Chicken and Biscuits a la Jessica Seinfeld

So I have to admit I watch Martha Stewart.  I think she’s a freakin’ genius in the kitchen.  I don’t think though I’ve ever actually made any of her recipes because I just don’t have the time to make everything from scratch.  However, her guests are another thing. I’ve tried recipes that several of her chef or foodie guests have presented because they’re so much more feasible for a normal person with a life. 

Recently Martha had Jessica Seinfeld on her show to promote her new book, Double Delicious. She made some really cool and simple looking breakfast items and I was sold.  I didn’t rush out to buy her book but the next time I was at Costco I happened to notice it in the book section and I picked it up.  This is a continuation from her first book Deceptively Delicious and includes recipes that are appropriate for family meals any time. All recipes include some kind of fruit or vegetable puree.  The pictures are wonderful and the recipes are straightforward and fast.  I’ve made a few of them already and all have been hits with both my picky little girl and almost equally picky husband (wonder where she gets it…). 

I made this Chicken and Biscuits for dinner on one of our recent crazy snowy New England days. It was the perfect comfort food to warm you up on a cold day after spending hours battling the snow! It was really tasty with a hint of sweetness in the biscuits and a wonderful rich gravy. I had to improvise a little since I didn’t have buttermilk and was fresh out of whole wheat flour. So, I googled how to make buttermilk and found a great tip on ehow.com: 1 tbs of white vinegar mixed with 1 cup minus 1 tbs of milk will make a substitute (put the vinegar in a measuring cup and add milk to the 1 cup line and let sit for 5 minutes.) Note: if you try this substitution, this recipe calls for ¾ cups of buttermilk.  Instead of the whole wheat flour, I used enriched unbleached flour.  My substitutions must have gone somehow wrong though since my biscuit dough was too runny and instead of individual biscuits dotted over the chicken, it had a sort of biscuit crust covering the whole thing (I suspect it was the flour).  Still, it wasn’t a bad thing and the biscuit dough definitely had the buttermilky tang to it and cooked up nice and airy.  The recipe serves 6 and between my husband, our daughter, my mom, and me, there was only a tiny bit left over (enough for my daughter to have lunch the next day).  Clearly we all liked it! My little girl actually asked for thirds!  Unfortunately I don’t have a photo to share since my camera’s battery decided to die just as I tried to take some pictures but when I make it again I’ll take some photos and share them.  Probably when I make it again I’ll add some frozen peas to the gravy for some added texture and goodness.  Try the recipe, check out Seinfeld’s website at www.doitdelicious.com and buy her book. 

Ingredients:

1tbs olive oil

2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cubed (about 1 pound)

1/8 tsp freshly ground black pepper

1 (8.5 oz) can reduced fat cream of celery soup (no one in our family likes celery so I used cream of mushroom soup and it tasted really good.)

½ cup non fat (skim) milk

½ cup pumpkin, carrot, or sweet potato puree

Biscuit Topping

1 ½ cups whole wheat flour

2 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

½ cup trans-fat-free, soft tub margarine spread

1 large egg, beaten

¼ cup honey

½ tsp cream of tartar

¾ cup low-fat (1%) buttermilk

Procedure:

1.      Heat the oil in a flameproof casserole or Dutch oven over high heat. Sprinkle the chicken with pepper. Add it to the casserole and cook until the chicken begins to brown, 4 to 5 minutes. Stir in the soup, milk, and vegetable puree until all ingredients are well combined. Remove from heat.

2.      Preheat the oven to 375 F. Prepare the biscuits. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. Rub the margarine into the flour with your fingertips until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add the egg, honey, cream of tartar, and buttermilk all at once. Mix just until a soft dough forms. Dot the biscuit dough over the chicken mixture. Bake 20 to 25 minutes, uncovered, until the biscuits are cooked through and golden on top. Serve immediately. 

Prep: 30 minutes

Total: 1 hour

Yield: Serves 6

The time is pretty accurate as I even had time to make carrot puree from scratch (cooking the carrots it my trusty microwave) and still it only took about an hour altogether.  

Spinach Pancakes… Veggies Hidden in Plain Sight!

One of the TV shows I watched as a kid was Popeye, so I needed no convincing to eat spinach. I actually believed the leafy vegetables had special powers.  I guess with all the recent talk about antioxidants, there was some truth to that belief.  Well, my little girl is not so easily fooled and spinach has been a tricky vegetable to get her to accept. When she was around a year old, she loved spinach and cheese omelets but when she became a picky toddler, she stopped eating spinach altogether.  I’ve had some success with mixing spinach into spaghetti sauce and store bought spinach quiche (provided it’s slathered with ketchup). I’ve also had some major flops, most recently with a macaroni and cheese Florentine.  I definitely want to widen the spinach repertoire and find something that the Little Miss can feed herself.  One of my favorite spinach dishes as a kid was spinach pancakes so I decided to give them a go, especially since I had some sour cream left from a recent enchilada dinner. When my two year old saw the pancakes, she said, “Cookie!” I wasn’t about to correct her especially if it meant a difference between her trying the pancakes and not.  Thankfully she liked them and even exclaimed, “Is gooooood!” That’s like getting a Michelin Star! 

