Chicken Leek Stroganoff

Yum! Tonight was a tasty dish adapted from a recipe by Jamie Oliver: Chicken Leek Stroganoff. This is my second time making it, but I didn't change much.

The recipe in a nutshell: Cook some rice, simmer some leeks, mushrooms, and chicken in a light cream sauce, dish the sauce over the rice, garnish and enjoy! It's a "19 minute" recipe which invariably takes me longer for some reason, but it's still pretty quick and easy.

I'll put the ingredients I used, you can cheap out if you like.

Chicken and Leek Stroganoff

Kosher Salt
Ground Black Pepper
3 large garlic cloves
1 cup jasmine rice
1 large organic leek
2 big handfuls crimini mushrooms
2 free-range organic boneless skinless chicken breasts
organic extra virgin olive oil
1/2 stick organic unsalted butter
2 glasses of (organic? local?) white wine
1 small glass of water (might as well get it ready) This will affect the final thickness of the sauce; err on the side of less water
1 bunch fresh organic parsley
1 heaping cup organic plain yogurt
1 organic lemon

Cook the rice*. I used a rice cooker. I cheat. Jamie uses packets. He cheats too.

Peel and dice the garlic cloves. Slice the ends off the leek off and save for future stock-making. Slice the rest of the leek twice lengthwise and then slice widthwise about 25 times. You want small leek pieces here. Slice the mushrooms into flat mushroom-looking discs and keep separate. Slice the chicken into fingers and keep separate as well.

If you keep them on the same cutting board it makes it harder to add them one by one... though technically it's okay to keep the mushrooms and chicken together. But is it sanitary?

Hm? Oh, the recipe! Right! Sorry, got lost there for a minute.

Put a couple of tablespoons of olive oil along with the butter and garlic in a large frying pan on high heat. Once the butter is mostly melted or starts to sizzle, add the leek and one glass of wine. Do something else with the other glass of wine, maybe drink it? Add the small glass of water and some salt and pepper, stir once lightly, then partially cover it. Give that five minutes while you "finely chop the parsley, stalks and all". Reserve part of the parsley (chopped or otherwise) for garnish.

Add the chicken, most of the parsley, the yogurt, and the mushrooms to the leeks. Bring to a boil, stirring, then reduce heat to a simmer for 10 minutes or until sauce has thickened to your liking. Squeeze half a lemon's juice into the stroganoff just before serving. Add further salt, pepper, or other seasoning if so desired.

Plate by dishing stroganoff over a serving of rice and garnishing with parsley and lemon wedges. Serve with any remaining white wine.

I also added a dab of yogurt for the sake of photography.

Oh no, what happened to all my posts??

Some things have changed in my recent absence; notably I now live in a completely different Portland basement than the one I posted from previously. Also, I'm now Cooking With Gas ™.

I have eaten in the interim and taken many pictures, so I'll be occasionally offering looks back into the Lost Months ™, but meanwhile here is what I cooked and ate (in a Portland Basement) last night.

Crumby Chicken

(this is how I cooked it, see below for how I would do it differently next time)

• 2 large organic boneless skinless chicken breasts


• 4 sprigs of italian flat-leaf parsley


• 1 peeled garlic clove


• 2 tablespoons of butter


• 1 pinch kosher salt


• 1 pinch ground black pepper


• 1 lemon


• 1/2 cup cracker or bread crumbs


• 2 tablespoons plain flour


• 1 large egg


• olive oil

Zest ze lemon, and food process the zest, garlic, parsley, butter, salt, pepper, and crumbs until the mixture is very fine. Put it on a plate so that you'll be able to dunk chicken in it.

The parsley in my crumb mixture left me with very green crumbs.

Whisk the egg by itself in a bowl suitable for dunking chicken breasts in.
Put the flour on another plate.
Cut some slits in the bottom of the chicken breasts, put them in some plastic (plastic bag, plastic wrap, whatever you've got), then take your girlfriend's prized cast iron skillet and whack the chicken breasts repeatedly.

She won't find out. If you don't have a girlfriend's cast iron skillet to use, a mallet would be okay, or some other big heavy flat implement suitable for chicken flattening. Flat chicken cooks faster and more evenly, as you may know.

Extract the breasts from the plastic, and coat them first in flour, then in egg, then in crumbs. You'll want them fully coated for best results.

Crank the oven way up, put the chicken breasts on a metal cooking dish (cast iron skillet perhaps?), drizzle some olive oil over the top of them, and put them in for 15 minutes.

This is exactly 15 minutes. The black crust is a good thing. Er... did I mention I now use a gas stove?
Imagine that it's really tasty, and the picture starts to look better.
Serve with lemon wedges (if you have any lemons... like say the one you zested) and a green side dish of your choice. I chose a green salad with a vinaigrette.

Results: Tasty. You could also fry the chicken at 5 minutes a side in some olive oil on the stove top, which would probably be even tastier, but more messy. Next time I do this recipe I will probably marinade the chicken somehow first, use more garlic, and less butter (the crumbs were more like a paste). I used bread crumbs here, but the recipe I was going from actually suggested crumbled cream crackers; what's a cream cracker anyhow?

Rosti (n) /roh-stee/ - anything shredded and fried in a portland basement

This falls under tasty and somewhat messy. It follows the rule that "even if you don't generally like something, it probably tastes good fried." If you like celeriac and radishes, so much the better.

