Mod Ozzfest 2013 -- Chicken & Kumara (Sweet Potato) Curry

(This recipe accompanies Naked Vine New Year 2013 -- A Taste of Australia.)

• 5-6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
• 2 Tbsp of canola or vegetable oil
• 1 medium white onion, cut into thin slices
• 3 garlic cloves, crushed
• 1 lemongrass stem, white part only, thinly sliced (although if you use the stuff in a tube, few will notice)
• 2 tsp ground tumeric
• 2 tsp curry powder
• 1 tsp chili powder
• 1 medium sweet potato (kumara), cut into 2cm cubes
• 1 can of coconut milk
• 1/2 cup of chicken broth or white wine
• 2 Tbsp of Thai fish sauce
• 1/2 tsp of sugar
• A handful of fresh cilantro, finely chopped

Cut the chicken thighs into strips or chunks.

Heat the oil in a wok on a medium-high heat and partially brown the chicken for about 1-2 minutes. Transfer chicken to a plate and set aside.

Add onion to the wok and fry for about 2 minutes or until translucent. Add a little more oil if the wok gets dry. Add the garlic and fry for 30 seconds. Add the lemongrass and fry for another 30 seconds. Add the tumeric, curry powder and chili powder and fry for 1 minute.

Add the sweet potato (kumara) and sugar. Stir well. Add the coconut milk, broth or wine, fish sauce and cilantro. Stir well to combine and bring to a boil.

Once the curry is boiling add the chicken and then turn the heat down to low and cover. Simmer gently for 20 minutes.

Serve curry on a bed of jasmine or basmati rice and garnish with more cilantro.

Earthy Shade of Winter (Spiced Lentils & Roasted Cauliflower)

Technorati Tags: food,recipes,wine

Sick of winter? Yeah, me too. Soup and stew season, for sure. The cold also lends itself to cravings for heavy, meaty food – and I was in the mood to make something a little healthier. This pair of vegetarian dishes were absolutely splendid side by side.

The cauliflower recipe originally called for golden raisins, but I thought the cranberries gave a much brighter flavor. The lime juice was a last minute addition to the lentil recipe. Lime juice just goes so well with greens and earthy flavors for balance.

To drink? A dirty, funky Bordeaux. Decant well, people. Enjoy!

Spiced Lentils with Mushrooms & Greens

• 1 c. lentils
• 1/2 lb. sliced portabella mushrooms
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 tsp. cumin
• 1/2 tsp. coriander
• 1/4 tsp. black pepper
• 1/4 tsp. turmeric
• 1/2 lb. Swiss chard or other greens, large stems discarded, leaves chopped coarsely
• 1 tbsp. chopped parsley
• juice of a lime

In a small saucepan, bring the lentils, some salt, and 2 1/2 c. water to a boil. Cover and cook over low heat for 30 minutes or until lentils are tender.

In another saucepan, heat a tablespoon of olive oil over moderate heat. Add the mushrooms, some salt, and a splash of red wine. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, for 6-7 minutes, or until mushrooms have given off most of their liquid. Add spices and cook, stirring, for 1 minute or until fragrant. Add the greens and cook, stirring, until wilted – about 3-4 minutes.

Add the lentils with the cooking water to the mushrooms & greens. Bring to a simmer. Simmer 4-5 minutes. Add the parsley and lime juice.

 

Roasted Cauliflower with Dried Cranberries

• 1 head cauliflower, cut into small florets
• 1 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
• 2 tbsp. dried cranberries
• 1/4 c. grated Parmesan or Pecorino cheese
• 1 tbsp chopped parsley

Preheat the oven to 375. Spread the cauliflower florets in a baking pan and drizzle with vinegar and a tablespoon or so of olive oil. Toss until coated. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss again. Roast for 40 minutes or until tender.

In a small skillet, heat a little olive oil over medium heat. Add the cranberries and saute for a minute or so, until berries are hot. Add the raisins to the cauliflower along with the parsley and cheese and toss to mix.

Simple Pleasures (Brined, grilled chicken with garden salsa)

So, it’s the end of the season. You’ve still got tomatoes, peppers, and boatloads of basil. You’re tired of making salsa. You’ve got enough pesto. What to do?

