serenecooking

Chicken stew (cacciatore-esque: chicken thighs, olive oil, onions, garlic, celery, v-8 for tomatoeyness, salt, pepper)

Quinoa

Steamed broccoli

This cake, but without the whisky (hush up,

kightp, we don't keep whisky in the house, and I don't like the stuff anyway, but if I make this for you, I'll leave it in. :-)

Now all I have to do is figure out the dining-table situation and we'll be having real dinners around here again. (We moved the dinner table to be my desk while I was radioactive, and never moved me back.)

Current Location: 94609
Current Music: "American girls are weather and noise..."

Last night's Mexican lamb-and-rice soup was excellent. Tonight, I tossed chicken thighs with a mix of olive oil, pomegranate sauce, garlic, and kosher salt. Put them on a rack above a cookie sheet full of potatoes and onions that had been tossed with olive oil and kosher salt, and sprinkled with garlic.

The house sure smells good. I'll try to remember to take pics. I'll serve it with a tomato-and-cucumber salad.

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: 94609

Nana's Famous Fried Chicken

( Long recipe that's easier than it sounds )

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: 94609

Well, the Mom Food Project is off to a marvelous start. I told mom yesterday that the last time I tried to duplicate her fried chicken, it didn't taste right, and the breading fell off. She told me that the chicken has to rest for a half hour for the breading to adhere. Okey-doke, check.

Then, "And how much Parmesan did you put in the breading?"

"Um, Parmesan? In fried chicken?"

Oh, yeah, there's parmesan in there. And lots of it. Anyway, she was right. The breading stuck, and it tasted just exactly as it did when I was a kid. Yay! Even the Munchkin, who has had mom's lots more recently than I have, approved.

Recipes in the next post.

( I'm gonna put the picture behind a cut tag for the folks who don't want to see pics of meat. )

This chicken soup is so good! I boiled a chicken, made a simple chicken stock with the bones and some additional chicken feet, added diced onions/celery/carrots, tossed back in the chicken and some pastina (tiny little pasta BBs), and simmered it for a bit with a little salt. Oh, man, perfect January food.

Current Mood: mellow
Current Location: 94609
Current Music: silence

I have been on a sort of a crusade lately to make all the foods my mom made for us when we were kids. None of my siblings has any interest in cooking, and I don't want my mom's recipes to die out when she dies. She's been having a blast teaching me over the phone to make knaedlach (matzoh-ball) soup, lasagna, pot roast, and on and on.

There's one dish, though, that was one of my very favorites when I was a child that I haven't asked her about: Chicken and rice.

The reason I haven't asked her is that I knew the recipe involved at least one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup. Oy.

It's worse than that, as it turns out: One can EACH of cream of mushroom, cream of chicken, and cream of celery.

I bit the bullet and bought the stuff. I will certainly find the resulting casserole too salty, but I'm eager to see if I can recreate my mom's one really trashy offering. Mostly, she cooked delicious foods from scratch, and still does. Tomorrow night, though, we're having chicken and rice, and I don't care who knows it. :-)

(Baking dish. Six chicken thighs. Garlic powder. A layer of sliced onions. Pour a mixture of the soup, some pepper, 3 cans of water, 3 cans of milk, and 2 cups of uncooked white rice on top. Sprinkle paprika on top. Bake at 350F for 45-60 minutes, until the chicken doesn't bleed when you pierce it.)

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: 94609
Current Music: "Jimmy is married and he lives down south. His wife lives somewhere colder..."

Bought a coconut, some lime leaves, some lemongrass, some galangal, enoki mushrooms, and a jar of shrimp/chili paste. Have some chicken and a bottle of fish sauce already. Made coconut cream out of the coconut with my stick blender (lots more fun than it sounds). Guess who's making tom kha gai tomorrow? :-)

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: 94609
Current Music: "Around the world in eighty muh'fuckin' days..."

I have always found my mother's knaedlach soup (matzoh-ball soup) to be about the equivalent of manna from heaven if I believed in manna from heaven. For the first couple of years that I was a vegetarian, I took one day a year off, my birthday, to eat my mom's matzoh-ball soup. On the third or fourth birthday, she found a vegan "schmaltz" and made me a veg version, so I didn't have her real-deal soup for another 20 years or so.

Yesterday, I boiled a chicken for stock, rendered chicken skin for schmaltz, and bought the vegetables. Right now, there is matzoh-ball batter/dough in my fridge, resting, and I shall pull the chicken off the bones in a little bit (I don't care at all about the chicken part, but most people seem to expect it.

When it's almost time to make the knaedlachs, I will put a pot of chicken stock on the stove, add onions, celery, and carrots, and bring them to a boil. My mother says she's been boiling the knaedlachs in water lately to help them stay together better, but that's not how she did it when I was growing up, so that's not how I'm gonna do it. I'll drop them into simmering soup and do them the old way. If they fall apart, they fall apart. I'll live with it.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, souuuuuuuuuup.

Current Location: 94609

Went to Costco today. Mostly bought staples -- sugar, toilet paper, butter for toffee, that kind of thing. But chicken (whole or parts) was 99 cents a pound, so I went kind of nuts. Bought two whole chickens and a big pack of thighs (our favorite part). Here is its fate so far:

Chicken #1: Skinned (reserved skin for schmaltz), boiled, saved the resulting yummy liquid for soup. Made chicken salad from the white meat. Saved the dark meat for the soup. Saved the carcass for the next batch of stock. Added onion, garlic, carrot, bell pepper, mushrooms, the dark meat, fish sauce, curry paste, ginger, and some shrimp to the stock to make a lovely Thai-inspired soup.

Chicken #2: Frozen for future knaedlach soup (see chicken skin, below)

Thighs: Skinned (reserved skin for schmaltz), packed two-or-three at a time into bags, frozen. Six meals' worth of chicken for about six bucks.

Chicken skin: Frozen until I get ready to make knaedlach soup (chicken soup with matzoh balls). My mother will walk me through it -- I've really only made it alongside her before, but it's really my favorite soup, and for the first few years that I was a vegetarian, I took my birthday off to have some of her matzoh balls (I was never a fan of the chicken, and eventually, mom found a brand of vegan "schmaltz" and started making me a veg version of knaedlachs).

Maybe next weekend there will be knaedlach soup. I've been on a total soup kick lately.

Current Location: 94609
Current Music: "Exeter, Rhode Island" -- Jennifer O'Connor

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Is "Hippychick Recession Cooking" redundant?

Dinner tonight

Tonight's dinner

Nana's Famous Fried Chicken

Nana's Famous Fried Chicken

mmmmmmm, souuuuup

Let the mocking begin

Yay!

Knaedlach soup

Poultry galore

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November 2009

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