GHI Wednesday: Meat Thermometer(s) with Classic Roasted Chicken Recipe

One thing that I think every home cook should have in their repertoire is a good, classic, moist, flavorful roasted chicken. Sure, you can go to the grocery store and buy a rotisserie chicken for about the same cost, but if you do a cost comparison by weight, the bird you get from the rotisserie is scrawny compared to what you can cook at home. Yes it's convenient, but honestly roasting a bird yourself does not take very much effort, you just need a few ingredients and the time for it to cook. 

Another thing that I think you need to successfully pull off a roast of any kind is a good meat thermometer... or two. You'll read in this post about the two types of meat thermometers I use, why I have two of them, and why you need at least one good one. 

Disclaimer: this is not a professional food blog (gasp)! It's my hobby. The food section of this blog is me rambling about food, sharing some recipes I have tweaked and love, and providing some cooking tips to those who are interested. So I'm posting iPhone pictures today because we left our DSLR camera at the hospital when we visited my BFF and her new baby. Which I'm so glad we brought because we used it to take exactly zero pictures. Anyway, I don't care that I'm just posting iPhone pictures, I just want to have something to show you guys the step-by-step for delicious chicken, and this will do the trick. 

Ingredients: 

1 roasting chicken

1/3 stick of softened butter

2-3 tbsp olive oil

Dried or fresh herbs

Paprika

Salt and pepper

4-8 garlic cloves

1-2 lemons, quartered or sliced (optional)

3/4 cup dry white wine

Steps:

1. Clear out the cavity of the bird. Remove the giblets bag and any huge pieces of fat (save these to make homemade chicken stock after!!). Check the skin for any feathers that stuck around and pull those bad boys out. Preheat oven to 425*

2. Prepare your herb rub. Mix the butter, olive oil, herbs, and about 1/2 tsp each of salt and pepper until combined into a paste. The herbs I use as a base are easy to remember if your parents were also quasi-hippies who were into folk singer-songwriter music... Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. I'm not kidding. I added chives this time for some onion flavor too which I really enjoy. Start out by adding the herbs in about equal proportions, and over time you'll experiment with different ratios until you find one you really like (I didn't have any garlic cloves left so I added some garlic powder to my herb rub. If using fresh garlic, don't use it yet). Save the paprika for the end, don't add it to the herb butter yet. 

3. Separate the skin from the breast. You'll know the breast side from the back side because the back of the chicken is hard without much meat. If you're feeling that side, then flip it over. Starting from the top (near the wings and away from the legs), wiggle your fingers between the skin and the meat until it separates. Take some of your herb butter and spread it down between the meat and the skin. Get it as evenly spread as you can.

4. Spread most of the remaining herb butter over the entire bird on the outside of the skin, making sure to cover every bit of it. Spread the remaining herb butter on the inside of the cavity. (Reminder that raw chicken has a ton of bacteria so any time you touch the raw bird, thoroughly wash your hands before touching anything else, especially other food! And same goes for any utensils or cutting boards). 

5. Smash and peel your garlic cloves. No need to press or mince them, just make sure you gave them a good smash with the side of your knife. Put the garlic cloves and cut up lemon into the cavity of the chicken. 

6. Sprinkle all of the skin on the outside with salt, pepper, and paprika. To do this, I usually keep one hand clean to sprinkle seasoning, and use the other to turn and manipulate the bird. Because as I said, and I can't say this enough, once anything has touched the raw chicken, it needs to be washed with soap and water before it can touch anything else. So do not salt and pepper one side, then turn the bird over, and grab your pepper grinder and dig your fingers into your salt dish... You'd need to do one side, turn it over, wash your hands thoroughly with soap and hot water, then do the other side. And by this point you've probably washed your hands a couple of times from putting on the herb rub, so that's my tip to save one more washing: one hand to sprinkle, one hand to work with the bird. 

7. Truss your bird. Yes that's English. Basically trussing is using kitchen twine to tie up the wings and legs so they don't burn, as pictured above. If you just put the bird in the oven the way it was, the limbs get loose and because there's less meat on them, they would cook crazy fast and would dry out by the time the rest of the meat is cooked. So the easiest way to do this is to tie the exposed bones of the legs together, and then set the bird on top of the wings. Doing this keeps everything together so it cooks much more evenly. 

8. Time to decide what you want to cook the bird in. I prefer using my cast-iron skillet because it allows for good even heating. Whatever you use, make sure that it has high enough sides to collect the drippings as the chicken cooks... So no sheet pans, and I would even avoid jelly roll pans. A glass dish works ok too. 

9. As mentioned, fold the wings under the bird and place it breast side up in your cooking vessel. Pour the white wine into the dish. As the bird bakes, the wine will cook off and steam and flavor the bird keeping the meat moist and tender. 

10. This week's gotta have item is a good cooking thermometer... Or a few. I have two, one that's an instant read, and one that is used as the food cooks and has an alarm (that is what's sticking out of the side of the chicken). Poultry needs to cook to 165 degrees to be safely eaten, but the higher you go above that the drier your chicken will be. The thickest part of the bird will take the longest to get there, so stick the probe of your oven-safe cooking thermometer into the thickest part of your particular bird, usually either the thigh or the breast for chicken. Make sure you are not hitting bone and they you are not poking through into the cavity. He temperature is taken on the very end of he probe, so make sure that part of the probe is in the thickest part of the meat. On mine, I then tell it what kind of meat I'm cooking and it tells me what the cooking temp should be, as noted 165 for chicken or any poultry. Then I turn on the alarm, and it will go off as soon as my meat is done. So there are no timers involved in this recipe, it tells me when it's done... To quote Ina Garten, "how simple is that!?" So now you have the probe thermometer placed, make sure the cable has enough room, and that the display can be safely kept outside of the oven. 

