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Wynded Words

~ Home of author Sarah Wynde

Category Archives: Chicken

Cozy days

26 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by wyndes in Campground, Chicken, Food, Soup, Sous Vide, Travel

≈ 6 Comments

I woke up yesterday to a gray, rainy, chilly day and thought, “I have got to get out of here.”

I woke up today to a gray, rainy, mildly chilly day and thought, “Oh, what a good day to snuggle down into my cozy nest and write a lot.”

I’m really not sure what the difference is. I had a nice lake view yesterday and you’d think that would have satisfied me. I’m speculating, though, that green is the color that matters. Yesterday’s campground was gravel and dirt, gray tree trunks, dead brown leaves, slate water, overcast sky. Today’s campground is some of the above (although not the water), but also spring green grass and forest green pine trees. Plenty of brown in view, too, but it doesn’t feel Gothic.

Another difference might be technological. I had no Internet connection and no cell service at yesterday’s campground. I’ve actually quite enjoyed being without internet at points in my travels — it pushes me to be present, to appreciate where I am, instead of mindlessly browsing FB or reading news stories that I instantly forget. But only, I suppose, in places where I feel safe. In general, I like knowing that if I need help, it’s a phone call away.

So, yes, today’s cozy nest includes internet browsing and probably some texting with friends. It also includes some cooking. I picked up chicken breast on sale at the grocery store yesterday, and I’ve already got my sous vide churning away. Two experiments: one with lime juice, yogurt, and mint, and the other with parsley, cilantro, garlic and olive oil. The danger with sous vide chicken is having the flavors be too strong, so I’m a little worried about the garlic version, but if I hate it, Zelda will be very happy to have my leftovers.

As soon as I finish cooking the chicken, I’ve got some corn-on-the-cob ready to go in. I’m quite excited to try it. I thought the sous vide corn I cooked last summer was close to the best corn I’d ever eaten, and it was late summer corn. This is, I hope, very early summer corn, nice and fresh, so it ought to be even better. I’ll see, I guess!

I’m also debating a scallop soup. I’ve got bay scallops in the freezer that need to be used up, but so far I can’t decide between a spicy ginger-lime scallop soup — maybe with rice noodles? — or a chowder-style soup with coconut milk and maybe some curry. But I bought a mix of gluten-free cheese biscuits at Aldi a few weeks back and I think the soup winner might be whatever would go best with the biscuits. The nicest part of mildly chilly days is that using the oven doesn’t cook us, too.

So, yep, cozy day in Mississippi ahead of me. And with some good words on Grace to go, too!

Insta-pot debate

10 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by wyndes in Chicken, Food, Personal

≈ 10 Comments

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Gettysburg Farm RV Park, Pennsylvania

I bought an Insta-Pot during the Amazon Prime summer sale days. It seemed like a good idea — I’d wanted one for a while and I figured it could replace my slow cooker and give me some additional functionality for life on the road. But when it came and I tried to fit it into Serenity, it started looking like an expensive mistake.

Not my first — I bought an Amazon Tap on impulse when I meant to buy a Dot and purchased a very expensive tire-pressure monitoring system before reading the manual and discovering that tire-pressure monitoring was built-in to the Dodge system. Oops.

Fortunately, those were easily returned, but the insta-pot decision wasn’t so clear. After all, I had wanted one and I do feel like I need a slow cooker. But it’s big. Really big. It doesn’t fit in the over-cab space (not that I would put something that potentially dangerous there anyway – death by Insta-Pot during a fast stop is not how I want to go.) It doesn’t fit in any of the cabinets or in the limited under-the-bed space. In fact, the only place I can store it is inside the wardrobe. Apart from that, it would have to sit out on the floor and that’s sort of the same problem as the overhead space — leaving heavy objects out to fly around the van while you’re driving is not the greatest idea. It probably wouldn’t kill me from the floor, but in a 50mph collision with B and the Insta-Pot, B would lose. Squashed dog would be heartbreaking.

So the question was: do I want to give up my precious wardrobe space to a pressure cooker? I decided to answer by trying the insta-pot out as quickly as possible.

