Week 12: Lockdown Chicken Burritos

Shit's getting real, isn't it?    So we're basically on lockdown right now - the hubs and me are home from work for however long we are.    As such, I'm scaling back some of the creativity on dinners and I may be focusing on a few favorites and using what I have, because I'm not going to the grocery store more than I absolutely have to, and you don't need any more empty store shelf pictures to know what that's like right now.   You can definitely get what you need right now, but you can't always get what you want - but that does mean you have to make do with what you have or what's available.

Fortunately, I've always kept a good stock in the freezer and pantry.   I love making homemade freezer meals so I have easy scratch made dinners most nights.   Sometimes those meals are just a starter - like marinated chicken ready to thaw and roast or it's a complete meal that just needs some fresh vegetables or a salad to pair with it.

This week I wanted to use up a pack of frozen grilled chicken that I had.   I marinate chicken cutlets (thighs or breasts) overnight, grill, slice up, and then freeze it in vac sealed bags - when thawed, it's not quite as good as fresh off the grill, but it is still very good and you can't beat the convenience of having it on hand to add to salads, pastas, etc.    

I'm using a pack of chicken I marinated in Grill Mates Mesquite marinade, which I normally use for chicken fajitas.    I've wanted to try using it for burritos because the hubs loves burritos, so that's what I made this week.  

I started out by doing what I normally do for chicken fajitas, which is to sauté 1-2 onions with 2 bell peppers in olive oil with some salt and pepper.   Once the peppers are cooked down, I just add the thawed chicken and and let it cook a little longer until the chicken is warmed through. If I was just making chicken fajitas, this is the mix I'd use for those.

Since I was making burritos, I wanted to do a rice and bean component.    I made a variation on a salsa rice side dish that I do and I purposely made a large batch because I knew it would freeze well.

Mexican Rice, 10-12 servings

1 large onion, chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 cups white rice  (can also use quinoa, brown rice, etc - just adjust cook times and amount of chicken stock accordingly)
2 14.5 ounce cans fire roasted tomatoes with green chilis  (or any diced tomato)
2 1/2 cups low salt chicken stock
1 1/2 teaspoons chili powder
1 1/2 teaspoons cumin
1 12 ounce bag frozen corn
1 15 ounce can black beans, rinsed
1 bunch cilantro, rinsed and chopped
juice of 1 lime
salt and pepper

First of all, don't let the amount of this recipe daunt you.    It freezes great and then you have it on hand for a quick side dish or to make more burritos.

If you like a spicier rice, feel free to add chopped jalapeño, red pepper flakes, or cayenne pepper as you like.

In a large 4 quart or larger pan over medium heat, sauté the onion in the olive oil with a pinch of salt until the onion has a softened and become translucent.  Add the rice and stir to coat the rice evenly in the oil, letting the rice toast 2-3 minutes.   Add the 2 cans of tomatoes, the chili powder, cumin, and chicken broth to the pan, give it a good stir and turn the heat down to a simmer.   Cover the pan and let it simmer for about 15 minutes, giving it a stir from time to time.     Add in the bag of frozen corn, stirring, and let it simmer for a few minutes more until the rice is cooked and the liquid has mostly been absorbed.   Turn the heat off and add the rinsed black beans;  cover the pot and let it sit for a few minutes off the heat to finish cooking.    Stir in the cilantro and lime juice;  taste for salt and pepper and add as needed.  

To assemble the burritos, you need about 6 ounces of shredded cheese (I like using a Mexican cheese blend, but whatever you like on tacos will be just fine) and large burrito style tortillas.   I made 4 burritos (dinner for one night, then lunch for the next day for the 2 of us), so I split the chicken/peppers/onions mix between 4 of the large tortillas, topped them off with some shredded cheese, and then about 2 spoonfuls of the Mexican rice blend.  

Just roll them up while the fillings are still warm.   I set 2 aside for lunch the next day, and then finished off the 2 for dinner.  

