Dinner last night was GOOD. My wife stewed some chicken leg quarters in the crock pot until the meat was falling off the bone. To the pot I think she added some carrots, celery, onions, bay leaf and thyme along with a bit of chicken stock. Again with the low fat, good healthy complex carb theme I steamed some brussel sprouts without any oil. I ‘baked’ a sweet potato in the microwave. Just 5 minutes and it was tender and steaming. Again, I didn’t use any fat to cook it. I can’t say much for the presentation, but the flavor was excellent. What really put this over the top was the little bit of sauce that was spooned over all of this. I made the sauce from the stew pot juices. I strained off all the spent vegetables and separated as much of the chicken fat from the juice that I could. This left me with about 3 cups flavorful chicken stewing broth. I put this in a pan and reduced it down almost to nothing! I was left with about 3/4 of a cup of wonderful, delicious chicken demiglas. I’ve never made a demiglas from poultry before. I was very very pleased with the result. Just a little bit added huge flavor to the plate.
Chicken
Healthy Eating and Bento Inspiration
I have been so bloated from all the parties and rich foods of the holidays. I am looking for lean proteins, good complex carbs, low fat foods, and lots of fresh vegetables. I haven’t been getting enough protein so I really loaded it up for dinner last night. I have a mixture of cooked grains mixed with fresh carrots, celery, cabbage and green onions dressed with a bit of rice vinegar. Lean chicken from the deli counter of the supermarket. And eggs! Yes, eggs. Notice they are quite pale? I used one whole egg and 3 egg whites to make these tasty, fluffy, light but packed with protein scrambled eggs. It was very satisfying.
I have been inspired by Biggie over at Lunch in a Box with all her wonder healthy bento box foods. So I jumped on the bandwagon. I had forgotten that my dear wife had purchased some Japanese lunch boxes a while ago. I took them out of storage and put them to use. You can see some leftovers here. There’s some of my seaweed and mushroom soup, fresh vegetables, more deli chicken breast and leftover cooked grain salad. Thanks Biggie! Now I just have to make time to prepare more. I was scrambling this morning to get this together.
Asian Influenced
I ate a lot over the holidays. I ate too many sweet rich foods. It’s time to cut back on the carbohydrates and fat and fill in with flavor. There is no better way to do this than with Asian food. You’ll be seeing a lot if low fat low carb meals from me in the near future. Tonight I made a mushroom and seaweed soup served with a soy/mirin marinated grilled chicken served on a salad with a ginger soy dressing. It was delicious, low fat, low carb and absolutely satisfying.
I used two kinds of dried mushrooms. One was already shredded into thin strips and the package simply called it “dried black fungus”. The other is my favorite dried mushroom, a dried shitake. These were soaked in water for a good 4-5 hours before cooking. I like to soak my mushrooms in zip-lock bags. It’s easy and convenient.
If you haven’t had soup made with dried seaweed you are missing out. I am inspired by many of the Korean soups (masters of soup if I may add) that use seaweed as a base. The Japanese also use dried seaweed as a soup and flavor base. I have two kinds in my soup this evening. One is Japanese – dashi kombu. This comes in wide sheets and hydrates to give a chewy thick seaweed in the end. I broke this up into small pieces. The other is a shredded seaweed. This one is much thinner and opens up into sort of very thin seaweed leaves as it hydrates and cooks. Both have a wonderful salty sea-like taste. It really is wonderful.
Here are everything combined together. The seaweed has been broken up into small pieces. The shitakes were sliced thinly. The mushroom soaking water was added to add all that wonderful color and flavor. To this I added some salt, lots of fresh ground pepper, lots of chopped garlic, a splash of soy sauce, and about 4 cups more water. This was heated to boiling and then simmered for two hours. This picture was taken before adding the water and cooking.
I made a simple salad of finely shredded romaine lettuce, green cabbage and carrots. This was eventually tossed with a dressing made from grated ginger, a splash of soy sauce, rice vinegar, mirin, sesame oil and olive oil.
Here is the salad with the grilled chicken on top. The chicken was marinated for two hours with a mixture of sesame oil, mirin, and soy sauce. It was grilled and allowed to rest for a few minutes before slicing.
The soup! It was delicious! I could eat this every day. The flavor of the shitake was most pronounced and it mingled with the seaweed flavor. I enjoyed dinner tonight!