The first thing I made was a lemon chicken recipe using chicken thighs. It was… eh. Acceptable, but I could bake chicken thighs in the convection oven just as easily and they would taste just as good, maybe better because they get crispy. Admittedly, they would take a lot longer and heat up the van a lot more, but still, the chicken thighs were not a selling point.

Next I tried hard-boiled eggs. Wow. It is incredibly easy to make absolutely perfect hard-boiled eggs using an Insta-Pot. Five minutes, no mess, no heating a pan over the propane stove, and the eggs were truly perfect, exactly the way I like them.

However, have I mentioned the preciousness of my wardrobe space? I need shoes, ones with toes, and a winter coat, and maybe some rain gear. All of those things, once I get them, are going to need to be stored somewhere. I’d like to try going to the occasional writer’s conference: that would require professional(-ish) attire, which again, would have to be stored somewhere. Cleaning supplies, the screen door for the back, towels, the shower curtain, dog food, tools… there is a lot of stuff competing for that precious, precious storage space. Perfect hard-boiled eggs are not good enough to warrant giving it up to a pot. A big pot.

Today, I decided to try again. I bought two bone-in chicken breasts at the store, figuring I could cook them, then use the bones to make a small amount of stock. But when I tried to find a recipe that made sense, I failed. I should have looked for the recipe before going to the store instead of after. Alas. But I’m used to having a lot of staple ingredients, including a fully stocked spice cabinet, on hand.

Of course, not having a recipe never deters me. I decided to improvise. I did wonder, while I was mixing up a marinade of Marie Sharp’s Exotic Sauce (which I brought from the house and need to use up), balsamic vinegar, a generous handful of cilantro, and several chopped shallots, whether I was setting up the Insta-Pot to fail. Talk about a random marinade! But I marinated the chicken in the above for an hour, then sautéed it for a few minutes on the saute setting, then added a little bit of chicken broth, probably 1/4 cup, and used the poultry setting to cook it. When it was done, I took it out, measured the liquid — about a cup — and cooked a cup of jasmine rice in a 1:1 ratio with the liquid.

But I couldn’t wait for the rice. The chicken smelled so good! I kept stealing tiny bites of it, trying to figure out why/how it was so delicious. Was it the exotic sauce? The cilantro? The chicken wasn’t overwhelmed by the marinade, but it was infused with the flavors of the other ingredients. I could taste them — a little bit of a tang, that green bitterness of cilantro, the subtle kick of shallots — in each bite of moist, falling apart, yet fully-cooked chicken. It was ridiculously good.

When the rice finished, I added some dried cranberries — which probably would have been even better if I’d added them during the cooking — and a sprinkle of salt and ate. And ate. And ate. I had to force myself to stop when I was past full because I kept wanting just one more bite. I can’t remember the last time I over-ate. Which is not a particularly good selling point in the insta-pot’s favor, really, but I don’t suppose I should blame it too much for that.

The debate’s not over for me: my fridge is not big enough to store lots of leftovers and I can’t freeze extra ingredients. I may eventually decide that a diet of mostly salads and cold foods just makes the most sense for life in a van. But oh, I do regret the time I spent wondering if an Insta-Pot was really worth $120. If you have the room to store it, the answer is yes, yes, yes. And if you follow that link above, the price (at the time I write this, anyway) is only $70. Totally worth it! (It’s not an affiliate link — I don’t get any money if you buy it — so if you know anyone who uses affiliate links on their site, go visit their site, find an Amazon link, follow the link and then search on Insta-Pot, so they’ll get a few dollars from the sale. Yes, I have been learning about affiliate links recently!)

In other news, I’m hanging out in Gettysburg. I failed to go to a museum of agriculture and industry today. I felt like I should, since I was close and I’m traveling and museums are worthwhile… and then I remembered that my goal with this life is not to be a tourist, but to live simply. And to write. So far the writing is not going well, but maybe being very well-fed will be inspirational. 🙂

Pan Sauce and Chicken Thoughts

11 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by wyndes in Chicken, Food, Randomness

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Pan Sauce Thoughts image

I make roast chicken fairly often these days, because it’s a solid protein that I can use in a bunch of different ways. Leftovers are basically the only way I can imagine surviving the AIP regimen — otherwise, I’d be cooking serious food at every single meal and sometimes one just wants a bowl of granola level effort when it comes to breakfast or lunch. Or dinner, for that matter, although I suppose we’d call it take-out at dinner!

