Sally’s Kitchen & Stuff

This is so simple it’d make your head spin. You can do this in a frying pan, but everything tastes better if you cook it in a wok. This makes 4 separates meals for 2. You will need 4 tupperware boxes, safe for the freezer.

Main Ingredients
12 Chicken breasts/thighs
(1 cup chicken broth
1 Can of baby corn minis
2 cups of mixed frozen vegetables, or mixture of:
    -Red bell peppers
    -broccoli
    -califlower
    -green beans) x4.

Marinating Ingredients
Teriyaki
    2 TBSP teriyaki marinade
    1 cup mirin*
    2 TSP sesame oil
Spicy Garlic
    2 TBSP chinese hot sauce with oil
    1/2 head of garlic, mashed and roughly minced
    2 TSP sesame/peanut oil
    1 TSP salt
    1/2 TSP pepper
Sweet BBQ
    Use Lee Kum Kee Chinese BBQ sauce. If not…
    1/2 cup water
    2 TBSP cornstarch
    1/4 cup brown sugar
    1 TBSP oyster sauce
    2 TBSP dark soya sauce
    whisk together and simmer on low heat until thick and sticky.
Sesame Chicken
    1/3 cup sesame seeds
    1/2 cup sesame oil (don’t worry, you won’t end up EATING all of it.)
    2 cloves of crushed and chopped garlic
    1 TSP salt
    1/2 TSP pepper

Instructions
Pour the marinating ingredients directly into separate tupperware containers, and mix well. Cut chicken into thin strips, and divide into 4 equal parts. Add to containers, and mix well with chopsticks. Leave in refrigerator for at least 4 hours, and then transfer to the freezer. It can stay there for up to 6 months.

When you feel like a stirfry, take it out of the freezer and let it thaw in the fridge overnight. Cook in a medium heat pan until cooked (depends on how thin you’ve cut the strips), and fish them out with a slotted spoon, leaving whatever sauce/browned bits are in the pan. Add the rest of the main ingredients except the broth. Toss for aprox 3 minutes (time enough for the pan to heat up again) and add broth. Keep tossing with a spatula, scraping up browned bits. Taste test on the brocoli - it’s the densest vegetable on the list - when the broccoli is dark green all over, cooked, and still crunchy, fish all the veggies out and toss with the chicken. Thicken the remaining sauce with cornstarch if desired.

Serves 2-3, each flavor, over rice. It’s a very versatile recipe, and makes a great meal in a pinch. You can use bagged frozen vetable mixes, and use water/wine instead of broth. This marinating while thawing trick also works on other meats - experiment!

This is modified from an old Jewish recipe. An ex-boss (who’s around 75 I believe) kept a recipe file from her grandmother, and I took a copy of it. I though it tasted a bit blend so I added more spices. You will need a roasting pan / baking sheet, a food processor or one of those handheld processors. Beware - the handheld one will take you ages.

Ingredients
1 1/2 lb chicken livers
1 whole onion
1 TBSP fine ground seasalt
1 TBSP garlic salt
1/2 TBSP pepper (ground fresh pepper works best)
1/2 TBSP paprika
EVOO

Instructions
Preheat oven to 400. Using kitchen scissors, cut fat and rough parts off the livers. Place evenly on a baking sheet and sprinkle with pepper and half the salt. Roast until tops are brown, approximately 30 minutes.

FINELY chop onions, and saute with EVOO. Cook until caramelized. Add the rest of the spices. Using a food processor, blend onions and livers together. If it’s too rough/dry, add a bit of EVOO. Blend until desired consistency. Scrape into mould and refrigerate.

Best served over plain Matsah bread.

Ok. So if you use my shepherd’s pie recipe, you’d have enough for 10. Maybe even more, if you use a bigger baking dish than the one I had. So what do you do with the extras? I used a package of frozen pastry, and made mini cornish pasties. It’s actually VERY simple.

Mash the shepherd’s pie until it’s just a heap of mixed meat and potatoes. Take a sheet of pastry and roll it out to 1.5 times its original size. Cut into 4 pieces, and put a scoop of shepherd’s pie in it. You can use an ice cream scoop. Flatten it, and fold the piece of pastry to a triangle. Seal with a dab of water (press to seal it - like playdoh.) and brush the top with melted butter, and stab a fork through the top for steam to escape. Repeat with as much shepherd’s pie as you have left. Bake in a 400 degree oven until top is golden brown, about 30 minutes. Let it cool on a wire rack for at least 10 minutes before serving.