11. Put your whole dish in the oven, being careful about the thermometer probe. Roast at 425 for about 30-45 minutes, or until the skin is nice and golden brown and starting to get crispy. You will then drop the oven temp to 350 and continue cooking until your alarm goes off, about another hour, though this greatly varies on the size of your chicken, your oven, many other things. Starting high then going low allows us to have golden crispy skin and moist tender meat. If we stayed at 425 the whole time, the bird would be super dry. If we stayed at 350 the whole time, it would take forever and the skin would get yellow at best and wouldn't crisp up (and honestly, what's the point of that?). 

12. Make sure that the bottom of your pan is never dry. As the wine evaporates, the fat and juices from your chicken will start to render off and should replace that cooking liquid. However if your wine evaporates before your bird gives up its juices, just add a little more wine or even some chicken broth would be just fine. 

13. When your alarm goes off, pull the bird and double check the temp. This is where the instant read thermometer comes in handy. I recently bought myself a gift... The ThermaPen! It is a wonderful, accurate tool and was a great investment for my kitchen. After the oven-probe thermometer says we're ready, I use the ThermaPen to test a few different areas and make sure that no matter where I put it, it reads at least 165. This is important because the ThermaPen is more accurate than the oven-probe, and it also reads the temp more quickly. The oven probe heats up and cools down slowly, so the reading might be slightly delayed.  I typically check two spots on each breast, one leg, and one thigh. This is overkill and totally not professional, because it pokes a bunch of holes in this beautiful bird you just roasted, but I don't care, I'd rather be safe with a few puncture wounds than serve undercooked chicken! You'll also know you're ready if the "juices run clear." This is something you hear and read a lot, but what it means is that when you pick the bird up, especially if you've made any cuts yet, the juices that come out might have a color at first, but after a second they clear up. Not crystal clear like water, but they shouldn't be red or brown, they should be clear to light broth colored and definitely translucent.

14. Let the bird rest. Residual heat will actually continue to cook the meat (for this reason, I'll sometimes pull it out when my oven gauge thermometer reads 160 because those last few degrees will come from residual heat). This means that parts of the chicken that are well above 165 will keep transferring some of their heat to parts of the chicken that are cooler, so it will continue to rise a bit. The benefit to letting the meat rest is that the meat will be more moist. When you heat meat, the muscle fibers you're cooking totally relax and let out all of their liquid. And that liquid is going all over in the meat at a molecular level as it gets hotter and hotter. But when you take it out of the heat and it begins to cool, the muscle fibers begin to contract again and as they do, they re-absorb a lot of that liquid. This can take 10-15 minutes for a chicken. If you were to carve the bird up right when you took it out of the oven, all that liquid would run out onto your cutting board and the meat would be dry. If you let your meat rest, that liquid redistributes back into the muscle fibers and makes it more moist. The challenge is that you don't want to serve cold meat! So one common trick is to "tent" your meat, meaning make a little tent out of aluminum foil to rest over top. Because it doesn't touch the meat directly it won't make the skin get as mushy, but the foil will help keep in enough heat that you won't serve cold chicken (this trick goes for any meat - steak, roast, turkey, whatever! The bigger the pieces of meat, the longer it should rest). 

15. Carve and serve!! The best parts of the chicken to serve this way are the breasts and legs (the wings don't serve as well when done like this). You can serve 4-6 people with one chicken, depending on how many side dishes you have. My advice is to use a good, sharp, long carving knife. When carving the breast, start in the middle just to one side of the breast bone, and carve down till you meet resistance. Then starting at one end, start carving along the bottom in towards the breast bone and from one end to the other. You've just released most of the breast - you probably didn't get 100% of the meat but that's ok... I'll tell you what to do with that in a future post! Repeat for the other breast. For the legs, carve the skin around the drumstick to release that from the rest of the body. Then you'll grab where the drumstick meets the thigh, and pull out away from the body a bit. It should start to release at the hip joint, and that's how you know where to carve. Give it a little tug and it will show you where it needs to be detached. You'll now have the drumstick and thigh in one piece disconnected from the main body. 

Here's part of our dinner for that night: some light meat (1/2 breast), some dark meat (one leg), and a couple of biscuits. Not pictured: romaine salad with tomatoes, onions, peppers, red wine vinegar and olive oil.

The last chicken we bought was almost a 4 lb bird and we paid $7.15 for it. Yes the already-cooked rotisserie chickens are like $6, but those are seriously half the size of this one. We got 4 good sized portions from the first cut of the bird (two legs, two breasts). Then I was able to take what was left and pick off a bowl full of other meat that I used to make 2 trays of chicken enchiladas. So that's another 4 meals. And we're still not done... I then used the bones, skin, gibkets, and drippings in the bottom of the cast iron pan to make about 2 gallons of some of the darkest, most beautiful chicken stock I've ever made! And that's sitting in the freezer waiting to be made into soups, risotto, casseroles, sauces, who knows! I could get another 8 meals out of that in the future. I'll definitely detail how to use your kitchen scraps to make stock in a future post!! 

