One Pot Wonder--Chicken Marbella

There are so many recipes in the Glorious One-Pot Meals cookbook that I want to try, that it was hard to narrow it down to the one to try first. I settled on Chicken Marbella, because I had both Brussels sprouts and portobello mushrooms to use. The recipe calls for prunes (my sister says to call them dried plums to make it sound better) which I'm unsure of how I'll like, but the author actually says her husband shares my skepticism for fruit in savory dishes and that he liked this. So in light of trying new things, I'm going with this!

Chicken Marbella (Somewhat adapted from the book to fit my larger pan )
Cooking spray
Chicken breast (another monster one from Costco)
1/4 c chopped, pitted prunes 
1/4 c chopped pitted Spanish green olives
3 TBS capers, with a bit of juice
1/4 c red wine vinegar
1 TBS olive oil
1 C chicken broth (was wine, but I don't ever have wine around)
1 TBS dried oregano
2 TBS finely chopped fresh parsley
6 fingerling potatoes (small)
sea salt
2 portobello mushrooms chopped
7 baby portobello mushrooms chopped
16-20 brussels sprouts (about 12 oz) trimmed and haved lengthwise
3 bay leaves

 I pulled out all the ingredients, and realized that it didn't call for any garlic--which seemed like a travesty, so I pulled out the garlic to add. After setting the oven to 400, I begun chopping with the dried prunes, which I have never ever in my life tried before this. I snuck a teeny piece and it was not bad.

I'm very glad that I finally broke down and bought some new knives a couple of months ago--it has made all of this chopping so much easier to have sharp knives! The prunes, olives, capers, and caper juice were mixed together, and set aside while I prepared the chicken. Since my two chicken breasts were so large (quite the image!), I decided to break them down into smaller pieces to fill up more of the pan.

At that point, I got a call from the Dominican Republic--my mom is finally feeling better after having some kind of tropical fever for several weeks, and we caught up about Thanksgiving goings-on. I'm getting excited to visit them in December for Christmas! Because of the skype call, I didn't get pictures of the rest of the prep, but the prune mix went on top of the chicken. The broth, vinegar, parsley, oregano, and extra garlic and red pepper was mixed and half poured on the chicken. I sliced the potatoes and layered them on top of the chicken slices, and then cut up and layered the mushrooms, and then sliced and covered everything with Brussels sprouts. Bay leaves and the rest of the broth completed the dish, and into the oven it went to cook for 45 minutes.

 The book says it is done when you can smell it outside of the oven, and sure enough when the buzzer went off I could smell it through out the apartment. Here is the finished dish--after I'd checked the chicken was cooked through.

The finished meal--Chicken Marbella

The Verdict: Good, but not great. Some of the chicken was overcooked, and a little dry, even though it basically poached in the liquid. The best bites were those that had the mushrooms, olives, capers, and prunes. Once again I would have liked more veggies to the amount of protein, and I wish I'd gone ahead and added the whole bag of Brussels sprouts! If I made it again, I think I'd marinate the chicken with the prune, olive, caper mix with some of the liquid before cooking, and increase the amount of veggies, and not slice the chicken into strips.

My Glorious Pot!

The next cookbook from my shelf is Elizabeth Yarnell's Glorious One-Pot Meals.  I am so excited about this cookbook, that I went out and bought a special pot to make the recipes in. Yay! I now am the proud owner of a bright shiny blue cast iron pot. The recipes in the book are for a 2 qt pot, to serve 2, but I bought the more standard 5 qt size. I'll just double the recipes and have left overs--I do like to cook meals to last for lunches all week!

This is what my shiny pot looks like--so pretty, and will make yummy meals! I want to make almost all of the recipes in this book--the fish dishes look amazing, as do the chicken ones, I even want to try lamb! Stay tuned for some experimentation with new recipes and my new toy!

Everyday Light Brownies

 So last Wednesday night, the furnace in my apartment went out, which lead to a chilly Thanksgiving morning! Fortunately, I have a nice space heater, and my wonderful brother-in-law (and landlord) was able to get it up and working on Friday. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at work on Saturday to find the heater had also gone out there. Joy! Sadly, it is an older and much more complicated system than my apartment furnace, and the HVAC crew was not able to get it working. With patrons at the door, and relatively balmy temperatures at 50 degrees, we stayed open all day. It was cold, it was busy, we were short staffed. Anyway, the brave staff who worked and maybe are still working with no heat deserve something special for their efforts. Hence, I made some brownies for them.