I decided to toast the outside of tortillas by adding a little oil into a
skillet on medium and then adding the burritos to the skillet.    I like how this crisps up the outside of the tortilla, plus it also helps the cheese inside the burrito melt.

You do want to keep an eye on these because they will burn quickly - just keep checking them, and flip over as necessary.

I also like to do this when I reheat burritos (usually I just make breakfast ones with egg/cheese/etc in them).    I find that I have to put them in the microwave for a minute or two first as the tortilla gets too crisp on the outside before the inside is heated through.

And there we have it...chicken burritos.   I mixed some sour cream with some lime juice and lime zest to have to dip these into.

Overall Rating:  7 out of 10.    These were very tasty, not too spicy, but definitely not any kind of authentic.   Still, it was a welcome change from tacos and I'd make them again.

Ease of Preparation:   6 out of 10.   While not particularly difficult, there's multiple steps to making the fillings for these.  Having the grilled chicken all ready to thaw and go made this much easier, particularly as I prefer to marinate chicken overnight before grilling.  

Will It Freezer Meal?   YES!    If I hadn't used grilled chicken that I had already frozen, I would have done a bunch of these for the freezer, and will do them in the future.   If you make everything fresh, you should make double or triple the amount of burritos and freeze them for easy dinners.   I froze the extra rice mixture and then vac sealed them, so I now have that on hand for making burrito bowls or as a side dish for enchiladas or tacos in the coming months.   

Week 11: Chicken and Pasta with Broccoli and Sun-Dried Tomatoes

I had planned on doing something with boneless chicken breasts this week because I've been heavily doing bone-in chicken thus far for this challenge.   That's not surprising  - we do love our bone in chicken.

I pulled out Cook's Illustrated "The Best Chicken Recipes" and found a pasta recipe which I had most of the ingredients for - this was important because if you've been to the grocery store at all in the last couple days, you know what it's been like -  long lines, empty shelves.   Crazy.  

So - I'm not going to make a big deal about posting the recipe for the "Chicken and Pasta with Broccoli and Sun-Dried Tomatoes" here because frankly....it was a bust.   And you really don't want to make it.

I was intrigued because the sauce was neither cream based nor had a ton of butter in it.   It was quick to come together, but I was juggling multiple steps between 2 pans on the stove in order for it to all come together.

I sliced and sautéed the chicken breast cutlets in a large skillet in a little butter, letting them brown a bit.   In the other pan, I had boiling water and blanched the broccoli, fishing it out with a slotted spoon so I could use the same water to cook the pasta.  

Both of these are put to the side.  The recipe has you tenting the chicken to keep warm, while just leaving the broccoli to one side, which makes no sense, because later the chicken is warmed in the sauce and the broccoli is just supposedly added straight to the plate (and will have since gone cold).   Hmm.

Once I fished the broccoli out of the water, I used the same water to cook the pasta.   I also needed some pasta water to finish the sauce -  I always forget to save it, so I set a strainer right on top of a  Pyrex measuring cup.   It's a simple hack - you dump the pasta in to drain, and it automatically saves you a cup of pasta water to add to the sauce.    

Meanwhile, in the skillet, I sautéed half a chopped onion, a couple cloves of minced garlic, some fresh thyme, and a pinch of red onion flakes.   One would think this would give the pasta sauce some flavor, but no.   I should have done the full amount even though I was only doing half the recipe.   I added a little flour to the mix, then added chicken stock and white wine.

That gets simmered for a few minutes until thickened and slightly reduced, then the chicken is added back into the sauce.    The sauce gets a tablespoon (if you follow the exact recipe) of parmesan cheese and an ungodly amount of sun dried tomatoes - it suggested using an entire 8 ounce jar.    I did not add nearly that much - while I like sun dried tomatoes, they have a strong flavor and a little goes a long way.   I also ended up adding more cheese because well.  Cheese.

The pasta gets tossed in this with some of the reserved pasta water to bring it all together.   Although the recipe specified that the broccoli was to be added directly to the plate, I also added the broccoli at this point to let it warm through.    