This recipe for Spinach Pancakes comes from a book called Natural Cooking the Finnish Way by Ulla Kakonen, published in 1974 by Quadrangle. 

Ingredients:
¾ - 1 lb spinach (I used a 10 oz. box of frozen spinach)

1 cup water (for cooking the spinach)

1 egg

1 ¾ cups unbleached white flour

1 cup sour cream

1 tsp sea salt

½ tsp raw sugar (I use regular granulated sugar)

2 tbs melted butter or oil plus additional for frying

·         Wash the spinach leaves, put into a saucepan and cover with water. Cover the pan, bring to a boil, and simmer about 5 minutes, or until the spinach is limp. Drain the spinach and reserve the liquid. Chop Spinach fine. (If using frozen spinach, put it in a microwave safe bowl, cover with damp paper towel and thaw in microwave, about 2 minutes. After 2 minutes, break apart with a fork and add about ½ cup water. Return to microwave for 3-4 more minutes to finish cooking. Drain spinach in a sieve, pressing to extract as much liquid as you can. Reserve 1 cup of the liquid. Puree spinach in a food processor/mini chopper, using some of the reserved spinach cooking water to help puree. I used about ½ a cup.)

·         Beat the egg lightly and add the spinach cooking liquid. (Note: if you are using frozen spinach you will have less liquid to add at this stage because some was used in the puree.)

·         Beat in the flour and sour cream in turns.

·         Add salt, sugar, and melted butter or oil.

·         Stir in spinach. The dough should be nicely green.

·         In a small-ring pancake pan or a crepe pan, fry rather thick pancakes on both sides, until crisp and brown. Keep warm until serving time. (I made smallish “silver dollar” pancakes using a rounded tablespoonful of the batter per pancake. Because it’s a thick batter you need to spread it out a bit after placing it on the pan. I got 26 pancakes out of this batter.)

·         Serve as a main course, with melted butter, and cranberry or lingonberry preserves. (This is a very Finnish thing and the tartness of the cranberries or lingonberries is a nice contrast to the mild flavor of the spinach. Of course you can also serve these as a side dish with a meat or other vegetarian main course. A couple of pancakes also make a great kid’s snack.)

Mac-n-Cheese Cakes

My daughter doesn’t need any trickery to get her to eat macaroni and cheese, but that’s no reason to not make her food a little more interesting and what’s more, her love of the stuff makes it an ideal vehicle for the goodness of hidden veggies.  Plus, the little munchkin is obsessed with cake, so anything that even remotely resembles cake should at least get one bite.  Considering she turns her nose up at most food I offer her without so much as a taste, one bite is a success.  Another bonus is these mac-n-cheese cakes make self feeding much cleaner than just straight up goopy, sticky macaroni and cheese.  For this recipe I used a boxed macaroni and cheese mix, but if you have a favorite from scratch recipe, then by all means use that and use whole grain pasta too.  These mac-n-cheese cakes have hidden lentils and carrots all wrapped up in one cute package. 

Ingredients:

• 1 box macaroni and cheese mix (plus any ingredients needed to make it)
• ½ cup red lentils
• 1 cup grated cheese of your choice
• 2-3 finely grated carrots

Optional:

• Cooking spray
• Bread crumbs

Procedure:

• Prepare the macaroni and cheese according to instructions. When cooking the pasta, add ½ cup red lentils to the pasta water at the same time as you add the pasta. The small elbow pasta I use takes 7-8 minutes to cook and this is just enough time for the lentils to cook. Time your lentil cooking accordingly depending on your pasta.  Red lentils are a perfect addition to macaroni and cheese as they don’t require any presoaking, cook quickly, and soften and disappear into the cheese mix. 
• As the pasta and lentils cook, grate carrots using a fine grater. The finer you grate them the more easily the carrots will disappear into the cheese mix.
• Place the grated carrots into a microwave safe bowl and add ¼ to 1/3 cups of the pasta water, enough to moisten but not so much that the carrots are swimming (1 or 2 ladlefuls). Cover bowl with a damp paper towel and microwave at 1 minute intervals 2 minutes or until soft. Stir the carrots during cooking to avoid drying them out. 
• When the macaroni and cheese is complete, mix in the softened carrots and 1 cup of shredded cheese.  The carrots will have some liquid in them but this small amount of moisture is OK. 
• Spoon the mixture into muffin tins, just shy of filling them. Lightly press down the mixture with the back of a spoon to pack it in and make it firm. If you have non-stick muffin tins you can use them as is, if not, spray them with cooking spray and coat with a thin layer of bread crumbs (of course you can do this with non-stick pans too for a little added texture).
• Bake at 375 for 20 minutes or until lightly browned on top and the cakes are firm to the touch (you don’t want them to fall apart after all that work).  If you use mini muffin tins, they will cook faster. You can also choose to make thinner patties by using less of the mix in each muffin cup and cooking them for a shorter time.  
• When your cakes are done, remove them carefully from the muffin tin and allow to cool a little and set up before serving. 

I may have mentioned before that my official little taste tester is not too keen on carrots so I braced myself for rejection at dinner time.  However, these little cakes were a success and she did indeed think she was eating cake. She didn’t even miss smearing cheese sauce all over her face.