Slow Cooker Chicken Tinga and Mexican Restaurant Style Rice!

It's hard to find slow cooker recipes that I both love and are truly fix it and forget it.  A lot of recipes require browning meat on the stove and other extra steps when I just want something where I can toss a bunch of stuff into the slow cooker and ignore it for several hours.  This recipe comes very close to accomplishing that.  But, it involves some pre-cooking food processor use. I sped things up by chopping the onion and garlic pretty coarsely. This meal will make your kitchen smell fantastic.  The chicken is tender, the sauce is complex.  Slightly spicy, slightly earthy, and this recipe makes a ton of it so you can put it on rice if you wnant.  The original recipe suggested serving with tortillas or over rice.  I love Mexican restaurant style rice. I decided to try and make some on a whim.  I googled a bunch of recipes and they all called for things I didn't have.  So I improvised and it turned out really well!

The rice is not terribly quick so if you're really in a hurry, serving the chicken with tortillas would be your best bet.  I suspect that the chicken and sauce would work well as leftovers or maybe even freeze.  That said, I have little experience with leftovers, but I'm trying to remedy that.

Panang Curry

I frequently go to the huge Korean supermarket near my house.  A few weeks ago, my husband found out about Great Wall, a nearby Chinese supermarket.  We both love dumplings, and he was told that Great Wall had some of the best.  Like any good little compulsive shopper, I went in looking for dumplings and came out with all kinds of extra stuff, including some panang curry paste.  I love ordering panang curry in Thai restaurants and wanted to try making it myself.  The result was so good that it's in my regular rotation now!

Yes, I know that's more than one standard service of rice.  

Shiitake Risotto with Lemongrass and Ginger

I've watched enough Top Chef to know that risotto needs to be made perfectly or people will be grievously offended.  After the most recent season, I learned that risotto is supposed to "spread" when you put it in the bowl.  When I was on vacation in St. Barth a few months ago, Dave and I went to an Italian restaurant.  The owner had imported the entire staff - waiters and chefs - from Italy.  I had some wild boar risotto and prodded at it for a few minutes before eating it. It was *fabulous,* and nothing like anything I'd ever made.  I thought I could make a great risotto before I tried this stuff.  It definitely spread out nicely, unlike the risottos I've attempted.  My risotto tends to "pile," which means that I make it too dry, probably because I get impatient and declare it finished when it looks like risotto in the pan instead of giving it some extra liquid to finish it.  So, when I made this shiitake risotto, I tried to make it with additional chicken broth so that it would "spread."  Initially, it did, but I made a ton of it, and by the time I got it all in my bowl, it looked like Mt. Risotto.  So, it's something for me to work on. 

Dave recently decided that he no longer hates mushrooms, which is awesome because I love them.  He likes shiitakes, so I found this recipe for shiitake risotto.  It was very tasty, despite being more pile-y than spread-y.  It has only a few ingredients.  I didn't have enough chicken stock, and ended up using a mix of chicken stock and veggie stock.  I think that this dish could easily be made vegetarian by using veggie stock and a little extra salt.  If you love shiitakes, this is a great dish because the mushrooms flavor the rice, too.  I was skeptical of this recipe because other risottos I've made always included a ton of cheese, but I didn't notice its absence. 

 

Chicken, Black Beans, and Rice

I'm in Texas this week for work, and apparently my iPad doesn't want me to post in compose mode. What little HTML I know is from years ago, so forgive my complete lack of formatting and lack of a proper jump.

Before I left for my trip, I made three Rick Bayless dishes. The first was Swiss chard tacos. The second was chicken with black beans and rice. Ive been making this for years. It's easy, hearty, and a great excuse to put salsa on rice!

The spice blend in this recipe is completely open to interpretation, I use a lot of extra chili power and have been known to add paprika to it as well. I make his smoky chipotle salsa because it's comparatively quick and doesnt involve a ton of ingredients.

