Adventures in Chicken 5 - Prosciutto-Wrapped Chicken

I have no great story here, I just wanted to try something new. So I searched some recipe sites and made this one up basically.

First I cut a slit in the side of a thick chicken breast and put in some garlic butter.




Then I wrapped it in a couple pieces of prosciutto, with the seams down, and put it into a bake-safe dish



Baked in the oven for about 20 min (would have liked the prosciutto to get crispier but, whatever), served with garlic sauteed crimini mushrooms, and boom dinner

Adventures in Chicken 4 - Slow-Roasted Chicken Wings

This is one of those absolutely insane ideas that I came up with that came out fine but I will never ever try again, HA. I love the way smoked chicken wings come out when my mom makes them on their electric smoker. And I don't have a smoker, but I was in the mood for this kind of tastiness, so I attempted to dry rub the wings and then slow-roast them over a pan of water. Utterly ridiculous. The only defense for this is that I was out of work at the time, beyond bored, and perhaps not in my right mind.

So first I rubbed the wings in something very similar to the chicken under a brick that I posted a few days ago.



This is where the craziness comes in. I lined a cake pan with foil and put some water in it, then I used my pizza screen and put the wings on it and roasted it at like 250 in the oven for about an hour. Ok yes the results were terrifically moist, but I don't think the whole ridiculous contraption was at all necessary LOL

Adventures in Chicken 3 - Fried Chicken with Ezekiel Breadcrumbs

One of my very most favoritest of all time ever recipes (yeah, it's that good.) is what we call in my house "fried chicken." in reality, my mom learned it from the Italian family she grew up next door to, and it's more like a typical italian "Milanesa" type dish. Anyway. Trying to cut out white bread meant no bread crumbs. So I got resourceful. I ground up some slices of Ezekiel bread (which has a really low Glycemic Index) and toasted them for a few minutes to make nice dried bread crumbs.



Then I made the typical breading with just the right amount (what's "just the right amount?" No clue!) of parmesan cheese, dried parsley, and fresh crushed garlic. Here you see my whole breading station, with the chunks of chicken breas in a slightly diluted egg wash and the breading:



Fry 'em up in grapeseed oil (makes fried stuff so nice and crispy!!!)....



and voila! A little darker perhaps than the original, but otherwise, very pleasantly close :D The little pieces are what my mom and I call the "babies" and they are my favorite :)


I always make a big batch, too, because this is one of the VERY few things I really like leftover, too!!!

Adventures in Chicken 2 - Chicken Under a Brick! (And once again, I stink)

Um, I can't believe I haven't updated this since September. I am ashamed. Thing is, I have no excuse. None. Yes, I am working full-time now (yay!) but I've been cooking a lot and have no excuse to not take the 15-20 min every few days to update with my latest experimentations. Blarg. So I will try to catch up. HA! I don't want to leave anything out, since I am documenting things for myself as much as anyone else (It's not like anyone reads this anyway ;)). So without further ado.... Chicken under a brick. Yeah, I made this in July and it's almost January. Whatever :p

Anyhoo, I took a bone-in, skin-on chicken breast and rubbed it with a variety of things: salt, chili powder, chipotle powder, garlic powder, cumin, paprika, dried parsley... and let it 'marinate' for a while:




Then I fired up the cast iron skillet super hot and put the chicken in skin down and weighted it with a heavy skillet topped with a couple cans, for maybe 5-10 minutes on pretty hot heat (I'm not gonna eat the skin anyway, yes yes I know, heresy).



Flipped it over, weighted it down for another few minutes, and finished it for a few minutes in the oven. And voila! A little spicy, a little crispy, and VERY VERY moist. :)

More Adventures in Chocolate (Truffles)!

For the perfect truffles, I sort of combined two recipes from two of my favorite Food Network chefs. I like this one from Tyler Florence because I like the idea of whipping up the filling to be creamy and smooth, and I like this one from Alton Brown because I like the idea of a Lindt Lindor truffle-like thing.

My truffles have only three ingredients, though. Great chocolate (70%+), cream, and some decaf espresso.

