Posts Tagged Celery
Parce que vous achetez les croutons
Posted by JT in Recipes, Side Dishes on April 9th, 2009
When asked why they hated Americans the French responded “parce que vous achetez les croutons.” (because you buy croutons)
I don’t know who to attribute that quote to, but I’ve always liked it as a statement on French vs American cooking. I usually make bread once a week, a boule or a loaf, but I don’t eat that much bread and it can go stale quickly. In trying to figure out what to do with a ½ a loaf of white bread I thought I would try to make some stuffing as a side dish with dinner. My wife loves stuffing and I have tried making stuffing (unsuccessfully) in the past. It always just tasted like wet bread. So to appease my wife I would buy and happily eat Stovetop stuffing from a box. Finally being ashamed enough that I couldn’t prepare what seemed to be a rather simple dish, and happening to have what I figured were the right ingredients on hand I tried again. This time successfully.
Homemade Stovetop Stuffing
2 cups of croutons
¾ cup chicken stock
Salt if your stock does not already contain it
Pat of butter
1 stalk celery diced
1 leek cut into rounds and separated
1 tablespoon garlic (or to taste)
1 tablespoon of sage
1. Make your croutons. For me all I had to do was cut ½ a loaf of white bread into the right shape and leave it out overnight, you may need to place yours in a low oven tossing regularly depending on how wet your bread it or how quickly you need your croutons.
2. In a sauce pot combine butter, leeks, garlic, celery and ½ the sage. Sautee until the celery and leeks get soft and aromatic.
3. Add your chicken stock and bring to a boil.
4. Add in your croutons
5. Add in the rest of the sage
6. Stir, mixing thoroughly, cover and let sit for a few minutes
7. Serve along side roasted anything
Sage is the secret that I had been missing and caused my previous incarnations to taste like wet bread (no matter how flavorful the stock.) I am now convinced I could add croutons, salt, water and sage to a pot and come out with acceptable stuffing.
Roast Chicken and Potatoes
Posted by JT in Main Course, Recipes on March 29th, 2009
Roasting a chicken is one of those quintessential things you are supposed to be able to do if you consider yourself a cook. I have a confession to make. I have been cooking for around 8 years now and I have never made a good roast chicken. That is until now.
One of my problems is that I refuse to use recipes. It feels like cheating to me. It doesn’t feel like you have learned anything, just memorized something. Because of that, the first few chickens I roasted came out sad and flabby and I stopped roasting chickens. Since then I have read a lot more about roasting chicken, and while this attempt still wasn’t perfect, it was a vast improvement and created the best potatoes I have ever had in my life.
Roast Chicken and Potatoes
1 chicken -unsure of weight
Potatoes -enough to create a bed for the chicken
Salt – 1 cup + 2 tablespoons
Baking Soda – 1 Tablespoon
Water – Enough to cover chicken
Pepper, Parsley, Lemon and Garlic – For stuffing the cavity and seasoning
1. Starting with the chicken, I buy my free range, organic chicken from a farmer. While the chicken does taste more “chicken-y” than the grocery store variety, the main difference I have found is the amount of fat. Farmer chicken has much more.
2. 48 hrs in advance, brine the chicken. I place the chicken in a pot, add water until chicken is covered, remove the chicken and mix in a cup (give or take) of salt, and then stir. No need to heat it, the salt dissolved just fine, and I don’t add any other flavors because I’m not really using this as a flavoring as much as to trap moisture in the cells and give me less of a chance of over cooking.
3. 24 hours in advance, remove chicken from brine and dry thoroughly. Once chicken is very dry create a rub of 2 Tblspns salt and 1 Tblspn baking soda. This is to desiccate the chicken skin and really give you thin, crispy skin. Rub this all over the chicken skin. Return to the fridge uncovered.
4. Preheat the oven to 375, remove the chicken from the fridge. Using a knife cut a bunch of slits in the chickens back to allow the fat to escape as the chicken cooks. Stuff the chicken cavity with a halved lemon, a few cloves of crushed garlic and a bunch of parsley.
5. Cut up your potatoes (I used fingerling because it is what I had) and create a bed for the chicken in your roasting pan. Place the chicken on its back on top of the potatoes
6. Roast chicken for 25 minutes at 375, turn up heat to 475 and roast for another 25 minutes, turn off heat and let cook for 10 more minutes or until the thigh registers 180.
7. Move the chicken to a carving board and let rest, move the potatoes (golden and crisp on the pan side) to a serving bowl add salt if desired, pepper and chopped parsley.
The brining plus salt rub results in a pretty salty chicken. That’s how I like my chicken, if you don’t I would reduce or eliminate the salt rub. Yes, this recipe involves a lot of advance prep, and not all of it is worth it. Going forward I will remove the baking soda, it left a little bit of a baking soda flavor, the skin on the back turns out soft from sitting on the potatoes, and I think that the salt plus 24 hours in the fridge uncovered will do enough to dry the skin. Finally, I’m not sure what I added by putting lemon, garlic and parsley inside, next time I’ll leave it out and see what type of difference it makes.
Here is a close up of the chicken skin where the thigh meets the body that shows the tissue paper like consistency the skin had.
Mom's Old Fashion Beef Stew
Posted by Van Santos in Recipes on March 28th, 2009
As a child, during winter, one of my favorite dinner treats was when my mother would make her been stew. Something about the contrast of the cold outside and the thought of a warm meal was comforting. Not only that, the carrots were soft and retained all flavors represented in the dish, the meat just fell apart with the touch of a fork and the potatoes were little bit of heaven. It was as if all the ingredients mixed together in such a way I was unable to deny this was my comfort food of the time.
With winter waining I wanted to make Mom’s Old Fashion Beef Stew so that I may enjoy the experience once more before spring comes to town.
Ingredients
- 2.5lbs Stew Meat (Pot roast, seven bone roast, etc.)
- ½ onion
- 1 celery stalk
- 6 carrots
- 4 potatoes (Yukon gold or Red)
- 2 tsp salt
- 2 c. V-8 juice
- 2 tlbs tapioca
- 1 tlbs sugar
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 cinnamon stick (optional)
Directions:
- Heat oven to 250 degrees
- Cut meat into 1 ½ inch cubes and place in 3 or 4.4 qt oven safe Casserole
- Peel and slice onion
- Slice celery and cut potatoes and carrots into chunks
- Place vegetables in pan
- Blend salt with sugar and tapioca, Sprinkle over ingredients in pan
- Place cinnamon stick in dish
- Pour V-8 juice into pan
- Wrap dish in foil and Bake stew at 250 degrees for 4 hours
All said and done, it should look something like this when heading into the oven:
As the dish cooks in the oven the moisture in the meat will add to the V-8, creating more of a “gravy” for you to enjoy. This goes very well with Sourdough bread. I was going to make some, but didn’t plan that far ahead, so I ended up buying fresh baked instead.
A few things to note:
- The Tapioca can be found in the baking aisle
- If you cut the vegetable pieces larger, you will need to cook longer until they are tender
- Make sure the foil is sealed to the edge of the pan you are using so all the heat stays inside the dish while cooking
My dinner has roughly 3 ½ hours left to cook but rest assured I’ll post a picture or two once the finished product comes out of the oven.
And there is the final product, fresh from the oven.
Additional tips/pointers/thoughts:
- I suggest you cut the meat/veggies on the small side, allows for easier eathing and additional time in the oven is not needed
- Depending on your taste, you may wish to remove the cinnamon stick
- This makes for great leftovers
For me, it’s a classic! Enjoy!
