Chicken with Mushrooms and Zucchini

We are going to be visiting New York City this weekend. It's our first visit since we moved. All of the plans just fell into place last night, so now we can let ourselves get excited. We have been having ongoing car problems with our 1985 diesel Mercedes (it seems to have air in the system and doesn't like to start). We didn't want to get stuck somewhere along the way, so we decided to rent a car. Now that we have transportation and a place to stay, it's time to start figuring out what and where we want to eat.

When you visit a former home town, where do you like to eat? Is there a place that just calls out to you that you must visit each time you are there?

Last night we enjoyed some chicken with mushroom and zucchini and a side of kale. The dish is very flexible-it would taste nice with some Italian seasonings and tomatoes, herbes de Provence would work well, but we went with some soy sauce, sesame oil and garlic.

Chicken with Mushroom and Zucchini serves 2
1 T butter
10 oz of mushrooms, sliced
2 medium zucchini, sliced
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 T soy sauce
1 T sesame oil
1 chicken breast. sliced

Melt the butter over medium heat, and add the mushrooms. Cook until browned and remove from pan. Add the zucchini and cook until tender, and then set aside. Add the sesame oil and chicken and cook until browned on all sides. Add the garlic, zucchini and mushrooms back into the pan. Sprinkle with soy sauce and cook for a couple of minutes for the flavors to combine and to ensure the chicken is cooked through.


This post is part of Traditional Tuesdays, Tuesday Glam Party,  Tempt My Tummy Tuesday, and Hearth and Soul  Blog Hop. 

Dinner Inspiration

As I mentioned in my last post, we have been trying to avoid sugar, flour and grains (more on why in a future post). These limitations have put us in a definite dinner rut of meat, winter squash and kale/chard. So I set out to find some inspiration that looked tasty, healthy and affordable. Here's what I found:

10 Grain-Free Dinners on a Budget from Holistic Kid

A delicious looking/sounding Taco Salad at Riddle Love. Also planning to check out her weekly meal plans too.

One of my favorite blogs, Nourished Kitchen, is always inspiring, but this Chipotle Chile, Chicken and Black Bean Soup looked especially appealing to me.

Do you have any recipes to recommend for an affordable grain-free dinner? Please share your dinner inspiration.



Last night we enjoyed a roasted lemon garlic chicken with baked butternut squash and sauteed red chard with garlic. Still part of our basic pattern, but it was tasty. We drizzled the pan drippings over the squash, and I highly recommend it.

Lemon Garlic Chicken
5 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
zest of 1-2 lemons
1 pasture raised chicken
1/2 C Chicken Stock
2 T butter

Pre-heat oven to 300 degrees.

Mix the garlic and lemon zest together. Gently loosen the chicken skin and push the garlic and lemon under the skin. Try to evenly distribute over the whole chicken. Place the chicken into a dutch oven and add the chicken stock. Rub the butter over the chicken. Cook the chicken for 1-2 hours (until a leg wiggles easily). Remove the lid, and turn up the heat to 400 degrees and cook for another 20 minutes or until the skin is golden.

Jambalaya

I was inspired by Laura over at Cooking in Kenzo and her efforts to eat entirely out of her freezer, fridge and pantry. I decided it was time for us to undertake a similar effort. Now she has an enviable situation of being the proud owner of a chest freezer, and I can only dream of such food storage capacity, but it's still time to clean out some leftovers before they become freezer burned.

My husband made up a delicious batch of jambalaya out of our leftovers. We have both worked at restaurants in the past while we looked for "real" jobs- I usually worked in the front of house and he usually worked in the kitchen. At one restaurant, he made big batches of jambalaya in a convection oven. They threw all the ingredients in raw and cooked it all together. This time around he made it in a dutch oven. We didn't really have enough rice in the cupboard, so he supplemented it with some wild rice we had on hand. It turned out really well, but think of this recipe more as inspiration for cleaning out your own fridge.


Jambalaya
2 T coconut oil
1/2 lb andouille sausage, sliced
1 lb chicken, cut into chunks
1 red, yellow, and green pepper, roughly chopped
1/2 onion, chopped
pinch of saffron
1 t salt
1 t garlic powder
1 t black pepper
1/2 t cayenne
1 t oregano
1 t thyme
1 C Basmati rice
1 C wild rice
2 C water

Combine the oil, sausage, chicken, vegetables and spices and cook until the vegetables soften. Add the rice and cook for a few minutes. Add the water and simmer covered for 45 minutes. Enjoy!

This post is part of Hearth and Soul Blog Hop, Dr. Laura's Tasty Tuesday, Tuesday Night Supper Club, Tuesdays at the Table, Tasty Tuesday, Made from Scratch Tuesdays, Works-for-me-Wednesday, Frugal Fridays, and...