You can wrap them individually after they’ve completely cooled and freeze them if you like, but pastry tastes best when they’re fresh. Reheating in the oven is ideal; microwaving them will cause the pastry to get soggy. These are so good you might even consider halving the shepherd’s pie recipe and make it into pastie filling instead - it’s a perfectly acceptable appertizer.

I’m feeling uninspired; I’m sure you’d be too if everything in your fridge is frozen and you haven’t had milk in it for days. What I need is a nice clean out of the freezer - I’m not even sure I know what’s in it anymore. Yikes.

I made seafood pasta last night. Stu had no idea what he was eating until halfway throught he meal. His comments were - "hmmm…it’s nice. There’s oysters in it…and mmm that tastes like olive oil…and woah it’s got quite a kick! What’s in it?"

"Well, there’s smoked oysters, bacon, chives, anchovies, cream, and a tin of halapino spiced sardines." - me

"Sardines?" - Stu

"Yup." - me

"I don’t eat sardines." - Stu

"No?" - me

"Well, it doesn’t taste like sardines. It tastes pretty good. Well, you’ve just found the strategy to make me eat stuff I don’t normally eat." - Stu

"Disfigure it?" - me

"Mince it." - Stu

There you go. Strategy for making kids eat spinach. Actually, I do have a good cold spinach with peanut sauce recipe. Tomorrow.

I just gained another good reason to like him. Yikes! Human perfection is not easily achieved, but I think he’s there. I’ve loved Futurama since the first season - it was like the Jetsons, on crack.

Stu always told me that the show is stupid, unoriginal, and steals from every genre imaginable. Let’s not forget that he watches Trailer Park Boys, shall we?

The quintessential Chinese dish. I remember being 19, moving into a rooming house. One of my house mates was an older man of about 50 or so with a daughter about my age. When I told him how old I was, he said, "you’re a daughter then!" Thereafter he always saved some steak for me if he was making some. One time we had so much leftover that we went to a supermarket together and picked up some side ingredients for a stirfry. He exclaimed, "this is the best stirfry I ever had!" I was so proud.

So what makes a good stirfry? It’s common sense, really. You need a wok, a wok spatula, peanut oil, and a gas stove. Granted, not everyone has these things, so in a pinch, you could use a nice big skillet, a nice wide spatula, and a electric stove. Peanut oil is essential to a good Chinese stirfry. You need something that would heat up to very high temperatures without burning. Olive oil is a no no, and butter is a no no no no no. Grape seed oil would work, in a pinch.

Chop your vegetables in a way that they would all cook at the same time. Carrots take longer to cook than say, mushrooms. So make sure your carrots are diced smaller than your mushrooms. Make sure you drain everything before a stirfry - any water clinging to food will 1) cool the oil down 2) splash the oil in your direction.

Make sure your oil is HOT before you put anything in. Hold on to one handle of the wok, and scoop up, turn, scoop up, turn. Make sure everything touch the oil at the bottom of the pan in turn. Toss and toss and toss. There shouldn’t exist a moment where the food is just SITTING at the bottom of the pan. If you did everything right, the stirfry process should take less than 5 minutes. Don’t forget the soy sauce.

On the way to work, there was this boxer that kept sticking its head out of the window. I guess it never knew it was providing much entertainment for Stu and I as we giggled at it going from one side of the car to another, being the proverbial "dog sticking head out of window".

That paragraph looked whacked. Ah well. You can’t always be brilliant.

The wonderful life of working in an office; I had photocopier training today. It was a state of the art Canon machine, with all the bells and whistles. Mmmm. Rep from Canon was very nice. She had a few quirks, one of which was saying "mmm kay" after every sentence. Ever seen "office space"? It was like that. I mean, really, after every sentence. It was very distracting.

You should use a glass / ceramic baking dish for this, but you could get away with using a roasting pan. I do that a lot. You will also need a large skillet for cooking the ground meats in.

