Shopping in the Pantry Challenge #1

Condensed Cream of Chicken Soup

I wanted to make chicken and rice for the kids. Typically, besides the obvious, recipes call for some combination of the condensed Campbell's "Soup is good food" variety - cream of chicken, mushroom, or celery. I've tried the organic remakes of these kitchen staples with fairly unimpressive results. Seems there's nothing like the Campbell's for consistency and flavor. But I've stopped using Campbell's because at least two of those soups contain MSG. Such a betrayal. And probably, as it turns out, one of the ingredients, along with marinating in tin, that's responsible for the soup's unique flavor.

For fun, I decided to look online to see if I could find an alternate recipe. And I did. Here. This recipe calls for using onion and garlic powder, along with dried parsley and poultry seasoning. I used actual vegetables. As you can see:

I sautéed some garlic and onion. I also added a bit of salt and
some thyme because I didn't have poultry seasoning. Then I added a little chicken broth.

Then half a cup of milk.

Now here is where it gets tricky. The recipe calls for mixing 3/4 cup of flour with the remaining cup of milk. When you do that you get something resembling wall paper paste or paper-mâché and you might want to back out at this step. Remember you're making condensed soup, right? So go ahead and add that mixture to the onion, garlic milk/broth in the pan and whisk it like mad. It will soon have the same consistency as its canned counterpart. I tasted it at this point and it was really close. I think it could have used a bit more salt, garlic, onion, and thyme as well as some celery. I didn't use parsley either because I didn't have any dried or fresh, but that would have been good too.

Next. This is where the Shopping in the Pantry Challenge comes in. I added a can of organic cream of mushroom soup that's been sitting on the shelf for at least a year. I've used this in a casserole before and it's a bit watery and under-flavored which is what prompted me to want to make a decent homemade alternative. I mixed in this soup and then I pureed it for about five minutes because I wanted to eliminate any trace of vegetable or herb matter that might make the kids freak out and reject the real object of the experiment: the chicken and rice casserole.

Once this was made, it took like fifteen minutes, I made the chicken and rice from this recipe which originally came from cook's recipes, but I can't find the exact link anymore. Seems it's disappeared into some wormhole. Good luck trying to find it. Luckily I emailed it to myself.

Cook 1/4 cup chopped onion in 1 tablespoon butter until
tender. In 1 1/2 quart casserole dish, mix onion, 1 3/4 cup
chicken broth, 1/2 cup chicken, 1 cup shredded cheese and
1/2 cup uncooked rice. Cover. Bake at 375 degrees for 1
hour. Serves 4.

I didn't put the onion in it. Just the chicken, rice, cheese and some chicken broth (not enough as it turned out) and baked it for an hour. The kids initially balked at eating it, but relented and even admitted to liking it. The great thing is that it leaves them open to trying other mixtures of rice and chicken like curry and arroz con pollo. Here's to expanding their palates one meal at a time.

Oozy and Crunchy Eyeballs

I will be making these for my son's 3rd grade Halloween Party on Friday. Will he eat any of them? No. He will not.

Fried Chicken

I love roasted chicken. My husband is not so fond of it. Last night when he asked what was for dinner and I said chicken, he looked kind of beaten down when he asked "roasted chicken?" "Well. I have to cook the chicken," was all I could think to say because I have been awakened by little Marshall every hour on the hour past midnight for the past two weeks and my snappy comebacks are more snappy that comeback-y I guess you could say.

But I thought about it. I flipped through my big notebook of recipes. When it fell open to the page with the fried chicken recipe I thought to myself I just can't go there. I can't go to the dark side. You know the greasy, fat-fried dark side. The reason being that I love fried chicken and I will not stop eating it once I start. This could go wrong in any number of ways that mostly will affect my health, but anyway. I grew up eating fried chicken every Sunday with mashed potatoes and gravy and salty over-cooked green beans or salty-overcooked southern greens or salty over-cooked canned corn or salty-over cooked slightly peppered canned peas (except in summer when food was fresh from the garden), and combination salad. Combination salad deserves its own post, but for those of you who aren't familiar with it - combination salad is chopped up iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, cucumber or a few tomatoes maybe but not always, sluiced in salad dressing made from two primary ingredients - Kraft salad dressing (not mayonnaise, rather a mayonnaise-like substance) and sugar. Sugar. Oh, and iced tea - Nestea and lemon and Sugar. Sugar. God I miss my grandmother's iced tea.

So I made the fried chicken using this recipe. It was the first time the kids ever had southern fried chicken and they were skeptical. I told them: "It's like katsu chicken. Really. Sort of. Except for the bones and the lack of flatness and the light panko breading." Olivia picked the breading off. Carter ate a little of both. Then they both devoured an entire breast. Because the secret is that the inside is oh so moist and tender from all that flash fat frying, eh? And not so greasy.

Note: I did not season the flour with paprika or thyme or dried mustard like the recipe called for. I did, however, use the full 1 tablespoon of salt and pepper and a sprinkling of cayenne (the kids don't do spicy so well). It was flavorful, but a little too hard-shell. I prefer the coating to be delicately crispy and light which may be as much about my technique as about the recipe itself . The thing I like about it is that you finish it in the oven, which also helps keep it tender and moist. I also liked frying it in my big iron skillet just like grandma used to.

Now I've crossed the threshold. Fried chicken is back on the menu chez nous. I'll be experimenting with various techniques and ingredients - namely butter milk marinades and such. It's all in the name of expanding the kids' food horizons. Sure.