But for those of you keeping score at home, not including the stock (which on sale let's say is $2 per quart, and I made 8 quarts, so there's $16 out of thin air), that comes to 8 meals that I was able to get out of a $7 chicken... It makes me so sad when people think eating healthy is expensive! In most cases, it is significantly cheaper to do all of your shopping around the perimeter of the grocery store focusing on lean protein and produce and avoid the processed crap in the aisles of the store.

I have to share with you something that broke my heart... this was such a moment of sadness for me about the health of our country and why we have an obesity epidemic. It is because of the intersection of convenient and cheap. Or in this case actual convenience and perceived cheapness. The second page in the sale paper for Jewel today... All of these items are buy 4, get $4 off (but they're still relatively expensive compared to real food!): Chips Ahoy, Ritz crackers, Kraft singles, sliced variety of cheeses, variety of block cheeses, Bologna, Lunchables, bacon, hot dogs, easy cheese, bacon again, Easy Mac, Velveeta skillet dinner kits, mayonnaise, Kraft salad dressing (pictured: ranch and thousand island), Cheese Nips, Chips Ahoy again...  My lord. Folks I promise you, you will be less hungry, feel better, have less health problems, and save money by avoiding the center aisles (except for whole grains like brown rice, oats, and beans) and eating more whole foods. It's a hard habit to break because your brain reacts similarly to junk food as it does to opiate drugs, but once you get over the hump it'll be the best thing you ever did. I highly recommend the book Salt, Sugar, Fat to anyone who is interested by this topic. Getting off my soap box now...

Cooking a whole chicken only takes a few steps of prep work and then with the right tools, you can set it and forget it. It's a delicious, healthy, beautiful, and impressive center piece for any meal, and it is very cost effective. Just remember that it will take a few hours to cook (my first attempt started far too late and we were eating chicken at midnight... I'll never live that one down). 

Bacon Egg & Cheese Breakfast Sandwiches

If you haven't been keeping up, I'm pregnant. And so are (what seems like) most of my friends. It's going to be such a wild ride as our kids all grow up together. With all these babies, that means that there are a lot of new busy moms.

In church, I learned that the best gifts aren't material things, they are gifts of your time, talents, and treasures. So I try to do that when giving gifts, especially for close friends and family where it feels awkward to put a dollar amount on how I value the relationship... so the opposite of the Michael Scott approach.

While I am no gourmet chef, I enjoy cooking and would consider it one of my "talents" (on my good days haha). And it takes time, which is something that I have plenty off right now, and I know for a fact these new moms do not. And for treasures, in a metaphorical sense it is special to share the recipes that I like and make, and I try to make healthy(ish) meals that are stuffed with as many veggies and nutrients as possible - but in a more literal sense it's also nice for a family to not have to spend money on carry-out for one night because let's be honest, new parents are not spending time cooking nutritious home-made meals... it's this or take-out. Or cereal.

With these things in mind, my usual gift for new moms is some sort of heat-and-eat meal. I've done spinach rollatini, zucchini and spinach lasagna, ranch chicken-pot-pie biscuits/bread, crock-pot chicken tacos, chili, and most recently: breakfast sandwiches. Here's my confession though... the sandwiches are just for me. I'm being selfish with them because they are my favorite and I know I'm going to need some meals in the freezer before too long. My energy is already starting to wane, and having a fresh cooked meal every night is getting to be a bit much for me to tackle. Because of that, with each of the meals I've made recently for my new mommy friends, I've also made a dish for myself and have it in my own freezer. I've been spending my weekends prepping tons of food because I have such limited energy during the week. So some of these meals in my freezer might be saved until the baby comes and I really need them, but some might get busted out before then because I need to. My goal though is to try and stock my freezer with as much food as I can before the baby comes, because if I have this little motivation to cook now, I can only imagine what it'll be like once my little one makes her grand entrance!! And it will be a grand entrance... she's her mother's daughter.

Specifically, breakfast is an awkward meal for me. I'm really not a big cereal person. I don't like the taste of most healthy cereals, and anything that I like the taste of is so chock-full of sugar, that I don't want to eat it. Plus I think it's an imbalanced meal with too many carbs and too little protein. I've been drinking a lot of Shakeology shakes in the morning which are super healthy and delicious, but in my current state and while I'm breastfeeding, I'll definitely need more calories than one shake will provide. So I make these sandwiches once in a while to supplement my shakes. And I figured that if I make them one at a time and really enjoy them, why not make them en masse? I've seen posts like this on Pinterest and figured I'd try it myself. One difference on Pinterest I've seen is that they just crack individual eggs into the cups of a muffin tin. Well I took a different approach for the following reasons: 1) the size of the muffin tin is WAY smaller than the English muffin, so a huge ring around the edge of your sandwich would be egg-less. After 4 years of working at Potbelly Sandwich Works, I'm quite a stickler for sandwich perfection... every bite of the sandwich needs to taste the same. 2) I wanted more than 1 egg per sandwich... I need more protein than that. 3) I wanted to use the egg as a way to sneak in some veggies (spinach - though you could probably add in lots of different veggies!! Just sautee them first. Try zucchini, peppers, onions, mushrooms, just about anything you like in an omelet would be good). 