Ingredients - serves 8 as a main dish
2 lbs ground beef
1 lb ground lamb
1 TBSP garlic salt
1 TBSP Italian style breadcrumbs
1 TSP fresh ground black pepper
1 TSP paprika
1 red onion - chopped
1 head of garlic (yes you do need this much), roughly minced
2 cups sliced mushrooms
1/2 tin of beef gravy (you can use gravy mix and water)
2 cups mashed potatoes (leftovers work best - with butter)
1 cup sliced baby carrots
1 cup frozen peas
EVO, Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions
In a large bowl, mix beef and lamb together by hand. Add garlic salt, breadcrumbs, pepper, paprika, and mix in well using fingers. Set aside. Preheat oven to 400.

Saute onions with a bit of salt in some EVO; add carrots, peas, garlic and mushrooms when they start to caramalize. Cook until carrots are cooked through. Using a slotted spoon, lift mixture out and set aside, leaving a bit of oil on the pan. Cook the ground meat until no longer pink, add the onion and mushroom mix back in and toss with beef gravy. Reduce until mixture is thick and sticks together - add a little flour if necessary.

Pack the mixture into the bottom of the bakin dish, sprinkle with remaining garlic. Cover with mashed potatoes, and slide into the oven. Bake until potatoes are starting to brown, about 25 minutes, depending on how moist the top layer is. Let it sit in its juices for at least 15 minutes at room temperate before cutting into it.

If you’re not picky about the meat sticking together, you can use more gravy, and use all of the pan sauce without reducing. It actually makes a much juicier, moise shepherd’s pie, but the pie will not hold its shape for very long; it’ll most likely fall right apart the moment it hits your plate. But if you’re not picky on how it looks, a shepherd’s pie that falls apart actually tastes BETTER.

You will need a ceramic baking dish and a frying pan. If you don’t have a ceramic baking dish, you can get away with using a small roasting pan. If you don’t have a certain ingredient - pan sauce, or veggies - just substitute with chicken broth and frozen vegetables.

Ingredients
Leftover chicken (I had 4 chicken thighs)
Leftover pan sauce/juice/soup/water from cooking the chicken
Leftover veggies served with last night’s chicken
1 can of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup
2 cups of sliced white mushrooms
1/2 of a red onion, chopped
2 cups of fragrant rice. You can use any rice you want.
splash of EVO
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions
Preheat oven to 400. Put all the leftover stuff in the baking dish, and throw it in the oven. Let it heat while you prep the other ingredients. Saute onions and mushrooms with some EVO on medium heat - use a bit of butter if you want to spoil yourself silly. Set aside. Boil some water in a kettle. Heat the cream of chicken soup on low heat in the pan.

Take the chicken out of the oven, and if not stripped, strip the chicken. Discard bones. Roughly chop chicken. Pour two cups of rice into the baking dish, cover with pan sauce, veggies, and chicken soup. Now add hot* water until you have enough to cover the rice with 1/3 inch of liquid on top. Put a lid on that and bake for 25-30 minutes.

When that’s done, it should be very moist. Mix in the chicken, mushrooms and onions, adding salt and pepper to taste. Pack tightly, and put back in oven for another 10 minutes to dry the top out to create a crust. Leftovers never tasted so good!

This is an ideal recipe for using up leftover turkey and gravy. You can substitue cream of mushroom/celery/broccoli/etc for different flavours; you can also use a different mushroom. There are a few things you have to watch out for. First, make sure you don’t put the chicken in with the rice to cook - the water will dry it right out. Second, the water must be hot when it pour it down the cream, otherwise it’d simply separate into chunks of soup. Third, don’t burn the soup while it’s in the pan. Since we’re not adding any water, burning it would be extremely easy to do.

Tomorrow’s forecast: I’m making shepherd’s pie tonight with leftover mashed potatoes. Mmmm.

I wonder how many chickens I have consumed in my life. Wait. I don’t really want to know. But needless to say, I’ve never wasted a chicken in my life. One of life’s greatest questions:

What do you do with leftover chicken?

You could make chicken salad sandwiches. But that’s quite uncreative. I knew people who slapped leftover chicken and gravy together between two slices of white bread and called it a meal. I call it a portable heart attack. Not that I’m anyone to talk. I’m making chicken a la king tonight - it’s simple, it’s easy, and it uses last night’s leftover chicken. Anyone can do it. All you need is:

1. A baking dish
2. 1 cup of rice
3. Campbell’s cream of chicken soup
4. Be creative. You can add mushrooms, carrots, celery, onions - anything that would hold up well in boiling water.
5. Leftover chicken

You can create something out of your imagination, or you can check back tomorrow for my spur of the moment creation.