Chickpeas

I was inspired by one of the blogs I read to get my dried chickpeas out of the pantry. I changed up the recipe a little (go figure), since I didn't have all the ingredients and had vowed not to go back to the grocery store until next week to get the next batch of ingredients for the roast chickens.

Here's the recipe: Chickpeas with Sausage and Peppers.

And here are the substitutions: mild Italian sausage for the spicy sausage (remember my stomach, plus these were in the freezer), canned artichoke hearts for the peppers, and white wine for the sherry. I'm sure it ended up being a pretty different dish, but it was yum, and my husband went back for seconds.

As I said, I used dried chickpeas. I'm pretty impatient and don't soak my beans overnight. I've always had success using the following method to "quick soak" dried beans.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup dried beans
• 3 cups water
• 1 Tsp salt

Directions:

• Add dried beans and water to a pot.
• Bring to a boil.
• Allow to boil for 2 minutes.
• Put on a lid and turn off the heat.
• Set the timer for an hour.
• After one hour, add salt, bring beans to a boil.
• As soon as they come to a boil, turn down to a simmer and cook until tender--which will vary according to what kind of bean you are cooking. The chickpeas took about 2 hours.

Tea

From left to right, top to bottom: oolong, yunnan, genmaicha, lapsang souchong, keemun, and pu-erh

Okay, so I guess it's a beverage, not a food, but tea is something that my husband and I drink with a lot of different cuisines and desserts. We like to buy it loose and in bulk. We usually put an order in late in the Fall, when it is starting to get chilly. Our favorite mail-order place is
Holy Mountain Trading Company. We can also pick up the yunnan and the genmaicha at Sams Oriental Food Market in Little Rock.

We have a pretty large assortment of teas in our pantry, but I've picked out six that show some of the variety found in products from the leaf of the Camellia sinensis plant:

oolong -- A Chinese tea, somewhere in between a green and a black. I always think of it as a green, probably because of the color after it has been steeped. It has a slightly coppery, vegetal flavor. Oolong can be double-potted--in other words, the leafs can be re-used to make a second pot, in fact, the second pot is often better than the first. The oolong we ordered this winter was the Ti Kwan Yin (Iron Goddess), from Holy Mountain.

yunnan -- a black tea, from the Yunnan Province in China. It comes in compressed cakes. The one that comes in the box above is a large cake, but I have also found it at our local market in smaller, individually wrapped pellets to make a single cup of tea. It has a rich red color in the cup and a sweet, mellow aroma and taste.

genmaicha -- a Japanese green tea with roasted brown rice. Originally this was a tea for the peasant class, thus the filler of the roasted brown rice. Sometimes the rice pops, and there will be little bits of "popcorn" mixed in as well (if you look closely in the photo above, there is a piece of popcorn behind the pile of tea). This tea is yellow in the cup, and has a roasted vegetative flavor. One of my favorite everyday teas, we get it cheap at the local market.

lapsang souchong -- a Chinese black tea that is traditionally smoked over pine-wood fires. This stuff smells like smoking tobacco and is an acquired taste! I like it best in the bitterest of cold weather. Once Ric and I put it in a thermos and carried it out with us on a birdwatching trip to our favorite national wildlife refuge on a cold February day--very warming. It is red in the cup and has a strong (and I mean strong) flavor. One of my cook books uses it, ground, as a dry rub to mock a smoked flavor.

keemun -- Another Chinese black tea. It is red in the cup and has a sweet, almost floral taste. This is our everyday black tea.

pu-erh -- a Chinese green tea. Called a "cooked" tea, it actually undergoes a fermentation process, and is pressed and sold in cakes. It is a pale brownish color in the cup, and has an earthy, mushroomy flavor.

For more information on tea, visit the wikipedia article:
tea on Wikipedia

Thursday Thinking Ahead--March 5

Fixings for Chicken Gyros

This weeks Thinking Ahead is very much a continuation of last week. If you will remember, I took Gourmet Magazine's March Article Birds in Hand as a challenge, and roasted two chickens last week and based my grocery list around the four recipes that were based around those two chickens. This article was intended for cooks like me who love to think ahead!

Thursday night we enjoyed Roast Chicken with Pan Gravy from the magazine, and my own Fennel and Sourdough Dressing. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we had leftover chicken for lunch with black eyed peas, biscuits, and my own Egg Noodles with Fennel-Pepper Sauce. Monday, and Wednesay we had Gyros with Cucumber Salsa and Tsatsiki (I was off on Tuesday, so I rummaged and saved the sandwiches for a work day).

The Chicken Gyros recipe will return to our plates later in the year when the farmer's market opens back up. It was a little out of season for the first week in March, and most of my grape tomatoes ended up in the trash as they were gray inside. Yuck!

The rest of the chicken is now up in the freezer. I'm saving it for next week when I'll make Cheesy Chicken and Mushroom Lasagne, and Leek and Pea Risotto with Grilled Calamari.