I feel bad for the "food" section of this blog because it doesn't always get the love it deserves. I have so many things that I make that I would love to blog about, but I'm in a hurry. I rush home, bust open the fridge, start cooking, and by the time I'm sitting down to eat, I realize that I didn't get out our big camera to take any pictures. So instead I just post a picture of my (usually half-eaten) plate to Instagram with a couple of hashtags, and think "oh well." But I'm making an exception this time. Though I don't have nice pictures of the step-by-step process, I had enough friends comment or message me to ask for the recipe that I thought I'd share... even though it won't be illustrated. So here goes!

Bacon, Egg, & Cheese Muffins

Makes: 12 sandwiches

Ingredients

12 English muffins

18 organic eggs

1 box frozen spinach (thawed, gently drained)

1 lb low sodium regular cut bacon

12 slices American Cheese

~1/2 stick of butter

Nonstick cooking spray

Salt & Pepper (~1/2 tsp each)

Steps to assemble

I'm going to walk through how to prepare each ingredient, and then the final assembly. This doesn't need to happen in any particular order, so use this as an opportunity to practice your mise en place and multi-tasking so that things come together around the same time.

English Muffins - Split English Muffins with a fork, toast lightly (if you have a big toaster oven, you can do 4 muffins at a time), and lightly butter the top and bottom of each muffin. Remember these will be re-heated so don't toast them to a nice dark color quite yet or they'll burn in the final cooking.

Bacon - The best trick to cooking bacon is to do it in the oven instead of on the stove. On the stove, it cooks unevenly because it wrinkles up, which means that the parts that touch the pan get darker and the spots in between stay soggy, and it's hard to reach every inch of the bacon to get it good and evenly crispy. Cooking it in the oven prevents that issue - it gets wrinkly still, but it heats much more evenly. But for a sandwich, the trick is that you want flat bacon so that it sits nicely on the other sandwich fillings. The easiest way to do that is to use two jelly-roll or sheet pans with edges. Place foil or a SilPat on the bottom of one jellyroll pan, lay out your bacon in a single layer, then place a slightly smaller sheet pan on top of the bacon, and put the whole thing in the oven.

What I like to do is use a sheet pan that's slightly smaller than my SilPat on the bottom - this means that all the bacon fat stays pooled on the SilPat. After several minutes of baking when a lot of the fat had been rendered off (and was starting to come up the sides of the smaller sheet pan on top), I pulled it out, and poured the bacon grease into my mason jar where I store bacon fat in my fridge to use for zillions of other delicious things. Having a pan that's just slightly smaller than the SilPat allows it to collect and be poured off really easily, and it keeps that pan (mostly) grease-free. I then flipped all the bacon, put the top sheet pan back on, put it back in the oven, and finished cooking. Be careful though because with this method your bacon goes from "crisp" to "burnt" really quickly, and because you have a sheet pan on top you can't see it - so as you're getting close, check on it frequently. And err on the side of pulling it out too soon because the bacon will cook more when you re-heat the sandwiches. Full disclosure, I totally over-cooked my bacon for this batch of sandwiches. But I'll live... lesson learned for next time! I cooked it at 375, though the temperature is less important, just check on it. Anywhere from 350 - 400 would work.

Eggs - As noted, I didn't want to use muffin tins, so instead I used ramekins. Holding these up against the English Muffins, the size was much more similar, though the egg patties still came out smaller than the muffins themselves. Thoroughly combine eggs, and stir in salt and pepper. Spray all ramekins thoroughly with nonstick cooking spray, including bottom and sides. Divide the thawed spinach into 12 (you can draw lines on the thawed spinach brick with your finger to estimate 1/12) and put 1/12 into each ramekin. Pour 1/12 of the egg mixture into each ramekin, and give it a little stir to distribute the spinach. Place ramekins on a sheet pan and place in oven (you can do this at the same time as the bacon). The eggs will puff up - it'll look like a souffle and rise way over the top of the ramekin but don't worry, they'll fall. They're done when they've set in the middle, mine took about 15 minutes give or take... Sorry I didn't time it, like I said I wasn't planning to write about this one haha! When they've set, pull them out and remove the egg patty from the ramekin. Either flip them over, or place on a cooling rack (allowing cool air to get to the bottoms will help them fall faster).

You're ready to assemble! Take your English muffin base, place one egg patty right-side-up on top, break 1 slice of bacon into thirds and put the 3 pieces on top of the eggs, put on one slice of American cheese, and the top of the muffin. Press, and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Lather, rinse, repeat, 11 more times and then you're ready to go to the freezer!

I've made these before and eaten them fresh and they're delish (I put the whole thing back in the toaster oven for another minute or two to melt the cheese). I've never frozen, thawed, and heated them before, so I hope that turns out as well as it looks like it does according to Pinterest!! I'll definitely post an update after I've had one! What I plan to do is put a sandwich in the fridge the night before I want one, and then I'm going to experiment with microwaving vs. toaster oven to re-heat. If you try it out, please let me know what worked for you, and I'll be sure to update once I have an opinion!

Wednesday's GHI: Toaster Oven & Roasted Root Veggie Recipe

So you guys know how by now that being frugal is the name of the game for me. I try to save money wherever I can without feeling like I'm sacrificing. If it's worth the splurge, I'm all for it (I'm looking at you truffle salt), but if there's a cheaper alternative that doesn't feel like a sacrifice, you better believe I'm jumping on that.