Chicken and Dumplings for a Snow Day

Today we woke up to find a winter wonderland. We got a total of 19 inches of snow which was enough for the Department of Education to call a snow day. I think a snow day is the perfect day to spend inside cooking and enjoying a nice hot bowl of comfort food.

The view out our kitchen window.

Commuters trudging down a nearby side street.

While I was sick, I made a couple of batches of homemade chicken soup. By the time my husband came down with the cold, he couldn't be convinced that he needed some chicken soup too. I did convince him that some chicken and dumplings could be satisfying. The thick, hearty texture is much more his style.

Prepare a chicken stew.

Cook the dumplings in batches to prevent over crowding.

A great hearty meal for a snow day or a day inside with a cold.

Chicken and Dumplings
inspired by Tyler Florence and good memories of my grandfather's chicken and dumplings

Chicken stock

3 lb chicken
2-3 bay leaves
1 t thyme
4 cloves of garlic
2 T apple cider vinegar
3 small carrots, cut into 3 inch pieces
2 stalks of celery, cut into 3 inch pieces

Chicken Stew

2 T butter
2 T coconut oil
2 carrots, sliced
2 stalks of celery, sliced
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 bay leaves
1/4 C flour
6 C chicken stock
1 C frozen peas

Dumplings

2 C flour
1 t baking powder
1 t salt
2 eggs
3/4 - 1 C milk

Place all of the ingredients for the chicken stock into a stock pot, and cover with water. Bring to a boil, and reduce to a simmer. Cook for 2-3 hours. Remove the chicken. Let cool enough to be comfortable to touch. Remove the meat, and return the carcass to the water. Cook for another 1-2 hours. Pour the broth through a fine mesh strainer to remove all the bits. Chill and remove excess fat.

Melt butter and coconut oil, and add the carrots, celery, garlic and onions. Cook until the onions begin to soften. Slowly add flour while stirring. Cook until the flour is integrated and turns golden (about 2-3 minutes). Slowly add the chicken stock, and cook until the stew begins to thicken (about 15 minutes). Add the peas and bring to a gentle boil.

While the stew is cooking, prepare the dumpling batter. In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, baking soda and salt. In a measuring cup, beat eggs and add milk. Add to the dry ingredients, and gently stir to combine. Use two tablespoons, to drop spoonfuls of batter into the hot stew. Leave some space between the dumplings. Cook for about 5 minutes on each side. Remove the cooked dumplings with a slotted spoon to a platter. Continue cooking the batter in batches until all of the dumplings are prepared.

Serve the chicken stew with a few dumplings on top.

This post is part of SoupaPalooza. Come join SoupaPalooza at TidyMom and Dine and Dish sponsored byKitchenAid, Red Star Yeast and Le Creuset

Chicken Scampi

We were so busy with the apartment hunt and planning our trip to England that we got behind eating up the vegetables the past couple weeks. By this last weekend, we had 2 tomatoes and 3 ears of corn that were past saving. In our 18 weeks of CSA farm share, it was the first food we were going to "throw out." To make ourselves feel better we didn't actually throw it out, but took it to the community garden to compost it. When we got to the garden the host suggested that we feed it to the chickens. She promised it would be a sight that we had never seen before, and she was right. She held the mushy tomatoes out, and the chickens jumped up to eat them out of her hand. I had never seen chickens jump before, and I have spent some time with chickens. We were happy to pass the tomatoes along for another creature to eat.



We had chicken scampi for dinner. This is one of my husband's specialty dishes. It's usually served with shrimp, but I'm allergic to shell fish so at our house it's made with chicken. It's a quick meal and always a crowd pleaser. I already wrote about it once here, but here is another take on it.

Chicken Scampi
2 large chicken breasts, cut into strips
6 cloves of garlic
2 lemons, juiced
1/2 t oregano
1 T butter
oil
salt and pepper

Heat up a skillet and add some oil to coat the bottom. Add the chicken, and cook until done. Add the garlic and cook one more minute. Turn off the heat and add the lemon juice, oregano and butter. Serve over pasta or rice.

Lemon juice looses lots of flavor when cooked, so always add it right at the end of the recipe.

This post is part of Works-for-me-Wendesday and Real Food Wednesday.

Composting

We are composting! Or, at least saving vegetable scraps to put in a compost bin. I always thought composting was out of our reach because we live in a small apartment without a yard or access to any dirt, but last Saturday we discovered otherwise. Our pick-up point for our CSA share moved to a community garden, and they have a compost system. Our CSA organizers pointed out we can bring in our vegetable scraps. They suggested putting the peels in the freezer for the week, and delivering them to the community garden when we pick up our share each Saturday. It was one of those moments when I felt silly that I hadn't thought of that myself. Of course! Freeze the scraps! Why didn't I think of that? At least we are composting now.

