Chicken

Chicken Piccata for a Crowd

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From the website https://www.cookingclassy.com/creamy-chicken-piccata/

I love chicken piccata but often have issues with versions available. The combination of lemon, butter, garlic and capers with sauteed boneless chicken breasts is classic for a reason. But if you take a look at even a few recipes out there you’ll find that there are significant variations, and they can’t all be the best! So I’ve gone on a CP deep dive and combined aspects into what I think make a perfect version. (The photo is from the website Cooking Classy for a recipe that’s somewhat similar to mine; I thought her photo was very representative of how the dish should look.) Let me explain how I tweaked the recipe. Issues I’ve addressed involve:

1. Not enough sauce—This problem is of course easily solved simply by increasing amounts.

2. Not using wine—It’s surprising that many recipes don’t include this fabulously flavorful ingredient. Chicken stock alone doesn’t give the sauce the complexity it needs. I’ve included wine measuring half the amount of chicken stock called for.

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A Guh-reat but Really Easy Recipe For Kung Pao Chicken

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Image by Fernando Sadao Shiraishi from Pixabay

I’ve had a standard stir-fry recipe for many years that can fit either chicken or beef depending on the stock/broth used and other variations. I don’t think lemon juice goes with beef, for instance, so I substitute sherry. It’s served me well, but recently I’ve become interested in developing a good homemade version of kung pao chicken. When we lived in Falls Church, VA, we ate a number of times at the Peking Gourmet Inn, a restaurant less than a mile from us that was a favorite of many celebrities, including the George W. Bushes. The walls are lined with many framed and signed photos. Gideon especially loved their kung pao chicken, saying that it wasn’t like any other version he’d ever tried. I loved their egg rolls, and sometimes for lunch I’d call in a takeout order (with extra garlic sauce), swing by and pick it up, and consume the two scrumptious, golden, packed-with-filling rolls in about five nanoseconds. Heaven! (Well, nearly.) In homage to that memory I made some egg rolls not too long ago that weren’t bad, although I didn’t deep fry them. Too messy! Then I decided to make a run at the kung pao. While the end result wasn’t really much like the PGI version, I have to say that the results were pretty gratifying. You know you have a hit on your hands when people keep taking seconds . . . and thirds. There was a tiny portion left. (Which I ate for lunch today, and it was just as good as freshly made!)

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Simplified Baked Garlic Chicken

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simplified backed garlic chickenI tried out this recipe when we had a bad snowstorm and I had to make do with what I had on hand, including some boneless chicken thighs. I will say again:  stop buying boneless chicken breasts and buy these instead.  They are so much better and cost so much less.  They are every bit as good as white meat and they don’t dry out.  If you think your family won’t eat them, just serve them up and don’t say anything.  I can (almost) guarantee that no one will know the difference except to say, ‘Hey Mom/Honey, these are really great!”

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A Great Alternative to Pasta Casserole

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pan of cheesy, creamy chicken casserole ready to take out of the oven

For many years my family enjoyed something called “Chiquita’s Chicken,” a recipe we’d gotten from a magazine article by the redoubtable Peg Bracken, author of the I Hate To Cook Book.  The article had a little booklet of recipes included which we apparently didn’t keep, although we did write down the one by Chiquita.. I remember that there was something called “Hao Nao Brown Kao” made with ground beef and vaguely Hawaiian or Chinese or some such, and another item called “Gloria’s Good Goulash.”  I found HNBK on cooks.com but the other two are lost to posterity. (At least under their original names.  Chiquita, whoever she may have been, apparently cribbed her recipe from an almost-identical one for “King Ranch Chicken,” which is very well known.)  Since Chiquita’s Chicken relies heavily on canned soup, I looked for something a little more upscale to replace it and found the following.  The cream of mushroom soup has been replaced by sour cream and cream cheese, so I guess that’s progress.  The cream of chicken soup stayed. The original recipe called for the chicken and cream cheese to be rolled up in individual corn tortillas, something I refuse to do.  Any time you’re asked for something that fiddly, just do layers instead.  (There are quite a few other fiddly things I do, such as the individual mini-tart shells, but at least there’s some point to them.)  So here’s my recipe, adapted from Taste of Home magazine.

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Company Roast Chicken

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plat of roasted herbed chicken ready to come out of the oven

This dinner was in honor of my in-laws’ return from a trip to Wisconsin and Minnesota. Hey, you always have to have a reason to celebrate! In contrast to the previous family get-together in September, for which I procrastinated and ultimately missed our morning church service and a rehearsal, this one went pretty smoothly. I made two recipes from Cook’s Country, one of the shows in America’s Test Kitchen lineup, and I feel free to give the recipe for the chicken below because 1) I’m supplying my own pictures, and 2) I made some changes. They say that if you make three changes in a recipe it’s now yours, but they have to be fairly major changes. I don’t know that this is now now mine, but I certainly have some advice to give. I had a friend in DC who said once, “Every time I make a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated [the magazine arm of the ATK empire], there’s always a point at which I say, ‘No way!’” That’s sort of what happens to me; there’s usually at least eye-rolling moment.

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