Santa Fe Chicken

After a few road trips around the US I bought a cookery book called 'America's Most Wanted Recipes' - it contains copycat recipes based on dishes served at some of the biggest restaurant chains across the US.

I hadn't used the book in a while so a couple of weeks ago went through and picked out several recipes to try. This one, called Santa Fe Chicken, is apparently based on something served at Applebee's, a restaurant chain I've heard of but never actually been to. Still it sounded like a nice recipe I wanted to try!

It's one of those recipes where exact quantities aren't required and you play it by ear, at least I did.

First butterfly a chicken breast to open it out flat and cut a thick slice of cheese - one per chicken breast. The recipe said to use Monterey Jack cheese but I couldn't find that in the supermarket. I think this would be nice with any kind of cheese but the internet tells me Monterey Jack is a mild white cheese and that Cheddar is a close cousin.

Wrap the flattened chicken breast around each piece of cheese and secure with a cocktail stick.

Mix breadcrumbs, Parmesan cheese, salt, cumin and pepper. Dip the chicken in a shallow bowl of melted butter and then roll in the breadcrumb mixture.

 

 

Bake in the oven at 180C for 30 minutes until the chicken is cooked through.

 

Serve with a cheese sauce and top with chopped red and green peppers - though I left these out as my husband and I don't like them!

 

Salmon with Mustard and Gruyere Herb Crust

I love salmon and often when I'm planning my week's meals, I put down salmon for one night - it tastes so good I don't really need to do anything, and can quickly cook a piece of salmon and some vegetables for a delicious dinner.

Sometimes though it's nice to do something a bit different. I found this recipe in my BBC Saturday Kitchen Cookbook; it's also available on the BBC website.

You make a crust from breadcrumbs, cheese and herb, and press it on top of the salmon. I didn't bother with the part where you chill it in the fridge and instead mixed it and pressed it straight onto the fish.

The fish is baked in a mixture of fish stock and wine which keeps it light and gives it a lovely flavour. I didn't bother roasting the tomatoes as I don't like them, but didn't think the dish lacked anything for it.

Austrian Schnitzel with Sauerkraut

It's the Austrian Grand Prix this weekend and there was really only one thing I could make for Formula 1 Foods - schnitzel. As I explained in this post after I went to Vienna last year, Wiener Schnitzel is the national dish of Austria. To be completely traditional it would have to be made with veal, but pork is very common and so is chicken.

I made pork for me and chicken for my boyfriend, dipping a piece of meat into flour then egg then breadcrumbs, and frying until cooked through.

The accompaniments are important too - sauerkraut is a must, though I bought this rather than made it. Many UK supermarkets sell sauerkraut - I used to get it from Lidl as they carry a lot of German brands but they stopped selling it due to lack of demand, but luckily I picked some up in either Sainsbury's or Tesco - I forget which now.

When I ate the Schnitzel in Austria, it was beaten into a very large thin piece of meat - I don't know how they did it. There were a choice of sides but the traditional one was boiled potatoes with parsley - far nicer than it sounds, so that's what I made with my Schnitzel this time.

There's still time to send in your Austrian-inspired recipes to Formula 1 Foods!

Homemade Scotch Eggs and Electronic Egg Boiler Review

Is it just me, or is it really hard to boil eggs to the exact moment of perfection where the white is solid and the yolk still runny, just right for dipping in soldiers?

Saying that someone can't even boil an egg is a statement of derision, implying that it's the easiest thing in the world. I can only assume when people say that they are talking about hard boiled eggs, which are very easy. But when it comes to soft boiled, I can never remember how many minutes, and even then it depends on the size of the egg, how many you are cooking at once, and how long the water has been boiling for before you put the eggs in (I have a tendency to wander off and let the pan boil for a while). And if you take the eggs straight from the fridge and put them in a pan of boiling water they can crack, which has happened to me more than once. Making an omelette is also supposed to be really easy, but is something I've never actually done before!

So when I was offered an egg boiler to review on behalf of British Lion Eggs, I was intrigued. I'd never come across one of these gadgets before - they are designed to give you the perfect boiled egg every time.

The Severin egg boiler was more compact than I was expecting, and looked like a very cute little gadget. The box didn't contain an instruction leaflet however, so I had to Google what to do and luckily found a PDF of the instruction manual online.

You pour water into the base of the machine, prick the bottom of your eggs with the device included and that's it - you select how hard you want your eggs from a dial and switch it on. I cooked three eggs on the soft boiled setting and if I recall correctly, it took about seven minutes. It uses less energy than boiling a pan of water which is another benefit.

The eggs were perfectly cooked and I decided to use them to make Scotch eggs - something I've never made before and never really liked eating despite them being a regular on picnics and salad dinners as a child. A friend told me that 'picnic eggs' are different to Scotch eggs - the egg in the middle is chopped and mashed up and formed into a ball, which explains of course why these Scotch eggs are smaller than an actual egg. When we were in a restaurant recently a friend ordered a Scotch egg as a starter that had crab if I recall instead of sausage meat (we were in a fish restaurant) and the egg in the middle had a runny yolk. It looked delicious and I've since discovered that getting the outside of the Scotch egg cooked through and the inside of the yolk still runny is considered the holy Grail of Scotch eggs.

