Chicken Chickpea Stew and Escargot

I took the suggestion from squawkfox to see what I could do with a whole roasted organic chicken. I haven't gotten 22 meals from mine, but 1) my chicken was a bit smaller and 2) I ended up freezing about 6 cups of broth and maybe 1/2 lb of cooked chicken meat that I haven't used yet. As I'm just one person, I can only do so much. I would say that I should very easily get 22 meals for one out of this 3-4 lb chicken. I originally roasted it a-la Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking- amazing what a constant basting with butter and olive oil will do for a chicken skin. And then I used the crockpot to make broth. I love my crockpot. I cooked chickpeas and they turned out beautifully, which is great considering that canned chickpeas cost more than dried but cooking dried chickpeas has always been more effort than it's worth. I cooked mine on high heat for about 3-4 hrs and they were perfect (after an overnight soaking, of course).

I then made this delicious stew (or is it more of a soup? hard to tell, but it's not very liquidy, so I'm calling it stew) with some of the leftover chicken. I've been calling it Chicken Chickpea Stew, but there's quite a bit more than just chicken and chickpeas.

I based this roughly on the recipe from squawkfox, but pretty much added whatever I happened to have on hand:

3 small potatoes, peeled and cubed

2 tbsp olive oil

2 small onions, diced

3 cloves of garlic, diced

8 oz mushrooms, sliced

2 c cooked chickpeas

1 c dried lentils, washed and drained

10 oz package frozen spinach (thawed, but straight from the freezer worked fine too)

1 can tomato sauce

cumin, chili powder, salt, pepper

~1.5 c cooked, shredded chicken

4 c chicken broth

1. pre-cook potatoes in the microwave- about 3 min on high, covered. (I find this prevents the soup from getting too starchy)

2. Saute onions, garlic, and mushrooms in olive oil in large pot on med heat, until onions are cooked through and translucent

3. Add potatoes chickpeas, lentils, spinach, tomato sauce, chicken, and broth. Add spices to taste. Cook for about 30 min, or until lentils are cooked and soft. Serve with a nice crusty bread.

Next time I would amp up the tomatoes, maybe adding chopped fresh tomatoes as in the original recipe. The chicken, chickpeas, and lentils make this for a very hearty meal. I've also been eating it spooned over roasted cauliflower. Why did I not realize how delicious roasted cauliflower was before? I'm really not a fan of raw cauliflower on the veggie trays, but roasting things brings out the lovely caramelization and of couse that's delicious in any vegetable.

I also finished my Escargot hat!! I love this hat, and it makes me slightly sad that the weather here has been unseasonably warm for February so I don't have much excuse to wear it. I did wear it into work on Thursday, and my coworker was like, "you know it's supposed to be 40 F today, right?"

I hold out hopes for continuing to wear this this year, as it's only February and knowing the weather it will snow in late March.

I think if you wanted to be super geeky it would be fairly simple to modify the pattern to have two swirls, one on each side of the hat, to give a pseudo-Princess Leia look. With brown yarn (maybe no contrast). However, I will refrain from such things, not least because my project list is already way too long considering all the 'real' work that I should be doing (operative word is 'should').

Pattern is from the Winter 2011 issue of knitty.

I had vague ideas of entering the amateur cooking contest for baconfest 2012, but again, that involves time to actually develop a dish and test it. I do have some ideas, but no time to do test runs. So, unless some time miraculously falls into my lap, I may have to wait for baconfest 2013. Unless someone takes my brilliant idea, in which case I will need to further brainstorm what one could do with bacon.

petits fours

I've had an urge to make my own petites fours. Why? I keep seeing them for sale on gilt taste, and I can't help but think that while those may be very tasty, I could do that. So I did a little googling, and voila!

