Posts Tagged ‘chicken’

This is a fitting bookend for the healthy spinach egg bake with the chocolate stout cupcakes in between. Going back and forth can be torture, but life is all about balance and like I say, it’s important to indulge on a diet (pretty regularly, in my opinion) but it’s also important to either stay on the horse or hop right back on the next day. So if you’ve been indulging in cupcakes or avoiding the gym due to this frigid (horrible) weather, try this and you’ll feel a little better.

I got this idea when I started to use prepared tzatziki sauce like crazy last year. In my daily diet, I try to be as clever as possible to find substitutions for fatty, awesome ingredients and this is one of my favorite finds. Tzatziki became my #1 replacement for mayonnaise on sandwiches, ranch dip for raw veggies, bases for creamy salad dressings, etc, mostly because it has very little fat thanks to Greek yogurt, and only has 35 calories per 2 tablespoons.

So when I got a hankering for thick, indulgent, creamy chicken salad last summer, a lightbulb went off and I simply used tzatziki with a dab of low-fat sour cream instead of awesome fatty mayo. In comparison, my combo has 80 calories while 5 tablespoons of full-fat mayo has 500. And low-fat has 250. Ha! Beat that! The other ingredients in my chicken salad are pretty classic. I love sweet grapes and crunchy celery and that’s pretty much it. I’m not a huge fan of nuts in my salad, but feel free to add them. Don’t forget the average ½ cup of nuts has almost 400 calories  – so don’t toss them in with a heavy hand!

Seedless and sliced.

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One of the things I miss most about living near my family is Sunday dinner.  When I was living at home, it was always something I looked forward to, and it was my weekly chance to show off a little and make something extra scrumptious and more time-consuming than any other weeknight meal.

This is one of the most thumbed, stained recipes in my Ina Garten cookbook, and for good reason.  It’s a really simple dish – just the classic pan-fried pounded chicken with lemon-butter sauce.  I just love a lemon beurre blanc and Ina’s is so fantastic, I don’t change much and it’s one of the easiest ways to learn how to work with acid and butter.

One of the other great things about the recipe is that it halves or multiplies very easily, so you can make this for 2 or 4 or 8 easily every time. I like serving a nice pasta tossed simply with good olive oil and herbs on the side, but you can also serve rice or just a fresh salad too.

It seems fitting that a week long drought of posts would be quenched with something labeled “quick” since it reflects why  there was a drought at all.  Work has been taking it all out of me this week and the last thing I felt like doing upon dragging my feet through my apartment door was cooking, so thus the drought.  I have something extra-super-special I’m making this weekend that I’ve been looking forward to for months (which will be posted Monday) but for now, I whipped this together tonight and it was scrumptious.

My dad messaged me this afternoon asking what he should do with a few boneless, skinless chicken breasts since my mother is away at her 40th high school reunion in Milwaukee.  Being a man who will happily eat frozen pot pies and canned peaches every night, I began suggesting the easy recipe below and realized just how tasty it sounded to me. So I went ahead and made it for myself, determined to post something new before my epic post Monday.  And here it is.

Oh, roast chicken leftovers, how I love you so.  Being at a photography shoot the past few days where all we’ve been shooting is picture after picture of gorgeous food (and eating awesome Thai Basil for lunch every day), my guilt over just eating cold chicken with a salad once I got home finally got to me.  Normally I would make a yummy chicken salad and serve it on fluffy, sweet wheat bread, but I saw this on Gourmet a few months ago and thought how it would be something great to do for when I had leftover roast chicken instead of just buying a rotisserie substitute.

Tstasiki is right up there with Dijon mustard in my list of favorite condiments, and despite knowing how easy it was to make, I never actually did it.  The lazier part of me just always picked up a container whenever I was in the store, and frequently my after-work snack is me dipping celery into the container (thankfully I live alone) while I put dishes away and make my lunch for the next day.  Cooling, tart and decadent without the fat, I use it as a sub for mayonnaise in chicken salad (great calorie reducer) and even as a salad dressing.

The tsatsiki is the only ‘recipe’ here, really.  The rest is tossing the chicken with some herbs and oil, adding some veggies and topping everything with the tsatsiki on some pita bread.  It’s a great fast weeknight meal and even better if you have the time to roast some potatoes with oregano alongside it. Otherwise, just enjoy on its own!

I love it when recipes almost go completely against everything you thought you knew. Growing up, roasted birds were to be slathered in butter, stuffed with herbs and spices and all sorts of vegetables, cooked for hours on end and fussed around with endlessly. True, my own Thanksgiving turkey follows these guidelines quite a bit (except I brine instead of butter) and there is great merit to everything I just said, but this method throws all of that out the window, and it is still my favorite way to cook a bird.

All you do is take a whole chicken, clean it, dry it really well, season with salt and bake at a screaming hot temperature for very little time, and you’re done. That’s it. Seriously.

The method comes from Thomas Keller of French Laundry and Per Se fame, restaurants known for froufrou and ultra-complicated recipes so it only seems ironically fitting that the chef who authors the recipe would be the last person I would imagine making a bird this way. But I suppose that’s the point. It’s all about the best ingredients, the best method, and the best results. That’s what true A1 cooking is about, in the end.

Since the method is so simple, makes enough for 4 servings and chicken is so versatile, this is the one of the best things for a single cook, in my opinion.  Knowing I would be in Denver all week for the photo shoot of our upcoming cookbook (exciting times!), I made this to have around so dinners would be extra easy since I would be pulling long hours all week. The things you can do with leftover chicken meat (especially meat this good) is endless, and you could easily feed off it all week.  Not to mention saving the carcass to make stock with, but that’s for another time.

Also, huge thanks to Red Wagon Farm’s stand for supplying the veg.  Not only is their produce to die for, they’re the sweetest ladies around and have extra long hours on Sundays.  Thanks girls!