Thai Chicken Tacos

I've come out of my cooking dormancy in a big way. I'll have made more than four new things this week alone! However, of all of them, this recipe clearly took first prize. It came from Better Home and Garden, June 2011.

The recipe said to marinate the chicken for only an hour, but as anybody who knows anything about marinating knows, that is not long enough. I put it in the marinade for about six hours.

For the slaw, I managed to get to Publix just as they were clearing out the wilted produce, so I went with a pre-chopped slaw mix for the lettuce and carrots and then picked up the green onions, cilantro and radishes separately. I left out the peanuts.

This dish was incredible! Richard says it is his new favorite. The flavor of the chicken completely awed me. I have never done any cooking with sriracha or fish sauce before now, but they definitely won a spot on the staple list. The slaw played very nicely with the chicken. The one minor thing I might consider changing is the tortilla. The corn flavor was almost too much. I might like to see how flour tortillas work.

My biggest dilemma was what to serve on the side. I don't know how one would classify this dish...Thai-Mex? Cali-Thai? Not sure. I ended up breading and frying some zucchini-very tasty.

Butternut Squash Gnocchi

I've been making ricotta gnocchi for several months now with great success, but I had not been brave enough to try my hand at potato gnocchi since Em's and my utter failure at it circa June 2009.

However, a friend had given me a butternut squash and although I love my curried butternut squash soup, I wanted to try something new with this delicious gourd. Enter butternut squash gnocchi.

To begin with I did not want to buy a ricer for the potatoes and presuming that people made potato gnocchi before Williams Sonoma existed, I decided to try it with my 100-year-old, French rotary grater. The results were great! As you can tell, I was very proud of this.

The squash roasted in well under an hour, after which it was pureed and reduced. I then gently mixed, kneaded, rolled and cut the squash-potato dough.

I refrigerated it for a couple hours and then made my big mistake. :( I usually read recipe reviews religiously, but for some reason skipped them for this one. The recipe said to cook the gnocchi for 15-17 minutes, which I thought seemed excessive. It was excessive. They came out well over-done. The sage and brown butter sauce might have been good if the canvass had been better. I served it with sauteed baby eggplant.

This was, however, not a total failure. I learned a lot. First of all, in my ricing reading, I noticed many people recommend ricing potatoes for mashed potatoes. After seeing the light and fluffy results of ricing, I definitely will try this next time I make mashed potatoes. Secondly, I reinforced my emphasis on reading reviews. All the reviews said 15 minutes was too long. Lastly, I could see myself trying potato gnocchi again but probably not this variety. I couldn't really taste the squash at all

My Enchiladas

Ok, so I think I can call this recipe my own, since it so little resembles the original recipe I learned years and years ago.

First, let's get one thing straight: My enchiladas are not authentic Mexican cuisine.  They fall squarely in the Tex Mex category.

Because I've made these so often, I no longer measure anything.  That will make writing the recipe a little difficult, but here goes.

1 1/2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (cooked and shredded)
small, fajita-size flour tortillas
1 can hot enchilada sauce
3 tbsp. chopped onion of choice (I use Spanish onions)
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup + 1/2 cup shredded pepper jack cheese
salt to taste


Preheat oven to 375.   Combine cooked chicken, onion, sour cream and cheese.  Add salt to taste.  Lightly brush one side of tortillas with enchilada sauce.  On sauced side, spoon on desired amount of filling.  Roll up and place in lightly greased baking dish.  After all have been assembled pour remaining sauce over enchiladas.  Top with remaining 1/2 cup pepper jack.  Bake uncovered for approximately 25 minutes.  Yields about 10 enchiladas.

Now, this is the version which I make to make the two of us happy.  I can't handle a lot of heat, so this is pretty tame.  Richard adds a little hot sauce and some jalapenos to his.  I used to put jalapenos in the recipe (I think the original called for green chiles), but it was too spicy for me.  It's a pretty good base recipe that can easily be adjusted to taste.  When I have the time, I let the chicken marinate for an hour in some oil, salt and a little fresh lime juice if I have it.

One of Richard's all-time favorite dishes.

Salmon En Papillote

I've been wanting to try this technique for some time, and then one night this week the stars aligned and everything worked out for me to do it.  Salmon was on sale and I had plenty of parchment paper, vermouth and vegetables on hand.

Originally, I was going to use this recipe from Alton Brown, but I couldn't find leeks (strange).  So, not knowing how much that would throw off the flavor palette I decided to go rogue.  I used zucchini, lemons, salt, pepper, a little garlic, shallots and vermouth with the salmon.  From start to finish the whole process took about fifteen minutes.  I stacked the zucchini on the bottom, then the shallots and garlic, followed by the salmon (seasoned with s&p) and finally the lemons and vermouth.   Wrapped it all up in the heart-shaped parchment paper and popped it in the nuker for four minutes.

For so little effort and time, the result was stupendous.  The zucchini was actually my favorite part.  Sitting on the bottom made it absorb all the flavors.  Good beyond words.

