Chicken & dumplings

At my friend Marion's request, here's my absolutely bitchin' recipe for chicken and dumplings. Well, not so much my recipe as Southern Living's, published in their 1981 Annual Recipes (yeah, I'm old). I could have taken a picture of this last night, since that's what we had for dinner, but I didn't. Next time. (Rich will be so disappointed to hear I need to make this again to take a picture. It might be his very favorite thing I cook. Honestly, it may be mine, too.)

Old Fashioned Chicken and Dumplings

Ingredients:

     3 cups all purpose flour
     1 tablespoon baking powder
     1 teaspoon salt
     1 cup chicken broth
     1/4 cup vegetable oil

     3–4 quarts chicken broth

     Cooked chicken, shredded

To cook:

Combine the flour, baking powder and salt. Add the chicken broth and vegetable oil; stir until the dry ingredients are moistened. Turn out onto a large, generously floured surface. Roll the dough to 1/16" thickness. Using a pizza cutter if you have one, or a knife if you don't, cut the dough into 5- x 1-inch strips.

Bring the broth to a full boil. Drop in the dumplings, one at a time. Cover, lower the heat so it won't boil over, and cook for 15 minutes. Stir in the chicken. Add salt and pepper to taste. Continue cooking, uncovered, until desired thickness is reached.

A few notes:

You really ought to use some of the broth to cook the chicken. Just add that broth to the pot with the rest of it after the chicken is done. I normally use a pressure cooker, but you can also stew or simmer it—your choice. I use 5 or 6 boneless, skinless thighs, but you can use whatever pieces you have handy and thawed. You just want to end up with a few cups (or whatever amount you like) of cooked chicken. I'd advise against adding vegetables when you cook the chicken, because it muddies up the flavors pretty quickly, but that's just my personal preference. And using the b/s thighs, I scrape off the visible fat first. After it's done, tear or shred into bite-size pieces (it's not as good if it's cubed).

I use a pastry cloth, i.e., a piece of canvas from my local fabric shop, to roll out the dough. You can also use a plastic or silicon sheet, or just a clean countertop, generously floured. Wherever you do it, make sure you've got a large area. Seriously, it takes a good-sized piece of counter real estate, maybe 2-1/2 feet square. And, yes, really, 1/16". The dumplings swell up as they cook, so if you start with them any thicker than that, you're going to end up with slabs. I like to take the dumplings off the pastry cloth after they're cut and layer them on a plate, sprinkling them frequently with flour so they won't stick together too much. That speeds up the process of dropping them in the boiling broth quite a bit.

If your schedule calls for it, or if you just prefer, after you mix the chicken in you can transfer the whole shebang to a slow cooker. Cook it on 'Low' until you're ready to eat. And, slow cooker or not, if it looks like it's not going to thicken up enough, mix a tablespoon or so of flour with cool broth or water, stir it in, and cook for a few more minutes.

This recipe is not only great comfort food, it's also perfectly suitable for delicate stomachs. No spices, nothing hard to digest…I used it to get over a case of Delhi Belly after returning from India, and fed it to Rich as he recovered from a terrible case of food poisoning a few years ago. An all-around good recipe to keep handy.

I think I'll go have some leftovers for lunch. Bon appetit, Marion!

Espresso, or why my kitchen looks that way

This is like mine. You can buy this one for $17 on eBay

About a hundred years ago, I was given an espresso machine. It was a little Krups home espresso maker. Back in those days, it was considered a nice enough home machine. I had just discovered cappuccino—in Milan, thank you very much—and was thrilled at being able to have it whenever I wanted (this was before Starbucks). But as so often happens with specialized kitchen equipment, it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, and the machine was hard to clean, to boot. So I stuck it up in a cabinet and forgot about it.

Fast forward twenty years or so. I've recently discovered that the only thing better than coffee made with Starbucks coffee beans, freshly ground right beforehand, and brewed in a best-in-the-world Technivorm coffee maker is a cup of coffee from Starbucks with a shot or two of espresso in it.* The espresso turns the coffee into a whole new experience—bolder but smoother than coffee alone. I know! You'd think very concentrated coffee added to strong coffee would equal something like battery acid, but it's just the opposite.

So for some months now, far too often, I've been going to Starbucks for coffee with espresso in it instead of just making coffee at home**.

Then I finally remembered that little Krups machine. Without fussing with the steamed milk (which was what made cleanup so hard), it might be worth hauling it out and using it. After some effort and a few delays (which is a whole 'nother long story), I now have a little Krups espresso machine on the kitchen counter beside the Technivorm, fully equipped and ready to work.

