A Tale of Two Pies, Pt.1: A Chicken in Every Pot Pie

Look at that picture.     LOOK AT IT.  Don’t you want to eat that?   Yeah, so did we.  Lousy food photographers over at Southern Living.

Too often chicken pot pies are just a weird chicken soup with a bit of puff pastry plastered on top.  In our mind, a proper pot pie should be encased in delicious crust. The crust is the thing, wherein we’ll catch the conscious of the chicken.



This is a very ready-made type recipe.  We aren’t above it, here at Chez Venza.  Frozen peas. Pre-cut matchstick carrots.  Frozen hash browns.  Pre-sliced mushrooms.  Pre-mixed Cajun seasoning.  Pre-made pie crust.  And the cruelest bit… a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken.  We could have done all of this on our own.   But we didn’t.  Still delicious.  So delicious.  



We did, however, make our own sauce.  This is a simple roux of butter, flour, homemade chicken stock, and creole seasoning.



In a dutch oven, sauteing onions and mushrooms.



Then we add the carrots, frozen peas, frozen hashbrowns, rotisserie chicken, fresh parsley, and the sauce we made earlier.



Using a seasoned cast-iron skillet and a pre-made pastry crust, we fill the pie.  Pre-made pastry crust is easy and tasty, but it's designed for a slightly smaller vessel (i.e. a pie pan).  As a result, the bottom layer felt a little thin.  In any case, we added a top layer of crust and then baked it.



Looks just as good as the Southern Living version, right?  The crust…brown and crusty.  The filling…thick and flavorful.  A slice of this pie, with a little hot sauce on top (although my wife doesn’t think that’s necessary) and you are in heaven!

C3: Birthment Day

Ah another birthday has rolled around at Chez Venza.  We each have our favorite flavors around here.  I always ask for lemon… she gets a bit more adventurous.  This year the birthday request was coconut cream cake.  Now, it’s not so much fun when she knows what I’m going to make…. so I made coconut cream cupcakes (herein “C3”). 

I started with a good old reliable America’s Test Kitchen recipe for coconut cream cake.   Then, after a little internet research, I discovered that any cake can become a cupcake!  You just alter the baking time a bit. 

Here are all the ingredients.  These ATK suckers seem to follow a reliable formula; when they pick a flavor… they really try to get as much of it in there as possible.  So, in this case, we have cream of coconut, (imitation) coconut extract, and sweetened coconut flakes.  Whats a matter, they couldn’t figure out a way to work in coconut milk?  Or coconut water?  Sheesh! 

A note on coconut extract:  despite going to our local fancy pants spice store…no go on finding the real stuff.  We had to settle for imitation.  I still have yet to see real coconut extract in a store.

 

Here’s a great opportunity to use some frozen egg white, as this recipe calls for 9 of them.  We just happened to have a container with 9!  Unfortunately, I had to separate them into 4 and 5.  This was impossible to do accurately.

 

Cream of coconut… outside of a pina colada?  Crazy!  It’s sticky, nasty stuff, but it tastes good and puts a ton of coconut flavor into the whole mess.

Lots of butter in the recipe.  Maybe a pound total.  Here a stick gets added bit by bit to the dry ingredients.

Batter goes into the cups… and into the oven.  I used a cupcake recipe cooking time and temp… bake 20-25 minutes.  At 20, they still looked really pale so I let them go longer.  Bit of a mistake; they dried out a little.  I should have tooth-picked them right away!

Now this is a weird step:  the first step in making the buttercream frosting is to double-boil the whites, cream of coconut, and extract until they are 160 deg.  Very odd.  I should have read ahead!

Then, into the mixer….for more butter!

The icing is the best part of this recipe!  Especially when you overcook the cakes a bit.

A cheap pastry tip and a ziplock bag = piping bag extraordinaire!

The icing is delicately applied to the cupcakes…. only so I can smash them into coconut.  Brilliant!

Speaking of coconut, as we were…  I toasted it in the oven.  This stuff is delicious on its own.  So good in cereal and in other things.

Behold!  C3!  And the best part is, she never saw it coming when I broke the cupcakes out of the trunk of our car after a concert.  Birthday surprise achieved!!!

Finger-Licken’ Fried Chicken

 

Or “Why did the Chicken Cross the Road?  To get to the other Fried”

Or “The Tricky to get batter to Sticky to some Chicky without it being Icky.”

Or “How to Better Batter A Bird”

Or “Easy chicken? I Fry Foul!”