Chicken and Broccoli
I came home from work last night and wanted to make something that fit my three requirements: 1) easy to throw together, 2) healthy and low carb, and 3) delicious. This is what I came up with. I makde a chicken and broccoli stir fry and served it on a bed of spaghetti squash. It turned out really nice.
I love spaghetti squash. It is healthy and delicious and it has such an interesting texture. I use it fairly often when I want to lower the carbs in a dish where I would normally have rice or pasta. Of course it isn’t the same but it still tastes great. I had a small sized squash here. The question was how to cook it quickly. I usually bake it in a hot oven for 45 min to an hour to get it soft and tasty. I didn’t want to wait that long so I looked to my microwave. I sliced the squash in half lenghthwise and removed the seeds. Then I placed the halves back together and tied it with some butcher’s twine. This I placed in the microwave and cooked it on high for 10 minutes. It was cooked to a perfect texture. Although you don’t get the caramelization that you would in the oven, it still performed well. I left it to rest while I prepared the rest of the dish.
I pre-steamed the broccoli for just a few minutes. Just until it was slightly cooked but still a bit crunchy. It would cook more in the stir fry. I cubed the chicken and seasoned it. I also added red onion, garlic and ginger. The onions, garlic, ginger and chicken were stir fried in my wok until the chicken was done. I added liberal doses of soy sauce, sesame oil and mirin. I tossed in the broccoli and covered it to cook through for a few minutes. I then added some corn starch slurry to thicken up the sauce a little bit.
This was so good I’m having the leftovers for breakfast this morning!
New Years Day Pot Roast
Nothing is more comforting than a slow cooked pot roast. On a bitter cold first day of the new year this really hit the spot. Slow cooked in my new Le Creuset pot with carrots, onions, peppers, red wine and a bit of honey mustard bbq sauce this really came out well. I served it in a big bowl with left over mashed potatoes and sopped up the juices with the left over day old sourdough herb onion bread.
Happy New Year
I hope everyone had a great New Year’s Eve last night. We celebrated with a few of our close friends. The evening started with some appetizers. First up was a cold sesame soba noodle salad. This was made by cooking and cooling soba noodles. These were simply mixed with some chopped garlic and green onions, lime juice, Vietnamese fish sauce and a splash of hot sauce. I also made mushrooms stuffed with breadcrumbs, parmigiano reggiano, mint and olive oil.
Dinner was roasted turkey with mashed potatoes. I also roasted some green beans and onions seasoned with garlic, balsamic vinegar and honey. My friend from Turkey brought a Turkish beef and eggplant dish and my friend from Korea brought some Korean pickled vegetables. I made some more no-knead bread flavored with onion and herbs.
Ah, dessert was interesting. If you live in my part of the world with lots of Norwegian influences you can find lefse everywhere. They have wonderful lefse in all the grocery stores. Lefse is kind of a crepe made with potato. It’s drier than a crepe and doesn’t have eggs in it. Sort of a very thin potato pancake (or tortilla). It is usually served with butter, sugar and cinnamon. I decided to layer them with chocolate ganache. I let this firm up and I cut them into squares. The combination of the potato flavor and chocolate was very interesting. It went over very well I think.
Sacrifice for your bread
The first time I made no-knead bread a month or so ago I didn’t have an iron pot or a ceramic La Cloche to bake it in. So I baked it on my pizza stone covered with a pyrex bowl. Of course I have never used this mixing bowl in the oven before so my brain didn’t even think that it would be 500 degrees hot when I grabbed it with my bare hands to plop it on top of the bread. I got some nasty burns on my fingers that are only just now about healed. Lesson Learned. I was so happy to get my Le Creuset pot for xmas as this is perfect for making no-knead bread in.
I took some liberties with the steel-cut oats no-knead bread from the breadtopia website. I actually started this bread a couple days ago. I’ll first list all the ingredients then I’ll tell you how I put it all together.
~0.75 cup sourdough starter
1.5 cups water
0.75 cup whole wheat flour
1.5 cup unbleached all purpose flour
0.5 cup steel cut oats
1.5 tsp salt
At 9:45 pm Friday evening I mixed together the starter, 1 cup water, 0.5 cups each of all purpose flour and whole wheat flour. This was mixed well, covered with plastic, and allowed to sit at room temperature. My starter was directly out of the fridge and had not been refreshed so I wanted to give this bread time for the starter to come alive.