Enter: toaster oven. When we were putting together our wedding registry, I knew that I wanted a toaster oven instead of just a regular pop-up bread toaster. At the time, I was really just thinking about the dinky little toaster oven that I grew up using (no offense Mom) that we would use to make cheesy bread as an after school snack, and I later started to use to make my decadent garlic bread recipe. It was this teeny little thing with heating elements on top and bottom, and my mom would put a piece of whole wheat bread in there with a slice of cheddar cheese, she'd cut up an apple, and voila - after-school snacks were served.

But in doing my research for our registry, I found that toaster ovens have come a very long way. And I found a model from Breville that I absolutely adore - it's their compact model, since we don't have a lot of counter space, but it's a full-feature design. The only thing it doesn't have is convection or pressure-cooking features, which I'm totally fine with. It has a bunch of settings, but the ones I use the most are toast, bake, broil, bagel, and defrost. It has two racks which can hold a lot of bread if I were to use it just for toast in the morning for a large crowd. But what it has that I love is a great bake / broil feature.

This is where we get into my frugality. It takes significantly less energy to heat up that little metal box to 350* than it does to heat up our standard-sized oven. And the energy is much more efficient - it's electricity through high efficiency heating elements vs. our gas oven. It also cooks more evenly and doesn't have as drastic of hot/cold spots as our gas oven does. So whenever I possibly can, I opt to use my toaster oven to bake rather than the conventional oven. I would say that I use the toaster oven more than 75% of the time I need to bake something. And this size oven is JUST big enough to fit a standard 12-inch frozen pizza (yes, we eat frozen pizzas every now and then... we're human too). I cook everything in there including meat and/or veggies I'm roasting, any type of broiling that needs to be done, desserts I'm baking (it's perfect to throw on just a couple of cookies, or bake up a quick cobbler to use fruit that's about to turn mushy). It fits my 8x8 glass pyrex baking dish and came with a broiling pan that I can use too. The cases where I'd opt for the regular oven instead of the toaster oven are if what I'm cooking is too big (either a roast, or anything in a 9x13 or one of my big gratin dishes), or if I need a dry heat. The gas oven provides a dryer heat because there's more circulation with the extra air that fills the big space, and the flames help it remain more dry. One example is if I'm making croutons, I'll most likely use the regular gas oven. But most of the recipes I've posted on the blog so far that were done in the oven have used the toaster oven.

The moral of the story is that I recommend a good toaster oven. You'll likely use it more than you think you will, it will simplify your time in the kitchen, and it will potentially save you money on your energy bills.

The recipe that I want to feature in my toaster oven is a Roasted Root Veggie Medley. It's super simple, but crazy healthy - tons of antioxidants, and lots of vitamins in the rich colored veggies!

Ingredients:
2 large beets - peeled and cubed
1 large sweet potato - scrubbed and cubed with peel left on
2 carrots - peeled and cut into 1-inch lengths (you can halve the lengths if they're too big), or ~1.5 cup baby carrots, halved
2 tbsp coconut oil
salt & pepper to taste

• Put the 2 tbsp of coconut oil into the bottom of your roasting pan, and put it in the oven while it's preheating to 400* and while you prep the other veggies
• After the veggies are cut and the oil is melted, toss the veggies in the pan with the oil to coat evenly. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and toss together again
• Bake at 400* for about 45 minutes or until roasted, fork-tender, and browning on the outsides (take out the pan and mix up the veggies at least once during roasting)

Wednesday's GHI: Salt

Something that every kitchen's gotta have is salt. One of the biggest cooking mistakes one can make is under-seasoning the food. When I say under- or over-season, I'm referring to the most common seasonings people use: salt and pepper. A frequent misconception is that it is best to under-season the food while cooking and then serve salt and pepper at the table so people can season to their own taste. Over-seasoning during cooking is obviously bad, and a mistake that I have definitely been guilty of. It's a problem because it's much harder to fix than under-seasoning, but under-seasoning is not good either. The reason it's not ideal to just assume that diners will salt-and-pepper their own food at the table is because just sprinkling some table salt on top of the dish right before eating does not add the depth of flavor that would be present if the seasoning had been done properly while cooking.

Cooking is all about building layers of flavor with each and every step. When cooking a savory dish with multiple steps, you should be seasoning at every step. For example, in the recipe I posted earlier this week for the pasta with the veggie cream sauce, I made sure to season with every single step. The key though is to not season too much at each of these intermediate stages, and that just takes practice to learn the right amount. No recipe will be able to accurately and precisely tell you "1/8 tsp when you add the mushrooms" you just sprinkle a pinch and through trial and error you learn what the "right" amount is (technically speaking, a pinch is an actual unit of measure that equals 1/8 tsp, but you're not expected to actually measure out 1/8 tsp when a recipe calls for a pinch). A pinch is usually supposed to be how much you'd get if you had a bowl of salt and you picked up as much as you could with your first two fingers and thumb using only the pads of your fingers. That's what recipes usually mean when they say a "pinch," not precisely 1/8 tsp. More commonly though, recipes will say "to taste." This is because it's impossible to know the perfect amount. The necessary salt level depends on a hundred variables in each recipe (how big are the tomatoes that you used, what brand of broth did you use, etc.) which means it's up to you. 

