Creates ~4-6 servings.

Ingredients:

• 1 chicken breast (optional: with fat still on)
• 1 can Cream of Chicken Soup
• 1 can Chicken Broth (or refill Soup can with broth and use that, ~1 cup)
• 4-6 medium potatoes, cut into ~1″ cubes
• 2 large carrots, diced (optional)
• Salt, pepper, and dried minced garlic/garlic blend (season to taste)

Instructions:

• Layer potatoes (and carrots) into the bottom of a 2-4 qt crock pot.
• Place chicken in next, then pour Cream of Chicken Soup and chicken broth over top.
• Add seasonings and gently mix. You want the chicken breast mostly submerged.
• Cook on low for 5-6 hours, high for 3-4.
• When food is almost done/done, remove chicken breast and place on heat resistant cutting board. Remove fat (if necessary) and cube or shred the chicken. Put back into the crock pot and gently mix.
• Serve over rice.

Chicken Taco Meat

Requirements:

1 Quart Crockpot

I’m rather fond of my little crockpot with a removable porcelain crock.

Ingredients:

1 lb chicken, cubed (frozen is fine)

3/8 cup Taco seasonings (add more or less according to taste)

1/2 cup water

Directions:

Place taco seasoning and water into crockpot. Mix well. Add chicken (don’t worry about covering with sauce) and cover with lid. Turn the crockpot to high and let cook for 3-4 hours (cook on low for 5-6).

Your time will vary depending on whether or not you use fresh or frozen chicken, or what type of chicken meat you use: fresh chicken/chicken tenderloins take less time to cook than frozen chicken/chicken breasts.

The meat is done when you can easily crush a cube of chicken against the side of the crock. At this point, turn off the crockpot and use a fork or two to shred the chicken. Stir the mixture; the chicken should absorb most of the liquid left leaving a thick sauce.

From here, you can use the taco meat in tacos or nachos or whatever else you can dream of. We usually do tacos.

Chicken Tacos

Ingredients:

Chicken Taco Meat (see recipe above)

Flour Tortillas, burrito style

Mexican-Style cheese, shredded (or cheese of choice; pogle prefers Colby Jack)

Lettuce (optional)

Directions:

Place tortilla on a microwave safe plate. Add cheese.

Add meat.

Microwave for 30 seconds to 1 minute to soften tortilla and melt the cheese. You can skip this test the day you make the taco meat since the meat will melt the cheese, although the tortilla will be somewhat stiff. This step is primarily for reheating the taco meat when you make tacos the next day or two (there’s enough meat for 8 or so tacos).

Add lettuce, if desired.

Fold and eat.

Kitchen Tips:

Freezing

One of the reasons why this recipe is so easy to do weekly is that we always have the primary ingredients on hand thanks to our freezer. The chicken, tortillas, and cheese all freeze superbly.

We buy chicken on sale for around $2/lb and divide it with 1 lb per sandwich bag (the no zip ones). I then put these into a larger 1 gallon size ziplock bag and place in the freezer. This protects the meat from freezer burn and allows for easy access to meal-sized portions. I always chop my chicken before freezing because we never cook anything that requires whole chicken pieces.

I freeze our tortillas in their original packaging. We buy our tortillas at the local Sam’s Club for $3.50/2-pack; the two packs come bundled in a nice thick plastic baggie that protects the contents from freezer burn. You can also save the outside bag for freezer other items in the future (just seal with a twist tie or tab).

Cheese can be frozen in several ways. For large purchases of shredded cheese, it’s easiest to use the same method as the chicken: divide into meal-size portions (I go with 1 cup) in sandwich bags, and place those bags into larger 1 gallon ziplock bags. I’ve used this method successfully with cheddar, mozzarella, and colby jack. If you purchase the small 2 cup or so bags of shredded cheese, I think you can simply throw those into the freezer as is (this is an ongoing experiment).

For blocks of cheese, freeze in original packaging or using the bag-in-bag method if you are breaking down a larger block into smaller portions.

To thaw, place item in the fridge according to this schedule:

chicken – 2 days before needed

tortillas – 1 day before needed

shredded cheese – several hours before needed; I will thaw shredded cheese on the counter if I’m going to bake the cheese within 2 hours

block cheese – 2 days before needed

Buying in bulk

I purchase my taco seasoning in 1.4 lb containers at Sam’s Club. Less packaging is better for the environment (as opposed to those itty bitty McCormick packages) and I was able to tweak the recipe to achieve a flavor that was acceptable to both myself and Sir Picky Eater.