We are still getting in the habit of saving our vegetable peels, but we are getting better each day. It's great to see our garbage really decreasing in volume.


Tonight we had chicken baked with kohlrabi, turnips, onions and garlic with sides of beet greens and brown rice. Baked chicken is one of our favorite meals for cool weather because it is so versatile and forgiving. We placed a chicken in our Dutch oven, surrounded in by chopped vegetables, covered it, and baked it. Cook it for 1 to 1.5 hours depending on the size of your chicken.

Here's another post on Oven Roasted Chicken with Vegetables.

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays at Food Renegade, Frugal Fridays and Grocery Cart Challene Recipe Swap.

Deadlines and Week 15

I haven't posted for several days because we were off to a wedding in Easton, Maryland. It was quite the affair. There was a traditional Hindu ceremony in the morning with a luncheon, we had about an hour for a costume change, and then there was an Episcopal service and a black tie reception. We are generally shorts and t-shirt people, so this was a big deal for us. I bought a new floor length black dress and heels. My husband bought a tux, a tux shirt, cuff links, a bow tie and cummerbund. We had made it to NJ when he realized that he forgot his bow tie at our apartment. There was not time to turn around, but luckily there ended up being a men's store right down the street from the hotel. The second tie was a real bow tie, so we also learned to tie it (our new skill for the weekend).

The luncheon featured a delicious Indian buffet made by the bride's family. For dinner, we enjoyed salmon and chicken entrees. My husband and I split the entrees, but we each liked our own dish the best. The salmon had a rich buttery sauce served on a bed of vegetables. The chicken had a flavorful maple, ginger and clove sauce with squash and spinach.



On our way home yesterday, we got a call from Zip Car telling us that our car was overdue. We thought we had it until 5:00, but they said our reservation ended at 11:00. Oops! They were able to rearrange the schedule and let us have the car until 3:30. There went our time buffer. We were racing the clock the rest of the way home. We were just entering the Holland Tunnel at 3:10, and we pulled into the garage at 3:30 on the dot. We quickly dropped off our wedding gear at home, and raced to pick-up our farm share. We arrived at the building, and learned that the pick-up point moved again this week. No climb to the roof top, but a walk a few extra block to a community garden. We made it in time, and because we arrived at the end of the day we got extra corn and garlic.


We saw the return of some favorites that we hadn't seen since the beginning of the summer. This week we will be enjoying garlic, corn, kohlrabi, radishes, turnips, kale, cherry tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes.

Chicken with CSA Succotash

My husband made dinner last night while I worked away on the computer. I worked at the table while he was cooking about 9 feet away (I know because I counted floor tiles.) We chatted about our days as we cooked and worked. He asked a couple of times if I was ready to type up the recipe, and taunted me that I was going to find the succotash recipe shocking. Mmm, what could make succotash shocking?


As he was plating up dinner, he revealed his recipes. The "shocking" ingredient was Sazon. It is really tasty, but I worry that it's full of chemicals.

This was a great meal for using leftover bits of veggies. We were getting down to the end of our CSA veggies, so my husband supplemented the succotash with the "emergency" can of black eyed peas from the cabinet. You can substitute whatever you need to eat up, and if you want to forgo the Sazon choose some spices of your own. A little chili powder would be a good choice for a similar flavor.

Chicken with Herbs
4 cloves of garlic
2 T fresh basil, chopped
2 T fresh oregano, chopped
1/2 t red chili peppers flakes
1 t paprika
1/2 t Dijon mustard
1 T apple cider vinegar
1 T melted butter
1 T olive oil
2 large chicken breasts, thinly sliced
salt and pepper to taste

Combine the garlic, spices, mustard, vinegar, butter and oil in a mixing bowl. Add the chicken and mix together with your hands. Let marinate for an hour or more. Heat a wok or pan with deep sides, and add the chicken mixture. Cook until cooked through (about 5-8 minutes).

CSA Succotash
4 cloves of garlic, sliced
1/2 onion, chopped
2 ears of corn
6 oven roasted tomatoes
2 frying peppers, julienned
1/2 lb of green beans, chopped
16 oz black eyed peas
1/4 c pepitas
1 package Sazon

Saute corn for 2 minutes. Add garlic, onion and peppers and cook for 1 more minute. Add the rest of the ingredients and cook for 5 minutes or until they are tender.

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays from Food Renegade, Finer Things Friday, Frugal Fridays, and Grocery Cart Challenge Recipe Swap.