Keeping that in mind, in the recipe I posted earlier this week I seasoned the mushrooms while they sauteed, I seasoned both sides of the chicken breasts before they were cooked, I added more salt and pepper when I tossed in all of the other veggies, a little bit more salt and pepper when I added the cream. And then the final step - TASTE before you serve! At that final tasting I decided the salt was perfect, but it needed more pepper. So a few turns of the pepper mill, and voila - dinner was served. Never serve a dish before tasting it. This is why I keep a pile of little spoons in the drawer next to my stove - those are my tasting spoons. I use them to taste my dishes throughout the cooking process but especially at the end before serving. I grab a clean spoon, dip it in my dish, take a taste, pop the used spoon in the sink. That tasting is your last line of defense, you should always adjust your seasoning before you serve. That's why you may have noticed that at nice restaurants, they don't put salt and pepper on the table... they season their dishes correctly throughout the cooking process so you don't need to add any more at the table. 

To further confuse matters, there are different types of salt that have different purposes. If you think I'm messing around, look at the picture of the different types of salts that I use in my cooking. Mike thinks I'm insane, but there is a reason for the insanity, and I'll tell you about each of the different types of salt and when to ideally use each one.

 Yes, I actually have all of these salts in my cabinet and use them all differently. The one that I don't show in more detail here (because I didn't want to waste any of this precious commodity haha!) is the truffle salt. This is used as a finishing salt, meaning you don't add it throughout the dish to add layers of flavor, because the truffle flavor would be cooked right out, and that would defeat the purpose. So this is used at the last step of seasoning before serving to give a nice salty truffle finish. My favorite use for this is sprinkled over top of pasta or risotto dishes. It also is incredible on homemade popcorn.

  Here are the salts here from right to left:

Maldon large-flake Sea Salt

 This is another finishing salt. The size of this flake creates a nice salty crunch for dishes that require that. Read: salted caramel. This is a great salt to use for sweet / salty dishes. I bought this to use with one of my FAVORITE desserts that I'll post about next time I make it... they're bars with a layer of shortbread, a layer of caramel (or toffee the way mine always come out), and a layer of dark chocolate ganache. And then you finish them with this beautiful, flaky, crunchy salt once the chocolate has cooled and they're phenomenal. I want to find other great uses for this beautiful salt. Can't wait to try more recipes!

 Coarse Kosher Salt

This salt is the work-horse of any serious cook's kitchen. Its the best salt to use in almost all savory cooking dishes, especially with meat. This salt has a flat, flaky texture. It is the preferred salt to use to season your meat when browning it in a pan or on the grill because the flaky structure creates a beautiful crust on the outside of the meat that you won't get as nicely if you use regular table salt. I keep this salt in a little dish with a magnetic lid. I do this because as the salt I use the most, I prefer to pinch it with my fingers vs. sprinkle it out of a container. This gives me better control over how much salt I'm using, exactly where it's going, and allows for more precision. It's also the perfect salt to use on a margarita rim... just saying.

Iodized Sea Salt

This one is kind of specific to my current situation. I use this as my primary salt when I can, especially as a finishing salt, for example when doing simple steamed veggies with a little salt and olive oil, or something like that where I'm just sprinkling some salt on top. I am only doing this for health reasons... truth is I miss my Kosher salt. I've read some interesting articles recently about a resurgence in iodine deficiency, which is particularly problematic among pregnant women. Kosher and Sea Salt don't usually provide iodine (iodine is never found naturally in salt, it is always added. But it is not added to Kosher salt, and this is the first sea salt where I've ever seen iodine added, so I snatched it up). Sea salt is a healthy alternative to traditional salt because a) it has a slightly lower sodium content for the same amount of saltiness (and less sodium is not a bad thing), and b) the natural sea salts have some minerals that you won't find in regular table salt. So I found a sea salt that has iodine added so that while I'm pregnant I'm getting those health benefits of sea salt and I'm getting my iodine. This salt does not have a long-term place in my kitchen. I will not be buying more of it after the baby comes. This particular salt has bigger granules than standard table salt, though not quite as big as the Coarse sea salt, and definitely not as big as the sea salt that goes in the salt grinder. It's more uniform in size than kosher salt (kosher salt is flat and flaky, this salt is more cube-like).

Standard Iodized Table Salt

This is a good salt to use in large quantities and for baking. The reason I like using it in large quantities is because recipes are typically written for this type of salt and when you're working with large quantities, weight matters in addition to volume. Because this salt is much finer in texture, more actual salt fits in a given volume than would Kosher salt. For example 1 cup of this salt would weigh more (because there's more salt that can fit) than 1 cup of Kosher salt. So when you're working with large quantities (maybe 1/2 cup or more), it's more accurate to use this type of salt, because this is the type of the salt that the recipe was typically written for. But when a recipe calls for "a pinch" or a tablespoon, the difference is not meaningful, so stick with your Kosher salt. I also like to use this when working with large quantities because it's much cheaper than the other salts I have. For these reasons, I use this one most commonly to salt my pasta water, salt the water to blanch veggies, make a brine for meat, and even in soups and other liquid applications (where it'll dissolve anyway so the texture doesn't matter). I also use this one for any non-cooking applications like cleaning my cast iron pan. This is also the best salt to use in baking because of that same precision in measuring. Again this is because of accuracy - baking is a precise science so the littlest details matter. It's also because this salt dissolves better due to its smaller size. And when you're baking, you usually don't want to bite into a salty crunchy flake (unless you're doing salted caramel, which we've already talked about).

Coarse Sea Salt

These big crunchy pieces are another great option when you want that salty, crunchy bite. They're more cubed than the flaky kosher or sea salt, but not quite big enough to fill the salt grinder. The best use for this type of salt is when I'm making pretzels, and other types of dishes where you want a bigger salty crunch.

