Pier 36

I’ve been trying to use up the odd cans of stuff in the cupboard. And the one-third-full condiments in the fridge. And the half bags of pasta, the bags of rice with half a cup left, etc. It’s Use What’s In The Cupboard/In The Fridge/Already Open Week.

I made the chowder featured on this hominy can with a few modifications. I didn’t have any ham, but I did have a few slices of bacon. So I started off by chopping and cooking the bacon (after trimming off as much fat as I could), and then used the bacon fat to saute the rest of the veggies and potatoes. I followed the rest of the recipe pretty closely, except for one thing. The liquid in the hominy can tasted like chemical brine, so I drained and rinsed the hominy and added a little water instead.

Oh, and I added some frozen cooked corn (the rest of a bag in the freezer) to brighten the soup up a bit. And also to use up the rest of the bag.

I served it with fresh home-made bread and salad with delicious pickled beets from the Farmers Market.

Tasty! And now there’s one less can in the cupboard.

Over the holiday weekend I cooked with cranberries and mushrooms. I made this decadent baked pasta dish from Citymama (whose divine food blog I have really been enjoying lately). And yeah, I also made more enchiladas. But this is a new variation: chicken mole enchilada casserole. (Although this will make you think all we eat is stuff Trader Joe’s sells in jars. Not true!)

I sauteed a package of chicken tenders, an onion, and a bell pepper separately, chopped up the chicken and mixed it all together with about a cup of cooked corn.

In a saucepan, I heated a jar of TJ’s red mole sauce with about half a cup of water and half a cup of milk for creaminess. The stuff is thick and the instructions on the jar recommend cutting it with chicken stock, but I don’t think it needs any more salt.

Then I steamed a dozen corn tortillas so they were nice and soft and cut the whole stack into quarters. I lined a 9×13 pan with tortilla quarters, covered them with half the chicken-veggie mix, then covered that with a third of the sauce. Another layer of tortillas, another layer of chicken and veg, another third of the sauce. Then a final layer of tortillas and the rest of the sauce.

To make sure the tortillas would be nice and moist, I added a little water, maybe a quarter to a half a cup, down the sides of the pan. I really didn’t want this thing to dry out. I topped it with cheese, covered it with foil and put it in a 350-degree oven for 30 minutes.

The results were fantastic. Seriously great. Moist and tender and yummy.

I made enchiladas last night. Enchiladas are easy and cheap to make. You just need corn tortillas (I got 50 tortillas for $1.25 at Safeway!), some sort of filling, sauce and cheese. The filling can be meat, sauteed veggies, cheese, tofu, leftover Thanksgiving turkey, whatever. Roll the filling in tortillas, cover with sauce and cheese, and bake. You can make a whole pan of them or just one or two on a plate. Last night I mixed some cooked shredded chicken with onions I sauteed with oregano and cumin seeds, because I like ‘em that way.

After we invited friends over, I realized that I didn’t have quite enough enchilada sauce to make two pans of enchiladas, so I improvised using an idea I read somewhere. I had a jar of green salsa, so I blended that with about half a cup of sour cream and a little milk to thin it (how much milk you need depends on the thickness of the salsa). I think it was actually better than the Trader Joe’s red enchilada sauce I used on the other pan.

Next time I make chicken enchiladas, I think I’ll cook the chicken in the crock pot. The chicken was a little too dry by the time the enchiladas came out of the oven last night.

Tuesday night dinner:
Chicken International (aka Chicken Country Captain)
quinoa
green beans

I have been on a crock pot spree for about three years now. Chicken Country Captain is one of my favorite things to cook in the crock. It’s a whole, cut-up chicken dusted in flour and curry powder and cooked with onion, garlic, bell pepper, tomato and raisins. I like the sweet-savory combo. After eight hours, the chicken kind of dissolves into a pile of tender meat and bones, so it’s really a stew. But that’s not uncommon with crock pot fare.

But the crock pot really should be restricted to cooking things when you aren’t home to do it yourself. It really is delightful to come home from work to a house that smells like dinner, knowing that all you have to do is cook up some rice or make a salad and voila! Dinner is served. But that enchanting dinner smell loses its charm if you are there the whole time dinner is cooking. You end up smelling like Chicken Country Captain yourself. You might go to pick up a loved one at work and have him say, “I smell dinner” when he gets into the car. And then you have to wash everything you wore that day because even though dinner was delicious, no one wants to smell like Country Captain for a week.