As little as possible. That’s what:

• 1/2 c. salt
• 1/3 c. sugar
• 2 cloves minced garlic
• 2 c. water
• boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• a tomato or two, diced
• a green pepper or two, diced
• pine nuts
• basil leaves, chopped
• couscous

Now, if you’re running really short on time, you can skip the brining. But if you have 10 minutes the night before, it’s so worth it. Brining makes anything (other than beef) juicier, more tender, and more flavorful.

Other than the brining ingredients, vary the amount of ingredients to your liking.

Put the water, salt, garlic, and sugar in a pot over high heat. Stir occasionally until all the solids have dissolved. Remove the pot from the heat. Either let cool to lukewarm or add a handful of ice cubes. Put the chicken in a ziploc bag. Add the brine. Seal the bag and put it in the fridge for at least four hours – overnight is better.

When dinnertime gets close, get a grill to medium-high heat. Drain the chicken and pat dry. Rub the chicken with a little olive oil. Sprinkle with ground pepper. Grill the chicken until the juices run clear – usually 6-8 minutes per side.

Meanwhile, heat a skillet over high heat. Add the pine nuts. Toss until lightly toasted. Add the tomato, pepper, and basil leaves. Cook, stirring, for one minute. Remove from heat. Add salt and pepper to taste and set aside.

Also, make your couscous. For this one, we used pearl couscous – but you can really use anything you like here.

When the chicken is done, remove from the grill and let stand for 5-10 minutes. Plate up. Pour a medium bodied, fruity white wine. Torrontes is a great choice. Chow down.

Captain Hi-Tapas (Basic Yummy Tapas)

 

OK, folks – this is going to be easy and quick, because that’s what we needed here. Rapid, healthy, fiber-filled calories for our enjoyment. It’s the end of the holiday weekend and we’re feeling a little bit uninspired. But tapas popped to mind, since it’s one of our favorite things.

For those of you unfamiliar with tapas, it’s the Spanish’s greatest contribution of culinary common sense. Basically, it’s a bunch of small-plate type appetizers. Almost anything can be tapas. But fish and roasted stuff are usually on the menu somewhere.

Since we had a bottle of La Cana 2008 Albariño – we decided to run with it. We just got the makings for a few small plates and decided to call it dinner Tonight’s ingredients:

• 1 link chorizo sausage
• 1 box Kroger mussels in wine and garlic sauce
• 1 bulb fennel
• baby carrots
• 4 new potatoes, sliced thinly
• 1 red poblano (I don’t know the real name) pepper
• roasting spices, olive oil, etc.
• crusty bread

OK, first off – before you give me any grief for the Kroger mussels…I know that they’re not the high-end stuff. I realize that they're not perfectly authentic. But the things take under 10 minutes to get a bowlful of scrumptiousness and a sauce that’s perfect for dipping bread.

Preheat the oven to 425. Chop up the veggies. Set the pepper aside. Put the rest of the vegetables in a pan. Drizzle with some olive oil and spices (for this, it was ground thyme, rosemary, salt, and pepper) and stir it all up. Put it in the oven.

We’re lucky enough to have a convection oven, so we took it out to stir about every 7-8 minutes. Regular ovens can go every 10. After 20-some minutes, add the peppers and a little more olive oil.

The mussels take about 10 minutes to cook. The chorizo link takes about that long to cook on the stovetop. The bread we used took about 5 minutes in the convection. You can time this up as you feel best.

When the veggies are tender and starting to brown, take it out. Plate it up. Chow down. Thank me later...

Me and the [Roasted] Bean – Curried Cauliflower & Beans in Lemon Yogurt Sauce

Some of you may know that the Sweet Partner in Crime and I were out for my birthday dinner last night. We did the “tasting menu” at Hugo, which was an absolutely divine experience to kick off my year #40. The next morning, we remained stuffed (8 courses was a challenge -- but what a divine challenge!). We decided it’d be a good idea to have something relatively light the next day.

