Wild Rice and Fruit Salad

This is a cold salad that they had at St Olaf, and which I always enjoyed. Between my memory and some online references this is what I pieced together.

Ingredients:

1.5 cups	uncooked wild rice
1 cup	sweetened dried cranberries
1/2 cup	slivered almonds
2	small apples, diced
1/2 cup	basalmic vinaigrette dressing
1/4 cup	olive oil
2 tbs	orange marmalade
1 tbs	honey

Procedure:
Prepare the rice as directed. Throw the almonds in a frying pan for a few minutes to toast them. Throw a cit of lemon juice on the apples if you like, as they may otherwise get brown from sitting around as you wait for the rice.

Mix the vinaigrette, olive oil, honey, and marmalade. The best way I found to do this was to start with the marmalade then slowly add the liquids. If you throw a lump of marmalade into a cup of liquid you'll have a hard time breaking it up.

Add the cranberries to the rice as it cools, then stir in the almonds, dressing, and apples. Serve cold.

This was a bit too much fluid; maybe decrease by a few tablespoons the amount of salad dressing.

The apples should probably have been granny smith, but all I had around were some small, soft, sweet ones. The softness was more a problem than anything, causing them to sustain damage during the mixing. Otherwise this was very tasty. It's probably really healthy too.

I took a picture of this, but I don't think I'll share it. As you may imagine, it doesn't look like anything. But I promise, it's worthwhile.

The Most Terrifying Thing

Take about half of a jelly jar and fill it with vodka (as cheap as possible). Add two sliced cloves of garlic and two seeded chopped habaneros. Let sit.

This was originally intended to be a beverage. I thought a bit of spice would perhaps distract from the cheapness of the vodka. Perhaps it would make for a very exciting shot, I thought. Note that it originally had only a fraction of that much spice. And hey, they had chili vodka in Hungary.

It proved to be quite strong, even at the original small dose of pepper. And it turns out that the spiciness didn't cover the bad taste of the vodka; it just added a horrifyingly potent aftertaste.

It gets stronger as it sits. This has been in my fridge for about a week. This morning I dipped the tip of my little finger in it for the tiniest of tastes. It woke me right up.


The plan now is to let it sit. Eventually it may be convenient to basically have liquid spice sitting around. it's basically some sort of sadistic cooking wine. Alternatively, it's an invisible way to do something terrible to someone's food or beverage. But that would be pretty mean.

Broccoli Ravioli

We made ravioli tonight from scratch. Well, Aaron started making them then had to take a long phone call so I ended up doing a bunch of it. I don't have the recipe on hand. I don't know that Aaron does either; the first thing we did was swap broccoli for spinach and then things got out of hand from there.

I'm hoping to try it myself in the next few days, minus the parts that didn't work out so well. Then I'll write it up properly.

Seville Chicken

This recipe comes out of the same cookbook as last time. Again, I changed it a bit more. Again, it was delicious. The biggest deviation I take from the recipe in this case was the replacement of slivered almonds with dried cranberries. I did it wrong. As I did them the cranberries were fine but very unremarkable; they could have been awesome.

Ingredients:

5	boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 1/4 cup	uncooked brown basmati rice
2	chorizo links, cut into chunks
1	onion, chopped
1	orange, peeled and sliced, with a thin section of rind reserved
3/4 cup	white wine
2 1/2 cup	chicken broth
2	garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 cup	dried cranberries
	flour
1	yellow bell pepper, sliced
1	red bell pepper, sliced
6	roma tomatoes, diced
1/4 tsp	thyme
	olive oil
	salt
	black pepper
	flour

Procedure:

To the flour add salt and pepper to taste. Dust the chicken with the flour mixture and fry in olive oil until well browned. It's fine if your pan is not large enough to easily fit them all frying at once; you can just do them a few at a time. Don't worry about cooking the chicken through as it'll cook for plenty of time later. Set the chicken aside. The recipe book recommends that you only need about 10 tsp of olive oil to fry all of the chicken but I found about twice that much to be appropriate.



Cook the garlic and onions for a few minutes in the used oil. Once they begin to brown, add the bell peppers. Cook until they soften a bit add the chorizo and stir fry some more.



After the chorizo gives you a bit of fat in the bottom of the pan add the rice and cranberries. Stir this around on high heat for a minute or two to tease the rice a little bit. I'm not sure exactly what this does, but I did it and it didn't seem to hurt anything.



Add the tomatoes, the broth, and the wine. Also stir in the thyme and the orange peel. Bring this all to a simmer and return the chicken to the pan. Simmer for about an hour, until the chicken and rice are tender. Just before serving, stir in the orange pieces and allow them to heat through. Serves five.



This recipe is supposed to have almonds instead of cranberries. I forgot to get them at the supermarket so I worked with what I had (and hey, cranberries go wonderfully with orange). The mistake I made was assuming for some reason that cranberries should be cooked as if they are almonds. Since I added them with the rice they got to simmer for the full hour. Over the course of that time they plumped up and basically lost all taste. I think the best way to do it would be to add the cranberries ten minutes before serving (or perhaps even right at the end with the oranges). That way they would still be sharp and firm. In that case a hint of cinnamon may also have been appropriate, or maybe even a bit of brown sugar.

The chicken was another deviation I took from the book. They recommended thighs. I used breasts. I think they suffered for not having skin; the flour didn't adhere to the chicken very well. The pieces are also huge. I think a better way to do it would be with chicken chunks, maybe a sixth of the size of the breast. They're more convenient to eat as well as having more surface area to hold onto the fried crust.

The recipe specifically wanted crushed garlic. I cut it into chunks and crushed it using the bottom of a mason jar. It was a bit juicier than I'm used to from mincing garlic but I don't know that the difference is relevant.

This recipe will be revisited. It was really quite delicious. I think it helped that I haven't cooked with thyme before. It's a nice little spice.

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.