Here’s a deep dark kitchen secret: fried chicken tastes awesome.  It is a dish, that once we got the knack of making, we’ve come back to again and again to tinker and improvise.

My first attempts to fry chicken were inspired by the way my mom made it: pan-frying.  I was also inspired by an episode of Good Eats where Alton soaks his chicken in buttermilk overnight, seasons it, coats it in flour, and pan fries it in shortening.  He made it look so easy.

Two times in a row we tried it.   Results: pretty on the outside and red on the inside.  Not good eats, my friend.  Managing the oil heat on the fly in a cast iron skillet apparently takes more skill than I possess.

But then, thanks to Ina Garten, I discovered the perfect, no-fail technique for frying chicken.  Now that recipe is titled “Oven Fried Chicken,” but be assured… a big vat of oil is involved.

A little sneak peak.

The night before, mixing buttermilk, Tony Chachere seasoning, and some Louisiana Hot Sauce to soak the chicken in.

When mixing a small amount of dry ingredients into a large amount of liquid, its really effective to add a small amount of the liquid first, stir until you have a thick paste or slurry and then add the rest of the liquid.  This is so effective I sometimes use this method to add sugar to my coffee so I don’t find a bunch of it sitting at the bottom.

The next day, ready to bread and fry.  Those are two baking sheets with parchment paper (for easy cleanup) and racks.  In the bowl is one 6 lb bird, cut into 10 pieces.  I do NOT suggest buying so large a chicken.  If you buy smaller chickens, you’re able to eat more pieces!

A container with flour, salt, and pepper.  I put one piece in at a time and shake till coated.  Then after I’ve coated all pieces, I go back and do it again.  The bits of buttermilk that clump in the flour will stick to the chicken and create the awesome “shaggy” fry coating that’s so great on some fried chicken.

So…. here’s a jar of bacon grease that I have collected and strained throughout the year.  Also, we have some lard leftover from another recipe.  I know I’m losing some of you at this point, but I jazzed up the canola oil I was frying in with these southern favorites.  Completely optional.

With the oven preheated to 350, the chicken gets fried in batches – 3 minutes on each side.  I added a little too much oil to the pot leading to more of a “deep-fry” than a “pan-fry.”  Also, the lard-bacon grease-canola oil mixture foamed in a way that pure canola oil never has.  No worries!

Doesn’t the chicken on the right look awesome?  But I assure you, it is raw inside. Here is the magic bit: Now it goes into a 350 oven for 30 minutes.  This has several advantages:

1.  You know the chicken will be cooked through.

2. It minimizes the time you have to spend babysitting the frying stage.

3.  The outside will continue to darken and get crispier in the oven.

4.  The oil from the fry stage will drip off the chicken and onto the parchment paper. 

5.  Since there is no risk of overcooking the chicken in the oil, the chicken will not take on much additional fat.

6.  The 30 minutes that your chicken spends in the oven gives you time to clean up a bit and make yourself a bit more presentable before your guests arrive.

I could probably go on.  The long and short of it is this: you get to have homemade fried chicken.

A 6 lb chicken yields some mega pieces! That’s only half of the chicken! Check out how shaggy the pieces are.  The parchment paper got a little singed as it was too close to the burner… nothing to do with baking it.

A little fried chicken, roasted broccoli, red quinoa pesto salad and some champagne.  Why the hell not!

Getting our Ravioli Roll On.

So we here at Chez Venza have a secret list of dishes that we want to tackle someday.  Every now and again, we’ll see something on TV, a magazine, or a restaurant and think “hey, it looks tough, but let’s take a crack at it down the road.”  Ravioli was probably one of the first dishes on that list.
A couple of years ago, when we were far less adventurous, my wife got us a class on pasta making at a local cooking school.  We got to handle the dough and learn to operate one of THESE.  Now, I’d seen a pasta roller before, but it just looked like it would be much harder to use that it looked.  Well, after a few rounds of supervised practice, it's basically easy as pie (actually much easier than pie.)  We picked up a pasta roller for about $20 and started making noodles.



Ravioli still were kind of daunting.  I mean, you have to individually make each little pocket!  After re-watching the Good Eats episode on making them, however, we decided to take a crack at it.

The first step has to be picking out what kind of filling you want.  The choices are vast, so this is actually harder than it seems.  We wanted to keep it simple, and based on a potential guest, vegetarian.  So we opted for a simple Spinach-Ricotta filling.  This is very similar to a spinach lasagna filling we’ve made before – quite delicious.