I buy most of my spices in bulk at Sam’s Club, actually, and then refill the smaller containers I had purchased previously at my local grocery store. This allows us to keep a large number of spices on hand in the kitchen, and reserves for our commonly used spices in the pantry (aka tall shelf in the laundry room; I keep the extra spices in a lidless box on the bottom shelf, out of the light).

So I hope this helps a few of you to try something new. I should warn you that, once you’ve had these chicken tacos, you’ll find it hard to go back to other style of tacos ever again.

-M

Looking back, seems crazy that I started shopping at midnight for that haul. I might take next year off. XD

This week’s food experiment: Roasted Turkey!

Smells good, but I need a roasting pan with a rack. *ponders how to get a hot 15lb bird out of a deep roasting dish*

I picked up some cheap red-tag steaks at Food Lion on Monday. Red tags simply mean the sell-by date is a day or two off, and the steak is going to get binned shortly if you don’t buy at the reduced price. Sometimes red-tags are horrid looking pieces of meat, already turning an unappealing brown in the packaging. Sometimes there’s nothing visibly awkward at all. These steaks were nothing amazing, just some square cut (in the cross section, 1″ to a side) strips of low grade beef. I tend to grab decent steaks like that to be frozen and later cooked in some kind of gravy in the crockpot, as 8 hours of slow stewing in a delicious brown gravy will make even the worst cuts of meat appetizingly tender.

Monday, however, I wanted to try searing the outside of the steaks prior to putting them in the crockpot. Searing, as examined on Good Eats, merely adds flavor. It does not increase moisture retention as some older cookbooks proclaim (in fact the extra cellular damage to the meat increases moisture loss during further cooking). But, seeing as Meabh wasn’t feeling that well, and feeling slightly adventurous, I decided to try going a step further and finishing the steaks myself. Hit the jump to see how I cooked them, and the pan sauce I made afterwards to accompany them.

To start with, I took our cast iron frying pan (stainless steel is really better for this, but we don’t have one of those) and rubbed just a bit of canola oil into the cooking surface. I then tossed it onto high heat. I also began pre-heating my oven to 350deg F.

Oh, hey, you notice how I was pre-heating the oven? If you’re using a stainless steel pan, it better be one with a handle thats merely an extension of the pain, in the same manner as my cast iron pan exhibits above. We’re going to be tossing these steaks in the oven to finish them later, and you really don’t want a melty droopy plastic nub where your pan’s handle used to be. Plus the smoke would definitely be unhealthy for you.

While the pan was heating up, I took the littlest bit of canola oil ever seen in the world, and rubbed it onto my steaks (which were close to room temperature, but not quite there, which was bad of me. Room temperature helps cook them more quickly/evenly, according to good old Alton. Once I had them oiled up, I dropped them into a metal pie plate with a mixture of kosher salt and ground black pepper. I didn’t have any black whole peppercorns, or I’dve lightly ground those in our mortar and pestle and used them instead. Such is life when you never remember to buy the spices you need. Roll each steak around and get all your sides nice and coated like below.

As you can see, I left the thin strip of fat on one side of the steaks in place, to add some extra flavor. It can come off later if you wish, after cooking is done.

Once your pan just starts to smoke, toss those puppies in there! About 1 to 1.5minutes on each side, depending how hot your stove gets. You’re going to get some smoke from this, turn your little fan above the stove on. If you have 4 sides to sear like my steaks, I’d turn the heat down a little after the pan is heated up, as the extra time on the heat might produce more smoke than you really want (Let this be the spot where I apologize to Meabh for smoking up the house, even if the smoke smelled delicious).

When you’re about done with your last side, kill the heat and open the oven itself. At 350degrees, I left my steaks in for about 15 minutes, until the internal temperature was around 160 degrees F. This was a good medium cooking. Go for 145 degrees if you like medium rare better. When you open the oven to check the temperature (every 6 or 7 minutes) be sure to rotate the steaks as well.

