Tag: Chicken

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Cooking

Chicken Masala

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I love to make a chickpea masala. This time I added chicken after I pan-fried it. Some garlic naan and saffron jasmine rice accompanied the dish. I wish I could explain how to make this dish in a more helpful way but the truth is that I usually don’t make masala dishes the same way each time. I mean there are the usual suspects such as curry, garlic, turmeric, cumin, and tomato (either paste or fresh or both) but sometimes I’ll add other things, in this case, it was a bit of jarred tikka masala sauce and serrano peppers. I hope that helps.

Categories
Animals

Stitch Gets Into Trouble Again

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I almost died laughing last night. I brought home a cooked chicken from the grocery store and Stitch Murphy got his head stuck in the packaging. I was in the kitchen and just saw him walk by with this enormous cardboard collar. His lazy ass was not even trying to get out of it. So I did what any respectable cat owner would do and picked him up to show Gar so that we could both heartily laugh at him (photo credit goes to Gar).

Categories
Life

Coconut Milk

I love a can of coconut milk for a lot of reasons but one of my favorite things to do with it is add a can to my turkey or chicken noodle soup. I’ve already made soup this way about three times in the past few months because I just cannot get enough of it. Homemade soup is the best. Just put your leftover chicken or turkey carcass in a large pot, fill with water, add a fair amount of salt, and boil to make your stock. Strain out your stock and pick off all the meat from the bones and return it to the stock. At this point I’ll check the salt content and I usually add a can of chicken broth or possibly some bullion to round out my stock. Finally your mirepoix and whatever else you want in your soup goes in. I love making a traditional noodle soup and adding the can of coconut milk and a few spicy dried thai chilies for some heat. The coconut milk provides a unique flavor that blends perfectly with the flavor of a traditional noodle soup and it is not too sweet. SO GOOD!

Categories
Cooking

Quick Brine

I’m not the biggest brining spokesperson in the world. I feel that the most important thing about cooking a tender, juicy bird is the cooking of it, not the brining of it. However, this brine recipe I found from Mario Batali actually does make a difference and it adds a subtle flavor that reminds me of meat roasting in the oven and fall.

1 cup kosher salt
1 stick cinnamon
1 bunch fresh rosemary
1/2 cup apple cider
2 quarts boiling water
2 quarts ice

In a container large enough to hold your chicken or turkey, combine the salt, cinnamon, rosemary, and cider. Pour in the boiling water and stir to dissolve. Next, stir in the ice and add your bird which should be completely submerged (you may need to put a plate on top of it) in the brine and refrigerated for 1-4 hours. I ended up adding a tbsp. of apple cider vinegar to the brine and I only used a little more than a quart of ice and let the brine sit in the fridge briefly to make up for the lost ice. When your bird is done in the brine, pat it dry and only add about 1/3 of the salt that you would normally apply to the outside.

Categories
Cooking

Pan-Fried Chicken

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If you are in a hurry to make dinner and want a quick and delicious method for cooking chicken breast then you absolutely must keep reading. So often, I come home from a long and tiring day at work and I just want to make a yummy chicken dinner with salad or rice or something like that. The best way to cook chicken in a hurry is to simply season it with salt and pepper and add it to a frying pan that has either a thin layer of vegetable oil or olive oil. Pre-heat your frying pan and cook the chicken over medium high heat. Side note, I really like non-stick frying pans they just make life so much easier. If you wanted to add a little more flavor to your chicken you could use some olive oil in combination with butter as opposed to the vegetable oil.

I always know when chicken pieces are done based upon how springy they are and how they feel. Start gently poking your chicken pieces while cooking and you’ll start to get really good at telling when its done but not overcooked. Overcooked chicken is really firm. Chicken that is cooked just right is firm but still a little bit springy. Undercooked chicken is soft and springy to varying degrees. When you take your chicken out of the pan, let it rest for about 5 min.

Of course I love making chicken this way because it is fast but, ultimately, it just tastes great too and it has a great crispy exterior. If you want to cook some chicken breast more quickly, butterfly or thinly slice it. Also, you can get creative with the seasoning depending upon what you are using the chicken for.

Categories
Cooking

Grandma’s Baked Chicken

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This chicken dish comes from a friend’s great grandmother. It is very easy to make, very inexpensive, and will make you enjoy chicken thighs whether you usually like them or not. The instructions for this recipe are for 2 servings but I could have easily made 4 servings in this dish.

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Cooking

Meat Grinder: Broccoli Chicken Cheddar

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Meat Grinder!

Meat grinders are fun and a hand crank one is relatively inexpensive. When Gar and I brought ours home we searched the kitchen for anything we could find that would be fun to grind and we came up with this… broccoli chicken cheddar burgers.

