Sunday, May 31, 2009

Leftover Roast Chicken Fritters (for lack of a better name)


Our next, delicious, and completely uncreative application for our leftover chicken was club sandwiches. Chicken, toasted Italian bread, lettuce, mayonnaise, and some bacon. It's very hard to start out with those ingredients and end up with something that's not good. Of course, we once would have said the same about bagels, cream cheese, and butter. Then the creative cook at an unnamed English restaurant toasted our bagels in the same oil he was using to make fish and chips. It was an ingenious—if entirely unsuccessful—example of cross-product usage.

But you don't need us to tell you how to make a club sandwich. Instead, we'll take the leftover roast chicken in a slightly different direction. This tasty little appetizer is very hard to write a recipe for, since we don't know the state of your roast chicken (done to a turn, underdone in some places, or massacred). We also don't know your spice rub (though we're betting you didn't slather it in Thai spices, like our sister's boyfriend). And we don't know how much you have. But the principles are what counts.

Chicken Fritters

1 ½ cup leftover roast chicken, shredded, chopped, and shredded again
2 stalk celery, peeled and diced
1 tsp lemon juice
Bread, several slices, soaked in milk
Bread crumbs or crumbled crackers
1 tbsp sweet paprika
½ tbsp garlic powder
½ tbsp sumac
½ tbsp oregano or Italian seasoning
1 tbsp chopped parsley
1 large egg
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil

1. Combine the chicken, celery, lemon juice, parsley, and spices, along with a pinch of salt and several grindings of pepper.
2. Squeeze the bread to remove most of the milk, and add to mixture.
3. Add one egg and mash together with your hands.
4. See where you're at. You want the mixture to have the consistency of a meatball. Likely it will be too wet at this stage, so you'll want to add bread crumbs or crumbled crackers. Eventually, it should hold together well enough to make a small ball that doesn't stick to your hands.
5. Heat a pan and make a tiny patty. Fry it quickly and taste. Then make adjustments to mix for seasoning.
6. Make patties by first rolling into a ball slightly larger than a walnut, and then flattening.
7. Fry in olive oil until golden on both sides.
8. Serve with a sauce of your choosing (our favorite simple sauce these days is equal parts water and sour cream, with a nice bit of chopped dill, some sumac, and a little lemon juice).

Sunday, May 24, 2009

An Unusual Chicken Salad (Leftover barbecued chicken)



We tried to leave early from a barbecue, and got a hunk of roasted chicken breast for our trouble. The next day, we found it rather dry and tough, and decided a wet application would be best. Surprisingly enough, the east-meets-west-meets-American-condiment-rack combination worked really well.

Please note, the ingredients are really for starting out. We normally adjust some/all of them to suit the chicken best.

1 ½ cup leftover roast chicken, shredded
3 tbsp cashews, chopped
1-2 tbsp mayonnaise (homemade is nice)
1 tbsp Madras curry powder
1 ½ tbsp sweet pickle relish
Maggi seasoning
Sriracha sauce

1. Combine the first five ingredients.
2. Add small amounts of the last two.
3. Mix.
4. Adjust, using the Maggi as you would salt.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Egg and Pea Curry (Imperial Palace, Macao)


(apologies for the dark photo. Newborns sap photographic energy)

A friend of ours has recently fallen under the spell of a famous doctor who counsels on diet. This poor man used to feast nightly on lamb shanks, pork ribs, and steak, but he now faces a small number of acceptable foods and an encyclopedic list of unacceptable ones. He asked us for something tasty and easy to prepare that fit his narrow requirements.

We offered up our adaptation of a great dish we had at a casino in Macao. The use of hard boiled eggs (somehow eggs escaped his hit list) in curry is very very good. You can use any compatible vegetables. Cauliflower and asparagus are especially nice, as are mushrooms.

Good variants of this dish involve lowering the heat at the end and stirring in yogurt (not permitted by the doctor), tempering in an egg (adds too much complexity), using coconut milk instead of flour and stock (absolutely forbidden), or serving it over spicy potatoes (these too are evil).

