Miscellaneous Chicken Dinner

Tonight I decided to concoct a totally random meal employing my fun and much-loved method of "what's around and needs to be used up or is leftover from other recipes?"  Having no idea what to call it, because I am guessing it's pretty unique, we'll just go with: Miscellaneous Chicken Dinner.

This will be a quick and dirty post, listing my steps as pictures, with what I was doing in the photo captions.  It was pretty straightforward and took about a half hour total.  Here we go....

First I minced 4 cloves of garlic, sliced a half of a large onion, and chopped about 6
or 7 dates.  I put it all in a pan with probably a tablespoon of safflower oil,
and some salt and pepper.  Then I started to cook it down over a medium flame.

Next, I tossed in a mostly full container of pre-sliced baby bella mushrooms,
and let it continue to cook down.

Then I took out the veggies, added another half tablespoon or so of oil,
and put in 6 chicken thighs.

I browned the thighs on both sides.

Now comes the wine, which had been sitting around in the fridge for a bit.

As you can see, by now the pan could use some serious deglazing.....

....which I accomplished by bringing the wine to a boil
and scraping the bottom of the pan with a whisk.

Once the pan was deglazed, I put the chicken back in....

....and dumped the previously cooked veggie right on top of the chicken.

Finally, I decided, why not throw in a sliced apple?

I stirred it in and let the whole thing simmer for somewhere around
10-15 minutes, until the chicken was cooked through,
at which point I uncovered the pan and let the sauce thicken a tad.

This is what it looked like all plated up on a bed of white rice.

It was pretty gosh darn yummy, although, I do think I could have used a bit more salt and pepper.  I will probably add that when I eat the leftovers for lunch later this week.

Crock Pot Oxtail Stew

Erhmahgerd sterw!  So yeah, wow, it’s been a while, but here we are back again.

Yesterday we made a pretty good meal (really, to serve as lunches at work) from some of the meat provided to us as part of M.F. Dulock’s “meat club.”  On the chopping block: oxtail.  If you don’t know what oxtail is (and admittedly, we didn’t either)….it’s exactly what it sounds like -- the appendage used by bovines to swat at flies on their buttocks.  ;)  There’s more meat on there than you’d think, though, and it turns out it’s great for braising and/or stewing.

Here’s the easy recipe (parsed down from one we found online, and amended slightly to our tastes)….

• 1.65 pounds oxtail, disjointed (this just means chopped up into singular vertebral chunks)
• Pork fat that was leftover in a pan where we had cooked breakfast bacon that day
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 cup beef stock
• 1/2 cup dry red wine
• 1/4 cup tomato sauce
• 6 peppercorns
• 1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 dried red chile pepper, chopped (some, but not all, seeds removed)
• 3 whole cloves
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 1 red bell pepper, chopped
• 1/2 tablespoon chopped parsley
• 3 potatoes, cut in chunks
• salt and pepper

Brown the oxtail pieces on all sides in the cast iron skillet with the pork fat, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.  Add the onions and garlic (with a bit more salt and pepper) and cook about 5 minutes more until the onions start to become translucent.

Put the potatoes and carrots in the bottom of crock pot, and season with salt and pepper.

Add the browned oxtails, onions, garlic, and remaining ingredients.

Cover and cook on low 6 hours or until the meat is easily pulled off (or falling off) the bones.

Quite delicious, super easy, and the house smelled fantastic all day, right from moment the meat went into the pork fat.  The weirdest part is that once you’ve gotten the meat off the bone of “normal” cuts, you are used to what the bones will look like.  Here, you end up with vertebrae.  Freaky.

Apple-Cranberry Stuffed Pork Chops

I don't know exactly where, when or how I obtained the recipe on which I based tonight's dinner, but the magazine page I worked from indicates that it's a Redbook from April 2008.  I wouldn't be surprised if I've really had it sitting around that long -- as we had recently cleaned out the recipe book; getting rid of stuff we'd probably never make, and singling out those that we needed to actually, finally try soon.  Anyways, this is the dinner I cooked, modified to our tastes, what we had on hand, and (we think, some better) ingredient choices:

INGREDIENTS:

• 2 Tablespoons butter
• 1/3 cup finely chopped dried cranberries
• 1/3 cup finely chopped celery
• 3/4 cup finely chopped onion
• Dried sage, about 2 teaspoons
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 Granny Smith apple
• 3/4 cup shredded mild cheddar cheese
• 6 one-inch thick boneless center-cut pork chops
• 1/2 cup chicken broth
• 1 and 1/2 cups apple cider
• 2 Tablespoons Dijon mustard with honey (Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?")
• Salt and Pepper

PROCESS:

Using a sharp knife held parallel to the board, cut a pocket in each pork chop, leaving three edges in tact.  Set them aside.

