He put us up with a family friend, Sandra. She was outrageously hospitable, providing beds for seven (!) of us guys (including Ryan, from whom I stole all of these pictures) and filling her fridge with food and beer for us. She treated us like family, which was wonderful.

On Saturday morning we took it upon ourselves to host a breakfast get together. After having stayed up until two or three in the morning drinking beers and telling stories we dragged ourselves out of bed at eight and got to work on food. We had some pancakes, which were tasty but I'm not sure what (if any) recipe was used. There was a fruit salad which is below even my standards for what can be written up on a cooking blog. My contribution was Red Eyes, which I guess I came up with. However, they are based heavily on One Eyes, taught to me by Pokey.

They are simple but very tasty.

Ingredients:

9	English muffins
8	eggs (approx)
3	roma tomatoes
	butter
	salt
	pepper
	milk

Procedure:

Crack your eggs into a measuring cup. It's important that you be able to pour well out of it. You can do the eggs however you want, I guess, but I added a few splooshes of milk (perhaps 2 oz total) and a lot of salt and pepper. Then whisk them.

Using a butter knife, cut the center out of each muffin (to make them look like rings). The hole should be just barely larger around than a roma tomato. The larger the hole, the tastier it will be, but also the more fragile. Then carefully pull the muffins in half and butter the formerly inside half.

The muffin holes can be toasted and eaten with butter and jam or whatever. They are English muffins, after all.



Slice the tomatoes into a few dozen slices. You'll have 18 half-muffins and each one should get a slice or two of tomato.

Heat some butter in a pan. Put an english muffin in, butter side down (yeah, that's a lot of butter. Don't worry about it. It's good for you. Pour in egg until the hole in the muffin is about half full.



Now, this is a bit trickier than you might suspect. The muffin has a rough bottom so the egg will try to escape. The trick I found to work best was having a very hot pan, then slowly pouring in egg with one hand while using a few fingers of the other hand to press the muffin flat against the pan. Once the bottom layer of egg solidifies you're safe to pour in more.

After letting that cook for a bit add in a slice or two of tomato to the cavity. Fill any remaining space with egg to try to keep the tomato from escaping. Cook the egg through. This will require you to flip the muffin, though it's unclear precisely when it's best to do this. They tend to not look that pretty in any case, so I'd just not worry about appearances and just flip it as soon as you build up the confidence.

You can serve these with salsa or plain. Despite having so few ingredients they are very tasty. They're more of an appetizer than a meal so it's hard to say how many servings this makes. A handful.

I would have really liked to put avocado in these with the tomato. However, we did not because Taylor is allergic and we felt it would not be appropriate to kill him on the morning of his wedding day.

Cheese may also have been nice. I would probably put it on top of the bottom layer of egg but under the tomato so that it's sort of a surprise (rather than being a visible garnish type feel on top).

Chicken with Spicy Onions

This is another recipe out of India's 500 Best Recipes. It was good. I'm going to have to start using these cookbooks more, since I'm finding that the people who write them really know a whole lot more about food preparation that I, an occasional cooking blogger, do (fancy that).

Ingredients:

1.5 lbs	boneless skinless chicken (approx)
2 tsp	ground turmeric
0.25 tsp	chili powder
2	small onions
1 bunch	fresh cilantro
1 inch	fresh ginger (approx)
1	chili pepper
1 tsp	cumin seeds
1/6 cup	plain yogurt
1/6 cup	heavy cream
0.25 tsp	corn starch
	oil
	salt

Procedure:

Mix turmeric, chili powder, and salt to taste (I used about 1 tsp, which worked fine). Cut the chicken into small chunks (perhaps 1-inch squares or so) and rub with this. Fry until the outside of the chicken is sealed. Don't worry about cooking it through; you'll cook it more later. Set the chicken aside, covering it to keep it warm.



Chop the cilantro coarsely. Mince the ginger an dice the onions. Mix those three ingredients together. Mince the chili peppers. Fry about 3/4 of the cilantro mixture with the cumin and peppers for a few minutes, until the onions soften.



Return the chicken to the pan with the mixture. Cover and cook gently for about 15 minutes.



Turn off the heat. As the pan cools down a bit, mix the yogurt, cream, and corn starch. Fold those in. Bring the pan back to the heat and cook until the chicken is tender.



Just before serving, add the rest of the onions, cilantro, and ginger. Serve over rice. Makes 4 servings.



This recipe makes a very tasty meal that feels very Indian to me, a person who has never been to India. It's probably the turmeric and cilantro combination. I'm starting to really appreciate those spices together. The ginger helps too.

Where I failed in this recipe was the chili peppers. I ended up with peppers that were quite mild. If you see the size of the pepper in the picture you probably can guess this... the larger a pepper, the less scared you need be of it. This was fine since the dish is well seasoned by itself. However, a bit of spice would have added to it. I anticipate making this again.

Pork Chop Bake

I didn't really realize that this was going to be an update until after I had made it. However, I was so struck by the simplicity and tastiness that I felt it appropriate to share.

Ingredients:

4	pork chops
1.5 cups	dry rice
10	small tomatoes
1	onion
6	dried hot chili peppers
	broth
	water
	salt
	pepper

Procedure:

Soak the pork chops for a few hours in broth. Then brown them, seasoning heavily with salt and pepper. This is just to make them prettier. You'll be baking them in a bit so you don't have to worry about cooking them through.

Put the rice in the bottom of a glass baking pan. Add to it 2 cups of broth and 1.5 cups of water. Add salt and pepper to taste. Chop the onions and cut the tomatoes into quarters. Put those on top of the rice and add salt and pepper to taste. Throw the hot chili peppers in there too.

Put the pork chops on top of the tomatoes. Cover the pan with foil. Bake at 350 F for 45 minutes, then remove the foil and bake for another 15 minutes. Makes four servings.



For broth I've recently taken to Kitchen Basics vegetable stock. I really like it, as it has a lot of character to it without MSG. It also has no MSG added and no MSG produced through hydrolized vegetable products and all that other nonsense that they're using nowadays to sneak MSG into things while claiming that there's none added. Note that I don't universally avoid MSG; I like chinese takeout and Doritos as much as the next guy. I just prefer to cook without it. It spooks me out a little bit.

As another aside, I'm starting to get skeptical about this technique for the hot dried peppers. It's been claimed to me that if you boil them with something, some of the heat will boil out of them and into the food. I have not found this to be the case.l In the future, if I want to use them, I will crush them and actually add them to the food. For this recipe I would probably use 1 or 2; they're quite hot. Six would be overkill.

Good Grief

It's been ages since I've put up an update. Sorry. I've got 3 that I'll try to get written up in the next few days.