First, chop the chocolate finely. It has to be chopped because unlike with the chocolate cake, where the chocolate was melted over a double boiler, the chocolate is melted by just a little bit of hot cream:




Cream and espresso heating together. It's done here, when you have the little bubbles around the edge... don't want to burn it!



Pour cream/coffee mixture over finely chopped chocolate:



And stir til nice and smooth. This is pure ganache at its finest. Gimme a spoon!!!!



Per Tyler Florence's recipe, I mixed it for about a minute with a hand blender. You can see that it has lightened a little, grown a bit in volume, and has a really lovely glossy sheen



Pour mixture into saran wrap-lined plastic container and spread til relatively even. I go for tasty, not pretty, as you can see LOL:



After letting cool in the fridge at least 2 hours, I cut the ganache into squares. Here, you could take the time and mess to roll these into round balls, but uh, why? Or, at this point you could roll the truffles into anything you want - cocoa powder, chopped nuts, etc.



But I followed Alton Brown's recipe.... chopped more chocolate really finely again, this time I did melt it - VERY SLOWLY - over boiling water. as you can see in the finished truffles, they are fairly shiny and because I melted it so slowly and took care to make sure the chocolate never got too hot, they have a nice chocolate "snap" that they should have. Nah, they don't look perfect. But oh boy.... they taste it :)

Orange Grapefruit Granita

Looking for a different dessert alternative, I had some orange/grapefruit juice mix in the fridge (freshly squeezed, about 2/3 pink grapefruit, 1/3 valencia orange give or take), strained. Straining the juice apparently raises the glycemic index, but whatever. I did not add any sugar or sweetener whatsoever

Anyway, making granita is super easy. I just put the juice in a container and made sure it was super cold. As you can see, it's important that the container is a lot bigger than the liquid.

Put it in the freezer



Every hourish, take a fork and just drag it around the top, mixing it up well and getting rid of all the chunks, until it fluffs up and looks like this:



Scoop and serve. Done!

Flourless Sugarless Chocolate "Cake"

I took this recipe from a Montignac book I got from the library. I promptly returned the book without copying the recipe. d'ooohhhhhhh. You can find a good enough reproduction here though. What I basically did was halve the recipe and make it in individual pyrex bowls, for a more manageable portion size. It's really pretty tasty and I am all for recipes that have only 2 ingredients and really rely on the quality.

The key is of course the chocolate. This was 72% tastiness from Trader Joe's. When you can get 500 grams of it there (or Fresh & Easy) for $3.98, why eat anything else? :D


Melted over a double boiler on the stovetop:


I don't have anything of the eggs.... and I'm not sure why. Sorry about that LOL

So this is what they looked like, right before going into the oven (at a high heat for a short time)




And this is right after coming out of the oven - i mean right after - they are still puffy. That went down as they cooled.



After refrigerating for a few hours, I turned it out onto a plate and this is what it looks like. A fluffy yet dense and rich cakelike dessert delicacy.



Melt some chocolate for a ganache and spread it on top and bam, delicious low-glycemic dessert with no added sugar besides what's in the dark chocolate. And man, really tasty.

I'm falling way behind...

Oh dear. Well, i haven't been lazy with my cooking, but i've been lazy with the blogging. I have so much stuff. Some good, some not so good, HAHAHA. Been playing with chocolate and chicken a fair bit. So I'll try like hell to catch up in the next couple weeks!

Vivoli Cafe is the best Restaurant in LA

Yeah yeah yeah, I know that a lot of people think the LA Food Scene has improved recently. Lots of celeb chefs are opening places here and there's always a line outside Mario Batali's outrageously expensive pizzeria. Gordon Ramsay (someone I really love) has a new restaurant here, and the list goes on.

So last May, I was looking for a place to celebrate my law school graduation. What I was finding were two extremes - casual inexpensive stuff and expensive overpriced pretentious stuff. Nothing in between, nothing where you could go and for $20 or $30 a person, get a damn good meal. Finally, I found the Holy Grail at the Vivoli Cafe and Trattoria on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood. Offering a fairly large Italian menu, I was concerned that they had too many things to be good. But the reviews were good so I figured we should give it a shot. And oh my god. Combining price, value, service, and atmosphere, this has got to be the best restaurant in LA. There are only about 10-15 tables. The owners and most of the waiters are actually Italian. They give you warm foccacia (homemade, I assume) with olive spread (hello, delicious) instead of plain old bread and butter, and what certainly looks like a homemade biscotti with your bill. I don't even like biscotti, but theirs are amazing with whole almonds. They even send you a gift certificate on your birthday.

