Chicken and Cheese Soup with Green Chilies

This has been one of my favorite soups for years. It's kind of like a tortilla soup, but heartier and with cheese. The recipe comes from the Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread Cookbook by Crescent Dragonwagon (best name ever). I've modified it somewhat by adding black beans and a few other things.

6 cups chicken stock
1 lb. boneless chicken breasts or 1 to 2 cups cooked, diced chicken
3 tomatoes, chopped
2-3 fresh green chilies, chopped
(or substitute one can of Ro-tel and one can of diced green chilies for the tomatoes and green chilies)
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 large onion, diced
3 cloves garlic
1/2 to 1 whole fresh jalapeno, diced
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons chili powder
1 teaspoon chipotle sauce or powder (optional)
1 can black beans
1/2 cup flour
1 cup milk or half-and half
12 ounces grated sharp cheddar
salt and pepper, to taste
chopped cilantro for garnish

Boil chicken breasts in chicken broth until cooked through. Remove chicken and strain broth back into the pan. Let chicken cool, then dice.
Add tomatoes or Ro-tel  to chicken broth and bring it back to a boil.
Meanwhile, saute onion in butter and oil in a large skillet until translucent. Add garlic and chilies and let cook for another 2-3 minutes, then add spices. Blend in flour, a bit at a time. Gradually add milk or half-and-half and stir until smooth and thickened.
Put a ladle of chicken broth into skillet and stir. Then add skillet's contents, along with the black beans, to soup pot and cook at a bare simmer over low heat, stirring often, for 15 minutes.
Slowly stir in the grated cheese and cook until it's blended and fully melted, about 5 minutes. Add chicken and cilantro, and season with salt and pepper. Add hot sauce if it's not spicy enough.

Serve with more cilantro, lime wedges, avocados and lots of tortilla chips.

Pitas stuffed with spicy sauteed chickpeas with beef and cilantro

Everything is better encased in dough. Calzones, apple turnovers, corndogs...
This recipe from Kalyn's Kitchen for spicy sauteed chickpeas with beef and cilantro sounded really good, so I turned it into the filling for my stuffed pitas.

I adapted the chickpea recipe slightly.
Filling
1/2 lb. low fat ground beef
4 tsp. extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp curry powder 
2 cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 cups chicken broth
1 1/2 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp. ground chipotle chile powder, more or less to taste, or use a diced chipotle chile from a can or other hot sauce
1 1/2 tsp. minced garlic
salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste
1/2 cup finely chopped cilantro

Heat 1 tsp. olive oil in a large deep frying pan over high heat, then add ground beef, crumbling into pieces as you put it into the pan. Use a metal turner to stir and break up the meat while you start to brown it, about 3 minutes. When meat is fairly broken up, add chickpeas. Keeping heat high, saute meat and chickpeas together until meat is well browned and chickpeas are quite brown and starting to pop, about 10 minutes. (If the mixture starts to stick turn down the heat a tiny bit.)

Add ground cumin, ground chipotle chile powder, and minced garlic and cook a minute more. Add reserved cooking liquid (with added stock if needed to make 2 cups). Scrape the bottom of the pan with turner to loosen any browned bits, season with salt and pepper, then reduce heat and simmer until most of the liquid has evaporated, about 5-10 minutes.

Turn off heat, stir in chopped cilantro and 1 T olive oil. Taste to see if it needs more salt or pepper.


Pita dough
This recipe is from 100 Great Breads by Paul Hollywood.


Scant 4 cups flour
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 cup sugar (superfine, if you have it)
1/2 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon yeast
1 1/4 cups water


Mix sugar, yeast and water together and let sit until it's foamy. Add olive oil and salt. Mix in flour in increments until dough is just slightly sticky to the touch. Let the dough rise for an hour.


Making the stuffed pitas
Divide dough into pieces the size of golfballs. Roll out a circle of the dough to about 1/4 inch thick. Put a couple spoonfuls of filling in the middle of one half of the circle, then fold the dough over to make a half-moon shape. Seal the edges. Put the stuffed pitas on a lightly greased cookie sheet and let rise for another half hour. Bake at 400 until lightly browned.


Serving
I served these hot with a tzatziki sauce. They are a good leftover, and taste fine cold or heated up in the oven or a toaster oven.

Triple-Chocolate Mousse Cake

I made this recipe from Cook's Illustrated for Christmas dessert. It's a good thing I got a Wii Fit for Christmas, because I feel personally responsible for making sure none of the cake goes to waste.

It's not a difficult recipe, but there are a lot of steps (most of them involve mixing heavy cream with various types of chocolate), so I'm just linking to the recipe.

This cake is both light and rich, and goes really well with coffee.

Chicken Pot Pie

There is perhaps no kitchen-related disappointment as great as that of an almost-empty Crisco container. The initial disappointment is the lack of Crisco for my pie crust, but the sadness comes later when I realize exactly what happened to all that Crisco. I ate it.

Anyway, I was able to scrape up enough of the shortening to combine with butter and make crusts for two chicken pot pies and one apple pie. An all-butter crust doesn't have the crispiness, an all-Crisco crust doesn't have the flavor. So I compromise by using half of each.

I like to make two pot pies at a time because I can freeze one and have it for dinner in a couple weeks. Pre-baked, it takes a couple hours to heat up in the oven and tastes just fine.

This is not so much of a recipe as it is loose guidelines. You can add other veggies. I like the simple combo of potato, carrot, onion and celery.

