Chicken Fricassee

While my first meat love is pork, chicken comes in as a close second.    I like love chicken.   There are so many things you can do with it, fry it, boil it, bake it, grill it, saute it, stew it, or fricassee it.  Which is a combination of frying and stewing,    I just love saying Fricassee, it makes it sound so exotic, and good.    Every so often I get a hankering for a good old fashioned meal of Chicken Fricassee.    It's a nice comfort food, and you can serve it with noodles or rice or mashed potatoes or, whatever you like.    I think it's a great combination of several veggies, in the past I've made it with celery and green peppers along with the mushrooms, but yesterday I just used half a green pepper, a pound of mushrooms and some green onions for the sauce.   And it was good.   Very good.   And best of all I have leftovers, giggle.  Or at least enough left over for another meal.  So, I'm putting it in the freezer so the next time I don't feel like cooking, TA DA, my dinner is ready, well almost, I'll still have to defrost it.

To start with, I used some chicken breasts that I'd boned and skinned.   But you can use cut up chicken for this as well, if you like drums and thighs, they go wonderfully here.

Chicken Fricassee
4 chicken breasts, boned and skinned or
1 whole chicken cut up, and skinned
2 tbsp. Flour
Salt and Pepper, to taste
4 tablespoons olive oil (just enough to saute the chicken and brown it a little) 
 1 whole green pepper, cut into chunks
8 oz.  mushrooms sliced
4 sliced green onions
2 stalks Celery, chopped (I didn't have any)
2 cups chicken stock  (home made is best here if you can)
1 teaspoon Marjoram or (Basil or Oregano or Sage)
2 tablespoons flour
1/2 cup milk or cream

Dredge the chicken in a little flour you've seasoned with some salt and pepper.   No need to go exotic here, unless of course you want to.   And in that case if you want to season it with some other herbs, feel free.  This is your dish, you can do whatever you want.    Saute the chicken until it's browned a little and then remove it from the pan. 

Place the chicken aside, then saute the green onions, mushrooms and green pepper for a few minutes until the green pepper softens a little and the mushrooms start to cook.

Put the chicken back in the pan, add the chicken stock and let it cook for 30 minutes or until the chicken is done.

Remove the chicken from the pan and set aside.   Make a slurry of the flour and milk and add to the pan juices to make a gravy. Cook until it is thickened and then add the chicken back to the pan and let heat through.   Serve with noodles or rice or mashed potatoes.

Another view, giggle.   I do have to say, this is an easy dish, and I think it tastes great too.

Senior's Lunch 3/29 and Mac and Cheese for a crowd

I think I left you with the fact that as I was trying to make a chocolate sauce last week, I managed to scorch it, sigh, which meant I had to start all over again.  But I made it.  I got another sauce done and on the cake and it was good.   We also did our usual crazy last minute stuff and managed to get the food ready and waiting for our people to come and eat.   The menu this week was:

Fried Tilapia
Mac and Cheese
Chicken and Rice Casserole
Coleslaw
Sliced Red and Yellow Tomatoes
Squash
Hushpuppies
Sliced Bread and Fresh Home Made Butter
Deviled Eggs

Fried Tilapia

Mac and Cheese

Chicken and Rice Casserole

Coleslaw

Squash

Sliced tomatoes

Home Made Butter and Bread

Hush Puppies

Deviled Eggs

And I have to say that the Mac and Cheese was really good, and just to give you an idea of how much I made, here's the recipe, but please remember I eyeballed a lot of this, and added until it tasted right. 

3- 3 pound boxes of Elbow Macaroni, cooked.  (this really makes a lot, each box serves 24)
1 lb. grated Monterey Jack Cheese
1 lb. grated Cheddar Cheese
1/2 lb. grated Sharp Cheddar Cheese
Toss the grated cheese with a couple tablespoons of cornstarch, keeps it from sticking to itself and also, very important, keeps it from separating while cooking.
2 lbs. Velveeta Queso Cheese, cut into cubes

2 quarts Half and Half
4-6 tbsp.  Cornstarch
1/2 cup yellow mustard,   (could have been a little more, I was eyeballing it).
3 tsp.  onion powder
1 tsp Cayenne powder.

1 1/2 packages of Panko Bread Crumbs
1 cup butter (approx).

Grease two large baking pans, I'll have to measure them next week and let you know just how big they were, but anyway, then divide the cooked macaroni into the dishes, half into each one.
Divide the grated cheese into two portions, and add half to each pan of macaroni, give it a little stir, you don't want it clumping up into one big cheesy clump.    Then chunk up each one pound package of Velveeta and add the cubes to the hot macaroni, stir.   Set aside while you make a white sauce out of the half and half and cornstarch.   Then pour half of the white sauce over each pan of macaroni, give it a stir and top with the buttered Panko Bread crumbs.   Bake until heated through, approximately 45 minutes or so, and the crumbs are browned a little.     This made a lot, and it was very good.    I'm actually going to be making this again, and taking it to a friends house for part of Easter dinner, so I'll post the more reasonable proportions for a family size recipe later.     However, if you're making Mac and Cheese for a large group of people, this recipe is spot on.  
 