Unlike recipes for noodles we’ve used in the past that called for fancy semolina flour, all the recipes seemed to suggest that all-purpose flour was preferred for stuffed pastas.  Here the flour and salt get a quick mix with the dough blade before the egg, water, and olive oil get added. 
There’s our dog Seamus in the background.  Say hi to Seamus!



After the food processor…. the dough is not much to look at.  I confess I despaired at this point.  After an hour in the fridge, it looked more like a real dough.



Starting on the biggest setting (i.e. the thickest output), we run the dough through the pasta roller a few times until it’s in a uniform shape.  Then, we start incrementally decreasing the thickness.  We took it down to level 2… we’ll go down to level 1 next time, as we thought it was still a bit thick.





Holy Sheet!



The filling gets dolled out in 1 tablespoon increments.  These suckers can’t hold much filling… you also have to be careful to leave enough room to seal them with egg wash.



It’s important to push out as much air as you can and make sure the filling is tightly sealed so it doesn’t come out in the pasta pot. 



A few minutes in boiling water, some homemade sun-dried tomato pesto, some crusty bread, and some sausage (the vegetarian couldn’t make it), and you’re in ravioli heaven.  All and all, it IS much easier than it looks, especially when you have teamwork on your side.  Go Team Venza!

We’re Poppycock for Poppy seeds!

 

Poppy seeds are a strange little ingredient, but they lead to some delightful concoctions.  I’m not sure that they necessarily lend flavor as much as a visual component.  They are awfully cute. 

We were at our neighborhood Penzey’s store (which recently opened in Austin), and I spotted a jar of poppy seeds.  I had been wanting to try out a poppy seed cookie recipe for awhile, but never got around to it.  Then I started thinking that I could also make lemon poppy seed muffins for breakfast.  I was getting pretty excited at this point.

We made the cookie dough on Saturday night.  We only made a half-recipe, and we STILL ended up using the entire jar of poppy seeds.  OH NO!  I already had my heart set on making muffins for breakfast the next day, so of COURSE, we had to go BACK to the grocery store and get more poppy seeds.  The insanity begins…

Our first mistake was buying such a tiny jar of poppy seeds.  Que lastima!

The first step in cookiedom is butter and sugar.  Have you ever eaten just butter and sugar?  Uhhhh, I mean, I never have…of course not….but it sounds like it could possibly be good, right?  We also added vanilla extract and one egg to this mixture (but was it enough?!)

The dry ingredients are flour, 1/4 cup finely chopped almonds, and poppy seeds.  The almonds add nice flavor to the cookie.  I thought about adding almond extract, but I didn’t want to overdo it. 

The flour mixture gets added to the butter mixture until it forms a dough.  Then we put it on wax paper and formed it into a log.  I twisted the ends to make it look like a giant tootsie roll!

Now’s the part where we decided to get a little funky with it.  The original recipe says to roll the cookie dough in colored sugar.  Well, we didn’t have colored sugar, so we decided to use sprinkles instead.  It seemed like a good idea, except that sprinkles are remarkably similar in texture to poppy seeds.  But look how fun it is!

A more juvenile blog would say this looks like unicorn poop.  Thankfully, this is not that blog.  (eww, she’s touching it.)

The dough needs to be chilled in the fridge for a couple of hours so that it is easier to slice into cookies.  They bake for about 12 minutes in the oven. 

We served the cookies with Haagen-Dazs’s Five-ingredient Lemon Ice Cream.  We don’t ever buy premium ice creams like Haagen-Dazs because we’d rather just make our own.  But we hadn’t really planned ahead at this point, so we just grabbed some at the store.  We were blown away by this ice cream by the way.  Wow, it’s amazing!  It goes really well with these cookies, too.

* * * * * (this is a poppy seed page break) * * * *   [the asterisks represent poppy seeds]

 

Lemon Poppyseed Muffins

So I’ve already mentioned that we went back to the store to get more supplies for the muffins.

With all this cooking…. we kind of go to the store a lot. 

Turns out, plain, full-fat yogurt is the secret ingredient.  How come plain, full-fat yogurt is so hard to buy at the grocery store?  It’s so rare that you find a single 8 oz  container.  It always comes in 32 oz.  Dang it.  Das a lot of yogurt.

We made a deliciously tart lemon glaze for the muffins.  Mmmmm….so tangy…

A perfectly lazy Sunday morning, eating muffins and reading the paper. 

Look at them seeds!  Let’s hope neither of us have to take a drug test in the near future…according to Mythbusters, we would totally get nailed after this past weekend!