The next day around 1:00 pm I mixed into the wet bubbling starter mixture another 0.5 cups of water, 1 cup of all purpose flour, 0.25 cups whole wheat flour, the steel cut oats and the salt. This was mixed well and allowed to sit out at room temperature for an hour. At that time I slightly kneaded the dough (ok, so maybe not completely no-knead). I simply folded the sticky dough over onto itself a couple dozen times right in the bowl. I didn’t want this dough to ferment too fast so I put it in the fridge for a nice overnight slow rise.
This morning at 6:00 am I took the dough out of the fridge and let it warm up. I scraped the dough out onto a lightly floured board, gave it a few turns and shaped it into a ball. This was plopped onto a piece of parchment paper and placed in a bowl. I covered it with a plastic bag and left it to do it’s thing. After 3 hours it had risen nicely. I heated up my Le Creuset in a hot 500F oven. Now I had been warned that the phenolic knobs on the Le Creuset are only rated oven proof up to about 350-400 degrees so I took the handle off before heating it. Once heated the bread was baked according to instructions – first 30 minutes with the lid on, then slightly reduce the temp to 450 and bake for another 15 minutes. The bread turned out great.
The handleless Le Creuset lid, however, was a bit unwieldy. As I was wrestling it off the pot at the 30 minute time it slipped and immediately seared a nice brand into the side of my hand. Sacrifice for the bread, I say! Two for two is too much. No more. I immediately went out on the web in search of a replacement knob. I found a Le Creuset stainless steel knob for $10 and promptly placed my order.
Garlic Beef
This evening I opened up a very unusual and interesting French wine from Languedoc. Minvervois to be specific. I thought this vegetative and peppery wine would go great with some Asian influenced beef. So I made a garlic beef dish served with steamed baby bok choy. I thinly sliced some ribeye steak and mixed it up with half an onion, quartered and sliced. I also added a head of garlic chopped, a splash of soy, mirin and a good shake of cornstarch. Oh, and some black pepper. This was simply stir fried in a wok until just under cooked. I added about 1/4 cup of water and covered it to let the sauce form from all the starch. It turned out pretty good. Quick and easy too. The wine matched perfectly.
Leftover Sourdough Focaccia
Yesterday was feeding day for my sourdough starter. As usual I hate to throw away perfectly lively babies so I used it to make a focaccia. I didn’t really follow a recipe and certainly didn’t measure anything. But it turned out pretty good anyway. I took almost a cup of sourdough starter and added about a cup of water to it. To that I added a tsp of salt and about two cups of all purpose flour. This was mixed up well, covered with plastic wrap and allowed to sit for a couple hours. After that I kneaded the wet dough in the bowl by folding it over on itself about 15-20 times. This was allowed to rise for another 3 hours. The very wet dough was poured out onto a sheet pan lined with parchment. I had doused the parchment paper with a liberal tbsp or more of good olive oil. I stretched the dough out thin with oiled fingers. It was a very nice texture – very pliable and relaxed. It stretched beautifully. I splashed the top with more olive oil to liberally coat it and then sprinkled it with coarse salt and a blend of dried basil, oregano and rosemary. This was covered with plastic wrap and allowed to rest for about an hour. I popped it into a 450F oven for about 15 minutes until the top just started to show hints of brown. The bread turned out better than I expected. The texture was nice and chewy and the oil made it slightly crispy. My first try at focaccia and it turned out pretty good.
To brine or not to brine
That is the question. Well, frankly, I prefer brining my poultry as it makes for a juicier and tastier bird. Here is a simple everyday chicken soaking in a mixture of sugar, salt and spices. For this three pound bird I let it brine for about 3 hours. A very good rinse in lots of fresh water and it was patted down with towels to dry it off. I rubbed the skin with a bit of butter and sprinkled it with salt and pepper. The bird was placed on top of a bed of carrots onions and celery in my favorite Revol chicken roaster. I set the oven to 450F to roast this at a high temperature. Once the internal temperature reached 170F I took it out, covered it with foil and let it rest for about 20 minutes.
This day I also spent a few hours cleaning out my pantry. I have lots of different kinds of dried beans and grains on hand so I thought I would make a medley of healthy grains to serve with the chicken. There’s kamut and red beans and mung beans and bulgar wheat and wheat berries and spelt and thai brown rice and yellow somethings and black eyed peas and black beans and lots of other things I had. These were soaked for a few hours before being thrown into my rice cooker and cooked on the “brown rice” setting.