I've used it four days now. And I'm learning:

• If you use the same beans for espresso that you use for coffee (and grind them the same) espresso can be bland. (Day 1)
• It's impossible to get coffee from the grinder to the Krups machine's filter basket without spilling it all over the counter. (Day 1)
• If you leave the grounds in the filter holder to cool off and forget about them 'til late in the day they solidify into concrete and become a more-or-less permanent part of the filter basket. (Day 1)
• Just using more of those same beans you use for coffee doesn't help with the blandness. (Day 2)
• If you try to empty the filter holder as soon as you make the espresso, before the grounds harden, the filter holder is going to be hot. All parts of it. Very hot. (Day 2)
• If you buy Espresso Roast at Starbucks and get them to grind it, you can fix both the blandness and spilled ground problems. (Day 3)
• If you flip that little plastic piece on the filter holder closed, it keeps the filter basket in place, so you can empty it while the grounds are hot. (Day 3)
• Still, you'd better be careful to not touch the metal parts. (Day 3)
• Unscrewing the lid of the water reservoir doesn't relieve all the pressure in the machine, even if it's completely finished brewing and you think it does. (Day 4)
• Releasing the filter holder while there's still pressure behind it causes a coffee ground explosion. Literally. It blows coffee grounds everywhere—all over the carafe, the drip tray, the surrounding counter in all directions, the top of the machine and, most significantly, back up into the machine where only a toothpick and bitter, bitter tears will even begin to budge them. (Day 4)

Yeah. At this point, 75¢ a shot is looking like a pretty smart investment.

*For my taste, a short (8 oz) cup needs one shot, i.e., a "Red Eye." A tall (12 oz) cup needs two shots (a "Black Eye"). I don't know what they call three or more shots. I'm guessing "Never close your Eyes again."

**I do have to point out that I just get brewed coffee which, at this writing, is $1.65 for a tall when you bring your own cup. I don't actually spend $5 on coffee, though adding shots does start pushing it in that direction.

Chihuly, first visit

My sister Linda and her husband Al made a quick trick up from San Antonio this week to go to the Chihuly exhibit at the Dallas Arboretum. We all four schlepped over there (it's a 53 minute drive from our house). It's really spectacular! Well, the Chihuly pieces are amazing, but the Arboretum itself is well worth the drive.

I've seen some pretty great gardens, from Bellingrath on the Alabama Gulf coast to Buchart on Vancouver Island, the Borromeo Palace garden on Isola Bella in northern Italy (where the bamboo had its own gardener) to Fragrant Hills Park and Beihai Park in Beijing.

The Arboretum has lovely formal areas, but is so very appealing because (besides being on the same continent, conveniently reachable by car) it has all these quiet tucked-away spots where I could easily see myself sitting and reading, or sitting and chatting, or just sitting for a while. And a lot of those spots are beside White Rock Lake or near charming water features that include little water falls or things that look like springs or creeks. And I do love me a spring or creek!

The Chihuly show was scheduled to end next week, but is so popular it's been extended through the end of the year. Our good friend Pat is coming up next weekend to go, so I'll be visiting it again. If you're in the area, you should too!

That's the "Dallas Star" piece behind me. And that's me looking
surprised that blue spikes are coming out of my head.

The wisest hockey columnist

Most of the time I like Brandon Worley and others at Defending Big D, probably my favorite hockey blog. Good information and usually good opinions. (Sometimes their 'doom & gloom' outlook gets to me, or they'd be my unqualified favorites.)

Picture of Benn & Morrow for no particular reason
other than I can and the team can't.

I like Ian Hudson's take on the current NHL lockout. He's a professor of economics at the University of Manitoba, and his views are pretty sensible. (Gee, that's a shock, right?)

I like Jeff Gordon columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (or, actually, STLtoday.com). He distilled the issues between the NHL owners and players to its very essence, as far as I'm concerned.

But they could both be usurped by Gavin Bard, from the Heckler Spray blog ("Internet villainy & grown-up gossip since 2005") just because of this one quote:

Gary Bettman, the weaselly grim reaper of the National Hockey League, is quite possibly the worst human being in the world.

Yeah. You tell 'em, Gavin.

A quick note about two things

First, if you bought the most recent Groupon for Classic Cafe, it expires on Wednesday, so you need to get there in the next couple of days. Second, if you get there in the next couple of days and they're still getting okra from their garden, order the fried okra. Yeah, it's not something you'd expect them to have on their upscale menu, but it was incredible. I never thought of okra as being something that would be much better home-grown — I mean, it's not like tomatoes, right? —but it made an amazing difference. (Plus, of course, you probably have to know just exactly how to cook it, which is something Classic Cafe is very, very good at.)