I have to say, I'm very pleased. I started with the blog post from bakerella on pound cake and petites fours. Other articles I read said to use a sponge cake, but I think the pound cake was brilliant- it's a very tasty cake in and of itself, and it held up nicely to the cutting. I didn't have any cream cheese so I used a tried-and-true pound cake recipe I had on hand:

Pound cake:
2 3/4 c flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup butter
2 c granulated sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract

sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Cream butter and sugar until smooth, beat in eggs one at a time and add vanilla. Slowly beat in flour mixture.

Normally this gets baked in a 10-in bundt pan for over an hour @ 325F. This time I put it in a jelly-roll pan and baked it for about 25 min @ 325F.

I also don't remember where I got this recipe from, or I would give credit where it's due. Normally I add 2 cups of blueberries (fresh or frozen) and some chocolate chips, if I'm feeling like it. And, I don't know how this happened, but last night I completely ran out of granulated sugar. Completely. I made up the difference with brown sugar, it was totally fine. And honestly, probably more flavorful than with white sugar.

Cool the cake, and then cut into 8 sections- I'm rather bad at cutting them into equal-sized portions, but it was ok. Then slice each section in half horizontally. There are some nice pictures on the bakerella blog. She said to apply a small amount of syrup to each piece- I didn't have a spray bottle so I tried just using a spoon. Way, way too much simple syrup. The cake started to fall apart as the liquid soaked through, after I added layers of jam and stacked it. So I skipped the syrup and just layered jam and cake. I used some blueberry rhubarb jam that I made over the summer. I also skipped the marzipan because I didn't have it and also I don't really like it that much.

The jam filling.

I decided to use a chocolate glaze instead of a fondant glaze. 1) because I love chocolate and 2) because I find fondant to be cloyingly sweet. I used a recipe from allrecipes for a shiny chocolate glaze. I doubled the recipe because I didn't want to run out. I think that was for the best, though I probably had a good cup or so of glaze left over. Still trying to decide what to do with that. I melted this over a pot of water on the stove rather than in the microwave, so that I could keep it warm over the water. I just turned off the heat and left the bowl on top of the pot.

I have no photos of the glazing process, because I only have two hands. I ended up with chocolate everywhere, possibly in my hair. But basically, I put the cake piece on a fork, and used a spoon to coat the cake with the glaze. It's pretty thin, making it super easy to pour over while it's hot. I then placed it on the silpat to cool. And then, after all of the cakes were coated, I melted some white chocolate, added some food coloring, and drizzled. :D I need to find a better method to drizzle chocolate (I am currently just using a fork dipped into the chocolate) because it sometimes results in globs of chocolate. And again, chocolate all over the kitchen.

So pretty!

nutella chocolate chip cookies

I was going to make peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, when I realized I didn't really have enough peanut butter. So I made these, kind of making it up as I went along.

1.5 sticks butter (12 tbsps)

1 c brown sugar

1 c white sugar

1 tsp (approx) vanilla

1/2 c (approx) nutella

2 eggs

2 c flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

12 oz chocolate chips

cream first five ingredients until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, blending well after each addition. Mix flour and baking powder, add to sugar/butter/egg mixture and blend. Stir in chocolate chips.

Drop by rounded teaspoon onto a cookie tray. Bake at 350F for approx 12 minutes. Cool on tray for a few minutes before moving to a cooling rack to cool completely.

Love.

note: next time, I might cut down the sugar slightly. 2 c of sugar is a LOT of sugar. On the other hand, they spread nicely and were chewy but crunchy all at once...

tiramisu kisses

I decided to make french-style macarons again today, only I had trouble deciding on a flavor. Then I remembered the instant coffee in the cupboard, along with the marcapone cheese I had made a while back (when I was contemplating making canoli for the Nov Daring Bakers challenge- that never happened, mostly because I was in charge of Thanksgiving dinner at our house, and who has time to fry canoli when all that's going on?).