Melt 1 Tablespoon of the butter over medium heat in a large nonstick skillet.  Then add the onions, celery, cranberries, garlic, sage, and a little salt.

Cook it down for a few minutes until it starts to soften and become translucent.

Then add the apples.

After a few more minutes, when the apples look cooked and a little soft, turn off the heat and stir in the cheese.

Stuff each pork chop with as much as it will hold.

I found that, even though it looked like way too much overall, there was just enough stuffing to fill them all quite plentifully.  Season the chops with salt and pepper.

Melt the other Tablespoon of butter in the now empty skillet, again over medium heat, and add the chops, being careful not to let the stuffing spill out.

Flip the over after about 4 minutes to cook on the other side.

After 4 minutes cooking on the second side, add the chicken stock to the pan.

Let it cook for a few more minutes until they are done, turning the chops over once more if you like.  I also chose to cover them loosely with a pot lid, to help the cooking along.

Transfer the chops to tin foil, and cover to keep warm.

What you should have left in the pan at this point is chicken stock, and maybe some bits of stuffing that fell out.  Now, add the apple cider and the  mustard, and whisk it all together.

Bring it to a full boil, and let the sauce reduce down to about half to one-third of its original volume.

Finally, serve each chop up with a spoonful or two of the sauce.  We had ours, as you can see, with steamed carrots.

This was very, very yummy.  What else can I say?  you should try it.  :)

Coq au Vin

In the interest of getting our butts back in gear, cooking more at home, and ensuring leftovers for lunches (we've been spending an obscene amount of money in restaurants and on take-out lately), we recently selected this Coq au Vin recipe to try out, from Julia Child's beloved Savenor's Market.  Having never done a Coq au Vin before, I planned to stick to it as exactly as possible, but there did end up being a few small changes.  Here's how it went (our version, not theirs)....

INGREDIENTS

• ½ pound of sliced bacon, cut into quarter-inch pieces
• 40 frozen pearl onions
• 3 pounds of chicken thighs and legs, skin on
• 8 garlic cloves, peeled
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• 2 cups homemade chicken stock
• 2 cups red wine (the original recipe called for pinot noir, burgundy or zinfandel -- I just used up what I had leftover, and honestly I have no idea what kind it was)
• Dried thyme
• Dried parsley
• ½ pound of button mushrooms, roughly chopped
• 2 Tablespoons of butter

PROCEDURE

First, I gathered up and prepared most of the ingredients (chicken, chicken stock, wine, bacon, onions, garlic, butter, and mushrooms).

Next, I decided to skip the step in the original recipe of blanching the bacon, and went straight into browning it on medium-high heat in a dutch oven that would be big enough to hold all the chicken.  This took about ten minutes.

Removing the crisped bacon (but not the rendered fat) from the pan, it was then time to work on the chicken.

I worked in two batches, heat still on medium-high, putting half of the chicken pieces and half of the onions right into the hot oil and leaving it for a few minutes to brown.

Then, I flipped it over, added half of the garlic, salt and pepper, and left it for a few more minutes to brown on the other side.

All of it (chicken, garlic and onions) was then removed from the pan.

I dumped the fat out of the pan, and added the chicken stock and wine to deglaze.  After which, the chicken, onions, garlic, and bacon were put back in, along with some parsley, thyme and two bay leaves.

I brought it to a boil, then reduced the heat and covered it, and let it simmer for 20 minutes.

Next, I took the chicken pieces out of the pan and set them aside, and it was time to work on the sauce.  I didn't remove the onions (as suggested by the original recipe) or any of the other stuff (garlic, bacon, etc).  The mushrooms were added to the pan, and the heat was turned up to full blast so that it could boil and reduce down.  At this point I also started a pot of white rice cooking, so that we could serve the chicken on top of that.

I let it boil for probably another 20 minutes, until the volume had reduced by approximately three quarters.

Then I removed the bay leaves, stirred in the butter....

....and added the chicken pieces back in to get re-warmed and coated in the sauce.

It was plated on top of a bed of rice, with a scoop or two of the mushroom-onion-bacon fortified sauce.

I have to say that at first, particularly as I was starting to reduce the sauce down, I though that maybe this recipe was too much trouble, and not worth all the effort.  But once we finally dove in and started eating it, I realized that I was wrong.  Very delicious!!

It only seemed complicated because it was my first time making this.  And it really didn't take very long (about an hour and a half start to finish).  I think I could easily do this one again, without even having to look at a recipe, now that I know the basic techniques involved in a classic Coq au Vin.