The menu is dirt cheap. I just came home from lunch (using my free birthday gift certificate). For 9.95 I got chicken with FRESH artichokes and tomatoes in a light white wine lemon sauce, which comes with penne pasta and the best marinara sauce I've ever had. I don't even like marinara sauce, but they make theirs homemade every morning. If they sold it, I'd buy it. The dinner portion of my dish was only $5 more for what I presume is a double portion of chicken breast. Even the steaks and seafood all hover around $20-25 and they make lunch accessible by offering a vast array of salads and sandwiches in addition to lunch-sized portions of pastas, chicken, and other Italian delicacies.

All of this is in a package of a very small restaurant that is dominated by a loud open kitchen - the smells permeate the whole place and you're instantly hungry. The service is excellent and they'll do whatever you want.

Today I treated myself to a tiramisu to go. Yeah it's against my diet, but theirs is homemade and I wanted to try it. Look at this masterpiece of deliciousness:




This place is special. I asked the manager where he was from in Italy and we ended up talking about Italy, the US (I asked why he was here when he could be in ITALY), Tuscan beef and gelato, and everything else. The fact that this restaurant is almost smack dab in the middle of the very yuppy Sunset Strip is amazing. You walk inside and you're not in LA anymore, you're anywhere - anywhere in Italy, that is. If you're in LA give this place a try. You won't regret it (and you won't go broke either, which in LA is really saying something for a really classy meal).

:)

Adventures in Pizza

It's already really clear that I love pizza. But on this crazy Montignac thing that I am trying to follow, my normal homemade pizza is a bit out of the question unfortunately. So looking for other solutions, I first tried using a 100% whole wheat pita (I'll say that bread and cheese on this plan aren't supposed to go together, but I can't give up pizza completely, I just can't. So I am just seeing this as an improvement and I don't think a small pizza on some kind of whole wheat bread a couple times a month is gonna keep me from losing weight.)

Not too bad.... but not quite good enough either :(



Then I tried 100% whole wheat lavash bread. I cut the bread in half and pre-baked it for just about 1 minute in the oven on 500 degrees.


I added a bit of pepperoni b/c dammit, I wanted to. This was much better than the pita. For the pita I think I will stick to making chips! :) But I would try this pizza on the lavash bread again for sure.


I finally tried making whole wheat pizza crust from scratch using 100% whole wheat flour. Something did not turn out right :( The glutens in the flour wouldn't develop (does whole wheat flour even develop gluten?) and I couldn't stretch it. It tasted alright but the texture was more like a cracker than a chewy pizza crust :( I did put a bit of flaxseed meal in it to bump up the health factor but I don't know if that would make a difference. So that was disappointing - I didn't even photograph it ;)

Man, I stink (and Chicken Adventures 1)

Well, some good job of updating I've done this past month. I've been cooking a lot, staying close to this Montignac plan as best I can, and overall doing not much in my unemployment-ness :p No excuses for not updating regularly but now I have so many pictures and posts floating around in my head, I have not much choice. So here we go.

First chicken adventure: Whole Grain fried chicken. I mixed whole wheat flour, flaxseed meal, and parmesean cheese for this breading. I wasn't thrilled with how it came out just b/c I like really crispy crunchy fried chicken.... but it wasn't bad, even if it doesn't really fit perfectly into the Montignac tenets b/c whole wheat flour has a glycemic index above 35.

So anyway, here's the breading:



And the chicken breaded:



And the finish product (ignore the brown rice, it didn't come out well ;))





Second chicken adventure: Garlic-y quinoa with grilled chicken. While looking for grains that have a glycemic index of below 35 that i can eat with meats, I decided to try quinoa. What I did here was saute it to toast it up, in a little garlic, then boil it per package directions.