I got the recipe from Everyday Food Light, and I was surprised at how easy it came together. Typically a box mix is as fancy as I go with brownies!
 The Ingredients:
Light Chocolate-Chunk Brownies
2 tablespoons vegetable oil (I only had olive oil, so I used that, I hope that is ok!)
4 oz bittersweet chocolate coarsely chopped (I used semisweet chocolate chips, since that is what I had)
3/4 c all purpose flour
1/2 c unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 c packed brown sugar
1/2 c unsweetened apple sauce
1/2 c fat free sour cream
1/2 cup egg substitute (I didn't have real eggs!)

So half of the chocolate chips went in the microwave in a bowl to melt, 30 seconds at a time. And all of the dry ingredients were whisked together in a bowl. I may have whisked too much, because there was chocolate everywhere, and I think I aspirated some of the mix. Still, easy peasy, so far!

The directions said to bake in a 9x9 pan, which I do not own. So I decided, and google helped, that a 11x7 pan would also work. I sprayed it with cooking spray, and preheated the oven to 350.

Next, after stirring and melting the chocolate chips, I added the wet ingredients together, and whisked in the melted chocolate. Fortunately, it didn't get everywhere, like when I whisked the dry! After that was mixed, I added the dry ingredients and just barely stirred until it was incorporated. I spread the batter in the pan, and dropped the remaining chocolate chips on top, and baked it for 34 minutes, when a fork came out mostly clean.

The Verdict: Yummy, but more cake like than fudge like, probably because I used more substitutions and less fat filled ingredients. My coworkers enjoyed them. One particularly liked how moist they were, and was excited about having the recipe for moist and healthy brownies! If I make them again, I might put them in a larger pan, to make thinner brownies, since these came out thick and cakey.

Adventures in Quinoa

So I selected two options from my Quinoa 365 cookbook, one is a main dish and one is a dessert. I figured if I was cooking Quinoa I might as well use it twice! And I wanted to expand my horizons--I've never had quinoa in anything but savory dishes.

Here are my two recipes from the book: Thai Cashew Chicken and Broccoli on Quinoa, and Raspberry Cream Cheese Muffins.

 I took these photos of the recipes to the store so I would get everything I needed, and I still ended up with no whole wheat flour, no baking soda, and no cashews. I borrowed the first two from my sister, in exchange for muffins! The second just didn't happen. So it is just Thai Chicken and Broccoli, no cashews.

My Quinoa has "bloomed" but still had some liquid to absorb.

I cooked quinoa just last week, but I usually cook it in the sauce, so it absorbs the flavor and everything cooks at once. So I was worried about getting the liquid ratio right--when the timer went off it had bloomed, but was still sloshy. Fortunately, a little more cooking, a lot of time sitting, and some fluffing and it turned out the right consistency.

 While the quinoa cooled and absorbed liquid, I got out the ingredients for the muffins. When I borrowed the flour from my sister she was all fancy with her food scale, and I wanted to do the same, but the amounts in the book were confusing. Sadly math is hard, so I got my measuring cup out and went to work. Dry ingredients in the bowl, I turned to the main dish.

I don't want to see the chicken this came from!

Oyster Sauce and Sesame Oil are new additions to my kitchen.

I buy chicken in 20 lbs bags from Costco, so I knew I'd have enough for this recipe. It calls for 4 chicken breasts, but the one I pulled out of my monster bag was almost 13 oz, which I figured was equal.






            The marinade was so flavorful and easy--I thinly sliced this monster breast, and set it all in the fridge to work its magic. 

 The quinoa had cooled, so in it went into the dry ingredients, where it formed funny little balls. The cream cheese was more of the same. I struggled with the raspberries--the frozen ones I bought were monster sized (and not even from Costco!). But I moved on to wet ingredients, where I sadly used mostly substitutions to make them lighter. Egg substitute, apple sauce, and a sweetener blend, pretty much only the vanilla was as called for in the recipe.

    I found the chicken dish to be easier to follow the recipe, (though I must admit that besides forgetting the cashews, I added less peanut butter and honey at the end). Broccoli and onion chopped, I fried them up with some sesame oil. Then the chicken into the pan. It had been marinating for hours by this point (in between cooking the muffins and finishing the chicken I went and played with my nieces) so it was pretty brown. It made it sort of hard to see when it was cooked all the way through, but since it was so thinly sliced it cooked fast!  I added a touch of peanut butter, a drop of honey, and tossed it together with the broccoli. Yummy, even without cashews!

  The Verdict: The chicken dish had great flavors, but the ratio of broccoli to chicken didn't work for me. In fact, I took the leftovers and added two more cups of broccoli, some mushrooms, and left off the quinoa all together. That is a dish I'd make again!