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Cooking

Tomato Basted Chicken Kebabs

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My obsession with grilling continues… I recently got a new grill and have been using it almost everyday. I just really look forward to grilling. So I was making chicken kebabs and I had a couple of large tomatoes I needed to use. Don’t ask me why but I thought I’d put a skewer through them and put them on the rack above the kebabs so that the liquid would trickle down.

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Cooking

Chicken Shawarma Wraps

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When I first saw Jeff Mauro’s recipe for Chicken Shawarma I thought of Marvel and The Avengers. There have been brief mentions of shawarma in some relatively recent Marvel movies, cartoons, and comics. For this reason alone I decided to make chicken shawarma as soon as possible. I slightly modified the recipe by using chicken breast instead of thighs and smoked paprika instead of normal paprika.

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Cooking

Grill Everything

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Recently I’ve been obsessed with putting everything on the grill. I’m sure one of the reasons is that the weather has been amazing the past week or so, staying mostly sunny and in the low to mid seventies. I have a small charcoal grill and a small propane grill. Mostly, I use the propane grill since its cleaner and easier. However, I appreciate charcoal for cooking something like an inch and a half thick cut rib-eye (mmm) and I really like arranging charcoal like one side of a sloping hill so I can clearly gauge and effectively utilize the varying levels of heat on the grill surface. The way I arrange charcoal would depend upon the grill I suppose.

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Cooking

Campfire Chicken

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This is one of the few times I’ve ever been camping in an RV and it is pleasantly strange to have things like a microwave and a fridge. However, the fire pit on the site had a grill rack on it and I was excited to do something with it. Enter campfire chicken. Once I had a decent fire going (and I felt the rack in the pit was sterilized enough) I seasoned my chicken breast with mesquite seasoning (just used a packet I brought) and put it over the fire. Luckily, the rack was adjustable so I could ensure that the chicken was far away enough from the fire so that it cooked and did not burn. Also, the chicken needed to be close enough to the fire to get some char and cook in a reasonable time frame so that it did not just taste like smoke. If the rack were not adjustable, I just would have had to be really thoughtful about where and how I built the fire in the pit so that the rack was in the right place.

I don’t remember how long the chicken cooked for, I didn’t really keep track. I just flipped it a few times and took it off when it was the proper firmness. I believe the cooking time was something like 15-20 minutes. The chicken had a great smoke flavor from the oak wood we were burning and it was perfectly crispy. It was also a nice break from eating burgers. I lost count on how many burgers Gar and I grilled up and ate with our small propane BBQ.

Categories
Cooking

Crock Pot Chicken

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If you haven’t cooked a whole chicken in the crock pot, you’re missing out. Firstly, I love buying and cooking whole chickens. You can cook or prepare them in many ways. You can break them down and use only certain pieces and save the rest. However, there is no other way of cooking a whole chicken that has a greater simple to delicious ratio than putting it in a crock pot with a simple seasoning. This chicken comes out falling off the bone. It is so moist and tender and so easy and so hard to screw up.

All you need to do is season a whole chicken that has been rinsed and patted dry and put it in the crock pot breast side up on a medium to low heat for 6-8 hours or 4 hours on high. Also, this may sound obvious to most but remove the innards. Every crock pot is different and I usually let my crock pot temperature and cooking time be dictated by my schedule. Yesterday was a crazy ass day at work and I figured it would be as much. So before I left in the morning, I put the chicken on a ten hour low heat setting so it would be ready after my long work day.

The last thing you need to know about making this dish is that you can get fancy with what you put in it besides the chicken but you really don’t need to do anything other than season with salt and pepper all over and under the skin to make it absolutely delicious. DO NOT worry about putting liquid in the crock pot, trust me, you really don’t need to. Instead of just salt and pepper, yesterday I used a seasoning blend that was a riff I did on Emeril’s “Essence” (Emeril’s creole seasoning) which is a seasoning blend I came across while looking up different recipes on fried onion rings of all things. If I had more time yesterday and wanted to do something different I could have mixed my seasoning blend with a can of crushed tomatoes and added onion and bell pepper. Once the chicken was done I could have removed and shredded the meat then added the meat back to the juices in the crock pot. I could have served that with black beans, rice, and homemade corn tortillas…. just a thought. Here’s the recipe for the seasoning blend I used for this chicken and I really hope you discover how easy and tasty it is to crock pot a whole chicken if you haven’t already.

1 tablespoon smoked paprika
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon garlic powder
½ tablespoon black pepper
½ tablespoon onion powder
½ tablespoon cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon dried leaf oregano
½ teaspoon dried thyme
¼ teaspoon cumin