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.