Fried Chicken

I said in my opening post that one of my goals was to eat food that is nutritious. But looking over what I have posted, it isn't exactly health food.

And it isn't. The food I cook isn't quite as healthy as what I would cook for myself because, frankly, I want the rest of my family to eat it. And cooking up some ribs in the long run is probably better for everyone than serving up some steamed veggies that no one will eat, leading hubby to make a fast food run later.

Tonight, I made the mother of unhealthy foods...fried chicken. And oh was it delicious.

But fried chicken is a great example of how home-cooked food can be much healthier than fast food or other restaurant food, even when it's a notoriously fatty dish.

How? Well, when I fry chicken (which I don't do very much at all), I fry skinless boneless chicken breasts, normally cut into three or four big chunks of meat. Having no skin makes the chicken far healthier. Yes, you can pull the delicious, thickly battered skin off of your KFC, but who has the willpower to not eat at least a few bites?

Also, you know what you are frying in. There is no 'healthy' oil to fry in (olive oil is no good--it can't handle the high temperatures of frying). But good ol' vegetable oil is still better than trans fats or lard, which are both used in many restaurants.

So, I still maintain that fried chicken can at least be healthier at home, even if it is still a long way from quinoa and arugula.

This is my simple frying recipe:

2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1 cup flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
3 large chicken breasts, cut into 3 large chunks each
Vegetable oil

Beat the eggs with the milk and then pour it over the chicken and let it sit for a few minutes, turning once. Put the flour, salt and pepper in a large ziploc bag. Drop a chunk in one at a time and shake a few times to coat it.

Meanwhile, heat about 1.5 inches of vegetable oil. I prefer cast-iron skillets for frying--they hold up wonderfully over high heat and heat evenly. Also, an occasional deep frying is a great way to keep a cast iron skillet seasoned--just make sure you empty it promptly afterward (and not down your drain, either!)

There are two main secrets to good fried chicken. First, like with all breaded and fried things, you have to have the oil very hot before you put the chicken in the oil. If the oil isn't hot enough, the breading just sloughs off or it absorbs too much oil and gets gummy. Before you put anything in the oil, it should pass the water test--get your hand wet and then shake a few drops of water into the oil. It should pop violently when you do so. That's when it's ready.

I fry for about 14 minutes, turning once in the middle. After the first minute or so, you can turn the heat down a bit--it still need to be medium/medium-high, though. You may want to keep thicker pieces in for just a bit longer.

And that's it! Make enough so that you can make yourself a chicken sandwich the next day, or send some fried chicken chunks in your kids' lunches, and it's worth all the cleaning your going to have to do in the kitchen, since it's impossible to fry chicken without making a mess.

Meatloaf

I love meatloaf, for a few reasons. First, most importantly, pretty much everyone in the family will eat it, several with great gusto. Also, it's not all that difficult, and can be done in the slow cooker (with some important restrictions). Best of all, you can be wonderfully creative with meatloaf--you can chunk all variety of different things into meatloaf and it will still come out as something that everyone will eat.

Here is my most standard meatloaf recipe:

Marjorie's standard meatloaf:

1 lbs lean ground beef
1 half medium onion, chopped
teaspoon bottled minced garlic
1 egg
2 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
2 slices stale whole wheat bread
salt and pepper to taste

Form this into a loaf and it cooks up great in the crock pot over about 7-8 hours. It looks a little rough along the top, but you're going to cover that in ketchup, anyway.


From there, you can add all manner of other ingredients and spices, such as bells peppers, chiles, or tomatoes. Go crazy and add fresh basil and pine nuts. (I can't do this in my house because of my husband's strict 'no nuts' rule. And no, it's not an allergy, it's just picky. I do use them when I make pesto, but they're all ground up then, which is acceptable to him.)

This morning I didn't have time to get the meatloaf together, so I did it in the oven, instead. I do oven meatloaf at 350 for an hour. There are some important differences in oven meatloaves and crock pot meatloaves.

1. You can't put cheese in the crock pot. This goes for everything. There are plenty of recipes out there that call for cheese in a crock pot, and they are uniformly horrible. Something awful happens to cheese in a crock pot, and it turns into something tasteless and spongy. In the oven, however, cheese is wonderful, almost any type (although you want to match up your cheeses with whatever else you are putting in, of course). I don't like meatloaf super-cheesy--I usually just use about 4 ounces with a pound of meat, and it adds a nice salty, tasty glue (I leave out the egg when I am using cheese).

