Coconut Chicken Strips with Orange-Endive Salad

I have a terrible tendency to mess with recipes - it's a meddlesome quality that sometimes results in a good twist and sometimes....I learn why the recipe said to do such-and-such. 

With this chicken dish, we learned that there is such a thing as taking it too easy on the oil!  Lucky for us, the results were edible, just not golden.  You'll see what I mean in the photo below.

We started with some buttermilk - soaked the chicken strips (about 1 lb of chicken breasts, cut into thin strips) for about 30 minutes, then dredged them in a mix of 1 cup panko, 1 cup shredded coconut (unsweetened!) and 1 tsp of chili powder.

Now, we've already made some modifications to the original recipe I was inspired by, but here's where I went wrong: I didn't use enough oil in the pan.  The recipe said 3 TB of oil.  I thought I could get by with a large non-stick pan and some canola oil spray.   As the chicken strips cooked, the outer edges of the coconut got very cooked, nearly burning, but the panko crumbs didn't brown at all.  In an effort to lighten the dish, we ended up with some visually unappealing chicken.  When we used a little oil, they looked great.

For the next batch, I used 3 TB of oil in the pan and amazingly enough, they browned.  There are times when I get too impatient and try to cut corners.  Then there are times when I learn the hard way why certain formulas appear over and over in our cookbooks.  Putting some oil in the pan seems like a pretty basic one, hum?

At any rate, we served the chicken strips with some carrots (microwaved and seasoned with a little salt and pepper) and an orange-endive salad.  The endive was just chopped, raw, and tossed with lettuce and segments of a blood orange.  The dressing was a store-bought vinagrette and the contrast between the slightly sweet chicken and the tangy, citrus of the salad was excellent.

The kids love dredging and coating things for the stove top, and I love an experiment, so it was a successful dinner all in all.

Shredded vs. Chopped

I've been out of town and eating way too much (good) food, so last night was a pseudo Monday and I wanted to do it right.  We also had a class at 5:00 and needed to do it fast!  Ah, the joys of the work-week.

I'd bought some easy salad ingredients to toss together, using some cooked pasta and some imitation crab as the protein.  I don't know about you, but for a long time I thought of imitation crab as....well, disgusting.  A friend re-introduced me to his rotini-crab salad and this is a twist on that dish (pardon the pun!).

I chopped a green pepper and put it in the bowl with some mung bean sprouts, cherry tomatoes, spinach leaves and the crab.  When I put the noodles on to boil, I left my son in charge of shredding the carrots for the salad and I jumped in the shower.

I came back to the kitchen to find this on the cutting board:

Kid-chef?  Nowhere to be seen.  So I drained the noodles, threw together the salad and turned around.  There he was, in his scout's uniform, which he'd suddenly remembered, mid-chopping, he wanted to show me.

You just can't be upset about that, you know? 

I served up the salad,

And it was good.

Here's what was in our Faux-Crab Salad:

1/2 green bell pepper, chopped small (so they don't see it....)

about a dozen cherry tomatoes, cut in half with kitchen scissors

1 package of imitation crab meat (made with fish and crab, good Omega 3s)

1/2 package of baby spinach

1/2 package of mung-bean sprouts

1/2 box of tri-colored rotini pasta, cooked al-dente

Vinagrette salad dressing to taste

2 medium carrots - shredded (with a veggie peeler).  Or chopped.

 

Okra Croutons

Just when you thought salad was boring, along comes inspiration:

See those crunchy things next to the chicken?  The ones that look like croutons?  They're actually fried okra slices!  This brilliant idea (which was not my idea) was the perfect twist to a weeknight chicken salad.  If you haven't tried okra, this is a great little test.  The brilliant chef took about a dozen pods, fresh from a friend's garden, and sliced them. Dipped them in half-and-half (because milk is too thin and milk+egg, which is the traditional wash, tends to make a clumpy breading) and coated them with a mixture of half flour, half cornmeal.  Fried in a small quantity of canola oil and salted, they provided the perfect crunchy, salty complement to the cool salad.

Okra is a vegetable I occasionally had as a child, and hated.  It was served up in a slimy stew and the texture was completely off-putting.  It wasn't until just a few years ago that I rediscovered this vegetable and served them pan-fried to my kids, who gobbled them up.

It's splattery when you fry them, so that's not a great step for kid-chefs, but dipping, breading and eating are!

Thanks for sharing!

Osso Bucco

This is my mom.

And that big bowl?  That's Osso Bucco.  Yum-my!  She kicked off our series of family dinners with several giant dishes of osso bucco that she had made ahead of time and frozen.  I've only made osso bucco once before, and it was delightful, so it was great to have it again.

It's one of those dishes that takes a long time to cook, but the preparation isn't too difficult.  Next time I'll be making a big double portion (at least!) in order to have some left to freeze.  It was easy to take the dishes from the freezer to the oven and just heat them through until they were ready to eat.

I read up a little on the dish - it's from the Milan area, made with veal shanks stewed in the traditional combination of onion, carrot and celery (sometimes with tomatoes) and sometimes garnished with a gremolata (garlic and herbs minced together).  We'll have to work up a recipe for the dish and share it soon.

Thanks, mom!

Turnips

Remember those baby turnips from the farmer's market I mentioned last time?

I had eaten perfect baby turnips last year in a little restaurant off an alley near Place Vosges in Paris and they were just about this size.  Why not recreate that moment, never mind the lack of rough-hewn stone walls, old wood, creaky floors and the haughty insistence of the host that we really needed a reservation but, since we were so early he'd see what he could do..., I opened Mastering the Art... and we were off!  It couldn't have been simpler.  We chopped the greens off, trimmed the tops and bottoms and washed them up.

No peeling, no blanching (because they were so small), they went right into the pot with enough chicken broth to nearly cover them and some butter (don't tell Julia, but I used 1/4 her recommended amount!)

They simmered for about 20 minutes, I cut them into halves and put them in little dishes: voila!

We ate them with a salad topped with the cranberry-shitake chicken mix and olive-oil drizzled avocados.  I was hoping the kids would hold true to stereotypes and dislike the turnips but they gobbled them up.  Sweet, tangy, buttery and brothy - they were delicious!  A grind of pepper suited me, but they didn't need anything else.

Bon Appétit!

Awesome Salads!

My son took a bite of Friday’s simple salad (baby spinach and ranch dressing) and declared, “I like *awesome* salads!”

Clearly, his mother’s salad was not awesome.

“What makes a salad awesome?” I asked.

“Lots of stuff!” and he began to list the things that had been in our friend’s salad last weekend. It would have been a shame to let this enthusiasm go to waste...

On Sunday, I stir-fried some chicken in a pan (note to self: get a grill some day) and turned him loose.

The salads were indeed awesome. Chicken, lettuce, shredded carrots, some leftover corn kernels and mozzarella cheese sprinkled on top (a cheese choice my daughter enthusiastically supported).

While we ate, we talked about which foods take the longest to make, but are the shortest to eat and vice versa. Store-bought cookies earned the award for shortest prep – grilled ribs were declared worth the work.

Next time I want them to eat more salad, I’ll have to remember “awesome”.