Sally’s Kitchen & Stuff

Q: What do I stuff a chicken to keep it moist? Mine always comes out dry.
A: Don’t stuff it if it’s small. Stuff it only if it’s turkey caliber "roasters."

Otherwise, what you stuff it with have nothing to do with the chicken turning out moist. But please make sure the stuffing is precooked if it involves meat ingredients. Use an instant read thermometer and pull out the chicken before it overcooks and "dry out."

Q: How did you do that awesome heart card origami?
A: I used a template from Canon papercrafts. It’s in the "Seasons and Holidays" section. It’s a doozy though.

Q: What are some of your ideas of alternatives to meat that’s closer in texture than tofu?
A: Whenever I have vegetarians over for dinner, I use seitan. It’s a gluten that’s refined from wheat, by washing the gluten from the dough and leaving only the gluten behind. The result is either solid and chewy, or reprocessed to be stringy. It can be fried, steamed, poached…basically cooks just like meat, and can be marinated as well. You can get it in Chinese food markets or health food stores. Like tofu, it tastes like whatever you marinated it in, and it absorbs flavour much better than tofu.

Q: Clam Chowder tastes like shite! You know what I mean?
A: I have no personal palate recollection of what shite tastes like, but the closest I can recommend would be the oh so lovely Durian fruit. It smells like shite. (Yet tastes like heaven.)

To quote Anthony Burgess, the Durian fruit’s "odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock." Lovely.

Q: Are you a chef?
A: Nope. I’m just an obsessive Food Network viewer who’s been cooking since the tender age of six. I still miss my old kitchen. We had a gas stove, and a great big wok - I reached it by standing on a step stool. There, I developed my love for ginger, green onions, hot peanut oil, and soy sauce.

Q: Do you know how to cook for a black man?
A: My white man boyfriend enjoys my jerk chicken, gumbo, oxtail, as well as my take on beef patties. Cuisine knows no boundaries.

Q: Could I be your friend?
A: Only if you’re within two degrees and asked after a few correspondences. And if you ask nicely

Q: 25 years on earth, what have you found?
A: True love.

Q: Why don’t you answer your messages?
A: Because friendster doesn’t have a user-friendly message system where I can reply in bulk or click next or anything like that. And I get way too many messages. Fear not though. I read them all.

Q: When are you going to add songs back on your profile?
A: As SOON as I can. Promise. I took them down a while back because I just … uh…don’t have the bandwidth. We’re looking at 2000 hits or so a day on some days, or uh…40 gigs of traffic with only 4 songs. It’s brutal. Best I can do next time is one song at a time.

Q: Ocean’s 12 is the worst movie ever?
A: Oh, definitely. I can’t believe I wasted 2 hours of my life on that one.

Q: How long IS your hair?
A: Knee-length. I keep it that way. Last month it was getting to be calf length so I got a haircut.

Q: I love you! Could you add me?
A: Don’t you know that approach, uh, scares women?

And there were 50 messages in my inbox. ARGH! We ought to increase the number of messages shown per page to like, 100 or something. To those of you who read and tried my clam chowder recipe, thank you! It’s the most popular recipe on my blog ever!

Now, please go ahead and check out the rest. My sheppard’s pie isn’t getting any love, and it deserves it. It’s a bit of a holiday dish since it is quite a bit of trouble, but I promise you that the end result is worth the time and effort. (It tastes better than roast turkey, serves about the same amount of people, and takes less time. How’s that?)

It doesn’t get simpler than this. Serves 6. Prep time - 5 minutes or less, cooking time, 30 minutes.

Ingredients
1 Can of cream of broccoli soup (you can use chicken / mushroom or whatever, but I like broccoli/celery)
1 Can of baby clams
1 big can of tuna packed in vegetable oil, drained
1 lb of parisienne potatoes, or 1 lb of diced potatoes
1 TBSP chopped fresh chives or green onions
3 slices (about 1 TBSP) of ginger
1/2 TSP white pepper
1/2 TSP seasalt
1/2 Cup of milk (reserved til the end)

Instructions
Prepare your canned soup according to package instructions (with milk and water, usually), add clam juice from the can and whisk until smooth over low heat. Add potatoes and ginger, bring to a boil, then simmer for 15 minutes with the lid almost closed. Remove ginger after the potatoes are done.

Open the lid, turn the heat up to medium high, and add the rest of the ingredients including the extra milk. Stir until everything is heated through. Soup should be thick enough to coat a spoon.