I made three large Scotch eggs, quite simply: I squeezed the meat from 9 sausages (I could have gotten away with using less if I had chilled the sausage meat longer then rolled it out). I mixed the sausage meat with some chopped parsley and a little wholegrain mustard and after peeling the eggs, rolled them in flour so the sausagemeat would stick, and shaped the meat around the egg. I then dipped each one in a shallow bowl of first flour, then beaten egg, then breadcrumbs.




I was wondering whether to deep fry or oven bake the Scotch eggs; the former is the standard way and means there is more chance of the egg remaining soft boiled, but the latter is healthier. The decision was made for me when I realised I had run out of cooking oil, as I usually use Fry Light which wouldn't have been suitable for this. I had a little vegetable oil left so I ended up frying the Scotch eggs to brown them then finishing them off in the oven.

They tasted very good - my boyfriend said he didn't like Scotch eggs but really enjoyed these. They made a very nice weekend lunch served simply with some bread and butter and salad. The egg inside was perfectly cooked but the yolk was sadly only ever so slightly runny. I will have to try making these again!

I love eggs for breakfast as well so this morning I used my egg boiler to make soft boiled eggs. I followed the instructions exactly, had the machine on its lowest setting and plunged the egg into cold water as soon as the machine beeped, but the inside of the yolk was barely runny at all. That was very disappointing, but I wonder if it's because I used smaller eggs, or only cooked one egg and if the timer is optimised for cooking more at once. I will have to try this again with larger eggs or perhaps find a way to time the machine myself and turn it off just before the beep says it's ready! Even so, I have a tendency to under boil eggs and when I cut into them, find that not only is the yolk runny but the white is as well, and this egg boiler meant the white was cooked perfectly, even if the yolk was a little overdone for my taste.

The British Lion is the UK's most successful food safety mark with nearly 90% of UK eggs now produced within the Lion scheme. The Lion Code of Practice has effectively eradicated Salmonella in British eggs.

Disclaimer: I was sent the Severin egg boiler to review. I was not required to make positive comments and all opinions are my own.

Fried Coconut Prawns

 

These are so easy to make and really delicious. They remind me of a meal I had at Bubba Gump's in America, which involved prawns cooked four different ways. To make these, all you need is plain flour (which you can add some salt and pepper to), 1 egg, beaten, and bowl of dessicated coconut and breadcrumbs mixed together.

Take each prawn one at a time (you really want to use the large prawns for this) and dip in the flour then the beaten egg then the coconut and breadcrumb mixture.

Deep fry a few prawns at a time in a couple of inches of hot oil in a saucepan, for a few seconds only. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper.

Delicious!

Serve with chips, of course - and a sweet chilli/mayonnaise dip wouldn't go amiss either.

Chicken and Ham Croquettes

 

 

One of my favourite novels when I was younger was Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. It's probably still one of my favourites, but I don't read as much as when I was a teenager, and I don't really read "the classics" any more - I was a bit studious (and pretentious) as a teenager I think!

 

Look Homeward, Angel is a 1929 coming-of-age novel, and highly autobiographical. The book tells the story of Eugene Gant, a precocious, sensitive young boy born into a family of larger-than-life characters who run a boarding house in Altamont - a fictionalised version of Wolfe's own home town, Asheville in North Carolina.

 

The novel is written in a sprawling stream of consciousness style and the language is both very much of its time and reflective of Eugene's romanticism and pretention, with paragraphs like "Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June."

 

The author and his mother (my photo of a framed picture in their house)

 

But that's to take it out of context of course, and when I first read this novel - I was au pair to a German-American woman who had studied at school and I borrowed it from her bookshelf - I was swept away by the beauty and somehow importance of the language and the ideas. The opening lines of the novel are particularly weighty and memorable:

 

“. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

 

I'm sure I've lost some of you there so should probably reiterate that this really is an outstanding novel, the author's masterpiece and most famous work (admittedly he died young, but it is in the canon of great American literature).

 

My photo of the author's writing

 

Fast forward 15 or so years and I was planning a road trip to my boyfriend across four or five US states, starting in Baltimore (where I was going for work), travelling as far as we could in just under a week and looping back round to finish in Washington D.C. We knew that we had time to venture as far as North Carolina and I was researching what we might do there, and came across somewhere called the Biltmore Estate - the Vanderbilt property that is the largest house in America. It actually turned out to be similar to many stately homes I've visisted in England and not actually any bigger than a lot of them, but for America it is quite unique. Anyway, Biltmore is in a small town called Asheville, which rang absolutely no bells at all until I was reading up on other things to do there - and came across the Thomas Wolfe house. I almost fell off my chair (literally) when I realised this was the Altamont I had read of - it is portrayed in such accurate detail in the novel and was so true to the real Asheville that I knew we had to go there. And when I discovered we could visit "the most famous boarding house in American literature" (NY Times) there was really no question. I'm not suer my boyfriend particularly appreciated the hour-long tour of what is not a particularly big house as the guide made continued references to the author and the book, which he had not read! But I was very excited to know I was standing where Eugene Grant - and in fact Thomas Wolfe himself - had grown up and that this was the inspiration for the novel.