So I made little tiramisu kisses. Coffee meringue cookies, sandwiched with a white chocolate marcapone filling and some chocolate ganache (because honestly, who doesn't like chocolate ganache?). I used a different macaron recipe from the Oct 2009 Daring Bakers Challenge, this time the one that came in my Dec Food&Wine by François Payard. He uses soft ball stage sugar to make the meringue, and I have a soft spot for Italian meringue after working at Sarah's. I omitted the red food coloring and added 2 tsps of instant coffee to the meringue before folding in the almond/sugar mixture.

The cookies turned out well, only some of them kind of exploded in the oven. The rest puffed beautifully and had the distinctive feet. My personal theory is that the cookies on the bottom tray (that kind of exploded) heated up too quickly and thus exploded.

Marscapone filling:

2 oz white chocolate, melted

8 oz (approx) marscapone cheese, softened.

-combine white chocolate with marscapone, mix well.

The assortment of cookies:

One that kind of 'sploded:

Perfect:

The only thing about french macarons is that they remind me of little hamburgers and thus I always have to remind myself that no, actually, they are sweet and fantastic.

a photo update

On my drive to Boston, not last weekend but the weekend before, it was raining pretty hard and I saw all sorts of rainbows. Absolutely gorgeous. I even saw a double rainbow at one point, but couldn't get a picture. Rainbows always make me think of Noah, and God's promise after the flood, and thus they always make me smile. (I also always think of an angle of 42 degrees, after that awful physics proof we had to do junior year in high school with Mr. Rylander.)

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I've been in a baking mood, so this past weekend I made a swiss roll. It's basically a simple sponge cake, with strawberry jam inside, rolled up. Much easier than it looks. It tastes okay, nothing stellar. I have recipes for chocolate rolls, which I want to try, but that requires things like baking chocolate that I didn't have on hand. However, since this was so easy to roll up, I won't be intimidated by the idea of it and might make it sometime.

I joined this website called the Daring Kitchen, and they have a monthly baking challenge and a monthly cooking challenge. I plan on doing both, but we'll see how time works out. It seems like a fun and exciting way to get new recipes. Next week (I think?) I get my first baking challenge, yay!

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I borrowed Joe's ice cream maker to make strawberry sorbato for these floats (which, by the way, were pretty fantastic), and I still haven't returned the ice cream maker (I will, soonish). Ice cream maker has made it on to my list of "appliances I want to own someday". Also on this list are a washer/dryer set, a stand mixer, and a sewing machine. About in that order, I think. Ice cream maker may be before or after sewing machine, I haven't thought it through that much. I made some mango ice cream, which turned out to be ridiculously easy and really really good. (My goal was actually to make a mango gelato, but I still haven't determined what the difference is between gelato and ice cream in terms of ingredients or technique. So I'll just call it ice cream to be safe.)

Recipe:

2 cans (14 oz? maybe?) of tropical mango (in the international foods aisle at Wegman's) in light syrup

1.5 c half and half

1. puree mango (with syrup) in a blender

2. strain to get all the fibery stuff out

3. mix with half and half

4. put in ice cream maker, churn until ready, freeze until firm.

I suppose I could've used fresh mangos, but the other recipes I found (yay google!) told me to take fresh mangos and combine with hot simple syrup, I figured the effect was the same as just using canned mangos in light syrup (which is just sugar and water, same as simple syrup, I checked the ingredients on the can first).

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My latest knitting project is a knitted rug, made out of leftover yarn from the half a dozen (or more?) blankets I've made over the years. I have a small dresser filled with yarn and knitting supplies, I've got to use it up somewhere. I also have a crapload of sock yarn, but I'm not quite in the mood for knitting socks. Must think of other things to do with sock yarn... In the meantime this is keeping me busy, though I'm running out of ideas for color combinations, and I think it needs to be several feet larger in diameter before I'm through.

Safety pins are holding it in place, so that I can see how the colors look as I go. I envision at least a 3 ft diameter rug, but possibly larger if I can make it.