Chicken and Dumplings

I had some frozen chicken breasts that needed to be used up as they were starting to freezer burn. This called for some seriously moist cooking. I also have a sore throat, so soup seemed like the best idea to me.

Chicken and Dumplings

3 large half chicken breasts, boneless and skinless
Several chicken necks
1/2 pound carrots
1/2 pound or so mushrooms
1/2 large onion
1 sprig rosemary
several sprigs thyme
2-3 tablespoons chopped garlic
2-3 bay leaves
20 oz. chicken stock
1 cup Bisquick(tm) baking mix
2.5 oz 2% milk
1/2 tsp garlic powder
Salt to taste

Boil the chicken necks in a gallon of water for about an hour, scumming the fat and flotsam from the surface. I put mine in cheesecloth so I didn't have to retrieve bones and skin.

Once the necks have boiled, remove them from the pan and discard (you could retrieve the meat if you so desire - I was lazy).

Chop carrots, onions, and mushrooms into bite-size pieces and add to pan. Add chopped garlic. Let simmer for an hour or so.

Add chicken breasts (still frozen) and simmer until done. Remove each breast and cut into bite-size pieces and return to pan.

About half an hour before you want to eat, add the salt, rosemary, bay leaves, and thyme.

Fifteen minutes before dinner, mix the baking mix, milk, garlic powder and a pinch or two of salt together. Add to boiling soup in teaspoon (or tablespoon) sized dollops, depending on how large you want your dumplings to be. Simmer for 10-12 minutes, turning over halfway through the cooking.

Of course, this won't be enough dumplings for the entire pot; I knew we'd have leftovers and I will make fresh dumplings for them. Double baking mix and milk quantities for a single sit-down dinner. If you don't like the baking mix I used, or can't get it, substitute your favorite. Adjust the fluid amount accordingly.

I'd forgotten how rich and creamy the dumplings make the soup; noodles never quite achieve the same effect. The dumplings just melted in my mouth. The soup was just velvety as we ate. Just what I wanted when I have a sore throat.

Feel free to add celery or mess with the proportions of vegetables in the soup. I just like a very carroty and mushroomy soup, particularly when I don't feel great. If you have a chicken (or turkey) carcass and time to make your own stock, feel free to omit the chicken breasts, chicken necks, and broth -- I only used them because I didn't have the time to start fully from scratch today.

Irregular posts

I'm sorry about the irregular posting these last few months. Life's been quite hectic and, while I've been cooking, I haven't had as much time to play as I would like. And I've had even less time to record what I've been playing with.

One of the reasons is I've gotten sucked into a big research project. I'm exploring how spices were used in the late medieval kitchen. One of my inspirations for this project was Tom Colicchio making a statement in his Top Chef blog about how medieval chefs would use spices to cover rancid/spoiled meat. That's like putting $30 gold braid on $2 cotton broadcloth -- doesn't make sense. Anyone with enough money to buy the spices would have enough money/resources to get fresh meat on a regular basis. So I'm looking at data from medieval household about how much spice they buy, how much is sent to the kitchen, how much is sent to the still room for perfumes and the like, how much is used medicinally, how much is sent to the creamery, and how much is given to visitors as gifts (lots and lots). I'm also looking at how many people are in the household so I can get an average of how much spice per person was purchased and used in the kitchen.

My preliminary results suggest that they weren't using that much more spice than the average American household and less than modern Indian households. When I say spice, I'm not talking about the herbaceous basil, oregano, etc. I'm looking at clove, cinnamon, pepper, etc. Salt and sugar are also excluded because they are used in a multitude of ways that are really outside the scope of what I'm interested in.

When I have more data and conclusions to post, you'll find them here. I'll also be posting recipes, but I don't know how often. Things are quieting down activity-wise, but winter is approaching with the waning energy that the cold brings.

Dyed Pie Crust

The dyed pie crust didn't happen this weekend. But I learned a couple of very important things:

• If you are going to dye a dough, don't add the to the dough after the dough is mixed. No matter how much you work it (and with pie dough this is bad), the dye does not get distributed evenly. In some situations, marbled pie dough might be the way to go, but this was not one of those situations. Next time: try mixing dye with the water the dough will be made from.
• Wear gloves. Blue might have been the shade I wanted for the dough, but it was not the color I wanted for my fingernails. Fortunately food dyes are reasonably water soluble, so with many repeated handwashings, the worst of it came out. But I do still have traces of the dye around the cuticles and edges of the nails from last Wednesday's experiment.