I brought over some warm muffins to my sister when I went to play with my nieces, her response: "tastes healthy" and "maybe you need better recipes." I actually enjoyed them--they are filling and yes, healthy. Maybe if I hadn't done all the substitutions they would have been more than healthy.

Verdict: tastes healthy.

Cookbook Collection

Prior to this past week, I had 5 cookbooks, if you count the nifty Jello pamphlet that has a spinning wheel of Jello salad options to go with every type of protein (which I totally count, it is pretty awesome). Weeks ago I had gone through my library's cookbooks and withdrawn titles that had not checked out in years, were damaged, or falling apart. I'll be reordering the popular titles, and adding new titles on popular topics, but cookbooks wear out fast, and some titles come and go in popularity (I'm super excited about the Star Trek cookbook from the mid 1990s).

In honor of Thanksgiving, we pulled all the old cookbooks out to sale--and once they were out for the public to view, I could vie with everyone else to buy as much as I could afford. I bought a lot of books, around 45! I just couldn't resist, and every time I walked past the sale shelves I found another title or 5 to add to my pile. There were probably 200+ that I withdrew, some were too gross to sell, and a lot were picked up by the public and other staff at the library.

So I'm going to try to cook at least one recipe from each cookbook I own--even the ones I had before that I've never cooked from. I can already tell some of the cookbooks I will return to and cook more than one recipe from, while others I may not hang onto.

My one worry is that I'll regain 500 million pounds with all the new cooking, so my coworkers have volunteered to eat any baking projects, and I will continue to make substitutions to make things healthier! Here is to more cooking in 2014!

Quinoa Challenge

So my first cookbook is Quinoa 365, promising over 170 delicious recipes using this "everyday superfood." I'd love to say that I selected this for the challenge of trying quinoa, but honestly I eat quinoa all the time. I selected this one because it looked like less of a challenge! I'm not sure I'm sold on "superfoods," but I do like the flavor/texture of quinoa over rice.

The cover on my copy is falling off, but all the recipes are inside!

So I've highlighted a few recipes I want to try--using things I have on hand, and I'm already very tempted to experiment. There is a recipe for a broccoli, chicken, quinoa casserole--that I know would be better with mushrooms, and I don't have any sour cream, so I could just use...! See, I am bad at following directions. I think this means I need to try something more different from what I've made before, so I have to rely on the recipe!

So tomorrow I'm going to try Thai Cashew Chicken and Broccoli on Quinoa, from page 88.There are at least 6 ingredients I don't have, though I may be able to borrow some so I don't have to buy a whole bottle of oyster sauce.

I also might try sprouting some quinoa--the book has directions--it could be good in a salad, or I could find a recipe to use them in!

A Cooking Challenge for 2014

Look at me, acting like I know what I'm doing, I'm not fooling anyone!

Early this year I found myself with a real grown up job, (where people looked to me for answers!!) and found that I was still basically living like the college student I was for 10 years. Most of my meals were fast food, frozen meals, or lunch meat sandwiches (I ate like a Sim with no cooking skills!) So I decided I needed to start cooking meals that didn't come from a box.



Over the past 8 or so months, I've cut out my fast food habit, explored an unknown world of veggies, whole grains, and packed lunches. I've also lost almost 75 pounds--yay for swapping hamburgers and french fries for zucchini and spinach! It has been a good year for me food wise, though my attempts to start running have trashed my knees.

My first and last run, now I hobble around.

Since my career as a long distance runner has stalled out of the gate, I thought I'd work on developing my talents else where! My cooking efforts so far have mostly been going to the grocery store, co-op, or farmer's market and buying whatever looked good and then trying roasting, stuffing, or sauteing it to see what would happen. Sometimes it will be great, while other times I'm left tossing a whole eggplant in the garbage as inedible.

So for this next year, my goals are not just to continue eating/cooking real meals and keep this weight off, but to learn to cook and to follow directions. The last is the hardest for me--one of the reasons I like to be in charge! But I think I need to know how to cook better before I experiment as much as I have been.

With this in mind, I've raided my library's book sale and bought 40-50 cookbooks, which is basically 500 times more cook books than I already had, but at around 50cents for most I couldn't control myself! So to fulfill my goal, I am challenging myself to cook at least one recipe from each cookbook, trying some new technique or ingredient or flavor combination I wouldn't ordinary have used. I want to follow the directions as much as possible, though with substitutions to make them as healthy as possible.

Here is hoping that 2014 will be as successful a food year as 2013 has been!