2. I don't use raw veggies in the oven. Some raw onion or chiles or peppers will melt nicely into a crock pot meatloaf, but they will often stay just a bit too crunchy in the oven. so, just make some adjustments. You also want to keep a close eye on it to make sure the loaf doesn't get too crunchy. This is the recipe I use tonight:

Oven Meatloaf:
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
2 slices stale 9-grain bread, crusts cut off
1 lbs ground round
1 can Italian-style diced tomatoes
2 ounces shredded cheddar cheese

Frankly, it turned out just wonderful. I always feel a little guilty using canned tomatoes (ye Gods the BPA!) but they really do make life easy, so I keep my pantry stocked.

If anyone is reading this, feel free to share your favorite meatloaf variations in comments!

Flat Iron Steak

I love Kroger's flat iron steaks.

What is a flat iron steak? It's a chuck steak, also sometimes called a 'top blade' steak. It's a relatively new cut of meat--apparently, it used to be a part of the cow that was normally sold as a roast or ground for ground beef. But some new butchering technologies have allowed them to cut out just the tender part of the top blade steak (without some of the nasty fascia in the middle that made it normally a steak only fit for grinding).

Why do I love it? It's a nice tender cut, but it's super cheap...I can buy 1 long 1-pound steak for about $5 when it's on sale, and then feed steak to my whole family, and I swear it's as tender as a sirloin.

I go simple with my marinades...I marinate in worcester sauce with bottled minced garlic, and then sprinkly the steak liberally with pepper while I cook it. The hubby likes his steak medium-well and I like mine medium rare, so I normally pull the steak off the grill, hack off some for me, and then put it back on for a few more minutes so we're all happy.

My husband doesn't like steak, but I do, and the kids often do (although not tonight). So I can't make it much, but I do treat myself. My husband will normally eat it happily enough, although it's never going to get a rave from him.

I served it with:

1) Some delicious yellow squash, sauteed with butter with some Italian seasonings, that we picked with the kids at a pick-your-own farm in Dacula. (Husband ate the veggies, which is always a coup; the children did not)

2) Roasted new potatoes, which my family has been loving lately.

I cut the potatoes up into long pieces, with the skin (about six pieces per new potato), stir them with a tablespoon of olive oil, sprinkle them with some fresh rosemary from the yard (we have a perpetually out-of-control rosemary bush, so I am always looking for ways to use it), and then roast them at 450 for about 25 minutes. They are easy, and come out DELICIOUS.

The kids ate pretty much nothing, and B wouldn't stop asking for cheese. But I enjoyed it, as did my husband, and the dog was stoked that he got to eat leftover steak.

I was kind of proud that I actually made three different fresh items--normally my family gets one, complimented with things out of the freezer or a can. But when everything is super-easy, it's worth it.

Slow Cooker Ribs

On the slow cooker things, I tried a new pork ribs recipes this weekend, and it worked out pretty decent.

I love pork ribs. I know they are absolutely horrible for you--there are many healthy cuts of pork, and ribs are not one of them. So this isn't a dish that fits my healthy criteria, but I always make sure I serve them with healthy and low fat side dishes to try to balance out the scales, and never eat more than 3 ribs at a sitting (the second part is harder than the first).

I do ribs in both the oven and the slow cooker; usually I just rub them down with a good pork rub and cook them with Coke.

I like to slow cook meats with Coke, although the effect is not what I think most people expect when they hear 'Coca-Cola sauce'. When I first tried cooking ribs in Coke, I think I expected it to reduce to a thick syrup. Not really, especially not in the slow cooker. It will thicken a little in the oven, but in the end, Coke mostly is just water, and that shows in the sauce you get (also, what water evaporates off largely gets replaced by the liquid fat that cooks off the ribs). In the slow cooker, you don't lose much water at all, so any sauce you use is going to be just about as thin at the end of the day as it was at the beginning.

Even though it wasn't the delightfully syrupy sauce I was expected, i still do like Coke, partly because I am convinced that the carbonation tenderizes the meat.

However, I have still been searching for something a little thicker, a little sweeter, and with a little more heat--which I found.

This time, for my slow cooker ribs, I used this sauce:

10 ounces hot jalapeno jelly
1 half bottle A-1
1 tablespoon bottled minced garlic
1 half large Vidalia onion

I got the idea to use the steak sauce/jalapeno jelly combo from e-mealz, an awesome recipes service that I recommend. Frankly, I had never heard of jalapeno jelly, but it sounded good. I melted together the jelly and steak sauce, poured it over the ribs, and then added the onion and garlic. The sauce came out divine--sweet, rich, and with just a perfect amount of heat (not too much for the kids--Calliope loved the meat).

I did something different with the ribs--usually I put them in the crock pot raw, but this time I broiled them--10 minutes on each side about 5 inches from the top first. For two reason--one, I wanted to try cooking some beans in the pot with the ribs, and I thought it might be good to cook off just a bit of fat first so the beans wouldn't be swimming in grease (also, it does help make ribs a tad more healthy). I also thought the crispy skin would be nice--tender ribs are wonderful, but they are nice when contrasted with a crunchy skin.

