4 posts tagged “chicken”

This dinner was all Leah! She marinated two whole chicken breasts in the leftover balsamic-honey syrup from dessert the night before with garlic, pepper sauce and a little red wine. Then she roasted them in the oven with a little more pepper sauce to add some extra flavor. The pepper sauce is from California, by Pepper Plant. It's not spicy, just really flavorful. We picked up a couple bottles after having some on potatoes during brunch in Pacific Grove and plan to use it a lot in our cooking this summer. Luckily, we found out that it's also carried locally at Central Market as well, so we can replenish our supplies when we run out!

The rice was Leah's take on kale-rice, but with swiss chard instead. She steamed the chopped up chard, onions and garlic in the rice cooker with the rice and a mix of water and chicken broth. When the rice was done, she just stirred everything together and added a little butter, salt and pepper. It was really tasty! I ate a ton at lunch today with my leftover chicken.

We used up the last of our CSA stuff this week, just in time! We're leaving for a 9 day road trip tomorrow, so we'll miss 2 weeks of CSA orders. We're donating this week's since it seems everyone's out of town, and friends will pick up next week's and hopefully enjoy it :)

So, this meal was kind of random, but ended up being really good. We had some beet greens and baby turnips (and greens) and a handful of mizuna left from the basket, so Leah sauteed them with some garlic, spring onions and butter. We poached a chicken breast in some chicken broth infused with coconut, curry, garlic and coriander (it's a soup base called College Inn Thai Coconut Curry Culinary Broth) and a can of coconut milk. We cooked some rice in the same mixture and both chicken and rice ended up having just a mild coconut flavor, which was nice. Leah made up a sauce of lime juice, fish sauce, soy sauce and grated garlic and that was AWESOME on the chicken and rice in the lettuce wraps. It would have just been "ok" with it, but with it, I just wanted to keep eating and eating! The greens and turnips also were very tasty!

We're leaving for California in the morning, so the CSA Challenge is on hiatus for 2 weeks, but expect lots of pics of the trip instead!

So, the second meal of the CSA Challenge was really just using up leftovers. We had a lot of chicken leftover from the night before and also had some carrots and onions, so I originally planned to make a pot pie. But when I got to the store to pick up some chicken broth and pie dough, I decided at the last minute to switch it to chicken and dumplings instead, because it would take way less time to make.

This one is easy enough to make. I started with peeling and chopping the rest of the purple carrots and sauteed then with a couple of the spring onions from the basket. Note: the purple leached out of the carrots and turned everything a weird purplish color, which looked kinda gross but tasted just fine. I would probably not use these again for mixing into anything, but they are fine on their own or roasted. After the veggies had softened a bit, I added a carton of chicken stock, about a half a bag of frozen peas, a few of the leftover potatoes from the previous night and the chopped up chicken and brought it to a boil. Also added a bunch of salt and pepper too. Then I mixed up the Bisquick dumplings, added them to the boiling soup, reduced the heat to low and cooked it uncovered for 10 mins, then covered for 10 mins. Then it was ready to serve and that's when we noticed how purplish everything was!

Dessert consisted of store-bought pound cake topped with the CSA strawberries and some fresh whipped cream. Very simple and very delicious! The only hard part was whipping the cream, which for some reason took me 3 tries and dirtying of various kitchen mixers until I finally just hauled out the Kitchenaid mixer to do it. I don't know why I thought the immersion stick blender chopper attachment would work, but I tried it first. Then I just used the regular attachment, since I had somehow managed to get that to work sometime before, but it also wasn't happening. I thought about using a hand mixer, but couldn't find a bowl that would work, so I dragged out the Kitchenaid from the pantry. Now I have a sink full of dishes and a countertop full of stuff, all just for some whipped cream!