Sea Salt Grinder

 This is what I serve as my "table salt." I personally prefer the flavor and texture of this better than traditional table salt that's served in a shaker. I've already noted the health benefits of sea salt vs. traditional table salt, and those benefits add to the reasons why I prefer this to be served. Although if I've done my job correctly while cooking, we shouldn't need it.

So that's the skinny on salt... every kitchen's gotta have it!! Let me know your thoughts!

Pasta & Chicken with a Veggie Cream Sauce

Most nights in our house are like a mini episode of chopped. I open my fridge, see what I have, figure out what I can make with it, and that's our dinner. This is compounded by the fact that Mike and I share the grocery shopping responsibilities. He'll come home with whatever looked good at the store that day, and I get to figure out what to do with it.

I honestly wouldn't change this set-up for anything. Sure it's more stressful at times than having a set weekly meal plan or planning the meals in advance, but it's fun, provides variety, saves money, and gives us a chance to try new things. He brings home a bunch of beets because they looked good at the store that day and were on sale... cool, now I get to figure out what the hell to do with a massive bunch of raw beets. I've never cooked broccoli rabe before, but it looked good and was a good price, so he came home with it. Time to pull out the iPad and learn what the dickens to do with broccoli rabe. I tend to peruse Pinterest and other recipe websites (allrecipes.com, foodnetwork.com, etc.) for inspiration, but I usually end up throwing something new together and hoping for the best.

In last week's edition of our nightly Chopped Challenge, I created one of the most successful totally-winging-it dishes I've made so far. Mike said that it was better than a lot of dishes he's actually paid for in an Italian restaurant and if this were on the menu, he would have much preferred it instead. I'd say that's pretty high praise from one of my most honest critics. He said that the ingredient combination I chose reminded him of a supreme pizza, but in a fancy pasta dish. He just loved it, and that always makes me feel good. Feedback like that is one of the reasons why I love cooking! Truth be told, I trust him more than my own opinion on the dish because I was so sick and stuffy when I made it that I could barely taste anything, and hardly had an appetite at all. But that's neither here nor there...

This dish was very loosely inspired by one that I saw on pinterest. The pinterest dish was just chicken breasts, tomatoes, basil, garlic, over pasta. That's not quite a complete enough meal to me. I need more produce (and flavor) in my life, so either I wanted to add more veggies to the sauce, or we would have had side salads. Upon taking inventory of my fridge, I opted for more veggies in the sauce.

In this post, I want to tell you about the importance of a cooking term called "mise en place." In French, that means "put in place" and the concept is that you want to prep all of your ingredients ahead of time so that when it's time to start cooking, you're done with all the prep, you're just cooking and assembling. It helps improve the timing of your cooking - things are less likely to get over- or under-done because you're not rushing. Everything is prepared and timed perfectly, and it makes the whole cooking process go so much smoother. The key to doing this REALLY well is knowing what needs to be finished before you can begin any cooking, and what you can multi-task while other parts of the dish are cooking. It's not efficient for you to prep literally all of the ingredients, and then stand there for 4-6 minutes staring at a chicken breast waiting for it to brown with nothing else to do... there are things that need to be done before you can put anything on the stove, and there are things that you can do while the cooking is happening. But knowing the difference so that your timing goes smoothly is the key to a good mise en place, and it takes p-r-a-c-t-i-c-e.

So here's how the dish ended up coming together (I'll do my best to estimate some of the liquid ingredients... this is the problem with cooking the way that I do. No real recipes... Sorry.)

Ingredients

• 2-3 boneless skinless chicken breasts
• 2 large tomatoes
• 2 bell peppers (any color besides green)
• 10 oz. Cremini (or baby bella) mushrooms
• 3 cups fresh spinach, rinsed
• 4 large cloves of garlic
• 1/2 bunch fresh basil
• ~1/3 cup olive oil
• ~1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1 lb. pasta (we used spaghetti for this one, but any pasta works)
• salt and pepper to taste
• shredded Parmesan cheese to garnish

Cooking time: 35 minutes
Serves: 4
Recipe with images, notes, and tips comes first; consolidated recipe below.

 We begin with our mise en place - for this recipe, we will prep all of the veggies and meat before even turning on the stove. 

Dice the tomatoes and peppers to a relatively small dice, and about the same size. Slice the mushrooms. 

Trim the chicken breasts and season the tops with salt and pepper.

Heat ~1/4 of the olive oil in a heavy bottomed skillet until shimmering. Add mushrooms (do not season yet). Cook over medium heat until just beginning to brown. 

Heat a large pot of water to boil for pasta
Clear a space in the middle of the mushrooms and add the rest of the olive oil. Add the chicken breasts, seasoned side down - season other side of the chicken breasts with salt and pepper. Salt and pepper the mushrooms at this time (if you salt the mushrooms at the beginning, you'll draw moisture out of them and into the cooking liquid. This will cause them to steam rather than brown, and we want that beautiful brown color, so don't add salt until you're starting to see some browning, which means that the liquid has been evaporated rather than pulled into the pan).

