Monday, December 27, 2010

Breaded Chicken Fingers

These were easy and tasty, but I just can't ever seem to get the seasoning right when I use bread crumbs vs. flour, so they turned out a bit bland. I'd recommend throwing some salt and pepper into the mix.

You will need:
One pound boneless, skinless chicken tenders
3-5 large crusty rolls
One or more garlic cloves, peeled
Fresh rosemary, washed and dried
Olive oil
One egg

Tear your rolls into medium-small chunks and toss in a food processor with the garlic and rosemary. Pulse until you get crumbs.


Dump the crumbs onto a rimmed baking sheet, drizzle with oil, and use your fingers to toss. Bake at 400F until toasty, 15 minutes or more, tossing often.



Break an egg onto a plate and whisk with salt and pepper.

Dunk the chicken in the egg, then coat with bread crumbs, pressing firmly.

Place on a baking sheet and bake at 375F for about 25 minutes, until cooked through.
Enjoy!

Takes about an hour.
Feeds four.
Difficulty: 2.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hi, friends.

So, here's what's up: Internet at home is extra-super sucky, and makes trying to do anything more complicated than send emails into an hour-long battle of wills, with the interwebs usually winning. I do have a couple recipes in the hopper, but I'm also dealing with new-computer syndrome: somehow can't seem to make the software work, so my camera won't yet download pictures to my computer. It's frustrating. Add to that the cold and flu season bugs that took me and Tim out of commission for the better part of the last two weeks, and I think I'm (slightly) justified in not posting anything for two months.

BUT! I have a terribly over-ambitious baking project coming up (probably even starting this weekend), and I have just finished successfully making homemade turkey stock for the first time ever in my life, so I'm feeling pretty good about getting back on the food-blogging bandwagon.

Can we talk about this turkey stock some more? I was a little worried about yesterday's bird--it was still a little frozen on the inside when I put it in the oven yesterday, and I basted it with a blush wine, so the meat came out pink to about a half-inch deep, which made me super nervous. My worst nightmare is to cook a huge meal for a bunch of friends and family and give someone food poisoning. (Tim's jabs and snide comments about my cooking certainly didn't help, either!) But we're 24 hours on, and I've heard no reports of anyone getting sick, so it must have been fine. Anyway, we refrigerated the carcass overnight, and Tim ripped it to pieces this morning so I could boil it down, scrape the rest of the meat off the bones, and make some super-yummy stock. It definitely took the better part of seven hours, but the house smelled amazing all day, and it only required about 10 minutes of my attention throughout the day.

A couple online recipes recommended using this soup base. Wish I'd known about that a week ago! At any rate, my stock is so delicious that I don't think anything else could make it better! The base might have sped up the process, but other than that, I don't know if it's all that important. All I did was toss in my bird pieces, chop up two carrots, a few stalks of celery, and an onion, and throw in about a teaspoon of poultry seasoning and salt. Then I simmered for seven hours, stirring and tasting occasionally. Once it tasted like an actual broth (and not just vaguely seasoned water), I turned up the heat and boiled for another 20 minutes, then turned it off, let it cool, strained the stock, pulled out the vegetables, and picked apart the rest of the meat. Voila! Stock. It's now in a large pot in the fridge, and I'll make soup tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Monday, October 4, 2010

Pictures!

Obligatory Times Square tourist photo, after seeing Next to Normal. It's too bad you can't see how HOT we look!

It was really rainy. So rainy that I, an Oregonian, bought not one, but TWO umbrellas.


The Folio!



This, right here, is my holy book.



Haylie got in trouble for taking this picture of me. Sorry, Haylie! I was too overexcited to think that this is the kind of place where they generally don't want you taking pictures of 400-year-old papers and things.


Peacock room at the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian. It's a crazy story--this guy (we'll call him Fred) gave the keys to his house to his artist friend (we'll call him Larry) before he went on vacation to Europe for two months and told him to go crazy. So Larry designed this "beautiful" dining room in blues and golds and very gaudy peacocks. Fred came home and was appalled, so he told Larry to fix it and went back to Europe for another couple of months.
But Larry was so proud of his work that he refused to change a thing. In fact, he started throwing dinner parties at Fred's house and inviting all his friends over so he could advertise what he was capable of creating. Fred came home again, and got reeeally mad.

I don't understand (or maybe Rachael said, and I forgot) why Fred didn't just hire somebody else to come in and fix it, but he didn't. Eventually, the room was auctioned off (yes, they auctioned a room), and this Freer guy bought it (apparently he was a fan of Larry's, and Larry's daughter asked him to buy it), and then it ended up at the Smithsonian.

Oh, and this burger was incredible. Bacon, BBQ sauce, onion rings...it's everything I ever asked my burgers to aspire to be.

