chicken

Chicken Ragu over Polenta

by Lisa on February 1, 2013

Every now and then, an ingredient that we’ve never used before will catch our eye. We immediately take it home and wonder what to do with it. A little research later, we often find a delicious recipe to try. When Jeromy picked up a stewing hen at the farmer’s market, I was skeptical. I came home, and a little search of the internets later, I found this recipe for stewing hen ragu. In the middle of the winter, what could be more comforting than a bowl of chicken ragu over polenta? The recipe itself is time intensive, but most of it is hands-off. The worst part is that it makes your house smell amazing as it cooks, but you can’t eat it until the next day.

I used a stewing hen, which is an older chicken and the meat needs a lot more coaxing to tenderize. You can also use a regular chicken, but you’ll want to increase the amount of tomatoes by another can since there is a lot more meat on a regular chicken than on a stewing hen.

The savory combination of rich chicken meat stewed in wine and tomatoes is brightened by adding lemon juice and parsley right before serving. Served over creamy polenta, this dish will please a large crowd or a small family with a lot of leftovers.

Chicken Ragu Over Polenta

by The Splattered Apron

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 3.5-4 hours

Keywords: entree chicken tomatoes

Ingredients (serves 6-8)

3-4 pound stewing hen
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large yellow onion, cut into thin wedges
5 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary
½ teaspoon red chile flakes
¾ cup red wine
1 can (28 oz.) plum tomatoes, chopped, with juice
½ cup water, plus more as necessary
Pinch ground cloves
Zest of one lemon
juice of one lemon
2 teaspoon parsley, chopped
salt and pepper
6 cups of water
2 teaspoons salt
1 3/4 cups of corn meal
3 tablespoons butter

Instructions

First, butcher the bird. Remove the legs and set aside. Cut off the backbone and remove any excess fat around the cavity and wing tips. Set the breast on a cutting board, meat side up and use a heavy object to crack the breast bone, so that the bird lies flat.

Season the legs with salt and pepper.

Over medium heat, heat a Dutch oven or heavy pot.

Add the oil, then add the legs and wings of the chicken. Brown on both sides, about 10 minutes. Remove the chicken to a plate, turn over the onions to avoid burning, then repeat the process with the breast section. Remove to a plate.

To the pot add the rosemary, red chile flakes and garlic. Sauté until fragrant.

Add wine and let it cook down until it has almost completely evaporated.

Add tomatoes, water, ground cloves, and lemon zest to the pot. Stir to combine.

Add the chicken back to the pot and cover as best as possible with the tomato, wine mixture. Add extra water if necessary. Cover the pot with a lid and turn the heat down very low.

Stir occasionally.

Stew the chicken until the meat is tender and beginning to fall off the bone, 3.5-4 hours. The liquid should be at a easy simmer during this time. If the pot seems dry, add a 1/4 cup of water.

Let the chicken cool to room temperature in the tomato sauce and store overnight in the refrigerator.

The next day, pick the chicken meat off the bone and add it back into the stewing sauce.

Reheat the ragu, add additional water to loosen if necessary. Taste and season with salt and pepper if necessary. Add lemon juice and remove from the heat. Stir in parsley and serve over polenta (prepared with this recipe).

Enjoy!

Recipe adapted from Culinate.

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{ 8 comments }

Buffalo Chicken Nachos

by Lisa on October 3, 2012

buffalochickennachos

This is what happened when my two favorite football watching appetizers got together and had a baby.

Seriously.

I love nachos. I love wings. So I put them together.

This is probably not the healthiest football snack but you only live once, right?

Buffalo Chicken Nachos

by The Splattered Apron

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 3.5-4 hours

Keywords: bake slow-cooker appetizer

Ingredients (1 large baking sheet of nachos)

3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
chicken stock
1 bottle of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce
tortilla chips
4 ounces Colby cheese, shredded
4 ounces Monterey jack cheese, shredded
2 ounces bleu cheese, crumbled
2 stalks of celery, diced
1/2 of a small red onion, thinly sliced

Instructions

Place the chicken breasts in the bottom of a slow cooker. Cover with chicken stock then add about 3/4 of the bottle of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce. Cook on high for at least 2.5 hours and up to 4 hours {the longer the better}.

Remove the chicken from the slow cooker and shred with two forks. Stir in more hot sauce to your desired level hotness.