This is as far as you can deviate from the typical sheppard’s pie and still call it that. The sweetness of the yam off-sets the saltiness of the meat very well, and since it requires neither a huge helping of butter nor an addition of chicken broth, it’s actually healthier on top of being tastier.

This takes HOURS unless you turn on a few burners at once. But it’s tasty enough to warrant an afternoon in the kitchen, and it’s pretty much guranteed to NOT fall apart the moment you dig in, and yet still moist and juicy. Pair this with a salad and some light veggies and you’re set for dinner. Feeds 8 teenagers, 10 adults.

Ingredients
1 package of lean ground beef (a couple of pounds, give or take)
1 package of pork sausage (uncooked, about 6 big ones)
1 & 1/2 CUP of Italian style breadcrumbs
A generous helping of Green Pepper Tabasco sauce
1 TSP sea salt
1 TSP fresh ground pepper

1 CUP of chicken broth
2 CUPS of sliced white mushrooms
2 TBSP butter
1 TBSP flour
1 red onion, chopped to bits
5 cloves of garlic, mashed

4-5 big Yams (about 7 inches long) steamed, peeled and mashed

Instructions
In a large mixing bowl, combine beef, sausage (out of their casing), breadcrumbs, tabasco sauce, salt and pepper. Work the ingredients in with your hands until evenly mixed. Brown, in batches if necessary, in a pan, until MOSTLY cooked. Mash a little with a potato masher to expose the raw bits. (This will help the pie "glue" together in the pan as it cooks) Pack the mixture into the bottom of a roasting pan / casserole dish, as tight as you can make it. If you overcooked the meat at this point the whole pie would crumble later, but it won’t affect the taste. I prefer the roasting pan because it gives the sides a nice crust, but it’s really up to you.

Saute the onions in the same pan, adding 1/2 cup of chicken broth slowly to draw out the oil, while scraping the bottom of the pan to add to the sauce any browned bits from the meat. When the onions start to brown, add garlic, and water if necessary to keep it moist but not dripping. Evenly top the meat with the mixture.

Saute mushrooms in butter, 1/2cup of chicken broth and flour. Cook until it’s not drippy and mushrooms are cooked. Layer this on top of the onions.

Lastly, evenly smooth on mashed yam, and brush with buttter to prevent it from drying out. Pop it into a 375 degree oven and cook for about 30 minutes. If you want browned sides, make it 40. The yam is NOT going to brown, but will stay moist and hot and keep all the moisture inside the pie.

Mom said it was the best shepperd’s pie she’s ever had.

An all-time favorite. My version is made with Chu-Hou sauce, which makes the seasoning bit that much easier. If you have time to fancy it up, you can drizzle the end result with a little bit of cayenne pepper mixed into sesame oil, and sprinkle with sesame seeds to complete a 3-color effect.

Ingredients
1 big steak, any cut. The leaner it is, the better of a time you’d have pounding it flat (I say big, but I used a typical 8oz.)
2 heads of broccoli
2 TBSP Chu-Hou Sauce (It’s sweet but has a slightly grainy consistency)
A dash of dark soy sauce
Fresh ground pepper
Cornstarch
Peanut oil

Instructions
Drech the steak in cornstarch. Cover between two pieces of plastic wrap (or cut into smaller pieces and use  ziploc bag), and pound flat (to, say, 1/4 inch or so) with a meat tenderizer. Cut into bite sized pieces. Prepare the spinach by trimming the leaves, then cut the stalks into slanted dollars, and bite sized flourettes for the tops.

Heat pant to medium high, and stir fry beef with a bit of oil, the Chu-Hou sauce, pepper, and a dash of dark soy sauce. As soon as the beef is seared on both sides, remove from pan to prevent over-cooking. Add broccoli to the same pan (to soak up all the flavours) and stir fry until stalks are darker green but still crunchy. Put the beef back in, stir, and thicken the liquid with more cornstarch if necessary.

The whole process shouldn’t take you more than half an hour. Serve over rice.

Today, is Friday. Today, is also aparment hunting day. Stu and I reserved the afternoon - and evening to jog around town looking for a perfect 2 bedroom apartment under $1000.

You’d think that with that budget I’d be able to find the perfect place; not so in Toronto. The average price of a two-bedroom apartment is $1150 here, not including hydro. Toronto has the highest living costs in Canada - it’s expensive, it’s dirty (if you don’t believe me, just check the satellite images in Google Earth), it’s a city full of good neighbourhood right smack next to bad neighbourhoods, separated by 2 lane streets.

