Brown Sugar Chicken a.k.a. Candy Chicken
via Stephanie O’Dea

• 6 boneless, skinless Chicken Breasts (okay, I only used 4)
• 1 cup Brown Sugar
• 1/4 cup Lemon-Lime Soda
• 2/3 cup Vinegar
• 3 cloves smashed and chopped Garlic
• 2 T Soy Sauce
• 1 tsp ground Black Pepper

Use a 4 quart crockpot for this recipe.  Plop the chicken into your crockpot. Cover with the brown sugar, pepper, chopped garlic, and soy sauce. Add the vinegar, and pour in the soda.  Cover and cook on low for 6-9 hours, or on high for 4-5. The chicken is done when it is cooked through and has reached desired consistency.  The longer you cook it, the more tender it will be.  Ours literally fell apart.

We served this with rice and some mixed veggies.  The sauce is sooo good.  Seriously.  You have to try it.  Just do not make it often — and do not tell your husband the ingredients! haha

So when I had the opportunity to make a recipe using Newman’s Own products, I decided to go for it. I really enjoyed their Low Fat Sesame Ginger dressing and knew the flavors would make a tasty stir fry. This will take you 30 minutes or less from start to finish and it makes two large portions. Adapt the recipe to your tastes, too, since it’s really about using what you have!

Not the best food pic ever, but don't let that deter you from trying this recipe!

Now, I’ve always been more comfortable at the keyboard than in front of a camera, but I gave it a shot in the name of recipe sharing. Oh, and by the way, the electric wok I was trying to use did really explode! It made a loud pop and shot a super fine white dust to cover our kitchen. Awesome. Not.

Quick & Tasty Chicken Stir Fry

Makes two generous portions.

Sauce:

• 1/2 cup Newman’s Own Low Fat Sesame Ginger Dressing
• 1/2 cup low sodium chicken broth
• 2 t garlic
• 4 T dry sherry
• 1/2 t cornstarch
• pinch of chili powder

Stir Fry:

• 1 large chicken breast, sliced
• 1 head of broccoli
• 1 medium sized red pepper, sliced
• 3 carrots, cut in half and quartered
• 1 handful green string beans, trimmed
• 3 T vegetable (or peanut) oil, divided
• small bunch of scallions, chopped

Begin by chopping up your veggies. Heat up a wok or large pan on high. To make the sauce, combine all the ingredients into a small saucepan on medium high. Stir occasionally until sauce starts to thicken. While it’s thickening, start with the rest of the stir fry.

Evenly cover pan with 2 T oil to the hot pan. When slightly smoking, add chicken slices and cook until lightly browned and evenly cooked, about 3-4 minutes. Remove chicken from pan and onto plate. Cover in foil to keep warm. Add 1 T oil back to the heated pan. Start cooking the peppers and broccoli first, cover pan to steam, for about a minute. Then add carrots and green beans, stir and cook uncovered for about two minutes.

Combine meat and veggies, drizzle sauce over and add chopped scallions. Serve with steamed white or brown rice.

Enjoy!

Ginger Beer Chicken

• 2.5 – 3 lbs Chicken (I used breasts, but you can use wings or thighs or whatever you feel like)
• 1 bottle Fat Tire Amber Ale
• 1/3 cup Honey
• 1/3 cup Soy Sauce
• 2 Tablespoons Minced Garlic
• 1 teaspoon Ground Ginger

Pour the beer into a saucepan and cook down for a couple minutes. Whisk in the honey, soy sauce, garlic, and ginger.  Cook until the honey is melted, stirring often.  Place the chicken in a glass baking dish (I prefer the Pyrex type with lids that seal nicely), skin side down (if you have skin).  Pour the sauce over the top and refrigerate for a few hours, overnight is best.  Cover with foil and cook for 30 minutes at 375.  Remove foil, flip chicken, and cook for another 30 minutes or so.  Remove when done and serve over a bed of rice.  The sauce is delicious.

Thanks to the Foodbuzz Tastemaker Program and New Belgium Brewing Company for sending me the stipend for beer.  It has been awesome to cook with!