This recipe will fill two pies.

cook 4-5 chicken breasts in 4 cups of chicken broth (I made my own from a leftover rotisserie chicken). Set chicken aside to cool. Strain broth into another bowl.


for the filling:
3 tbsp butter
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
4 celery stalks, diced
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup dry white wine
4-5 medium-sized Yukon Gold potatoes, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
3-4 large carrots, diced
chicken broth
3 tbsp heavy cream
salt and pepper

Use your favorite crust recipe, or this one I adapted from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook:

2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup butter
1/3 cup shortening
ice water

Stir together flour and salt. Cut butter into tablespoon-size chunks and add it to the flour. Cut it in a few times with a pastry cutter, then add the shortening and use your pastry cutter until shortening and butter are the size of small peas (or lentils?). Add water a couple tablespoons at a time, gently mixing with your hands between each addition until dough comes together. Of course, don't overwork it.

Using the pot the broth was cooked in, heat the butter over medium heat until foamy. Add onions and celery, and saute until soft. Add garlic and saute for a little longer, then add flour and stir it around until no white is showing. Add wine and stir some more. Add broth, potatoes and carrots. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring frequently. The mixture should be the consistency of slightly thin gravy. Add cream, salt and pepper. The filling should be slightly salty--the potatoes will absorb it as they cook.

I make this with a full bottom and top crust, but I've also used Stovetop stuffing as a sort of crumbly topping with good results.

Bake pies on the bottom rack at 375 degrees for 50-60 minutes, or until bottom and top crusts are golden. A good way to keep the top crust from burning is to put a pizza stone on the rack above.

Mojito sorbet, pina colada sorbet and more

When it was 100+ degrees this summer, I found the best way to cool down was with a refreshing sorbet, made even more refreshing by the addition of rum.

I used my KitchenAid ice cream maker attachment, which made it super fast and easy. Also, this is a recipe where you can't go wrong...taste it halfway through freezing, and if you don't it adjust the ingredient amounts.

Mojito sorbet

juice of 1 lime (or more, to taste)
1 small bunch mint
1 cup water
2 tablespoons sugar
rum to taste

Boil water, remove from heat, add sugar and mint. Steep mint for 5 minutes then discard. Mix ingredients in a bowl or pitcher, add more sugar, rum or lime to taste (you can also throw in some limeade if you're too lazy to squeeze limes. Just cut back on the sugar, or get rid of it altogether.) Put in refrigerator or freezer until cold, but not freezing.

Pour mixture into ice cream freezer and freeze according to directions. It takes about 20 minutes to get to a good thick consistency.

Pina Colada Sorbet
I must say, that of all the liquor sorbets I've made, I prefer the pina colada sorbet by far. It's got a lovely smooth, creamy texture and it's incredibly easy. I tried making it with fresh pineapple that I pureed and cream of coconut, but I found the texture fibrous. Maybe I should've strained the pineapple and just used the juice.

But why go to the trouble when R.W. Knudsen's pineapple-coconut juice works just as well and tastes just as good. Pour a bottle of cold pineapple coconut juice in the ice cream maker along with rum and sit back while your sorbet mixes itself.

Chicken Quiche-adilla

Terry, my carpool buddy, is always bringing delicious food to work for us to sample. Last Monday he brought two quiches: chicken quesadilla and bacon arugula. While the bacon arugula was tasty, the chicken quiche-adilla, as I renamed it, was wonderful. The jalepenos provided just the right amount of heat, and the rotisserie chicken stayed tender and flavorful. I generally like quiche, but sometimes it just seems like you might as well have eaten scrambled eggs because it's so eggy. Not so with this one. Jason said it reminded him of a pot pie, one of his favorite foods, and I was glad of that because maybe now I won't have to make him pot pies, which are way more time-consuming than this. Or maybe I'll start making my pot pies with a tortilla crust too. Enamored with the success of creating pies inspired by other food items, Jason has requested a Tater Tot Pot Pie. But I'm not sure about that. Not everything can be baked into a pie. Or maybe it can.

Terry said the recipe was probably from Cooks Illustrated, but Jason found it at grouprecipes.com, where it goes by the (boring) name of Chicken and Cheese Quesadilla Pie.

Chicken Quiche-adilla

1(10") flour tortilla,burrito size
1 rotisserie chicken, skin discarded, meat shredded in bite size pieces (about 3 cups)
/2c finely chopped fresh cilantro
1/3 cup drained, jarred pickled jalapenos,chopped
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
salt and pepper
2 large eggs
1 cup whole milk
1 cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 450. Grease 9" pie plate. Press tortilla into prepared pan and spray lightly with cooking spray.Toss chicken, cilantro, jalapenos, 1 cup cheese, 1/2 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp pepper in large bowl till combined. Spoon over tortilla.
Whisk eggs, milk, flour, baking powder and 1/2tsp salt in bowl until smooth. Slowly pour over filling, then sprinkle with remaining cheese. Bake until surface is golden brown,about 20 minutes. Let cool 5 minutes. Serve with sour cream and salsa.

Notes: I was alarmed by the large amount of flour at first, but it worked out just fine. The cilantro I had was brown and goopy, so I omitted it. But really, cooked cilantro doesn't have much flavor anyway. I would suggest chopping up some fresh and sprinkling it over the pie when you serve it.

Bacon explosion: The love story of a man and his meat