 

The boarding house in Asheville

 What has all this got to do with food, I hear you ask.... I often like to cook dishes inspired by fiction, whether it is books or films (the latter as I take part in the monthly Food 'n' Flix challenge). This month Chris at Cooking Around the World and Galina from Chez Maximka are hosting a new challenge, called Read, Cook, Eat - the idea being to make a dish based on any book. That's quite a wide brief, but after my trip to Asheville I knew I had to make something from Look Homeward, Angel.

 

The book is full of food - mainly family meals cooked and eaten in the boarding house, though there are also passages describing how the paying guests ate in the dining room while Eugene and his siblings were squeezed into the pantry. There are very evocative descriptions of food as Eugene absorbs everything around him and describes the food in as much detail as he describes everything else.

 
In the gift shop of the Thomas Wolfe Museum I was thrilled to find a recipe book called "Papa loved hot biscuits and corn bread - recipes from the Old Kentucky Home" (the name of the boarding house in the novel). It was put together by the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Advisory Committee and in the book was a recipe for croquettes, which I decided to make. I adapted the recipe a little, to leave out the mushrooms as we don't like them, and the celery salt as I didn't have any. I've also rewritten the recipe in my own words.

 

To serve two, you need:

Two chicken breasts, cooked, or equivalent amount of leftover cooked chicken

100g cooked ham

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp chopped fresh parsley

1 egg 

about 50g plain flour

about 200g dried breadcrumbs

1 cup croquette sauce - see below.

 

For the croquette sauce:
4 tbsp butter

1/4 tsp salt

1/3 cup plain flour

1 cup milk or cream

First make the sauce. In a small pan melt the butter, add the flour and stir until blended. Gradually add milk, stirring continually. Bring to the boil and simmer for two minutes then remove from the heat and allow to cool.

To make the croquettes, place the chicken and ham in a food processor with the salt and the parsley and pulse until you have almost a pate. Then stir in the croquette sauce; if there is room in your food processor you can blend again.

 Shape the mixture into balls.

Crack an egg into a shallow dish and beat it and place the breadcrumbs in another.

Roll the croquette in flour then in beaten egg then roll in the breadcrumbs until coated. Repeat with each croquette.

Fry or oven bake until golden brown.

Only a couple of these per person are very filling. They are definitely better homemade than from the freezer cabinet too!

 I'm sending these to Chris at Cooking Around the World and Galina from Chez Maximka

 

Mini Treacle Tarts

These may not look like much, but according to my boyfriend they taste delicious!

I wanted a bite-sized dessert option that wouldn't take too long to make so these were ideal. I found the recipe on the internet but adapted it as rather than weigh out quantities I played it by ear. I used Jus-Rol shortcrust pastry though if you want you can make your own.

Roll out the pastry and cut out circles. Spray a baking tin with Cake Release - you can use a mini tart tin, or a shallow cupcake tin, but here I found another use for the whoopie pie tin I was given a couple of years ago.

Add about 1 tbsp of fresh white breadcrumbs onto the centre of each pastry case and spread out evenly.

Drizzle 1 heaped tsp of golden syrup over the top and allow to soak in.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C for 15-20 minutes.

I have to admit it was a bit of a job getting these out of the pan (as you can see!) and it probably would have been easier to make a large treacle tart and cut it into slices, but I wanted these to be bite sized. They are best served warm, maybe with some cream - though they are very sweet, so you won't want too many!

I'm sending this to Dead Easy Desserts, a blog challenge hosted by Maison Cupcake, for desserts that take 30 minutes or less to make.

I'm also sending this to Cakeyboi's Treat Petite, as the theme is baking small treats for loved ones, and my boyfriend loved these!

Crispy pork medallions

I'm always trying to find ways to make pork more interesting- I don't like it as much as any other meat but it's inexpensive and I do like to vary what I eat. I came across this recipe for crispy pork medallions, which you could also use with a pork chop or pork steak.

To serve two, you need:

2 pork chops or 4 pork medallions (as they are quite small)

2 tbsp Dijon honey mustard

1 cup breadcrumbs

1 tbsp chopped fresh thyme

1 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

oil or Fry Light for frying

Preheat oven to 180C. Mix the breadcrumbs and herbs in a bowl and season.

You can use any mustard for this recipe - wholegrain would also work well - but I really love this Dijon mustard with honey.

Spread mustard over one side of the pork medallions

Coat with the breadcrumb mixture and repeat on the other side. Place on a baking tray lined with tin foil and cook for 15-20 minutes depending on the size and thickness of the pork.

Serve when the pork is cooked through and the breadcrumbs are crispy.

I'm sending this to Cooking with Herbs, hosted by Karen of Lavender and Lovage.