I saw a recipe in a Food & Wine that looked good, but with my level of energy and motivation that evening, there were a couple of steps too many. I didn't need to make my own croutons or cook down a bunch of spices. I tried to make the recipe as foolproof as possible. What I ended up with was a pretty scrumptious vegetarian meal. Lots of fiber here, my friends…

• 1 good sized head cauliflower, cut into small florets
• 1/2 a red onion, cut into thin strips
• 1/2 lb. green beans, trimmed and cut into 2” pieces
• 1 tbsp curry powder
• 1 c. plain yogurt (I used Dannon, but the original recipe calls for Greek)
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1/3 c. minced fresh cilantro or 1 tbsp. dried
• croutons

Preheat the oven to 425. Put the cauliflower and onion strips together in a bowl. Add about 3 tbsp. olive oil, the curry powder, salt, and pepper. Mix well. Put into a baking pan, sprayed with nonstick spray.
Put the beans in the same bowl. Add another tsp. of oil. Mix well. Put in a smaller baking pan, also sprayed.
Put both pans in the oven and roast, stirring a couple of times, until the vegetables are tender and slightly browned (about 15 min for the beans, 25 for the cauliflower mixture).

Meanwhile, whisk together the yogurt, garlic, lemon juice, cilantro, and salt and pepper.

When the veggies are roasted tender, put into bowl and stir to combine. Add a handful of croutons and stir again.
Plate up the veggies. Drizzle with the sauce. Chow down.

Torn Between Two Recipes… (Roast chicken with asparagus, fontina, and tomatoes)

After you’ve been cooking for yourself for awhile, you’ll start to notice flavors and flavor combinations that you especially like. You’ll find yourself collecting recipes that mirror those likes. Since you like them so much, they’re pleasurable – and since they’re similar, it occasionally starts blending together.

If you remember from back over on The Naked Vine, on one of our New Year’s Eves, the Sweet Partner in Crime went nuts with Giuliano Hazan’s “Every Night Italian.” We worked our way through great chunks of that cookbook, and there were two recipes we really liked: “Grilled chicken breast stuffed with asparagus and fontina” and “Chicken Breast Fillets Rolled with Pancetta, Rosemary, and Sage.”

When we went to the store, we ended up getting a mishmash of ingredients. We did get the chicken breasts, but we ended up with prosciutto instead of pancetta, asparagus, fontina, and some random grape tomatoes.

First off, the actual recipe called for wrapping these things up and grilling. But two things prevented that: 1) I was tired and wanted no part of the grill that night, and 2) the chicken breasts, even after butterflying, were not easily rolled with the stuffing. Since everything was falling out anyway, we made two major adjustments: 1) cooking the chicken on stove instead of on the grill and 2) not rolling ingredients into cooked chicken....just putting everything on top instead.

Anyway, sans grill, we cooked the chicken in about 1 T of oil until slightly brown, about 3-4 minutes per side, adding the prosciutto halfway through. We then essentially braised the chicken and prosciutto (with lid on) in 3/4 cup of white wine until more or less done (about 10-15 minutes). At that point, all the wine had cooked off or cooked into the chicken (yummy). We also "pre-cooked" the asparagus in a skillet on high heat with a cup of water and salt for 4-5 minutes, then drained it. We added the cheese, asparagus and tomatoes to the chicken and put the whole thing under the broiler for about 3-5 minutes. 

If you're following this recipe, at this point, take it out and check for done-ness.

If it’s done, then plate it up, crack a bottle of light Italian red, and go to town.

The moral of this story isn’t that you need to make sure you have every ingredient you need clearly listed when you head to the store. It’s that when you start to figure out the tastes you like, you can grab things you like (in our case, chicken, tomatoes, asparagus) and cobble something together that both looks and tastes good when you’re pressed for time. Whether you’ve had a tiring day at the office or made a last minute dinner invite, trust what you like and you won’t go wrong.

(Many thanks to the SPinC for some corrections to the recipe.)

Return to Hot Chicken (Chicken with artichokes and basil pearled couscous)

I'm not the only one who cooks in the household, contrary to popular belief. In addition to being a world-famous criminologist, the Sweet Partner in Crime is pretty handy around the kitchen. After all she did get me interested in many things culinary and introduced me to the notion that a house without wine is like a house without a heat source. Sure, you could live there, but why would you want to?