The fact that the zucchini absorbed so much flavor, made me reconsider my stacking technique for next time.  I placed the salmon skin-side down on the veggies.  Next time, I will probably do skin side up, so the fish can get more flavor.  The salmon had a great deal of the lemon flavor but much of the vermouth/shallots/garlic flavors sank to the bottom away from the fillet.

One other thing I love about this technique is that it makes clean-up so easy.  Just toss the parchment paper when done eating.  No pots. No pans. No fish stuck to a pan.  And the plates just needed a minimal quick scrub to get the juices off.

Chicken Piccata

Chicken Piccata is one of Matt's favorite dishes, so I've played with various recipes for it a great deal looking for "the one." Ina Garten's was the 3rd or 4th I tried, and it was the closest to what I was looking for. However, I use her recipe more as a set of guidelines and do not follow it line by line.

For one thing, her recipe does not call for capers (?!) so the first thing I did was add those to the sauce. After trying various amounts, I settled on 1/4 - 1/3 teaspoon of capers (without any of the brine in the jar) per recipe. It doesn't seem like much, but the capers have a powerful flavor and using much more than that gave us more of a caper-y sauce than we wanted - we were after a balance between the capers and lemon juice.

Her step of putting the squeezed lemon halves in the pan with the sauce while it is reducing is cute, but threw the balance the other way, toward being too lemon-y. So I skip that. Also, it goes without saying that squeezing fresh lemon juice is the way to go here. I have yet to find a recipe that does not benefit from squeezing fresh. It's easy, takes just a few minutes and the result is always far superior.

I've tried many variations on the chicken breading, most notably using panko when I made this last night. I'm kind of torn on panko. The breading is thicker, yes, and crispier, but the panko itself doesn't have the best flavor. That's kind of a problem since whatever breading I use tends to come off the chicken in sheets when soaked with sauce for serving - which isn't a problem - but you sometimes end up eating a bit of breading by itself and in a direct comparison between panko and standard Progresso Italian, Progresso Italian wins in flavor. I've also noticed, when using panko, that I get a better breading if I double the steps - i.e. flour, egg, panko, egg, panko. Hitting the egg and panko a second time gives you a much thicker breading. If only the panko itself actually had a good flavor. I've tried three brands - Progresso, whatever brand comes in the big container from Costco (can't remember what it's called) and some obscure Asian brand that I got at the Asian market. I had the same problem with all three. Progresso was, if I recall correctly, the best, but it was also much more expensive. So overall, I'm not completely sold on panko. Matt prefers Progresso Italian anyway, so I'll probably stick with that going forward.

For the chicken, split chicken breasts cook more evenly. In an attempt to give the chicken itself more flavor, I brined the four chicken breasts overnight in a mixture of 1/4 cup kosher salt to 4 cups water. (I also threw in a couple bay leaves because, well, why not?) The chicken sat in the saltwater for a good 24 hours before I set out to make dinner, and it did make a difference. The chicken did not taste salty, but just had more depth of flavor. I will continue to do this step in future. The times listed on Ina's recipe for cooking are way off from what I end up doing - I find the chicken usually needs 4-5 minutes per side, and not 2, in order to brown nicely. I've also noticed that the chicken needs longer than 10 minutes in the oven to be cooked thoroughly. As far as what kind of fat to saute in, her recipe calls for olive oil, but I have also successfully used olive oil/butter, butter alone, clarified butter, and bacon fat. The latter two are my favorites.

Given the prevalence of butter in the sauce, I noticed a BIG difference the one time I made this using fresh butter from the local Amish market. It was much, much richer and creamier than using Land'o'Lakes, which is what I usually have around. If I have the good stuff in the house, I use it, but don't sweat it if I don't.

Finally, I've found that the kind of white wine used in the sauce does make a difference. My personal preference for a cooking white wine (for any savory application, not just this recipe) is Sauvignon Blanc. It's not overly sweet, and has a nice tanginess that I find very pleasing. Last night the only white I had in the house was a Pinot Grigio, and I didn't like the sweetness of that grape with the capers and lemon.

Picky about sauce ingredients or no, I usually make just a little extra of it. For example, I usually double the recipe for the chicken and then do three or four recipes of the sauce, depending on what I'm serving the chicken with and whether any of the sides would want some sauce (like pasta).

However I vary it - this is still one of Matt's favorites.

Ina Garten's Portobello Mushroom Lasagna

I adore this recipe.  It has definitely become a staple in my house.

There's nothing tricky about it; it really is as straightforward as it looks.

I use the baby bella mushrooms, just because they are easier to find and a little more economical.  I also use salted butter in the bechamel.  The main flavors in this dish are the mushrooms and the parmesan so the extra bit of salt in the butter helps bring that out.  (Be sparing with the nutmeg or you'll taste that above all else.)  Other than that the only change I made to add a small clove of garlic while the mushrooms are sauteing.

Portion-wise, I halve the recipe which feeds two and leaves leftovers.  It keeps extremely well in the refrigerator.

It's also one of those recipes that will "wow" guests without causing you to pull your hair out.