However, I still cooked them for 8;30 hours, even though I had broiled them first. And it was too long--the ribs were still yummy, but drier than they should have been I think just 7 hours after broiling would have been ideal.

I actually find that 7 hours is normally the perfect time for most crock pot dishes, unless you have a whole chicken or a very big pork shoulder. Despite what some say, meat can definitely get too dry in a crock pot, and my family is very picky about super-tender meat.

I also made a mistake with the beans. I like to cook with dry beans whenever possible, since they are healthier, cheaper, and tastier than canned varieties (they soak up what you cooked them with; in cans, they've just soaked up salt). You have to be careful, though, since beans do need a LOT of cooking. Normally, a crock pot is a perfect place for dry beans, since you are cooking for a long time in a lot of liquid anyway.

However, there are a lot of ingredients that can make beans skins get tough and keep the beans from getting as tender as they should be. Apparently, steak sauce and jalapeno jelly are two of those ingredients.

The beans were still delicious, but the texture was a bit off--they were just a tad firmer than they should have been.

When I do this again--and I will, because as I said, I am sold on the sauce--I am still going to broil the ribs (I do like that crispy skin and slightly lower fat content), but I am ponly going to cook the ribs for 7 hours. And I will still use dry beans, but I am going to soak them overnight first, to just make sure they get all the way where they should be.

Crock pot chuck roast

I thought a very good first real post would be about my crock pot. First, because there have been many people who ask me for crock pot recipes (ok, to be honest, people usually ask about them because I have started the conversation about my love for my crock pot--maybe they are only asking to be polite). Second, the crock pot is wonderful--it's an easy way to make fresh, delicious food with minimal effort--or a way to time-shift preparation to morning-before-kids-get-up or naptime.

Also, the hubby has this thing about 'slabs of meat'--essentially, if he has to use a knife to cut it, he doesn't like it. He wants stews, meat that is fall-apart tender, or meat between bread. Since I want to eat something besides sandwiches and stews, the crock pot fits the bill nicely.

Tonight, I am slow cooking a chuck roast in some home-made bbq sauce. After cooking on low all day, it's very easy to shred it with a fork and serve it on some buns.

It's possible to just slow-cook in bottled sauce, but it's not going to be as good. Partly, the jarred sauce is too thick, and doesn't mix well with the fat that cooks out of the beef. It also doesn't have anything like the nice flavor complexity you can get from making your own.

This is my basic recipe, which you can customize in a hundred different ways:

1 medium onion, chopped
1 tablespoon bottled minced garlic
1 can Coke
1/3 cup Worchester sauce
1 can pureed tomato
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon dried mustard
1 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt

A few alternatives: brown sugar of course works nicely if you don't want the coke; ketchup also works well in place of the pureed tomatoes, although if you go that route you will probably want to cut the vinegar and some of whatever sweetener you are using. I keep meaning to try it with fresh diced tomatoes, which would melt into the sauce over the course of the day and would add a sweetness of their own, but haven't tried it yet.

I am also a big fan of liquid smoke if you like that nice smokey taste.

Another great thing to do with a good chuck roast is pot roast, of course; the nice thing about pot roast is that you can throw in some veggies for a nice one-pot meal.

My basic roast:

2-3 lbs chuck roast
1 onion, cut into chunks
1 bag mini carrots
2 baking potatoes, cut into chunks
1 teaspoon bottled minced garlic
salt and pepper to taste
1 can cream of mushroom soup

Just put the veggies on the bottom, salt and pepper the roast and lay it on top, sprinkle the garlic on top of the roast and then pour the cream of mushroom soup on top. Cook all day on low; it's a good old stand-by.

Chinese roast:

You can really have a lot of fun playing around with aromatic vegetables in a slow cooker. One ingredient not used enough that does wonderful in the slow cooker is ginger. Just get about a 3-inch ginger root, peel it, chop it, and then put it in the slow cooker with a chuck roast, some chopped onion, garlic, salt and pepper and a cup of teriyaki sauce. I serve this with some stir-fry vegetables (the bags of pre-cut stir fry in the produce section of the grocery store) and rice.

You can also make a delicious, deep flavored roast with onion (it's rare I make anything in the crock pot without onion--it add some very necessary and delicious liquid to the pot), red wine, garlic, and ketchup. Shred the meat, stir in some sour cream at the end and serve it over egg noodles and you have beef stroganoff.

This is long now, so I will save my chicken, pork, and veggie slow cooker recipes for another day.