So chicken — can be eaten plain, hot or cold, put on a salad, mixed with various ingredients to be sort of a chicken salad (no mayo, so it never feels like real chicken salad to me), used in soup, mixed with cooked veggies as stir-fry, loads of options. And yet… chicken is kind of boring, especially when you’re not breading it, adding barbecue sauce, or frying it. Even my stir fries seem bland since I can’t use soy sauce. (Fish sauce — while similar and a useful discovery — adds too much saltiness to be equivalent.)

Anyway, last time I made roast chicken, I decided to try chicken gravy. It was … interesting. I understand why people don’t make chicken gravy very often. It’s fattier than turkey gravy or beef gravy. I suppose southerners are actually notorious for chicken gravy on biscuits, but I’m not a real southerner, so I’ve never even tried that.

This time, I decided to make sort of a combo — part pan sauce, part gravy. A pan sauce would usually be made with chicken broth, not the chicken drippings from the roast chicken, so with this pan sauce/gravy, I used chicken drippings, added white wine vinegar and capers, cooked it down a ton and then added arrowroot powder to thicken it up.

It requires more experimentation. But the general concept — pan sauce over roast chicken slices, is excellent. Next time the right approach might be to try a couple tablespoons of the drippings for the flavor, water, and balsamic, cooked down a ton.

Meanwhile the roast chicken strategy that I tried last night was the chicken rubbed with olive oil, sprinkled with garlic salt, in a 400 degree oven, cook for 30 minutes, then turn, then cook for another 45 minutes. The turning wasn’t worth the effort — the bottom skin still wound up soggy. Someday I’m going to figure out how to make a perfect roast chicken without a lot of effort (my favorite answer used to be pick up a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store, but that no longer works for me, alas) but my roast chicken also still requires experimentation.

Why post experiments? Because the last five times I’ve made roast chicken I’ve tried something different and now I can’t remember anymore what I’ve tried or not. ARGH! So writing down the experiments is how I’m going to find the answers. It’s the scientific method of cooking.

Spicy Grilled Chicken

29 Thursday May 2014

Posted by wyndes in Chicken, Spicy

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No photo, bad me, but last night I grilled chicken tenders.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with them when I started out. I’ve found that marinating chicken in a dairy-based product (yogurt, sour cream, mayonnaise) keeps it moist when you cook it, but I was sort of in the mood for spicy. Or tangy? I didn’t know, so I decided to go with everything. I made a marinade with the zest and juice of a lime, a couple tablespoons of mayo, and a tablespoon or so of siracha, and marinated the chicken in it all afternoon, before grilling it on a hot grill, a couple minutes per side.

Yum. Both spicy and slightly limey and as low-calorie as a marinade gets. Eaten with grilled asparagus and small potatoes. I burned the potatoes, but they were still delicious.

Chicken with Roasted Lemon, Olives, and Capers

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by wyndes in Chicken

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Image

This dish was mostly based on this recipe from Kalyn’s kitchen: http://www.kalynskitchen.com/2007/03/recipe-favorites-chicken-with-roasted.html

I really liked the idea of the roasted lemons, and they were tasty. It’s an interestingly different flavor from simple lemon juice: both a little more bitter from the rind and a little sweeter somehow, probably from the roasting.

Things I did differently: well, only made half the recipe for starters. Pounded the chicken breasts thin and then sliced them in half, so cooked them for a lot less time. I didn’t have poultry seasoning, so I used a little kosher salt with the pepper. I also didn’t have green olives so I used kalamata. And I didn’t bother to rinse the capers. The chicken broth was homemade, so low-salt enough that it balanced out the flavors of the salty ingredients. I used coconut oil instead of olive for the cooking and then about a tsp of fake butter instead of the two tablespoons of real butter. Coconut oil seems to thicken a sauce nicely on its own.

Things I would do differently next time: probably mix whole-wheat flour with white. I could taste the flour and didn’t love it. Make sure the lemons are sliced thin and cut off any really big rind. Otherwise… well, maybe try it with green onions. But it was pretty delicious as it was, so I might not bother.

Two thumbs up — definite keeper!

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