Sometimes really simple things can seem euphorically good.

Take tonight’s dinner. I cooked a package of chicken breast tenders and then dumped in a jar of Trader Joe’s red mole sauce. Mole is something Dave and I both love passionately, but would be hard-pressed to make from scratch, sort of like Ethiopian food — maybe I’d do it once out of curiosity, but it will always be easier and more economical (and probably better) to buy the stuff in a jar (or an Ethiopian restaurant) than to slave away at home.

I also had a bag of baby zucchinis and squash I bought yesterday at the farmers market. I sauteed those tender little vegetables in olive oil with some garlic and a generous amount of dried oregano and salt.

I texted Dave and asked him to pick up some fresh corn tortillas on the way home from his afternoon outing. We made tacos with chicken, a little bit of sour cream and fresh cilantro. And that was it: a simple, delicious, fairly low-effort meal. It was awesome.

The season of black-eyed peas approaches. The “season” really is just New Year’s Day, when I cook up a huge pot of beans with turkey ham and we eat them with collard or turnip greens, cornbread, and sometimes mashed potatoes. It’s a southern thing, and I learned the very complicated (NOT) recipe from Dave’s mom.

Every other year or so we make a party of it, and invite everyone to roll on over whenever they wake up from the previous night’s reveling. What this really means is that instead of partying on New Year’s Eve, I’m soaking dried beans and cutting up potatoes and pre-measuring cornbread ingredients. I’m not complaining.

Last year I bought a lot of canned black-eyed peas for some reason — maybe as backup in case my vegetarian recipe turned out badly? But they’re still in my cabinet. I’ve been in a let’s-use-up-the-stuff-we-have phase this week, so I pulled out two cans of peas and a can of tomatoes on Friday night, determined to use them for dinner.

I sauteed an onion, some celery and some garlic for a few minutes, then added the drained beans, tomatoes with liquid, a dash of cayenne, and a little bit of chicken stock. Cooked that for a while as I mashed some potatoes using the rest of the can of stock.

I seasoned with salt, brown sugar, a little bit of worcestershire sauce and vinegar. It turned out pretty well.

So now I only have something like six cans to go.

Canned chicken-noodle soup is much improved by a squeeze of fresh lime juice.

Last night’s dinner:
Roast chicken
Creamy polenta with mushrooms
Steamed broccoli
Tuscan Moon sangiovese ($5 at Trader Joe’s and worth every penny!)

It’s so easy to roast a chicken, every time I do it I wonder why we don’t do it more often. Rinse a smallish (~4-5 lb.) chicken and pat dry. Sprinkle generously with salt. Put in some sort of pan, breast side up — for this, I use a sturdy sheet pan. Brush the breast and legs with a couple of tablespoons of melted butter. I stuck a lemon in the bird’s nether cavity for a little lemony flavor, since my parents just visited and brought a load of lemons from their sunny southern home.

Roast at 400 degrees for about an hour until the meat thermometer reads 170-180 degrees F, depending on how tender you want it. If you use a shallow pan, the skin gets nice and browned and crispy.

The polenta was also super simple. I pureed one of those solid polenta logs in the food processor with a cup of milk to make it creamy. Sauteed a packace of sliced mushrooms. Mixed them together and heated for a few minutes on the stove.

Active time for this meal was less than 20 minutes. However, every time I roast a chicken I am reminded after dinner why I don’t do it more often: we don’t have a dishwasher. Cleaning up the roasted-on skin and fat and goop from the cooking pans takes a while.

But it’s sooooo good! Even when your olfactory senses are about 75% impaired by The Cold That Won’t Go Away.

To celebrate the faint, intermittent return of my sense of taste and smell after being sick all week, I made a quesadilla for lunch. I wasn’t sure what surprises the fridge held, but we had chicken, cheese, whole-wheat tortillas and some heirloom tomatoes. Perfect.

I haven’t been cooking dinner much, but I have been canning like there’s no tomorrow. Because god knows when I might find myself in sudden, dire need of some homemade mango chutney!