Kinky Pie

...And we're back. After a yearlong hiatus forced by two moves, two jobs, grad school and a brief stint documenting the horrors of a terrible class, Food Libido returns with a new kitchen and new appetites.
I've made a lot of pie in my day, and I've hardly been shy about experimenting when doing so. But lately I've been in a dessert-rut, I've run out of ways to spice up brownies, and though I had a fantastic foray into Kentucky Derby Pie last week, it's left me wanting more. Today we're breaking new ground in overlapping sugar cravings, by layering three things I love - pie, blueberries, and brownies.
To do this, we'll overcome a number of obstacles:
1. Fit a 9" pre-made pie crust into an 11" pie pan. Yes, that should be easy, but I want a crust, not just a crusty bottom. And yes, it would be easier to make my own crust, but I tend to cook through bricolage, not new developments, so it wouldn't do to make too much too new.
2. Find an acceptable blueberry pie filling recipe - we'll use Valerie's, sort of, whoever she is, because it's the first one I clicked that used iPaper.
3. Guess how long the blueberries should cook, if at all, before dumping brownie mix over the top of them to create a top crust.

So here's what we threw in:
1 Cup blueberries (frozen, I keep a decent sized bag in the freezer)
1 Cup water (with a shot of bourbon to loosen things up)
2 tbsp butter (we don't take kindly to margarine around these parts)
1 tbsp cinnamon
3 tbsp corn starch
3/4 cup brown sugar
A pinch of salt and a good long squeeze of lemon juice (from one of those plastic lemons)
Of note--bourbon, blueberries, and cinnamon smell amazing together when heated.









The mixture won't do anything like boil, if stirred over low heat, but will congeal nicely for spreading over the frozen blueberries in the pie crust.

Given the existing thickness, we're going to opt against pre-cooking the blueberries, and toss the brownie mix over the top of everything.

So we've tossed a package of Betty Crocker Dark Chocolate Brownie mix over the top (and snuck in Coke instead of water).
Now it's into the breach, 325, for god knows how long.







Here's the final product, after an hour in the oven.
For the future:
1. Blueberries are awesome, but this could easily be adapted for raspberries or strawberries.
2. I'd like to try something that would allow a bit of red pepper into the mix.
3. I have no idea how thick this brownie crust is going to be relative to the mantle of molten blueberry beneath, it may require some fractional batch for an optimal ratio.
4. Bourbon, blueberry, and cinnamon together, either as ingredients or flavor components, would make for some awesome cocktails.

Chicken and Biscuit Stü

I hate stew. I think Leviticus would hate stew for the same reasons I do - it's incomplete, and represents the unfortunate combination of unlike things. Stew, typically, is some blend of big chunks and gruel-like broth, without the moderation to be a chowder or the modesty to remain a soup. I don't like eating it, even though it may be flavorful and delicious, because I have to decide whether to eat the chunks then drink the broth, or drink the broth then eat the chunks, or try to save it by soaking up the broth with bread or thickening it with cracker crumbs or cheese. So you'll never see a proper stew recipe here, ever, I promise.
But when googling "chicken biscuit recipe," because I love biscuits and I love chicken, but have no immediate idea of how to bind the two culinarily, nothing seemed all that pleasant. The predominant recipes require either a white gravy, which bores me, or some variety of stew-like sauce to be baked either under or over the biscuits, resulting in 1. Stew and 2. Soggy Biscuits, which defeats the point of Flaky Layers.
Disappointed, I turned inward, to the depths of my mind and my cabinets.
I found sun-dried tomatoes, mushrooms, an orange pepper, onions and garlic. I thought at first I could liven up a simple gravy with some tomatoes or peppers, but realized that the problem was not what was in the gravy, but the gravy itself. So back to basics, I figure we'll start from vegetables and hopefully end up in biscuits and chicken, skipping all roads that lead to stew.

Stü:
1 Orange pepper (and 1 red pepper, roasted)
1 Handful mushrooms
1 Handful sun-dried tomatoes
1 Onion
3-4 cloves garlic
Frozen chicken tenderloins
1/2 a beer (I used a Stone IPA, a disappointing effort by an otherwise legendary brewery)
1 can Pillsbury Biscuits (Flaky Layers) - I recommend Butter Tastin', because it's the most ridiculous flavor variety I've ever found, and really does tast' like butter.

Start with the onions and garlic, sautéed in olive oil with a pinch of sugar. While these are cooking, you can start chopping the peppers and toss those in, then the sun-dried tomatoes, and finally the mushrooms. Depending on how quickly you chop, you'll probably be ready for each subsequent vegetable, cooking-wise, once it's been chopped. Keep the heat low, so that you don't burn anything, and everything has a chance to get soft. Add salt, black and red pepper to taste, and we'll have a second round of seasoning when everything is done.
Somewhere around peppers you can start some Lazy Chicken. You can probably also put the biscuits in.

Here we are with all the vegetables together:

Now we'll try to skirt as close to stew as possible, without actually making any. Once the chicken is done, chop it into small pieces, and toss it in with the vegetables. Pour about 1/2 of your beer into the mix, and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. Turn the heat up, and steam off most of the liquid.

