Posts Tagged: chicken

Uncategorized — 4 Comments
14
Jun 10

Lemon-Herb Pulled Chicken Salad

If a savage and a gourmand met for lunch, they would eat this chicken salad. Pulling meat is a raw, carnal process. There are few times when you feel more connected with your food than when you’re tearing it apart. Coincidentally, it’s also a wonderful way to work out aggression. Despite the process, the final product is delicate, light, and clean. The flavors are clean and straightforward, with just enough nuance to make things interesting.


This chicken salad uses a lemon-olive oil vinaigrette instead of the usual mayonnaise. This works beautifully, as the meat absorbs all of the dressing, leaving you with a wonderfully fragrant dish without the heft of traditional chicken salad. A few fresh herbs only enhance the freshness of the dish.


Change things up however you want. I happen to love the contrast of bright lemon with sweet, peppery basil and a few chives, but feel free to use your own combination of herbs. Or substitute a different type of citrus. Better yet, if you have leftover roasted chicken, use that; it will cut your prep time and add wonderful flavor.


Recipe after the jump…

appetizers / main courses — 2 Comments
7
Oct 09

Thai Chicken Tenders

I started off calling this post “Skewerless Chicken Satay,” but it felt oddly deceptive. Because for me, Chicken Satay translates roughly as “Peanut Sauce on a Stick,” and there’s no peanut sauce (and no stick) in sight. Not to say that you can’t serve these chicken tenders with peanut sauce. Because that would be mighty delicious, but I didn’t do it here.

Instead, I looked for a way to make a classic Thai appetizer into a convenient weeknight dinner. I love the light flavor of chicken satay. It’s subtle but distinctly Thai. And that yellow color. And those delicious brown grill marks. They make me weak.

So it’s really no surprise that I loved this dinner, and even more because it was so simple to throw together. Without the tedious skewering of chicken satay, I spent less than 10 minutes on prep work. And in the time it took the chicken to marinade, I was able to make the rest of the meal.

Recipe after the jump…

main courses — No Comments
24
Sep 09

Balsamic Glazed Chicken

Have you ever wondered about the price markup at restaurants? On average, food costs the restaurant only 35% of what you pay. But try to make a restaurant dish at home, and you’ll find that you have to buy so many weird ingredients that it ends up costing more money, and taking way more effort to make it yourself. This dish is a serious exception.

Now, I’m sure that many professional chefs would turn their nose up in scorn at me for saying this, but I don’t believe that you need to be a hugely ambitious cook to enjoy an elegant dinner every once in a while. And I certainly don’t believe you have to break the bank for it.

Take this dinner. At under $1.50 per person for the main event, you can probably afford to splurge a bit on a side dish or two. I sauteed up a bunch of spinach with nothing but olive oil, garlic, and a pinch of salt, bringing the total to a whopping $2.50 per plate. It takes all of 20 minutes to put together, and dirties only one pot and one skillet. And the leftovers are absolutely delicious cold.


Recipe (and price breakdown) after the jump…

main courses — 3 Comments
25
Aug 09

Lemon Chicken

Last Monday, my wallet was stolen. After being emptied of cash and credit cards, it was returned a couple days later, but my grocery shopping days were over until I could get my hands on some money. Experienced bloggers probably have an arsenal of unpublished posts ready to go in case of a crisis like this. But the whole blogging thing is pretty new for me, so I was caught off guard. Now that I have money again, it’s bye bye frozen leftovers, and hello freshly cooked homemade meals. You have no idea just how excited I am.

Just before my wallet was stolen, I was planning on making chicken picatta for dinner. But over the course of a pasta-filled week, my craving for yet another Italian dinner has temporarily evaporated. Lemon chicken channels the essence of chicken picatta, but strips the classic of its rich butter sauce in favor of a clean, bright tang that is absolutely mouthwatering. As the chicken cooks, some of the sugars in the lemon juice begin to caramelize, adding a complex and slightly sweet note to an otherwise simple dish.

Contributing to my willingness to make food that requires the use of a stove is my recent purchase of an air conditioner, which I swore mere days ago that I would not buy because I didn’t want to pay the electricity bills, only to come home to the hottest, most humid night of trying to sleep yet this summer. Thankfully, my resolve quickly dissolved, and suddenly using the stove has become a real possibility. This was the perfect simple yet exciting summer meal to get me out of the frozen food doldrums.