Here, with the focus on the steaks instead of the thermometer, is the finished product fresh out of the oven.
Pull the steaks out of the pan and set them aside to rest for a bit. I tossed them in my freshly washed out pie pan. If you’ve got a lot of excess juice and grease in your pan, you might consider draining the majority of it out. Leave the little bits in there though, we need those. Then, turn your stovetop back up to high, and add about 1/2 a cup of either beef broth, or just water and a splash of soy sauce to the pan. Your choice, whatever you have on hand. I used water and soy sauce, myself. Boil this down, scraping the bits of meat residue from the bottom of the pan up with a whisk and stirring it into the mix. Those bits are called the fond, and we’re deglazing them from the bottom of the pan to bend them to our will.

Once you’ve reduced most of the liquid out of your pan, things get fun. Turn your heat down to low, and add the remaining sauce ingredients. I used the remaining heavy cream (1/2 pint) from the earlier creamed corn cookery, although again I wish I’d had half and half on hand instead as the sauce would’ve been a bit less rich. I also added 3 tsp of my wife’s whiskey to the pan for a bit of extra kick. Alton uses cognac in his steak’s pan sauces, and green peppercorns and other fancy stuff that I don’t know will ever populate my kitchen. I’m sure you could use various red wines or other liquors as well, if you have one that suites your fancy. Get creative, I did! I added a teensy bit of garlic pepper to the sauce myself to round it out, but the remaining pepper and salt coating from the steak had the sauce seasoned well already for me. Never salt the sauce until everything else is perfect, or it’ll end up too salty.

Simmer this mess down on low heat, stirring often with your whisk, until you’ve got a thick creamy sauce. Then, throw some of those newly rested steaks back in there and give them a good coating!

You can serve your steaks whole, or cut them into thin slices on a bias (meaning you cut across the grain, it helps produce short grains in the slices so they fall apart in your mouth). Drizzled a bit of this sauce across the steak however you plan to serve. Maybe toss some over mashed potatoes, or over some steamed veggies too. This sauce is rich! and delicious.

Oh, and just to show you how the steak turned out, I tried to capture the perfect brown ring of flavorful goodness, surrounding the perfect and uniform light pink interior that resulted from this cooking method. Here’s a cut steak for you to drool over, and a closeup that almost lets you see what I’m talking about. Hope you enjoy this if you try it, and thanks again to Good Eats for the inspiration! A pan sauce wasn’t something I even really knew about before that!

If a recipe of mine isn’t just pulled from the internet or from Good Eats, there’s a nearly 100% chance that its origins lie in either my mother’s or her mother’s influences on me.  I’m always striving to just come close to the culinary masterpieces I grew up enjoying. Unfortunately I often fail at writing down what they tell me, so I wing it and it never quite matches what I expect.

You could almost call this a fried corn, rather than creamed corn. Creamed corn has a lot of negative connotations for many people I’ve spoken to about it, and I attribute this to lunch-ladies and the horrid abomination Del Monte and others can and call ‘creamed corn.’ Trust me when I say I wouldn’t touch that stuff, and you shouldn’t either, with this recipe available to you. Hit the jump to see what I’m talking about.

Basic ingredients:

• 6 ears of fresh yellow sweet corn
• 2 tsp bacon grease (or some fresh bacon ready to be cooked)
• 2 tsp unsalted butter
• 1/2 pint heavy cream/half and half
• kosher salt and ground black pepper (the fresher the better on the grinding)

Preparation:

First and foremost, the only really ‘hard’ part of making creamed corn is what we call ‘milking’ the corn. Go ahead and remove the husks and silk from your corn. Do it by hand. Those tools that ‘help’ really aren’t going to do much good. And it gets really fast and easy with some practice. Builds character! Once all your corn is all as naked as it never wanted to be, take a large bowl (you really want large, this is going to splatter some, so do yourself a favor and make cleanup easier. Do this outside if you don’t have a large bowl to use) and place a smaller bowl upside down in the bottom as a perch to work on. Using a sharp knife (I prefer the larger one as pictured below, as it gives greater control and stability for the entire process) place one end of the corn on your inverted bowl, and cut the top half of the kernels off the cob as evenly as possible, all the way around.

Once all the kernels are littering the bottom of your bowl, you begin the part that will give you hand cramps if you really try and scale this recipe up. Holding the knife perpendicular to the surface of the shorn-cob, scrape the blade up and down the cob, evicting all that juicy corn goodness while leaving behind the remaining pulpy bits.