Here the beer is steaming away:

Once it's simmered down, flake your biscuits in half and pile the stü on, I added cheese (not pictured) because I always add cheese to things pronounced "stew." It doesn't actually need it though, I think, format-wise, it's complete.

Here's everything together, no cheese:



Final Thoughts - Biscuits are tasty, but there needs to be more ways to enjoy them in combination with other things. Maybe one day I'll return to the aforementioned enchilada biscuits, look for them. Also, beer in recipes is an excellent way to add "mystery" without worrying about E. coli.

Fibonacci Cooking

A theme for these first three posts might be that each of the subsequent dishes has included, in part or whole, some portion of the previous recipe. I always appreciate having versatile leftovers or bases for dishes that come up, so this is probably going to be a fairly common occurrence here. This is common with sourdough or some vinegars, and I admit, I'd like to someday have an ever-developing pot of stew or chili just growing from its own leftovers, bubbling and steaming in a crock pot. But all great journeys must begin with a single step, even foodstuffs that evolve and may one day strike up conversation or take up cooking on their own, so we'll just take some sautéed onions and peppers for now.
We finally got groceries, so I don't have nearly the impetus to continue with the same creativity as the previous posts. I can, however, show a couple time-saving tricks to make fairly straightforward fajitas. And no, no Italian theme ingredients, that'd just be a mess.

Fibonacci Fajitas:
Frozen chicken tenderloins
1 Onion
1 Pepper (yellow)
Roasted red peppers (in a jar)
3-4 cloves fresh garlic
Tortillas
Cheese
Chile powder, cumin, salt, and brown sugar

Lazy chicken - Find a lid that fits cleanly on a frying pan. If you buy your cookware in sets, this should be easy, but if it's some amalgam of shared dishes from various roommates, it could be taxing, and a better seal around the edges will result in better chicken and less oil splattered all over your stove.
Toss some olive oil in the frying pan, and chicken tenderloins in a single layer on the bottom. I usually add some salt, and some chile powder for this dish because I'm not using salsa.
You can pretty much leave the chicken in the pan on medium-low heat and forget about it, 5-10 minutes while you chop vegetables and start them cooking. Flip the chicken, once, and I usually call it done when I can shred the chicken with chopsticks or with a pair of forks.
Here's the chicken, pretty much done. (The lower piece has been separated to show it's cooked through.)















For the Fibonacci theme to make any sense, we'll turn to the filling. The sautéed onion, garlic, and pepper blend from the last recipe's eggs, we'll remake those, and then take them somewhere new.
Slice your onion and peppers into strips. Usually I do this by cutting the onion into rings, then halving them, and cutting the pepper vertically. We're using yellow peppers for reference in the pictures. Chop the garlic finely, and throw them all in a frying pan with some olive oil. I add a clump of brown sugar to help caramelize the onions, and then toss chile powder and a bit of cumin for flavor. Let these cook over medium heat until the onions are clear and the peppers are soft. After, I threw in some roasted red peppers from a jar and let them heat up with the others, primarily for color.















For assembly, I just toss all of the above in a tortilla, some people heat theirs, I throw in cheese, salsa or guacamole depending on the mood and what I've got on hand.
Here are a couple pictures, with and without cheese.



A keen eye will detect some unrecognizable bean mixture. That's exactly what it is. I won't include it in the recipe, because it's starvation food from before we got groceries that I heated up and added as an afterthought, but it works with the repurposed-food theme we've got going today. For the truly devoted, or the starving, canned-food types, it's a can of refried beans, a can of diced tomatoes (drained), chile powder, sautéed onions and garlic, and a good splash of Frank's with some salt to fight all that acid. I originally was eating it on strips of leftover nan, it'd work with pitas or tortilla chips just as well.

Today's Secret Ingredient: Desperation

We haven't bought groceries here in probably two weeks, aside from individual items for single meals, so the pickings are getting slim. But necessity is the mother of invention, and everybody needs to eat. Coming from a family that only bought food when there was absolutely nothing left to eat in the house, I've long realized that the days before a grocery run are often the most ingenious and prone to outright failure. The bright side is, like camping food, you're too hungry to turn anything down, and everything gets the benefit of the doubt.
Remember last post's chicken? I still had about a pound left, and my roommate had a bunch of corn meal left out from frying okra. So lightly-breaded, pan-fried chicken sounds pretty good, and I figured I should run with the Tex-Mex theme of cornmeal and add some chile powder and cumin to the mix, sort of an on-the-border chicken fried steak.

The Chicken:
1 lb Chicken Cutlets
Corn Meal
1 egg
Tabasco and Frank's Red Hot (optional)
Salt, Black Pepper, Chile, Onion, and Garlic powder to taste

In a bowl, beat the egg until the white and yolk are well-mixed. I like spicy foods, so I added a few drops of Tabasco sauce and a good shake of Frank's Red Hot.
To coat the chicken, toss a handful of cornmeal, a couple tablespoons of chile powder, some ground salt, black pepper, a pinch of cumin, and a shake or two of the garlic powder and onion powder, mixing it all together with a fork.
Lightly oil a frying pan, and let the oil get hot over a medium flame. Dip the chicken in the egg, and then roll it in the cornmeal mixture until evenly coated.
My cutlets took somewhere in the area of three to five minutes per side. You can cut into one to make sure it's cooked through.
Here's the cornmeal mixture, with one coated cutlet.