 (Chicken goes into the pan seasoned side down)

(Then you season the second side of the chicken once you've put it in the pan and before flipping) 

Cook the chicken breasts for 4-6 minutes without disturbing, until beautifully golden brown on that one side (brown food tastes good!). Cooking chicken in olive oil always leads to splattering, so I like to put the lid on my pan but off-set it slightly so that the steam can escape. Once that side is done, flip the chicken breasts, and again do not disturb for another 4-6 minutes

Once the pasta water is boiling, add a handful of salt, and add your pasta. Cook according to the instructions on the pasta. When finished, do not rinse pasta in cold water, and do not add olive oil to prevent sticking. Adding olive oil to your cooked pasta lubricates the noodles, which means that your sauce won't stick to it either. And because this is a loose sauce (it's not very thick), you need as much help getting it to stick to your pasta as you can, so don't add olive oil when it's done cooking. This is why mise en place is important - you need to time it so that the pasta finishes cooking right as the sauce is finishing up so that you can plate everything right then.

This is where you can multi-task... while the mushrooms/chicken and water/pasta are cooking, mince the garlic and slice the basil into fine ribbons (called chiffonade). Set aside.

When the second side of the chicken is beginning to brown, add the tomatoes, peppers, spinach, garlic, and 1/2 of the basil. More salt and pepper now please. Replace the lid to help the spinach wilt down, and stir frequently to help break up the tomatoes and mix the juices all together

When the veggies have cooked down and a nice sauce has formed (about 5-10 more minutes), remove the chicken breasts and set aside on a plate

Add the heavy cream to the sauce in the pan and stir to combine. Heat for a few more minutes so the sauce can thicken slightly. Take one final taste, and adjust seasoning as necessary. 

 Here's where the nightly Chopped Challenge came into play - the original recipe was literally just the chicken breasts cooked in olive oil, add tomatoes, garlic, basil, cook till the tomatoes form a sauce. Add a bunch of butter to thicken up the sauce, and serve over pasta. So I thought adding more veggies can't be a bad thing, let's start there - adds flavor and nutrients so it's a win-win. Well then it came time to add the butter for the sauce... and that's when I remembered that I was out. Totally out of butter. Knew I would run out during all the holiday baking (I buy butter from Sam's club and keep it in the freezer), and tried getting more but Sam's club was out of butter. Can you believe that? Completely out of butter. So I've been surviving on my last remaining stick which I just used up on another dish and forgot that I'd done. So... now what? I needed something to make a sauce. Then I saw the carton of heavy cream I had sitting in my fridge, also from holiday baking. What makes heavy cream different than milk? BUTTER fat!! If you shook heavy cream forever with a blender ball in it, you'd wind up with a lump of butter and some whole milk. Well I wasn't about to churn some damned butter, but I did hope that I could turn this "pan sauce" into a cream sauce, and the butterfat that's in the cream would do its job in thickening the sauce and giving that beautiful velvety texture that you're aiming for when you add a pat of butter to a sauce. Mission accomplished!! The cream mixed in with the pan sauce beautifully and made this delicious sauce - it's a very loose sauce, it isn't thick at all. But it clings to the pasta deliciously and flavors every bite without being too heavy or over-powering. You can hardly even see it because it's almost the same color as the pasta, but Success!

Cut chicken up into pieces and add back to the sauce (I didn't do that for this version, but I wished I had. I just served the whole breasts, but next time I'll definitely cut it up first). To serve, pile pasta on the plate, spoon on some veggies, chicken, and sauce. Top with grated Parmesan cheese and some of the remaining chiffonade of basil. Enjoy!

1. Prep all of the veggies and meat - dice the tomatoes and peppers to a relatively small dice, and about the same size. Slice the mushrooms. Trim the chicken breasts and season the tops with salt and pepper
2. Heat ~1/4 of the olive oil in a heavy bottomed skillet until shimmering. Add mushrooms (do not season yet). Cook over medium heat until just beginning to brown
3. Heat a large pot of water to boil for pasta
4. Clear a space in the middle of the mushrooms and add the rest of the olive oil. Add the chicken breasts, seasoned side down - season other side of the chicken breasts with salt and pepper. Salt and pepper the mushrooms at this time 
5. Cook the chicken breasts for 4-6 minutes without disturbing, until beautifully golden brown on that one side (brown food tastes good!). Cooking chicken in olive oil always leads to splattering, so I like to put the lid on my pan but off-set it slightly so that the steam can escape. Once that side is done, flip the chicken breasts, and again do not disturb for another 4-6 minutes
6. Once the pasta water is boiling, add a handful of salt, and add your pasta. Cook according to the instructions on the pasta.
7. While the mushrooms/chicken and water/pasta are cooking, mince the garlic and slice the basil into fine ribbons (called chiffonade). Set aside.
8. When the second side of the chicken is beginning to brown, add the tomatoes, peppers, spinach, garlic, and 1/2 of the basil. More salt and pepper now please. Replace the lid to help the spinach wilt down, and stir frequently to help break up the tomatoes and mix the juices all together
9. When the veggies have cooked down and a nice sauce has formed, remove the chicken breasts and set aside on a plate
10. Add the heavy cream to the sauce in the pan and stir to combine. Take one final taste, and adjust seasoning as necessary. 
11. Cut chicken up into pieces and add back to the sauce. To serve, pile pasta on the plate, spoon on some veggies, chicken, and sauce. Top with grated Parmesan cheese and some of the remaining chiffonade of basil. Enjoy!

Do you play Chopped Challenge in your kitchen? What fun recipes have you come up with by doing that? Share your thoughts on this recipe or tell me about your own concoctions in the comments section!