And the dilemma, is that my bf seem to hate every single one of them except for the most expensive ones. Geez, I’m the woman here! I’m the one who has to walk home late at night, and I have no fear. I have pepperspray, and thank the government for our gun control laws and strict weapon carrying laws, rapists here don’t even carry knives.

Lakeshore? Scuzzy. Downtown? Too hard to get out of. Northwest? It’s a shootings-neighbourhood. No it isn’t! It’s Martingrove & Eg, not Rexdale! Then again, I can’t argue. He’s been here all his life, and I’ve been here ten years.

Let’s just HOPE we find an apartment today that isn’t tiny, cramped, and roach infested.

I used walnuts, but it can work with pecans and almonds. I find peanuts have too strong of a flavour for this recipe.

Ingredients
1 flan container of walnuts halves (or pieces)
1 Cup of sugar
1/2 stick of butter (not half a block. Half a STICK. That would be 1/8 of a block.)
1/2 TSP nutmeg
1 TSP cinnamin
1 TSP seasalt or kosher salt

Instructions
I used a large skillet for this. Turn the heat up to medium and dump the walnuts in. Toast, stirring and tossing constantly, until some oils are released and they’re crunchy, about 15 minutes. Transfer to a bowl to cool.

In the same skillet, dump in the cup of sugar and salt. Cook until mixture is slightly bubbly and a light caramel brown. Turn the heat all the way down and stir in butter, cinnamin and nutmeg. When the whole mixture looks homogenous, stir in the walnuts and turn to coat. If you want a grittier sugar texture, you can stir in another 1/4 cup of sugar. Now you can either let the whole thing cool in the pan or pour it onto a square of waxed paper.

Makes a great party snack. For alternate versions, you can add maple butter or other spices. (I’ve even added crushed bits of ginseng in!) If you want to make poppycock, double the butter add some store-bought packages of pre-popped popcorn.

I’ve always thought that the western roast chicken is way too much work. When the Chinese cook a chicken, we marinade it in soy sauce, throw it in a wok with a rack, put a bit of ginger and green onions at the botton with a bit of water, and just cover it until it’s cooked. The result is always tender, juicy, yum. The whole idea that I have to rub down the bird with butter and baste it every hour is just so much trouble.

Of course, every mother I’ve met does turkey and chicken the same way: they slave over a broiling hot oven or wake up at 7 am to start prepping and nursing the bird. They rub, they spice, they baste every hour. So the first time I roasted a chicken I figured that if my grannie can do it in a wok with zero work, I can do it in an oven. So I just stuffed, tied, and left the bird in the oven for hours. No basting, no fussing, no rubbing all over with grease. (I did rub it with spices and salted it) I didn’t even flip or turn it - it’s on a roasting rack, so I figured it’d be alright. The result was the same - it’s juicy. It’s good. It’s…well…it tastes the same as the other birds that other people slaved over, except with less work.

This is, however the time when I would actually recommend a meat thermometer. Take the chicken out 10 degrees early, cover, and let the internal temperature rise. Beef can be eaten rare, chicken, never.

There is a plus side to this method as well - opening and closing the oven cools the bird down and lowers the temperature so that it takes longer and more energy to cook your bird if you baste.

Another thing - pick a "roaster." An 8lb - 10lb bird is perfect. Smaller ones tend to come out dry.

You’ll need a baking sheet for this recipe. It’s so easy you can get children involved. Feel free to experiement with the flavour of yogurt.

Ingredients
14 Chicken drumsticks (You can do this with chicken legs too, just not so many)
1 Cup of plain or vanilla yogurt
1 Cup of all-purse flour
1 Cup of Italian style breadcrumbs
1 TSP cayenne pepper
1 TSP salt
Pepper and other dry herbs, to taste
(You can also add crushed nuts. I like pistachio, personally.)

Instructions
Preheat oven to 400.

This is going to be MESSY. Dip chicken in yogurt, rubbing in with hands. Try not to put thick layers on, but thin, even layers.

Mix all the dry ingredients together. Drench chicken in the dry stuff until evenly coated. Brush a baking sheet down with oil, and lay chicken out evenly. Pop it into the oven for about 20 minutes, and it’s done!

It’s great finger-food, healthier than its fried counterpart, and the skin actually turns out crispy. The yogurt keeps the chicken moist and keeps the breadcrumbs from burning in high-heat.