The challenge now is to find something to go with chicken. Tortillas and bread are out, because we're out. Biscuits would work with the Tex-side, but I've got nothing to set up as a gravy, and enchilada sauce, though and inspired option, takes me a little while to put together properly.
I feel like I'm in competing in Iron Chef against myself, with no sous chefs and no $12,000-per-show budget. But if "chicken" is my secret ingredient, I see no fault in using multiple stages of its life or varieties of its preparation in a single dish, actually, I aspire to do such things. So I scrambled to prepare some eggs before the chicken got cold.

Eggs:
4 eggs
1 Onion (small)
1 Green Pepper
3-4 Cloves Garlic
2-3 tbsp Butter
Brown sugar
Cheese

So that the eggs were appropriately dressed up to fit our goal here, that being unnecessary attention spent on food, I added fresh garlic and chopped onions and green peppers.
Start by mincing your garlic and dicing your onion and pepper to about fingertip size.
We're still out of olive oil, so I used butter to sauté the vegetables before adding the eggs.
Have your eggs out of the fridge as long as possible before cooking them, room-temperature eggs are more fluffy when cooked.
I tossed the garlic, onions, and green pepper in a frying pan with the butter once it melted, and then a bit of brown sugar, having learned my lesson about undercooked onions. Once the onions had caramelized, the garlic toasted, and the peppers started to brown, I tossed in four eggs, and then scrambled the lot together. Once the eggs were done, I also added a handful of shredded Mexican Blend cheese I found in the back of the fridge.
Here are the eggs, almost done. Yes, I cook with chopsticks, I can stir, flip, taste, and whisk, and they'll never scratch the non-stick finish. I suggest you try a reusable set, I got twenty pairs at our local Asian market for a buck and change. Or just save the free ones from your Chinese takeout, but these tend to splinter and don't wash well.














Here's the final product. I still haven't gotten my pictures quite figured out, maybe I need some sort of background. Or better lighting in the apartment. Or to move.
















Final thoughts - The chicken turned out really well, but I'd have liked a bit more flavor in the breading, and the chili powder on its own can be a little bitter. I'm averse to adding anything sweet, so some extra salt would probably help, and some lime juice at the end. And green peppers helped to pick up the eggs, but some diced or sun-dried tomatoes, and red or orange peppers would have added a lot color-wise. I'm also completely biased towards any pepper that isn't green if we have any, so the appeal for others might be completely aesthetic.
Today's Lesson: Undercooked onions equal smelly breath.

A Caesar Salad Gone Awry

I can never bring myself to eat a salad for dinner that doesn't actually resemble some other meal on a bed of leafy greens, it just seems that for every inch of plate-space taken by lettuce or the like, I'm losing valuable calories. And to some extent, isn't cooking always a balance between how much energy you can consume for a given amount of prep time, while maximizing enjoyment?
The following recipe is the butchering of a fairly standard caesar salad, adding sautéed mushrooms and onions, and steaming spinach (lettuce is all crunch, no substance - I can't stand it). I found thin-sliced chicken cutlets because they were on sale. I imagine thicker breasts would have worked, or tenderloins, but thicker chicken would be more difficult to cook through in a frying pan. Bacon was added for substance and absurdity. If I can ever combine two or more meats in a single dish, I try to.

So here goes:
1 package of chicken cutlets
8 oz bacon
1 onion
4-5 mushrooms
1/2 bag baby leaf spinach
Croutons, caesar dressing, and parmesan cheese are optional

Wrap the chicken in bacon, overlapping strips so the whole thing stays in one piece.
I lay these in a walled frying pan, put a lid over to control splattering, and cooked them over medium heat until the bacon was crispy. The chicken, thinly sliced, was done before the bacon, and I turned the heat up to make sure it was crisp.

Here's one of the chicken and bacon, just about done.














Meanwhile, slice onions and mushrooms, and sauté them in butter, tossing in a little salt. I would have preferred olive oil, but I'd run out, and my arteries have only me to blame. I mentioned we wrapped the chicken in bacon, right? Butter is the least of our problems.
Chop the spinach and lay it in another frying pan, with a little water to steam it. You can also toss the mushroom and onion mixture in. It should only take a minute or two for the spinach to turn bright green. For me, that's done.

Here we are plated, unadulterated.















I added croutons and parmesan cheese to make this in some way resemble the salad that was originally planned, and tossed some Newman's Own caesar dressing on top.
Here's the final product, probably seconds before I ate it. I think the white background, especially with the clear plates, looks better. I'll have to work on that.















Follow up - Although delicious, this gave me abominable onion breath for at least a couple hours. I think I undercooked the onions, if you try this, toss them in before the mushrooms with a little brown sugar, and caramelize them. That usually mellows them out quite a bit.