Curry with Eggs and Peas

4 hardboiled eggs
1 large onion, diced
1 cup frozen peas
1-2 tbsp Madras Curry Powder
½ tsp cayenne pepper
1 tbsp flour
¾ cup chicken broth
2 tsp Garam Masala
Water
Salt
Canola oil

1. Place 1 tbsp canola oil (or some evil ghee) in a hot frying pan
2. Add onions and fry vigorously, stirring often, for about 8 minutes until they begin to brown. Do not allow to blacken.
3. Reduce heat. Add flour, curry powder and cayenne. Stir and cook for about 1-2 minutes until flour smell disappears.
4. Add stock and stir vigorously until roux is dissolved.
5. Add water until desired thickness is reached.
6. Cook for about five minutes until flavors are incorporated. Add more water, as necessary.
7. Salt to taste.
8. Add peas and eggs, and cook for several minutes, ensuring that the egg yolk is well-penetrated by the sauce.
9. Finish with garam masala to taste.
10. Serve with rice.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Rarebit to the Rescue (Welsh Rarebit)


Last night, in the middle of baking a loaf of all-wheat bread, our baby daughter decided to interrupt. We remembered the bread 20 minutes too late.

What to do with dry, overcooked bread? If it was white bread, it would have joined our pile of bread crumbs. But all wheat's a different problem.

Our thoughts soon turned to something forbidden during pregnancy: a beer and cheese sauce. By toasting the bread crisp and drenching it in yummy Welsh rarebit, we saved our loaf. This recipe, by the way, is no different from any other you'll find. If you're looking for a way to save cash, don't go crazy on the beer. You can make a perfectly acceptable rarebit with a can of Budweiser.

Welsh Rarebit

2 tbsp butter
2 cups cheddar cheese
½ bottle dark beer
½ cup milk or cream
1 tsp dry mustard (more to taste)
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
½ tsp cayenne pepper
1 tbsp flour
Four slices thick wheat bread
Parsley and chives to garnish

1. Heat broiler. (this step is optional)
2. Melt 1 ½ tbsp butter in saucepan, stir in flour, mustard, and cayenne.
3. Allow to cook about 1 minute, or until the flour smell is gone.
4. Whisk in milk and continue whisking until lumps are gone and sauce is thick.
5. Whisk in beer, and allow to cook for a few minutes to remove excess alcohol.
6. Stir in most of the cheese to make a thick sauce.
7. Add Worcestershire sauce to taste.
8. Stir in remaining butter.
9. Toast bread until fairly hard.
10. Top bread with some sauce.
11. Optional: Take this sauced bread, top with cheese and place under broiler.
12. Check at 30 second intervals until the cheese is browned.
13. Serve garnished with herbs, sprinkled with Worcestershire sauce, accompanied by a bowl of the remaining sauce.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Fattoush (Leftover Pita Bread Salad)


One of the most photogenic of all foods, fattoush is a classic leftover dish: a Lebanese grandma's way to get rid of stale pita and uneaten veg. The idea is to toast (or fry) the pita, and toss it with herbs, a vinaigrette, and whatever you've got lying around. It sounded simple—until we consulted Chef Google.

From him, we learned that authentic fattoush is a very daunting undertaking. It requires barrel-aged feta, salt-cured olives, Arabic bread, pomegranate seeds, purslane, sumac, brined pickles, vine-ripened cherry tomatoes (is there another kind?), seedless English cucumbers, and French breakfast radishes (as opposed to French dinner radishes, which are equally common in our supermarket).

Then we stopped. It can't be authentic to turn a simple leftover dish into a $20/plate rare vegetable treasure hunt. Our advice is to concentrate on the pita, and empty out your produce drawer.


Fattoush


2 stale pitas, cut into triangles (Making your own works best, and it's really not hard.)
¼ cup olive oil (the yummy stuff)
1 tbsp chopped garlic
2-cups vegetables (in our case, hot cooked corn tossed with raw spinach)
Herbs (we used 2 tbsp of chopped parsley and mint)
10 or so kalamata olives, pitted
10 grape tomatoes
10 bite sized hunks of goat cheese
1-2 cups cucumber cubed

1. Heat oven to 350.
2. Heat oil and garlic together.
3. Toss pitas through the garlic oil, then spread on a sheet pan.
4. Bake until almost hard through.
5. Mix vegetables, herbs, olives, cucumbers and tomatoes.
6. Toss together with pita toasts.
7. Top with dressing (see below)

Sumac-buttermilk dressing

Before your head explodes, remember that cultured buttermilk is not leftover churned butter; it's similar to yogurt.

¼ cup buttermilk
1 tbsp olive oil
2tsp lemon juice
dash salt
1 tsp pureed garlic
1 tbsp sumac (ok, so we broke down, it is really nice)
1 tbsp of dill and parsley chopped.

1. Add lemon juice, garlic and salt to a small bowl.
2. Whisk vigorously while pouring in oil in a thin stream.
3. Add buttermilk and whisk.
4. Add sumac, dill, and parsley.
5. Taste and adjust.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009