I marinated the chicken in simple olive oil, a little red wine vinegar, lots of garlic, etc.:




finished meal (sorry for the blurriness, I suck):

I'm Back!

Sorry for not writing lately (if anyone cares? LOL)... had a nice food-filled stay at my parents' house.. put the diet on hold of course and filled up on take-out Chinese (the fried rice is just different!), homemade creplach (think Jewish meat-filled ravioli all made by hand), steak, smoked chicken wings (which are just simply divine), and a sublime birthday dinner of prime rib at my favorite group of restaurants.

Also made a Paula Deen recipe for chocolate chip pancakes - we added cocoa powder to it to double the chocolate and they were some of the best pancakes I've ever had - we were skeptical about whipping the egg whites but it really worked well.

Otherwise, ate a lot of blueberries and I do mean a LOT. I have a couple pictures from older meals that I need to get up and then I'll get right back into it here in LA. I will say that since I've been back, I've been behaving very well, so yay!

Update

Well, I haven't really made anything creative - I really haven't had time (though my dinner tonight might be photo-worthy). With the exception of this past Monday when I had a sandwich on a white roll and a milkshake (yes, very bad), I've been good. Bought some more healthy goodies like roasted soybeans to squash the craving for salty crunchy snacks (I don't really like the soybeans, so I don't eat that much hahahaha), Luna bars, which are made for women and apparently have a low glycemic index, some Organic Quinoa from TJ's, a "sprouted wheat berry flourless" bread at TJ's that's really not that bad, some Barilla Plus pasta (I hope it tastes good), etc.

As for the "diet," I am trying to understand the combining aspects. I got one of Montignac's newer editions from the library and will take it home when I see my parents. Yes, that's going to make things difficult - it will be white bread, potatoes, rice, Chinese food, dessert, and other such unhealthy stuff galore :( I'll try to do the best I can but it's going to make things difficult. So I figure I will use the week and a half to just let myself be spoiled and enjoy these things (some of which, like the Chinese fried rice and prime rib and stuff, I literally can't even get here so it's not like it will make me crave it forever), and then come back and really get in gear and do it right. One exciting thing is that this newer Montignac book has a really amazing-looking recipe for chocolate cake, the only ingredients are chocolate and eggs, so I can't wait to try this one!!!

Will keep you posted!

Homemade Tomato Sauce

Ever since Trader Joe's stopped carrying my beloved "Starter Sauce" in a box, I decided I'd try making my own sauce. Finally I did it! So I went to Whole Foods and took three kinds of Italian tomatoes - I mean real imported Italian tomatoes with nothing added except a little salt in one case. A box of Pomi chopped tomatoes (that I had already pureed), a 28oz can of whole peeled San Marzano plum tomatoes and a smaller can of San Marzano cherry tomatoes (by the way, I found out a little too late that these still had the skins on. whoops. If you use them - I got them at Whole Foods with a yellow label - check first LOL).

As to why real imported tomatoes, they have this intrinsic sweetness that allows the sauce to be made with no added sugar. It works especially well for salsas too but for pizza as well, because when the sauce is combined with the crust and cheese and toppings, the sauce's flavor still gets through. :D Considering how much sauce I got for about $5 worth of tomatoes, I'd say it's worth the extra money to get a really top-quality end product that can be used for a long time.

But first, I heated up some extra virgin olive oil in my biggest pot and lightly sauteed about a half an onion (I don't really like onion so I go small on them) and many cloves of garlic, on pretty low heat for a few minutes. BTW, using a very large pot is crucial, even if you aren't making that much sauce - when the sauce cooks down, it kind of bubbles and blubbers and well, spits. If the pot's full, it will bubble and blubber all over your stove (yes even on low heat) ;)



Then I added about half a can of tomato paste (get one that has ONLY tomatoes as an ingredient please) to thicken it all up and let that go for about a minute, then I dumped in all the various tomatoes. I decided to put all the seeds and juice in, I figured it'd just cook down and I was going to puree it anyway. Maybe that's wrong. HAHA. Also, with the can of San Marzano tomatoes (which I put in after the cherry tomatoes, aka after I realized they had their skins on and I had to turn off the heat and go through and try to get all the peel out LOL), I was more careful and looked at those one by one and what I did was take off that hard part where the stem was attached that you get in tomatoes - I figured it'd be hard to puree later so I might as well do it. As I put each one in I squeezed it to break it up a bit.