Senior's lunch March 22nd.

Just in case anyone's curious, here's what we've been feeding our senior's the past two weeks.   We do a weekly lunch for a small donation, and work very hard to make balanced, good tasting food.    And I think on the whole we succeed.     Sometimes we have missteps, like me today, I managed to scorch a chocolate sauce I was making and ended up chucking it, but, I persevered and make a good one to pour over the angel food cake we had.   I've said before I'll let you know when I make something that's inedible, it doesn't happen often mind you, but it does happen. 

Last week we had fun.    Actually, we seem to have fun most weeks.   And sometimes our timing is off, but for the most part we have the food ready to go by noon.   Lousy picture up there, but the menu was:
Hamburger Steak with Onions
or Shrimp Salad
Green Beans
Roast Potatoes
Harvard Beets
Glazed Carrots
Rolls and Homemade Butter

We do give people a choice of either meat, and I think for a $3.00 donation, we do pretty good.
Robin made the Hamburger Steaks and she and Janey made the patties. 

  I got busy with Sarge peeling a whole buncha Shrimp that had been donated and since they'd already been cooked we decided to make a salad with them.  And I have to say, it was a hit.    

and of course we also had our other vegetable dishes;

Grilled Onions and those are glazed carrots in the background.

Green Beans

Roast Potatoes

Harvard Beets

Hungry yet?   Just kidding, and this was last weeks lunch.   I'll post our adventures from this week tomorrow, right now I'm heading for a soft chair and footstool for a little while before I head out the door to go to Trivia Night at a 2Al's Restaurant.   

Tapa's Night for March

 It's Tapa's time again, well it was on Saturday.   I try to do two dishes each time, one new recipe and one that seems popular with everyone.   I was just looking a blog called Newyorkerbyheart .  It's a Danish blog I've bookmarked and followed for a couple years now.   And the other day she had made this recipe, just one of those 'thrown together' type recipes and I had to 'steal' it, or at least part of it.  I thought it lent itself so nicely to appetizers.   
So simple, so easy and finger food friendly.    I made it in smaller pieces than she did, but OMG, was it good.

Chicken Bites

And for my everybody friendly dish, I made some Cheese Quesadilla's, some with jalapeno inside and some without.   I served them with some salsa for dipping.

Quesadilla's

I also did a third dish, well, it was supposed to be served with bread, but I forgot to pull the Sourdough bread out of the freezer so I served it as a dip with potato chips.   The dip itself disappeared, or at least most of it did, but it would have been so much better on some bread or in a wrap or...

Feta Cheese dip

Then there were the following dishes which were brought by our guests;

Key Lime Pie

Taco dip

Strawberry Crostini

Tuna Spread

Potato and Tuna Salad with Deviled Eggs and Tomatoes

Broccoli and Mozzarella Bake

Hot Crab Dip

Little Sausages in BBQ sauce

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Baked Brie with Chopped Nuts

Chicken Fingers 

And to top off the evening, we even had LIVE entertainment, Debi Jordan graced us with a couple of songs and was accompanied by Doug on the drum.   

I'll post the Chicken Bites and Feta Cheese dip recipes and how-to's tomorrow.

Cooking Demo- Saubraten and Leberknodel Soup

I've talked about the Cooking Demo's at the Crooked River Grill before, and they are always fun.   I got to present a Danish Menu last year, and had a blast doing it.    And have been fortunate enough to attend most of the dinners since then.   This week we had a German menu.   I got to try Saurbraten for the first time.   And better yet, a soup that I'm still dreaming over, Leberknodel Suppe.  The recipe for which is at the end of this post.  The soup, well, let me just say I filled up on it and could have made that my entire meal.   But then again, I like liver.  Sorry, but I do.   

For starters there was a lovely salad, and the soup.   Sigh, I took pictures of it, but didn't know what the ingredients were beforehand, so I kinda put a bunch of the little meatballs in my bowl, didn't know what kind they were until I ate one.   And fell in love, well, serious like at any rate.    Then my table mates told me it was liver, and I smiled.   And now I have the recipe for it, and I'll share, I do share stuff from time to time.

 
The meat for the Saurbraten is actually marinated for several days before you brown it and then cook it slowly in the oven.   It was served with Potato Dumplings and Red Cabbage.   Quite tasty, and now I've finally tasted Saurbraten, and I'm glad I did.

  

Leberknodel Suppe
2-3 quarts of chicken or beef broth
1/2 pound of finely ground beef or veal liver
2 small onions, finely chopped
2 tbsp. parsley finely chopped
2 tbsp. chives, finely chopped
1 cup breadcrumbs
1 egg beaten
Salt and Pepper
1 1/2 tsp. grated lemon rind

Heat broth, combine all other ingredients to make a dough.    Make small dumplings about 1 tsp. in diameter and drop gently into the boiling broth.  Simmer about 8 minutes or until the dumplings rise to the top.  Garnish with chopped parsley and chives.   Serve right away.

And for dessert, a Black Forest cake, which I neglected to take a picture of, sigh.