New recipe coming soon!

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Friends!

I'm currently in the Amtrak lounge at Chicago Union Station, en route home (finally!) from a whirlwind tour of New York, DC, and Baltimore with my BFF and other lovely ladies. I spent a week doing things I can't do in good ol' FoGro, like eating fresh croissants while staring at the Washington Monument, or seeing a Broadway show, or making a pilgrimage to my Mecca to see my holy book (i.e. a copy of the First Folio at the Folger Shakespeare Library).

I've spent some time with some wonderful ladies (Tiffanie, Haylie, Sara, and Rachael), eaten some excellent food (croissants, muffins, cupcakes, duck fat fries, an incredible burger, a breakfast to die for), and seen some truly amazing sights (aside from the Washington Monument, a Broadway show, and the Folio, we also saw the Capitol building and got a backstage tour of the Smithsonian--complete with a jaunt through the tunnels).

Pictures and a new recipe are forthcoming; I just need to get home first. It'll be another couple days (I love the train, but it's been more than a week since I last saw my husband, and that's completely unacceptable), but the end is in sight. Oregon, here I come!

Sunday, September 19, 2010

French Toast for the soul




Oh, man.

This weekend was hellish. Our old, blind, deaf, declawed cat was accidently let out of our home Friday afternoon, and I spent Friday night and Saturday in hysterics over it. Tim, who was in Texas, flew home early to help find her. We both missed our dear friends' wedding because of it (D & R, we love you guys TONS, congrats!), which just added more hurt to the wound.

The good news is that Adina is home safe and sound, thanks to the goodness of people in our neighborhood. By the time I realized she wasn't in the house, she'd already been picked up, so she wasn't scared or alone in the rain. And our dear friends are off to Hawaii on a well-deserved honeymoon, and I'll just have to settle for watching the video as soon as it's done--with any luck, that will be less time than the 15 months my wedding video took!

So, since everyone is safe and happy and all is right with the world, here's a recipe for french toast that I made a couple weeks ago. It was delicious!

You will need:
Bread
Six tablespoons butter
One cup milk
One egg
Two tablespoons sugar
Two teaspoons vanilla extract
One teaspoon cinnamon
One-quarter teaspoon salt
Half a cup of flour

Place the bread slices on a cookie sheet and dry them in the oven at 200F for about 15 minutes.


Melt two tablespoons butter in a shallow dish in the microwave, and whisk it together with the milk, egg, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and salt. Slowly whisk in the flour until smooth.









Melt one tablespoon of butter per batch in a large skillet. Soak two slices of bread in the batter, about 15 seconds per side, and transfer to the skillet.

Cook over medium heat about two minutes per side, until golden brown. Keep warm in the oven until all slices are complete.

And make sure your pets are tagged and microchipped! If your pets ever go missing, call this guy first: http://www.k9sardog.com/. His dogs came out yesterday and tracked our cat. They didn't find her, but they did help alleviate our fears--they were able to tell how far she'd gone, that she hadn't been killed, and that a person had picked her up. Big thanks to Harry, Willow, and Tyler!

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Cinnamon Bread

So, PW posted a recipe for cinnamon bread a couple of weeks ago, and I was dying to try it. BUT, my boss told me that I wasn't allowed to make it until I worked 12 days in a row. Slave driver!*

At any rate, this bread is excellent. Here's what you'll need:
One cup milk
Six tablespoons butter
Two and a half teaspoons active dry yeast
Two whole eggs
One-third cup sugar
Three and a half cups all-purpose flour
One teaspoon salt

Melt the butter and add the milk, then nuke it in the microwave for 30 seconds or so to warm it up. Add the yeast and let it sit for a few minutes.




In the bowl of a mixer, combine eggs and sugar. Add in the yeast mixture and stir till combined.




Add the salt and half the flour, and stir, then add the rest of the flour.


Switch to the dough hook and knead for 10 minutes or so. If the dough's still very sticky, add a little more flour.


Heat a bowl until it's warm, and then drizzle in a tiny bit of vegetable oil and toss in the dough to coat it. Cover it with plastic wrap and place it in a nice, warm place to rise for two hours.

When it's risen, dump it out on a clean surface and roll into a flat rectangle no wider than your loaf pan. Smear the dough with two tablespoons softened butter, sprinkle with a quarter cup of sugar, and douse liberally with cinnamon.




Smear your loaf pan with butter. Roll it up verrrrrry tightly, pinch to seal, and place it seam down in the pan. Let it rise another hour or two, and when you're ready, bake it for 40 minutes at 350F.



Yummmmm.


*Kidding. Stacie's totally lovely in every way, and I was the one who made the decision to work 12 days straight. It was a long road, but warm cinnamon bread at the end of it was a delicious reward!