Gave it a taste....and found it to be very bland.    Added salt and pepper....didn't especially help.    Added some more cheese and another tablespoon of butter.   Slightly better.      Finished with some fresh parsley which tasted like parsley.  

Overall Rating:   3 out of 10.   This wasn't terrible or inedible...it was just bland and ultimately very uninteresting.    Nothing that really popped.

Ease of Preparation:   6 out of 10.   While a relatively fast dish to pull together, you really have to have everything chopped and ready to go, as you're juggling back and forth between 2 pans.

Will It Freezer Meal?   No, but then, you probably don't want multiple dinners of this around either.

Week 10 of the 2020 Chicken Challenge: Chicken with Miso, Sweet Potatoes and Scallions

We're back cooking with Diana Henry this week, this time out of her latest book, "From the Oven to the Table".    The concept of this book is that you have one oven dish  - throw a bunch of stuff in - bake/roast - and that's dinner.   That concept gets two thumbs up from me.

Diana Henry being Diana Henry has an entire chapter on meals centered around bone in skin on chicken thighs.  (And yes....there are more chicken recipes scattered throughout the book as well).

I also realized after I made this that the other DH recipe I already made for this challenge was actually fairly similar to this one (Week 2's Vietnamese Ginger Chicken)....womp womp.   I'll make sure to do something very different from her next time (and there's plenty of that are different).

One thing I enjoy about DH recipes is the they do incorporate some ingredients that I wouldn't normally use but aren't necessarily hard to find.    This particular recipe uses miso paste - if you have a larger grocery store like a Wegman's or a local Asian grocery store, it's not hard to find at least some varieties of it (there are quite a few different ones).   I just ordered a tub off Amazon.

Miso paste is basically a fermented soybean product that adds a salty-savory-umami flavor to a dish and is widely used in Japanese cooking.  Ligher miso like the one I'm using here tends to have a sweetness to it and darker miso is richer and saltier.

This recipe came together fairly quickly.    Give the pan a little spritz of cooking spray (very important - you'll see why later).   I used my Aldi knock off of a Le Creuset enameled cast iron roasting pan again....love that pan.   I had one giant sweet potato that I peeled and cut into "wedges" which ended up more like thick cut fries, which go in into the pan.

For the chicken, I used 2 chicken leg quarters for no particular reason other than I had them and that's what I pulled out of the freezer.

You then make a marinade out of a couple of ingredients:

2 tablespoons white miso paste
1 tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons dry sherry
1 tablespoon temari/dark soy sauce
1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger
3 garlic cloves, grated finely

I tweaked DH's ratios a little bit here because I was only doing 2 servings but the leg quarters were on the larger side.    The recipe also calls for using sake, which I really don't keep on hand, but offers dry sherry as an alternative, which I did have.   I opted to leave out the fresno chili (with seeds) that DH calls for because hubs is still not feeling 100% so nothing too spicy on the menu.

I used a Microplane grater for both the garlic and the ginger - this is one of the MVP's in my kitchen.   Any time you need something finely minced or zested, use a Microplane - it does the job far more evenly and quickly than I can do with a knife.   It's such a great tool.

You just add all your ingredients to a bowl and stir to mix.

Take the sweet potatoes and mix with some of this seasoning mix and spread out in the pan, then smear the rest of the seasoning paste over the chicken leg quarters and into the pan with them.    Just a note....DH says that the chicken and sweet potatoes should be in 1 layer, so if you really wanted to do that, use a sheet pan.   Even with cutting the serving size down for 2 people, I wasn't really able to do that in this pan.

These get roasted in a 400F oven for about half an hour.  

Meanwhile, trim a handful of scallions - I used about 6 as the hubs isn't a fan of them - but leave whole.