I didn't really pay attention to how long I cooked it for, although I guess it was only about an hour... but it seemed quite thick already and it had reduced a fair amount so I killed the heat and let it cool for another hour or so to make it easier to handle and to make sure it thickened well. You can see in this picture as compared to the one above that it is a good amount lower in the pot and it just looks a little darker and thicker even in a picture:


After it cooled for a while (to basically room temperature) I mixed in some fresh parsley (Italian flat-leaf, of course) and a good pinch of kosher salt and pureed it in the blender (b/c I like pureed sauces). And there you have it! You can see the flecks of parsley in the final product; I hope that adds a fresh-tasting touch. I'll probably use it a couple times before breaking it down into smaller containers and freezing. If there's any excess water it should float to the top and I can get rid of that so it won't really get grossly watery after freezing.

"Diet" - Day 1

So let's see... Breakfast consisted of a hard-boiled egg (minus yolk, ick), a slice of the whole wheat bread, a good slathering of almond butter, and some freshly-squeezed grapefruit juice (combined with a little orange) diluted with water. I had it the same time I normally do, and normally I get hungry around 10-10:30am at work and I made it all the way almost til lunch before I craved anything (had a couple almonds around 11:30). All in all not bad :D

Lunch: turkey sandwich in half of a 100% whole wheat pita, two slices of super sharp Vermont cheddar, carrots, a tomato, and sugar snap peas. This is actually about the same lunch I typically bring to work - except for the whole wheat pita. Not bad, a very small change and the whole wheat pita from TJ's tastes fine.

Fruit: some grapes and cherries.

Afternoon snack: handful of raw almonds and some raw sunflower seed kernels

Dinner: Fried chicken! Yeah, you read that right. Fried chicken. chicken breast pieces breaded in a breading of whole wheat flour, flaxseed meal, and parmesean cheese. It was actually really quite tasty.





*note* it seems that I'm not understanding this Montignac method that well - apparently certain combinations of food is also part of the whole thing. So I need to read more closely this weekend and I put a couple more of his books on hold so maybe it will help steer me in a better direction. of course, not liking fish and some of the other "staples" in his method is sort of a problem so I may not really be able to follow it that closely, but we'll see.

"Sendoff" Dinner

I decided I would start this new 'diet' yesterday (Monday), so on Sunday I pretty much ate like crap all day ;) For dinner I decided to make chicken wings and a potato cake.

First I defrosted the wings in their ziploc bag they were frozen in and whizzed up a marinade consisting of extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt, lots of garlic, a little fresh parsley and cilantro and half a canned chipotle pepper (I love the spicy smoky taste it imparts). I tried adding a pinch of flaxseed meal to thicken it up a bit. Zapped it in the mini-chopper and dumped it into the bag and smushed it around. I took the marinating in a plastic bag thing from my mom. I've seen Alton Brown and others do it on the food network now, but I think my mom was first ;) Anyway, I let it marinate in the fridge for a few hours and roasted in the oven for about 35 min at 400ish (my oven temp is kooky) or until nicely brown.


But the real YUM thing was the potato cake. I'll give credit where it was due, my parents and I saw it on the Food Network a few years ago and tried it that night and I've loved it ever since. It's a bit of a pain making it for one but as you can see the point is to shred up Yukon Gold Potatoes (yes it MUST be Yukon gold, I've tried it with both russets and red-skinned potatoes and it's just not right), squeeze out the extra water, mix in a little salt and pepper and like you see in the pan, flatten it out to be a cake. cook on fairly low heat with a little butter and oil in a nonstick pan for about 10 min per side or until dark brown. I like to drain it on paper towel for a sec to remove some of the oil.




As you see in the final picture, it looks like the potatoes might be burnt. I assure you they're not. The goal is to take the cake out in that perfect minute window right before the potatoes burn. It's fantastic. SO crispy on the outside and so soft and luscious on the inside - it's the way potatoes were meant to be. Oh how I will miss these potatoes over the next few weeks. :(