Preheat the oven to 350.

On a large baking sheet, spread a layer of tortilla chips.

Spread the shredding chicken over the chips.

Sprinkle the diced celery over the chicken.

Distribute the bleu cheese all over the chicken, sparingly. You don’t want to be overwhelmed by the bleu cheese.

Next, add the red onions.

Then the shredded cheese.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, until the cheese has just melted.

Serve immediately.

I’m going to go easy on the pictures—it’s pretty obvious I was losing daylight when I took these. But this combination of flavors cannot wait for good lighting! I love how the celery maintains it’s crunch and cooling effect against the hot buffalo chicken, melty cheese and crunchy chips.

I could have easily eaten half of this sheet myself, but I shared them instead. After I did a little quality control .

If you like buffalo wings and you like nachos, you’re going to love this. Who’s looking forward to Sunday football now?

Enjoy!

{ 6 comments }

Greek Eats {Mediterranean Stuffed Chicken}

by Lisa on October 27, 2011

It’s no secret that recently I have been struggling to get into the kitchen and cook. It’s just when I say to Caroline, I’m going to go cook now you can watch me from your chair, she gives me this look that says, “really? you want to go cook instead of hang out with me?” and I can’t walk away.

As a result, we’ve been eating out far too often. I’ve reached the point where it’s just not okay anymore. I love cooking and I hate spending so much money eating out. So tonight, I made dinner.

{Mediterranean Stuffed Chicken}

Print this recipe!

Serves 2

Ingredients

2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, pounded to 1/4 inch thickness {or use chicken cutlets}
6 ounces chopped frozen spinach, thawed and drained
just under 1/4 cup of sun dried tomatoes, chopped
6 kalamata olives, chopped
1 1/2 inch block of feta cheese, crumbled
salt
pepper

Method

In a medium bowl, mix together the spinach, tomatoes, olives and feta until well combined then set aside.

If using chicken breasts, pound them out to 1/4 inch thickness, then lay them on a cutting board. If using chicken cutlets, there is no need to pound them.

Split the spinach mixture in half and place in the center of each chicken breast. Fold the chicken breast so that the filling is rolled up in the chicken. Place on a baking sheet lined with tinfoil, seam side down. Season with salt and pepper.

Place under the broiler for 8-10 minutes until the chicken is browned on top and cooked through.

This dish is so quick and easy to prepare, especially on a busy weeknight.

It’s also rather filling and full of good for you ingredients. I paired this with an end-of-summer vegetable sauté from my neighbor’s garden {Swiss chard, baby zucchini, tomatoes and garlic}, broccoli roasted in sesame oil and the harvest grains mix from Trader Joe’s.

This method is a great way to use leftover vegetables in your fridge. You can stuff chicken with almost anything! Make this recipe your own.

Enjoy!

{ 8 comments }

Simply Summer {Fried Chicken}

by Lisa on June 30, 2011

With Fourth of July days away, Jeromy and I were talking about our favorite summer dishes. This one isn’t necessarily just a summer dish, but there’s something about fried chicken that makes me think of sitting outside, enjoying the company of family and friends late into a summer night.

We’ve tried quite a few different fried chicken recipes in our day and we’ve taken the best of all of them to create this one. We learned from Alton Brown that if you fry at the right temperature {300 degrees} the meat won’t absorb the oil so it’s not really as bad for you as you think. Granted, we’re not running out, purchasing a deep fryer and frying everything in sight, but for an occasional treat, this does the job!

(Fried Chicken}

Ingredients

For batter:

4 3/4 cups buttermilk
2 whole chickens, cut into 16 pieces
2 tablespoons smoked sweet paprika
6 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons sugar

For breading:

2 cups flour
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup panko breadcrumbs
salt
pepper

For frying:

half gallon {or so} peanut oil

A few notes:

I normally like to use the fat free grass-fed buttermilk from Whole Foods, but in a pinch the full fat version worked just fine.

I am terrible at butchering whole chickens, so I did myself a favor and asked the butcher to do it for me. Same price as a whole chicken, but cut for my convenience

Peanut oil is the way to go for this recipe. It’s pricey, but the good news is it can be used a couple of times before it needs to be thrown away.

This makes a double batch because we wanted to put some in the freezer to have on hand for those first few weeks after our baby girl arrives. If you want less, use one whole chicken and half the rest of the ingredients.