Also, make a glaze to add to the chicken, whisking together:

1 tablespoon white miso paste
1 tablespoon honey
1/2 tablespoon temari/dark soy sauce
1/2 tablespoon dry sherry

After the chicken has been roasting for half an hour, add the scallions to the pan, shuffle around the sweet potatoes around a bit to make sure they're cooking evenly, and pour the glaze over the chicken leg quarters.    Put the pan back into the oven to roast for another 15-20 minutes, until cooked through and looking lovely.

Yum!    DH says to make some stir fried veggies to go with this, and I was too lazy - I just steamed some broccoli, tossed it with a little toasted sesame oil, and then drizzled it with some of the pan drippings.  

I'll point out - notice how the marinade burned to the pan around the edges?    This is why it's important to spray the pan with a little cooking spray - partly because the sweet potatoes didn't stick too much (they did a bit because of the glaze), but the pan came clean easily with a 15 minute soak in hot water and dish soap.

Look how gorgeous that came out!

The chicken was very flavorful and juicy.  The skin was more sticky-caramelized than crisp because of the glaze and marinade.   The sweetness from the honey was very mild - the garlic, ginger, and other seasonings really balanced that out.    

I kept thinking that I'd want rice with this dish to drizzle some of those lovely pan drippings on, but the sweet potatoes were surprisingly wonderful with this flavor combination.   This is one of the reasons I so like Diana Henry recipes - she suggests something different, like using the sweet potatoes, that I would not have done and they come out delicious.    

However, I was not a fan of the roasted scallions - I find scallions when whole tend to be very fiberous and unpleasantly chewy.  I would have preferred them sliced thinly and scattered on instead of roasted whole.   

Overall Rating:  8 out of 10.    This was very tasty and well balanced.   The unusual addition of the sweet potato was surprisingly delicious.

Ease of Preparation:   9 out of 10.   The recipe contains a couple things you probably have to make sure you have on hand ahead of time, but the overall recipe is simple and comes together easily. 

Will It Freezer Meal?     You could toss the chicken with the marinade and then freeze it, with the glaze on the side, to make for an easy dinner.    The sweet potatoes won't freeze raw.

Week 9 of the 2020 Chicken Challenge: Mostly Homemade Chicken Soup in the Instant Pot

Mostly Homemade Chicken Soup.....sooooo good!

So the hubs was still battling with a bad cold earlier this week, no appetite and couldn't taste much of anything.    Obviously, it's just not a good week to try a new recipe ~ real life always seems to happen when I do these challenges, so I just roll with it.    He's starting to feel better though, so we should be back to something a little more unique on the menu next week.

I'm also having problems with Blogger this week - it really isn't letting me move the photos around where I want them to be in the post.   I tried a couple different ways, but I give up - maybe next week it'll behave better.

I opted to do an old recipe - my classic chicken noodle soup - but tweak it for the Instant Pot.    I have to admit, using an IP is fast becoming my favorite way to make soups  - it's definitely all I will use now to make stocks.  Instead of having to simmer it for hours, you can just run it on the pressure cook function for an hour or so for chicken bones (2-3 hours for beef bones, depending on what recipe you're following).   

I had the leftovers from the Herb Roasted Chicken I made last weekend, which is a great soup starter.  

Full confession:  I don't think I've ever made stock completely from scratch outside of a culinary class  (I do have plans to do that later this year as part of the Chicken Challenge - and today is not that day).    I do, however, like to combine store bought stock with bones and other seasonings to make a rich soup base, which is what I did here.   I picked all the meat off the chicken and set that aside, and put the remains into the Instant Pot.

In addition to the chicken carcass, I also added a couple carrots, a couple ribs of celery, an onion cut in half with the skin (the onion skin adds color to the stock), about 10 peppercorns, 2 bay leaves, and the stems off a bunch of fresh parsley.   In addition to the box of stock, I also added about 6 cups of water, which brought the liquid to just under the "max fill" line on my 6 quart IP.    Put the lid on, chose the pressure cook option, put the timer on for 45 minutes.   