I originally intended to make a half recipe. But, I added extra green onions and made plenty of salsa. I also used the whole can of black beans because I didn't want to waste them. So, it was more food than two standard servings. The chili powder turns the rice a nice red color and seasons the chicken very nicely. The star of this dish is the salsa though.

Chicken, Black Beans, and Rice
From Rick Bayless Mexican Everyday
Makes two generous portions

Ingredients:
1 large or 2 small chicken breasts
1 15 oz can black beans, drained and rinsed very well
1 generous Tbsp of ancho chile powder plus more to season chicken
1 tsp medium hot chili powder (or as much as you want, I added extra a few times as I cooked).
1/2 medium onion, chopped (I used a white onion here)
1/2 cup rice
2 garlic cloves, minced
3/4 cup chicken broth
4+ scallions, sliced
Rick Bayless smoky chipotle salsa (below)

Method:
1) sprinkle the chicken with salt and chili powder. Heat some vegetable oil in a skillet and brown the chicken on all sides. Then cut it into cubes. It doesn't matter that the chicken isn't cooked, it will get more time in the pot.
2) After removing the chicken from the pot, add the garlic, onion, and rice. Cook until the rice becomes opaque. No more than 3 or 4 minutes.
3) Add the chili powder and mix well. Cook for one minute. Then add chicken broth.
4)Bring to a boil and then cover the pot and let simmer on low heat for 10 minutes. Then stir in the beans and chicken. cover the pot again and let cook for 12 minutes or until chicken is cooked.
5)Test to see if the rice is dine. If it's ready, stir in the scallions and then serve in bowls. Let people add as much salsa as they want.

Smoky chipotle salsa
From Rick Bayless Mexican Everyday

Ingredients:
4 oz tomatilloes
1 chipotle from a can of chipotles en adobo, seeded
2 cloves garlic, peeled
Salt

Method:
1) Shuck the tomatilloes and rinse them off. Slice them in half lengthwise. Heat a nonstick
pan over medium heat. Put the garlic and tomatilloes in the pan and cook for 3-4 minutes each side.
2) Place the tomatilloes, garlic, and chipotle in a blender and blend until it's the texture you want. Season with salt to taste.



recipe

Turkish Chicken with Tomato Rice Pilaf

This is a dish that I make a lot.  It's simple, easy, and tastes amazing!  The original recipe is from the first Middle Eastern/ North African cookbooks I bought, Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon, by Claudia Roden.  Every recipe I've tried from this book has been delicious.  I've adapted this dish since the first time I made it, when I followed the recipe to the letter.  This picture is of the dish as I make it now.

Originally, the recipe did not call for the chicken to be spiced with sumac, zatar, and paprika.  Even though zatar contains sumac, I really like the tartness and so I add extra.  The spicing could work just fine without a separate layer of sumac, though.  The rice pilaf is interesting because instead of cooking the rice with water, peeled, liquefied tomatoes are used.  So a blender or food processor is necessary to make this dish.  Peeling tomatoes can be a pain in the butt.  I have an electric kettle, so I just cut an X in the bottom of each tomatoes, boil some water in the kettle, and then pour it over the tomatoes.  Alternatively, water can be boiled on the stove and the tomatoes can be dropped in for 30 seconds or so.  The pilaf as presented in Arabesque is quite tasty, but I love lemons, and so I added lemon juice to the pilaf to blend well with the lemon juice on the chicken. 

Normally, I intend to make salad with most meals, but last night I worked out and was feeling lazy.  The red peppers are something I make when I want a vegetable, but don't feel like cooking a side dish or making salad.  I'm sure that the idea of them is not completely original, but I didn't consult a cookbook to make these.  They're "pickled" in white wine vinegar and seasoned with Aleppo pepper, a Turkish spice (which strikes me odd since Aleppo is in Syria) that looks like regular crushed red pepper but is more mild and flavorful.  It packs a little heat, but won't overpower a dish like crushed red pepper.