Method

Combine the buttermilk, garlic, paprika, salt and sugar. Whisk well to fully incorporate all of the ingredients.

Add the chicken.

Cover, give it a good shake to coat the chicken and refrigerate for at least 4 hours and up to overnight. When you’re ready to fry, prepare the rest of the ingredients.

Add the flour, panko, cornmeal, salt and pepper to a plastic bag. Shake to combine well. We set aside half of this mixture in a bowl so that we could add more to the bag as it became clumpy from the batter.

Choose a large pot for frying. We used our Dutch oven because of it’s ability to retain heat and because it’s wide mouth would reduce the risk of oil overflowing a narrower pot, especially when the chicken pieces are added.

Heat the oil in a large pot to 300 degrees, or really just a little bit over–when the chicken is added the temperature of the oil will drop, but try to keep it at 300 at all times. This means time spent futzing with the heat of the burner {futzing is a word, right?}. It also means that a candy thermometer is a very useful tool to have around. Besides tracking the temperature ours has a very handy clip that attached to the side of the pot.

Jeromy is ready for some breading action {we find that food safe gloves are very useful when working with raw meat, poultry and fish}.

Take a few pieces of chicken out of the batter and add them to the plastic bag. Be sure to leave air in the bag so that the flour has room to get around and coat each piece. Then, shake it up!

Using tongs, remove one piece at a time, shaking off excess flour and carefully add it to the oil. We found that in our Dutch oven, 3-4 pieces worked well.

Carefully monitor the oil temperature and adjust the burner heat accordingly.

Cook for 10 minutes. Monitor the temperature—it will drop as the pieces are added, but you can overshoot 300 degrees if you crank up the heat and don’t keep an eye on it.

Then remove the chicken and place it on an inverted cooling rack over a layer of paper towels to wick away excess oil. If the chicken fried steadily at 300 degrees, there shouldn’t be all that much oil because the moisture leaving the meat prevents the oil from entering it.

Repeat the process, replenishing the breading in the bag as needed, until all of the chicken is cooked.

We decided to pack up our chicken and head to Bon Air Memorial Garden for a picnic! This park is gorgeous and it’s where we met up with Lindsay for our maternity photo shoot.

The chicken was delicious. It has a great, crispy crunch on the outside while staying nice and juicy on the inside.

Enjoy the chicken hot or at room temperature, it’s great either way.

A picnic with my husband, what a wonderful way to end a Work From Home Wednesday.

Happy Independence Day–enjoy!

{ 2 comments }

Mangia! {Chicken Piccata}

by Lisa on May 16, 2011

Oh man. I love this recipe. Last year, Jeromy and I decided to cook every recipe out of Giada De Laurentiis’s book, Everyday Italian. We didn’t make it through the entire book in one year, so we’re going to keep plugging away, but this recipe stood out as one to make over and over and over again. And we do.

The fresh and bright flavors of this recipe make it perfect for a springtime meal—I haven’t changed this recipe at all from the original. I still had the lemons from our lemon tree so I made chicken piccata for our Sunday dinner. Served on a bed of angel hair pasta, it’s a filling meal and I ate it the leftovers for lunch today.

Ingredients:

1 package thin cut chicken cutlets {about 1 pound, there were 6 in this package}
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
All-purpose flour, for dredging
4 tablespoons unsalted butter {I used Earth Balance}
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/3 cup fresh lemon juice {from 2 lemons}
1/4 cup drained capers, rinsed
2-4 tablespoons flat leaf parsley, chopped

Method:

I always rinse chicken or other meat products before using them. So rinse the chicken and pat dry. Then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Dredge the chicken in the flour, set aside.

Heat a large sauté pan over medium-high heat and melt 2 tablespoons of the butter with the olive oil. Once combined, add the chicken to the pan in batches.

Cook for 3 minutes per side, until the chicken is browned. Remove and set aside on a plate.

Next, add the chicken broth, lemon juice and capers to the pan. Bring to a boil, scraping up the brown bits from the bottom of the pan.

Return the chicken to the pan and simmer for 5 minutes, until the chicken is just cooked through.

Using tongs, transfer the chicken to a platter. Whisk the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter into the sauce. Pour the sauce over the chicken and garnish with parsley.