That said, the experimental painting with the dyes worked okay. I need to get some food-safe brushes for applying the dye, a spoon just doesn't give light enough coverage. And I don't know what I want to do with the yellow dye; as a paint it looks more orange than yellow. Hmm, just had a thought: cake decorators thin their dyes with vodka so they can airbrush with them. Perhaps that will work for these dyes too!

I'm also going to look into a local cake-decorating store. Perhaps I'll find something a bit more appropriate.

Life

Life has just been kicking my can this summer. If I could work 80 a week at my office, I'd still be behind. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel so things should get better soon.

I am planning to do some pie shell decorating for this weekend. I promise I will post my results!

Still here!!

I have not fallen off the face of the earth. I've been dealing with a lot of life right now - including the death of my mother-in-law. So, it's been kind of tough to write and tough to cook. Next week, things should be easier, so look for a post mid to end of the week.

Radishes, Not Just for Salads!

When my mother rejoined the workforce in my teens, my dad and I picked up a lot of her cooking tasks. Over time, my dad took over making all weekend breakfasts and was usually pretty good. My mother never needed to worry about leftovers as my dad kept finding new and inventive ways to use them. Some of them didn't work out too well, but most of them worked incredibly. I think it helps that my dad never had a home ec teacher to tell him it wouldn't work.

One of his great discoveries was that radish roots sauté wonderfully. They didn't work too well in the omelet, but on their own they were exquisite.

This week I was able to get wild-caught, fresh salmon on a wonderful sale. I've been grilling it until tonight, when a wind/dust storm made grilling inadvisable. Each night, I've been trying to come up with a new vegetable combination to accompany it. Tonight, I decided on radishes.

Sauteed Radishes, Zucchini, and Onion

1/2 cup zucchini, sliced
1/2 cup radishes, sliced
1/2 cup onion, (sliced lengthwise in strips)
1/4 teaspoon coarse kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon olive oil

Heat oil in skillet. Sprinkle salt over veggies as the oil heats. Sauté onions until they start to become translucent. Add radishes and zucchini and sauté until they are to their desired doneness.

This is a very easy and flavorful vegetable dish. A lot of people find zucchini to be bland, but I don't. I do find that it plays well off a stronger flavor, so it's creaminess can come to the fore.

When choosing radishes to sauté, make sure the radishes aren't too big or too strong. If they are, the radishes will be bitter.

Book Review: Over a Red-Hot Stove

Over a Red-Hot Stove (ed. Ivan Day) is a wonderful series of essays of reviewing the development of cooking technology from the 16th century to present. The six-essay series tackles a different aspect of technology development from the development of the kitchen range to changing meat roasting technologies to changes in yeast/leavening techniques in breadmaking.

I found Peter Brears' (author of Cooking in Medieval England) essay on the changing technological changes in the methods of roasting meat quite compelling. His discussion of the transition from open hearth roasting to closed oven roasting provoked a lot a thinking about why we value grilling so much today. Grilled meats share a lot of characteristics with open-heart roasted meats.

Early meat roasting technologies involved one or more spits arrayed in front of a large open hearth, burning wood or coal (occasionally even turf, when fuel prices are too high). Drip pans placed under the spit caught the fats and fluids rendered from the meat as it roasted, and were basted back onto the meat as the roasting process progressed. This treatment led to a very succulent and flavorful piece of meat.

Two important characteristics of open-hearth roasting are intense heating of one side of the meat at a time and removal of the rendered fats from the meat. The alternating periods of heat allows the sugars to rise to the surface of the meat and carmelize, providing incredible Maillard reactive flavors (enhanced by basting from the drip pan). In addition, the application then removal of heat allows the heat to slowly penetrate the meat and slowly change the protein structure of the meat, leaving the meat very tender and juicy.

Most grilling instructions call for grilling one side of the meat, then turning the meat and grilling to desired doneness. If a thin steak is being grilled, this may be the most efficient way to grill, but for a thick piece of meat, this process increases the likelihood the meat will be burned. Personally, I prefer to work with meat at least one inch in thickness (and thicker when doing pork ribs). By turning the meat periodically during the cooking process, I alternate the intense cooking heat with cooling, drawing the sugars out of the meat. I also drain the rendered fats away from the meat, preventing the fat from overheating and affecting the flavor of the meat. While I can't baste with drippings to increase succulence, I can marinate and add flavor and fluid prior to cooking, thus increasing the succulence.

I love it when a book about food or cooking makes me put things together in different ways! Over a Red-Hot Stove certainly stirred things up in my mind. Go get a copy for yourself and see what it makes you think about cooking!