Kitchen Chick

Oh Where, Oh Where is Kitchen Chick?

I've had "a lot of life" lately.  I'll try to get back to regular posting soon. 

Recent sightings of Kitchen Chick include that great city of Toronto for Tapas and Dim Sum (but not at the same time) and the ConFusion Science Fiction Convention.  Check back for reports soon.

Maya Angelou's Smothered Chicken

Joe's parents gave us Maya Angelou's cookbook for Christmas. What an amazing woman! The stories she tells of her life alone are worth having.

Her smothered chicken is delicious and easy, though it requires an hour of marinating time, but that's not all that inconvienent when the hour is used to prep a side dish or two. I give the full recipe here, and then add how I adapted it for just two people at the end.

Smothered Chicken
serves 8

Two 3-pound fryer chickens
Juice of 2 lemons (about 1 cup?)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1 cup all-purpose flour
8 Tbs (1 stick) butter
1/2 C vegetable oil
2 medium onions, sliced
1 lb. button mushrooms, sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
2 C. chicken broth

Wash and pat dry chicken. Cut into pieces, and put in a bowl with lemon juice and water to cover. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

Wash lemon water off chicken and seasons with salt and pepper. Dredge pieces in 3/4 cup of the flour.

In a large skillet, fry chicken pieces on high heat in the butter and 1/4 cup of the vegetable oil until dark brown. Remove from skillet.

Add remaining 1/4 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of oil to the skilllet and cook until brown. Add onions, mushrooms, and garlic, stirring constantly. Put chicken back into the skillet. Add broth and water to cover. Turn heat to medium and cook for 25 minutes.

Kitchen Chick's changes:
I used 1 lb of boneless, skinless chicken breast (it's what we had), and cut the amounts for the remaining ingredients in half. Except for the vegetable oil — I used only one quarter of the amount specified. I also diced the onion because Joe doesn't like big chunks of onion.

I usually cook with boneless chicken breasts, so I just chopped the breast into sections and cooked it up per the directions, but with a little less time since the smaller chopped pieces would cook faster that a cut up chicken. When I cook this again, I will slice the chicken breast thin and pound it like scallopini. I think for this kind of recipe that will be a much better method for cooking chicken breast meat, which can easily become too dry.

Musings about 2004

I started a food blog. And I kept it going. For most of a year. At times it seemed like it took too much work and time when so many other things in my life were demanding my attention, but I kept it going and I've learned a lot along the way. I'm still trying to sort out what I want to do here. What's my focus? Do I need a focus (beyond food, that is)? Do I want a focus? I'm starting to become a bit more picky about what I post. At first, I had thought that I'd be posting a lot about Asian cooking, especially Chinese and Thai dishes. It's what I'm most familiar with, what I've been cooking the longest. Yet, this blog has made obvious to me what I was being slow to realize — that over the past few years I've expanded my day-to-day cooking beyond Asian cuisines. North African has become a new favorite (and this is spreading slowly to the rest of the Mediterranean), and with Marcella Hazan guiding my hands, I can even cook Italian.

The Dark Side of the Trifle

I had to make something decadent for a New Year's party. You could make the trifle, Joe pointed out. Yeah, but I've already made it twice this year. He said, You could make a chocolate trifle. It could be the 'Dark Side of the Trifle.'

Hmm... I thought about how I'd do it, then I did some research to see how other people have done it, and I found this gem of a recipe from Emeril Lagasse for Cranberry and Semi-Sweet Chocolate Trifle. But semi-sweet chocolate is just too... mild all by itself, so, to use Emeril's own words, I decided to kick it up a notch and added Godiva Chocolate Liqueur and bittersweet hot fudge sauce.

BAM!

(I can't believe I just said that.)

Emeril's individual recipes are in the extended post, but here's how I assembled my trifle:

Chocolate Cranberry Trifle
2 8" chocolate cakes
1 batch cranberry compote (1 batch should be just enough)
1 batch chocolate pastry cream
bittersweet or dark chocolate hot fudge sauce (I used Sanders for expediency.)
Godiva Chocolate Liqueur
Whipped cream (sweatened with a bit of confectioner's sugar, if you like)
Chocolate shavings

To assemble trifle:
Cut cake rounds into slices. (See my previous trifle recipe post for directions on how to do this.)

Spread Chocolate Pastry Cream in bottom of trifle bowl. Add a cake layer. Soak cake with chocolate liqueur. Add a layer hot fudge sauce. Add a layer of cranberry compote. Add chocolate pastry cream. Top with another cake layer and repeat until bowl is full. Top with whipped cream and chocolate shavings as desired.

I think in the future I will try a darker chocolate cake, or maybe add dark chocolate chunks to the cake.