Once the pressure cook cycle was done, I left it to natural release for about 20 minutes, at which point the pin still hadn't dropped, so I released the pressure.    When you're dealing with that much liquid, it takes a long time to come to pressure and it takes a long time to fully natural release.    

Strained stock

I strained off the liquid into a big mixing bowl and threw away all the solids - nothing more to try to use them for.    I tasted the stock and it was actually very flavorful, but desperately needed salt, which is exactly where I wanted it to be.    I will sometimes bring the stock to a boil and cook it down if I think the flavor isn't strong enough, but it was richly chicken-y at this point and I also had some other additions I was going to make to it that would bump up the flavor.

While the stock was doing it's thing, I cut up the veg that I wanted for the soup -  4 carrots, peeled and sliced;  4 ribs of celery, finely sliced, and about 5 diced shallots.    I really prefer to use leeks or shallots in chicken soup - the flavor is milder than onion and really wonderful.   I had the chicken meat set to one side with some fresh chopped parsley and also the leaves off the celery.   I love using celery leaves as an herb - they have a slightly bitter, grassy taste that's really lovely in a soup.   If I didn't have the fresh herbs, some dried thyme, sage, rosemary, parsley would have all been welcome in this.

I gave the IP pot a quick wash, then got it started with the saute function.   I put a little olive oil in the pan, then added the carrot/celery/shallot and sautéed that for a few minutes until the veggies softened up a little bit.    I poured the strained stock back into the pot.  

At this point, I knew the stock needed salt and I wanted to build the flavors a little more, so I pulled out some Better Than Bouillon, which is basically a bouillon paste.   I really like BtB products but they do tend to be salty to my tastes.   The saltiness is at a level that you can work with, but you have to be aware of it  - so I used no salt added boxed stock when I made the base stock, and I buy the low salt BtB when possibly (I think they just make chicken and beef in low salt), and if I know I'm going to use some of this bouillon in a recipe, I avoid adding extra salt until I taste the final product.    What's nice about them is that when you have a dish that needs a little extra salt, you can add a bit of this and it adds flavor as well as salt.     I added about a 2 teaspoons each Low Salt Roasted Chicken and Roasted Garlic to the pot.

I got the lid back on the IP and then ran the pressure cook cycle for 6 minutes.   It didn't need long - it just needed to cook the veg through and also blend in the Better Than Bouillon into the stock.    If I was going to use raw chicken here instead of using the leftover cooked chicken, I would added maybe a pound of boneless chicken and run the pressure cycle for 10 minutes, which is enough to cook the chicken so it's tender enough to shred easily.

I let it natural release for about another 20 minutes, then released the pressure.   Once the pin dropped and I took the lid off, I mixed in the leftover roast chicken, celery leaves, and parsley and let sit together just to warm the chicken through.

For the noodle component, I cooked fine egg noodles separately - I don't like how they bulk up and basically turn the soup to sludge, so I prefer to cook them on the side and just add them to the soup bowl, then ladle the soup on top.    The fine egg noodles will warm up quickly, so it's a really easy way to control how many noodles you want to add.

We didn't eat our way through an entire 6 quart pot of soup (surprisingly!), but if you're going to make soup - make enough to freeze so next time you want some, it's ready to go.    

I split the rest of the soup base into two glass containers with about 4 cups in each, each of which will make a generous meal for the two of us.    I like to freeze in these containers overnight, then I run some hot tap water on the bottom and use a butter knife to pop out the "puck" of soup.

I then vac seal that puck, and it's good to go hang out in my freezer for up to 6 months.   Next time someone gets a cold (or we just want chicken soup), it'll be there.

Overall Rating:  10 out of 10.   Comfort food at it's best, and my favorite soup. 

Ease of Preparation:   7 out of 10.     While not difficult, it does take some time to make the stock - the Instant Pot makes it a lot easier, but it isn't "instant".    However, the results are well worth the effort.

Will It Freezer Meal?   Absolutely.   You're doing yourself a disservice if you don't make extra and freeze this.   I prefer to freeze without the noodles in the soup, but you can if you like.