Celeriac and Radish Rostis

Ingredients:

1 celeriac bulb (sub 3 large potatoes if you prefer)
1 bunch radishes (approximately 250g)
1 small bunch carrots (approximately 300g)

4 tbsp all-purpose flour
salt / pepper to taste
1 tbsp sprinkleable thyme
1 tbsp finely diced (or granulated) garlic

4 individual tbsp olive oil

Shred carrots, radish bulbs, and peeled celeriac bulb into a good sized bowl. Squeeze excess moisture out of mixture (use the bottom of another bowl, or squeeze handfuls of the mixture over the sink. Trust me, this helps). Mix flour and spices into the... mix. Take a picture.

Did you take your picture yet? Here's mine. Yours doesn't need to include a dish brush.

Prep a plate to receive the rostis by layering some paper towels on it. Add one tablespoon of the olive oil to a large, flat pan over medium-high heat. Create smallish patties of the shredded mixture and gingerly place them in the oil once the oil is warm (shimmery). Use a spatula or similar device or you may get injured and I may get sued. That would suck.

Take another picture.

Cook patties for approximately 3 minutes on each side, waiting until underside is brown and crispy before flipping. If you nudge one of the rostis and it moves easily in one piece, it is probably ready to flip.

These ones aren't quite ready to flip.


Here are some flipped rostis. Note the lovely brown color, like McDonald's hasbrowns. If they look like Denny's hashbrowns, you probably should have waited. Actually these ones have some burnt spots... maybe I waited too long? Nah, I like burnt spots.

Scoop out the rostis once they are finished on both sides and place them on the paper towels. Remove any excess bits if you are worried about them scorching, add more olive oil and more rostis, and repeat until the shredded mixture runs out.

Blot and serve. Serving suggestions: Some sort of creamy topping, such as sour cream or a creamy aoili, would be great. They are similar to potato pancakes, so if you have a preferred serving style for those, it should apply. The carrots will make them mildly sweet, maybe like sweet potato pancakes.

I had mine with an avocado aioli mixture, similar to the dipping sauce I use when eating artichokes, except with avocado.

The recipe is add ingredients to a bowl and mix. The ingredients are one avocado, two tablespoons of mayonaisse, a splash of soy sauce, a splash of balsamic vinegar, a few grinds of black pepper, a smidge of spicy mustard, and a tablespoon of diced garlic.


Mush up and enjoy.

This color indicates I added too much soy sauce and balsamic vinegar. The mayonaisse may have also been extraneous given the creaminess of the avocado. If you try it, let me know what you think.

Sauteed Mixed Greens, Rice Pilaf with Scallops, and Roasted Beets with Onions

Tonight I made a large dinner, fairly simply, over the course of an hour. I used scallops, rice, olive oil, butter, cream, flour, salt, pepper, beets, chard, kale, rosemary, leeks, onions, and garlic, most in somewhat random amounts. This was the end result:


And boy is it good.

For the beets, remove the beet greens and set them aside, then place the beets in a foil packet with chopped onions (they'll be quite tender so take that into account when chopping), garlic, and whatever spices you like, as well as some olive oil. I stuck a healthy swatch of fresh rosemary in the packet this time. Then cook the packet in the oven at 450 degrees for 40 minutes. Sizzle sizzle.

For Pilaf, simply saute some chopped onion in a saute pan with a lid, then brown some rice lightly with them. I used long grain jasmine rice; any long grain rice will do, some wild rice added in isn't a bad thing either. About 1/4 onion per cup of rice, once the rice is lightly browned add two cups of broth for each cup of rice, and bring to an active boil. Once boiling, place the lid on the pan and reduce the heat to simmer (medium-low to medium heat). Check after 10 minutes (a glass lid is quite helpful here), the pilaf is finished when all moisture has been absorbed into the rice. I garnished mine with chopped leeks, chives also work for this.

The greens are a simple saute with a roue. Heat oil in a pan until water flicked into the pan sizzles and pops. For chard, you can give the big stems the foil packet treatment like I did, or just start cooking them first. Once the stems have a good head start, add the leaves. Some time after the chard leaves, you can add thinner greens like kale (I generally remove the stems) or even leeks. Beet greens are probably last on this list, since they don't take much time to cook at all. I cook my greens until they are really done, but you can "stop early" if you like your greens a little crisper. I add water during the process to sort of steam the greens, if the pan still has oil in it this can cause some splatter so be careful. When the greens were almost finished I added some wine, cooked that off, and then pulled them out of the pan.

I deglazed that same pan with a little more wine and some water, and then plopped in half a dozen scallops. I seared them on both sides, let them absorb some of the tasty moisture, and then set them on top of the pilaf. I added some more water to deglaze the pan again, and once everything was off the bottom I added some cream and flour to make a simple sauce. I pour the sauce over the greens, but it would have been good on the pilaf as well I'm sure.

You can fit this on a plate however you like, but I put the scallops on top of one side of the pilaf, the onions from the beet packet on top of the other side, and the greens (with the "gravy" on top) on the other side of the plate. The beet got its own home between them, and the chard stems (from a separate packet) ended up being my seconds.

All of these recipes are really simple and substitutable, I could have easily used chicken instead of scallops for example, and any combination of greens would have worked.