Oven Roasted Chicken with Vegetables

I had an interesting walk from the subway to home. A cute new chocolate shop opened, and they were handing out samples. I tried a lemon caramel chocolate, which was good. A lot going on with the flavors, but I did choose lemon caramel chocolate. There were signs up and down the street warning drivers that parking was off limits because Happy Hour was filming. We see these signs a lot - last week they were filming White Collar. But this time they shut down Eight Mile Creek to film. I wonder what Happy Hour is? Next I saw a bike tour peddling toward me, and then lots of paparazzi and people taking cell phone photos of an Evian event. I admit that I had to take a peek through the window to see what all the fuss was about, and I saw a blond young woman. I just assumed she was a model and kept walking, but I just googled "Evian event NYC" to find out that it was Maria Sharapova. Google is amazing - it knows which celebrity I saw on my way home from work. Mind boggling! Last but not least, I noticed that the decorations for the Feast of San Gennaro are starting to go up. Soon we will have the equivalent of a county fair right outside our front door.

Once I got home, I found out my blog won an award from a fellow blogger, Cooking in Kenzo. I will write more about it in my next post, and get to pass it along to other blogs that I love.


It has finally cooled off this week in NYC, and we are getting some long overdue rain. On my way home from work yesterday, I decided that I wanted to have oven roasted chicken. It was finally cool enough to turn on the oven. Mmmm, it hit the spot. We cooked the chicken and vegetables all in the Dutch oven which made it a no fuss meal. All of the vegetables took on a great chickeny flavor.

Oven Roasted Chicken with Vegetables
1 medium chicken
1 onion, cut into good size chunks
1 small cabbage, sliced
2 carrots, cut into 1 inch chunks
salt and pepper

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Rinse and dry the chicken. Add vegetables to the Dutch Oven, and place chicken on top. Cover it and cook for 30 minutes. Remove the cover and turn up the heat to 425, and cook until the juices run clear (about 30 more minutes).

Oven roasted chicken is a gift that just keeps giving. We had salads with leftover chicken for dinner tonight, and now I have the bones in the crock pot making chicken stock.

Chicken Salad Crostini

The East Coast is in the middle of a horrible heat wave; it was 103 yesterday and 100 degrees today in NYC. The electric company is urging everyone to cut back on their electricity consumption because there are concerns of blackouts. Because of the temperatures, we were determined to prepare a dinner that required no heat.

We cooked some chicken in the crock pot over night, and put it in the fridge for the day. My goal for dinner was to make something new and different that used the chicken and CSA veggies, but required no cooking. Nothing came to mind, but luckily my husband came up with the idea of chicken salad sandwiches with homemade mayonnaise. We discovered in the process that the bread was a bit stale, so the sandwiches became crostini.


Chicken Salad Crostini
2 salad turnips, peeled and chopped
1 French breakfast radish, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 shallot, finely chopped
1 C shredded chicken
2 T mayonnaise
salad greens
toasted slices of bread

Mix the turnips, radish, carrots, shallot, chicken and mayonnaise. Layer the bread, salad greens and chicken salad.

Mayonnaise inspired by Joy of Cooking
1 large egg
1 egg yolk
1/2 t Dijon mustard
2 t vinegar
1/2 t salt
3/4 C olive oil

Blend egg, egg yolk and half the mustard in food processor or blender for several seconds. Add half the vinegar and salt and blend for several more seconds. Slowly add the oil while the blender or food processor is running. (We are able to pour the oil through a small hole in the top, and it controls the pace for us.) Once the oil has been added, turn off the machine. Fold in the rest of the mustard, vinegar and salt. The mayonnaise will only last 1 -2 days in the fridge.


The crostinis were ok. We kept a lot of the marinade in the chicken salad, but it ended up not tasting great with the veggies. Maybe it burned a bit? Next time I would make the chiken salad with plain shredded chicken.

Bok Choy and Mushroom Stir Fry

Before we left for vacation, we had to eat up some bok choy. We had a bunch left from week 2 and then we got 2 more bunches in week 3, so we had to find a way to use A LOT of bok choy. I decided to make a stir fry. There are great mushrooms available in Chinatown, so I headed over to pick out some king oyster, oyster and shitake mushrooms. I ended up cooking each of the vegetables individually because we had such a large quantity of each.


Bok Choy and Mushroom Stir Fry
3 bunches of bok choy, cut into 1 inch wide strips
1/2 lb oyster mushrooms, slices
1/2 lb shitake mushrooms, sliced
2 king oyster mushrooms, diced
2 T olive oil
4 T sesame oil
4 T soy sauce
handful of sesame seeds

Saute bok choy in olive oil. Cook the mushrooms in half of the sesame oil and soy sauce until the liquid is absorbed and the mushrooms are tender. Combine and toss with the rest of the oil, soy sauce and sesame seeds.

We added sauteed chicken and served it over whole wheat couscous.