This is going to be easier than I thought

Rich cleaned out some bookshelves over the weekend (oy, huge mess in the living room for a few hours). After going through the giant stack he pulled out, he came in and deposited a stack of those Sunset-type books—you know, the big, thin paperbacks that were always some kind of How To guide or basic reference books—on my desk. They were mostly about gardening (flower, bulb, vegetable) and houseplants, but there were a few about canning, pickling and the like. (Apparently we had some big plans in self-sufficiency when we first met, though it could also be that the books were just on sale. At the time, neither of us could much resist a marked-down book.)

One of them was 12 Months Harvest, an interesting book about—duh—preserving food. And making cheese, soap and bread (delicious together) as well as covering a few other Foxfire-type subjects. (It was published in the hippie-dippie 70s, so that might be rather shaping my impression of it.)

Since I've made a tiny little foray into the world of preserving food (boiled cider, aka apple molasses and freezer strawberry jam), I've kind of gotten the bug. I asked for and received a canning starter kit (I had to borrow from Rich's friend Ron to put up the boiled cider), so now I'm really ready to get going. And this is Autumn! It's harvest season. There should be lots of stuff to preserve!

Yeah. I'm still thinking about it.

There is one thing I'm definitely going to try, though. In that stack of books there was also a copy (a hard back copy) of Better Homes and Gardens Home Canning Cook Book. That one contains a recipe that solves a forty-year conundrum for me. When I was in high school (circa the dawn of time), my cousin Mike and his Massachusetts-born wife Kathy gave my parents a jar of cranberry jelly. This is not the same stuff you serve with turkey at Thanksgiving. It's actual jelly, made to spread on toast. It was delicious. I ate it every morning until it was gone. And there was no more.

Now, children, keep in mind this was long before the Innerwebs existed. All I could do in those primitive times was keep an eye out in the grocery store, and hope that my travels might one day take me through cranberry jelly country. Many years passed, and the IETF fellows put together the Internet thing. I used it to search for cranberry jelly. I found (and tried) jam, preserves, spreadable fruit…but nothing was ever exactly right.

Somehow it never occurred to me to look for a recipe for it. The Home Canning Cook Book has one. It's complicated and exotic, requiring many ingredients and painstakingly precise chemistry: You boil cranberry juice cocktail and sugar, add pectin and put it in jars. Whew!

So soon I'll once again have cranberry jelly on my toast. And someone will, no doubt, be getting some via the Homemade Christmas Gift Grab Bag. That makes the book mess all worthwhile, I guess. Who knows? Maybe I'll even try a little soap to go with it.

When I don't feel like cooking

Cooking dinner can be a challenge. Not that it's especially hard to do, most of the time—particularly for those of us with home offices, who can slip out to put the potatoes on or turn down the oven when we need to. It's the dailiness of the thing. Having to come up with something for your hungry household to eat every single, solitary night that comes along. If nothing else, it gets tedious.

Those of us with a few years' experience at it all have our go-to dishes and recipes for those nights when we really don't feel like cooking at all. Until now mine has been spaghetti and meat sauce. Like my mother used to make—McCormick's sauce mix and a pound of ground beef.

Just recently, though, I discovered that if I realize early enough in the day that I'm not going to feel like cooking, there's an even easier way around it. And it's really good, too.

(Adapted from WikiHow, How to Make Crockpot Chicken Tacos)

Slow Cooker Chicken Tacos

4–8 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
Chopped onion

1 packet taco seasoning mix
16 ounces (a medium-sized jar or 2 cups) chunky salsa

Tortillas
Toppings (shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, guacamole or sliced avocado, sour cream, shredded cheese, etc.)

Mix the taco mix with the salsa. (I use medium heat salsa, usually, because I'm not a complete wimp. Suit yourself and your own pain threshold.) Pour a little in the bottom of the slow cooker. Put the chicken and chopped onion on top of that. Pour the rest of the salsa combination over it.

Cook on high for about 4 hours or on low for about 6. When the chicken can be shredded easily with a fork, it's done. Remove the chicken and do that…shred with a fork. Return to slow cooker and mix with juices.

Serve wrapped in tortillas with whatever toppings you like. Pinto, refried or black beans, plus Spanish rice, round out the meal.

These tacos are so good, they remind me of my very first taste of Mexican food ever. It was 1966, I was nine, and we had just moved from Prichard, Alabama (okay, it's a suburb of Mobile, so not quite as Podunk Junction as it sounds) to San Antonio. We were living in an apartment (another first) while we looked for a house, and went to a drive-in Mexican place down the street. As I remember, my very first bite of my very first chicken taco tasted a lot like these. That taco made me a fan for life.

And these tacos make it very easy (in every sense of the word) to recall.