It feels good to be back.

Recipe after the jump…

sauces — No Comments
13
Aug 09

The Dipping Debate

People tend to divide into two camps when it comes to dipping sauces. Those who oppose dipping wonder why anyone would bother eating something if they are only going to use an overpowering sauce to completely mask its flavor. Those in favor love the fact that dipping sauce adds excitement to even the simplest of dishes. I fall squarely in the second camp, with a couple of caveats:

  1. I always make sure to eat some bites with sauce and some without. I want to taste my food, but I like the variety that the sauce provides.
  2. I never smother my food in sauce. Dipping sauces are strong, and a little goes a long way. Besides, the best things to dip are crispy, and overdoing it on the sauce just totally kills the crunch.

With nearly a quart of buttermilk leftover from making homemade blue cheese dressing, I decided to test out the whole brining chicken in buttermilk thing that supposedly makes southern fried chicken so juicy. In order to do this, you just stick chicken in buttermilk and let it sit in the fridge for a day or so. It’s so easy that I successfully completed this step in an intensely mindless state, after working 13 hours straight starting at 3am. All you have to do the next day is take the chicken out and cook it however you like. The theory is that the buttermilk makes the meat juicy and tender when it’s cooked. It actually works quite well.


I opted to just make oven baked chicken fingers (coat the brined chicken tenders in panko bread crumbs, spray them with olive oil and bake at 375-400 until cooked), which are an otherwise boring meal, no matter how interesting buttermilk may be. I recruited the help of 4 easy dipping sauces that take almost no work to make and bring plain chicken to new heights. For a bit of a smoky flavor, I made a mexican style dip with store bought fajita seasoning. Then, I made my own honey mustard (which is literally just honey and mustard, but beats the store bought stuff by a mile). After that, I tried an amazingly simple apricot sauce, and lastly an Indian curry dip with red onions. These sauces are all about contrast: two are creamy and spicy, two are sweet and tangy. None of them took more than 2 minutes to throw together.



Recipes after the jump…

appetizers / main courses — 5 Comments
10
Aug 09

Mini Buffalo Pizzas & Blue Cheese Dressing

I often find myself craving buffalo chicken for no apparent reason. In the heat, it’s the cool and creamy blue cheese dressing that appeals to me, and in the cold, the hot sauce beckons me unrelentingly. Today was one of those days when it was all about the blue cheese dressing. Standing in the grocery store with no idea what to make for dinner, I discovered myself next to the blue cheese when suddenly the craving struck. I wasn’t in the mood to fry up a batch of wings, but the thought of pizza with buffalo chicken, doused in blue cheese dressing had my mouth watering.

I’m sure that pizza dough is quite easy to make, but it’s certainly easier and faster to buy. Store-bought pizza dough is surprisingly good, and because I’d resolved to make my own blue cheese dressing from scratch, I wanted a plain, simple backdrop for the other flavors in my hand–nothing too bold or outrageous.

There are several tricks to make something ordinary into something slightly fancier, but the easiest by far is taking something usually served in a large batch and shrinking it down. This, in addition to the fact that I didn’t feel like making a whole big pizza, inspired me to miniaturize, and my experimentation worked out nicely. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to put together and 12 minutes to bake. That’s less time than it takes to get delivery, and it’s so, so much tastier.

Recipe after the jump…

main courses — 1 Comment
21
Jul 09

CPO & Chipotle Lime Sour Cream

CPO, or Chicken, Peppers, and Onions became a standby for me while at college because it has essentially 3 ingredients, is really easy, and super versatile. Nearly every cuisine around the world incorporates these 3 ingredients into its repertoire, so all you need to do to mix it up is change around the sauce.

Today’s version took on a latin flare with a chipotle-lime sour cream, which is adapted from a recipe by Andy Husbands, one of this year’s Hell’s Kitchen contestants. Served atop a warm tortilla, it was a blend of warm and cool, tangy and creamy, chewy and crunchy that had my mouth dancing and me excited for every new bite.

Recipe after the jump…