We do have an understanding that maintains peace in the valley. Over the years, we've learned that our cooking styles do not exactly mesh. In fact, unless the two of us come to an agreement on the division of labor, we try (for the most part) to avoid being in the kitchen together. I tend to be a bit...free...with the number of utensils, pots, pans, and other such implements of destruction I'll use in the course of meal preparation. If we try cooking together, I'll go to pick up the spoon I've been stirring a sauce with, only to find that she's put it in the dishwasher while my back was turned. She's a more efficient cook.

Also, she's a much better "throw together" cook than I am. Most of what I know about "non-recipe" cooking's come from her. Give my sweetie a pantry full of random ingredients, some veggies, and a spice or two, and you've got a simple dinner. To wit...if you want to follow what she ended up doing with this amalgamation, here's what we had:

• Boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• Frozen artichoke quarters
• A lemon, sliced thinly
• A plum tomato, chopped
• 2 tsp capers
• Basil, oregano, garlic to taste
• 1/3 c. white wine, 1/3 c. chicken broth
• Box of Near East "basil pearled couscous" mix

Thaw everything. Preheat oven to 400. Pour some olive oil (which I leave off ingredient lists all the time...it's a staple like salt and pepper) over the chicken and sprinkle with spices. Put in a roasting pan and add the white wine & chicken broth to the pan. Lay the lemon slices across the top. Top with the capers, artichokes, and tomato. Salt and pepper the lot. Roast for around 30 minutes, depending on the thickness of the chicken.

Meanwhile, make the couscous. The SPinC discovered that this particular type of couscous is much more labor intensive than the "boil water, dump in couscous, stir, remove from heat, let sit" normal method, so plan accordingly. When chicken is done, add pan juices to couscous. Mix.

Plate it up. Pour some fruity, easy drinking white wine. Chow down.

Start to finish: Under an hour

Crepuscule with Monkfish & Chorizo (Monkfish and Chorizo Kabobs)

I've stumped the fish folk at Kroger twice with monkfish.

Both times, I've seen filets that looked pretty good, and the Krogerman handing it to me has said, "I've never known what to do with that." The answer? Grill it. There are any number of ways you can make it, and I've tried several. I remain a fan of the fire.

You'll sometimes see monkfish called "poor man's lobster." (It's also known as "goosefish.") The flavor and consistency is indeed akin. At under $10 a pound, it's worth thinking about for that kind of flavor -- especially when that flavor is paired with that wonderful Latin-esque sausage, chorizo.

Monkfish and chorizo. Like chocolate and peanut butter. Two great tastes that taste great together. There;s something about the richness of the fish with the spice and fat of the chorizo that just works well together. They're great together in things like paella. but grilling them is best, in my opinion. Since we're still in a surprisingly good patch of weather for early March, we fired up the grill again. My favorite way to pair these two has always been kebabs with some good veggies.

We got the grill fired up and got some yellow rice going. This particular kebab iteration required me to pre-cook a few links of chorizo. Put three links in a skillet with ½ cup of water. Cooked them for 12 minutes, turning once, then cooking uncovered, turning as necessary (brown 'em!) for 3-4 minutes. Set the links aside to cool. Cut up the veggies (tomatoes, peppers, & mushrooms in this case, but you can use whatever you like) and monkfish into good sized chunks:

Skewer the veggies, chorizo, and monkfish pieces. It might look something like this:

The grill should be hot by now, so put the kebabs over fire. Medium to high heat, 5-7 minutes on a side. I like using a grill basket, simply for neatness and ease of use. If you do use one of those, cook more towards the longer time. Then plate up a bed of rice, take the chunks off the skewers and arrange. Top the lot with salt and pepper.

We did a side by side of an inexpensive pinot noir (Lurton, a French pinot noir table wine) and Black Box Sauvignon Blanc.

Both wines worked fine. I liked the pinot, the Sweet Partner in Crime enjoyed the white. Either way, a very easy to cobble together, nice looking dinner, if you don't mind doing a little chopping.

Total time start to finish: just under an hour.




The night was young once we finished, so we decided to enjoy the good weather and the patio-friendly temperatures while we could. We started a fire and got rid of the last of the holiday greenery. Poured some more wine and had some chocolate. A nice way to end a fairly crazy day...