Tuesday afternoon I rummaged through the pantry and fridge, and made up one of my trashcan pastas for lunch on Thursday and Friday to finish out the week before heading back to the grocery store.

Chicken

Salsa

Tzaziki

Fish Teapot Viewed Through Another Vessel

Egg Noodles with Fennel-Pepper Sauce

This weekend I needed a side dish to go with my Roast Chicken with Pan Gravy, and came up with the following combo. The pan gravy called for only 2 tablespoons of the leftover fat from the roast chicken, so I saved the rest--way too much flavor to waste! I used a tablespoon of it in my sauce, but you could use butter.

I have a love affair with black pepper--if you don't, you might want to cut the pepper down. This has a bite!

Ingredients:

• 6 oz dried egg noodles (From Scratch)
• 1 TB fat
• 1 TB flour
• 1 1/4 cup fennel broth (from scratch)
  
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 1 Tsp fresh ground black pepper
• fresh chopped flat leaf parsley to garnish

Directions:

• Cook noodles in 4 quarts water, drain and set aside.
• Heat fat, until melted, then turn to low heat.
• Mix in flour until blended into a roux.
• Slowly pour in broth, while vigourously whisking roux, until all ingredients are well blended.
• Cook, whisking often, on medium low heat until thickened.
• Whisk in sour cream until well blended.
• Heat for a few more minutes to allow it to thicken back up.
• Stir in pepper.
• Stir sauce into noodles until well coated.
• Garnish with chopped fresh parsley.

Fennel and Sourdough Dressing

I made this dressing over the weekend to go with the roast chicken, and to use the fennel broth I made from the scraps from last weeks pork loin with fennel.

Ingredients

• 1 (1-pound) loaf sourdough bread, cut into 1/2-inch cubes (10 cups)
• 2 medium onions, chopped (2 cups)
• 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter plus additional for greasing pan
• 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 2 cups fennel broth (from scratch)
  
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh dill
  
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Directions

• Put oven racks in upper and lower thirds of oven and preheat oven to 350°F.
• Spread bread cubes in 2 large shallow baking pans and bake, stirring occasionally and switching position of pans halfway through baking, until dry, 20 to 25 minutes total.
• Transfer bread to a large bowl.
• While bread is drying in oven, cook onions in 1/2 stick butter in a 12-inch heavy skillet over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until golden, about 20 minutes, then add garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, 1 minute.
• Add broth, dill, salt and pepper. Stir for a minute.
  
• Add onion and broth mixture to bread, toss and combine well, reserving skillet.
  
• Increase oven temperature to 450°F and butter a 13- by 9-inch baking dish (3-quart capacity).
• Spoon stuffing into baking dish. Cut remaining 2 tablespoons butter into bits and dot over top of stuffing.
• Bake stuffing, covered tightly with a sheet of buttered foil (buttered side down), in upper third of oven until heated through, 15 to 20 minutes.
• Remove foil and bake stuffing until top is lightly browned, 10 to 15 minutes more.

Sunday Brunch--Chicken Biscuits

So my tummy was upset last week--that's actually putting it very mildly. I was home from work a day and a half, and in so much pain that I was longing to be with my co-workers instead of being at home in bed, or worshipping the you know what.

Wednesday, I finally managed late in the day to have some Liptons Chicken soup, and toast, and jello--and that was little bites and sips over a period of 3 or so hours. Most of the soup ended up down the kitchen drain. The thought of food was miserable--which is saying something, since usually I probably spend way too much time thinking about it.
Thursday, thank goodness, was my day off and I managed very wobbily, with lot's of rest breaks, to roast the chickens that I knew we'd need to see us through my long weekend at work, or else it'd be fast food for sure! I had about four bites of that chicken because it smelled so good, and because finally my stomach seemed to want something. Big mistake!

Friday, I made it through half a day at work, ate a little toast off and on that I told one of my co-workers burned like the fieriest of Mexican food, and then came home to rest that afternoon. I finally managed to eat a full meal--a small serving of garlic pasta. It stayed down, but didn't feel so great.

Then Saturday morning I woke up hungry--not just hungry but craving of all things a chicken biscuit! And I actually felt almost normal after I ate it! Here's the result of that craving:

Unfortunately, the biscuits turned out pretty flat. I believe the common metaphor is "like hockey pucks." They tasted yummy, but I was also craving a certain texture--so I tried again for Sunday Brunch.

I turned to one of the few food network celebrity chefs that I really care for--Alton Brown. AB always uses science as the basis for his recipes, and if ever I needed science it was now. Altons Southern Biscuits turned out wonderfully! Although the recipe claimed it would make a dozen, I only got six out of it.




This time I measured the dough to make sure it was the right thickness. I ended up with a much smaller round of dough. I made sure that the biscuits were touching. Also, since it seemed to be very important that the shortening, butter, and buttermilk remain cold, I put the unbaked biscuits in the fridge while I waited for the oven to finish warming up to the right temperature.