Click the image to get a closer view. You can see how I’ve milked the top half of the cob clean of its juice, and the difference in appearance with the bottom half I’ve yet to conquer. Once your ear is cleaned, discard it with the husks for later composting. Repeat for your remaining ears of corn. And don’t take forever, that poor naked corn is cold, after all, and exposed to prying eyes. I can do 6 ears of corn in under 20 minutes now. Practice definitely helps. Don’t rush too much and scrape your knife right into something substantially more tender and beloved than your ear of corn, of course.

When all finished, use your nearest handy spatula to assist you in removing your corn to an appropriate sized non-stick saucepan. Yeah, I’m using one a wee bit large here, but it was the most convenient to grab for me, so there it is. In front of my pan, you’ll notice my remaining ingredients. Kosher salt is your friend, and you really want the bacon grease as well; it does so much for the flavor. If you don’t have stored grease in your fridge, use some fresh bacon and fry it up, then drain the grease and add it in. Oh, and crumble that bacon and set it aside for later.

Go ahead and add all your ingredients. Take it easy on the salt and pepper to start, you can always add more, and you want to let the corn get cooked before really digging in on heavy flavoring. Turn your stove up to medium-high and prepare to stir vigorously for a bit.

Here you see the ingredients as they begin to melt into our mixture. I went heavy on the pepper, as I just don’t think its real creamed corn without a nice bite to it, and I’ve got some experience in how much I can safely add to start. You can always add seasonings, but you can never take them away! Stir it frequently while the heat does its thing, you should actually have the bottom layer trying to brown and burn on you. The former is ok and desired, the latter is bad and to be avoided. So keep stirring as it tries to burn for several minutes.

Once you’ve browned a good bit of the corn, turn the heat down as low as it can go, and let your corn simmer and stew and reduce for a good hour, if not more. Stir occasionally, and every 20 minutes or so give it a taste and add salt and pepper as desired. If you wanted to get fancy, you could experiment with other savory seasonings from your spice cabinet. I personally love the flavor of corn by itself, and with the bacony additions I see no need for further spices.

If you desire, you can add more cream and butter as it reduces over time. The last time I made a very large batch, I ended up adding quite a bit of extra cream towards the end before simmering some more, to achieve the consistency I wanted. Once its simmered at least an hour (more if you’ve got a lot more than 6 ears cooking in there!), you can add that crumbled cooked bacon you put aside earlier, if you so wish. Trust me. Its really a good addition. But you can live without it if you must. You can actually live without the bacon and its grease entirely, but you really don’t want to if you have a choice.

And there is the finished product. Once I declare its finished, my wife rushes in to sample it in large amounts right away. I’m not far behind her. If I want this to last more than a day, I have to immediately take a portion and prepare it for freezing. If you intend to make a large batch to freeze for future meals (my grandmother always does this for Thanksgiving), remember to take it a bit easier on the pepper. It’ll only get spicier with age in the freezer.

The materials aren’t expensive and you can season it however you prefer. If you end up making this regularly like us, a trip to Sam’s Club might end up looking something like this:

I just had to show off our other finds too. Mason jar for scale (recycled from purchased sauce and used for storing homemade sauce in the refrigerator).

Here’s my newest recipe for Pogle’s Favorite Garlic Spaghetti Sauce with Meat:

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground beef
• 2 28-oz cans of tomato sauce
• 2 6-oz cans of tomato paste
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 teaspoon dried onion, ground
• 2 teaspoons oregano
• 1 teaspoon basil
• 1 teaspoon Garlic Garni (a garlic seasoning mix; eliminate or replace with more of the above)

Directions

1. Cook ground beef in a skillet until browned; drain off or absorb fat (I use paper towels for this).
2. In a large crockpot, combine cooked ground beef, tomato sauce, tomato paste, garlic, and seasonings. Mix well and cook on low for about 4 hours.
3. Be tortured by the smell until it is done.
4. After 4 hours, turn off the crock pot. I recommend that you make some spaghetti or breadsticks to eat with the fresh sauce. Nomnomnom. Leave remaining sauce in the crockpot to cool.
5. When the crockpot is cool enough to work with, you can either put the entire thing in the fridge (I only do this overnight or so; do place a potholder down, just in case!) or get out a couple of mason jars to fill up. The acidity levels of tomato-based sauces will keep this sauce good for a very long time in the fridge.
6. Be sure to use some bread to clean the inside of the crockpot. Why let it go to waste?! Nomnomnom.

This recipe is guaranteed to give you garlic breath, so make sure you share with those closest to you to inoculate them to the smell.