Fat Tire-Tilla Soup

Ingredients

• 1 can Chicken with Rice Soup
• 1 bottle Fat Tire Amber Ale
• 1 cup Salsa
• 1 can (15 ounces) Pinto Beans, drained
• 1 can (15 ounces) Black Beans, drained
• 1 cup Corn (I used frozen, I suppose you could use one can of corn)
• 1 can (10 ounces) cooked Chicken
• 1 can (4 ounces) Green Chiles
• 1 teaspoon ground Cumin
• Toppings: Crushed Tortilla Chips, Shredded Cheese, Sour Cream

Combine all ingredients except for the toppings in a crockpot and cook on low for 8 hours (or high for 6).  Serve with tortilla chips, sour cream, and shredded cheese on top.  This recipe is a great way to use up stale chips — because they soften in the soup!

Thanks again to the Foodbuzz Tastemaker Program and New Belgium Brewing Company for supplying the beer for this recipe.  All ideas and reactions are purely my own.  Are you going to try and make this soup, or is it going to the back of your cookbook until the fall?

Garlic Green Beans and Chicken

For the second dish, I used her recipe for Parmesan Garlic Smashed Potatoes (it just so happened to be on the page next to the green beans)!  It is similar to this recipe, but just add garlic!

Parmesan Garlic Smashed Potatoes

Thanks to Giada de Laurentiis for the recipes!

Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats–A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners (A 30-Minute Meal Cookbook)

I cooked the Proscuitto, Garlic & Herb Cheese Stuffed Chicken.  I only had to purchase a few extra things to make this meal, but the expensive thing was tarragon.  I had to buy a bunch of it for $6.75.  I expected to taste more of it in the dish for the price, but no luck.  I want to incorporate it into a few meals this week so it does not go to waste!

It was not as flavorful as I expected, but it is probably because I served it with asparagus and not rice.  I think it would have been much better over rice — to soak up the extra sauce!  I also need to work on my chicken flattening skills.  I may have been using my real hammer since we do not have a meat pounder.  hahaha  The asparagus recipe was also from that cookbook — 2 new recipes in one meal!!

This week’s menu – lots of leftovers and eating from what is in the house.  Also, mashed potatoes and a green bean dish from Giada!

Happy Wednesday!

The original "dinner plan."

Fig Topped Chicken

Ingredients:

• 2 Chicken Breasts (we use the boneless skinless)
• Handful of Spaghetti
• Butter
• Figs (pureed)
• Goat Cheese
• Proscuitto
• Honey

First, cook the chicken.  I broil it for 20 minutes.  Cook the spaghetti.  In a saucepan, melt some butter and pour it over the cooked pasta.  You can then heat up the pureed figs in the saucepan.  Once it’s hot, you are ready to plate your meal.  Put the pasta on the plate, top with butter, followed by chicken and figs.  Smear some goat cheese on top and then melt under the broiler for a few minutes.

In case you were wondering, this meal was not perfect.  It tasted a little odd. So Matt and I improvised a bit.  He added some proscuitto to the top and drizzled on honey.  It was much better, but still not my favorite dish.

Dinner, Take 2

Aren’t you glad to know I fail too?  Yeah, I thought it would be comforting!

Have you ever had a recipe flop?  Any idea on how to fix this one?

For the citrus chicken, I will just show you what I did with pictures.  There is not much of a recipe.  Oh yeah, and this is almost a whole meal right here!  I found this recipe from Giada, and then just winged it. I used one Whole Chicken, 2 Mandarin Oranges, 2 Lemons, 3 sprigs Rosemary, a few scoops of chopped Garlic, 6 or 7 Red Potatoes, Olive Oil,  and Salt & Pepper.

There are a few sprigs of Rosemary in the right side of the picture.  Just pretend you can see them.  And what’s funny is there is a shallot behind the chicken’s butt, but I cut it out of the picture — however I did not use it.  Keep this knowledge for later though, trust me!

What you cannot see.  I cleaned the chicken by rubbing it under running water and then pulling out the giblets. Yuck! Toss those.  I mean, if you have a good use for them, then save them. But I do not — I just toss away.  The easiest way is to keep that bag that the chicken was in right there, and put them straight in it, then into the trash.  I’m a smart girl, I know. Okay so you cleaned the chicken, then pat it dry with a paper towel.  Pour some EVOO (that’s Extra Virgin Olive Oil, but we all know that from Rachel Ray, right?) on it and smear it all around.  Pretend you are giving the chicken a massage.  Then sprinkle salt and pepper (freshly cracked is best) and rub in.  You want to put the EVOO and spices on both the outside and inside of the chicken.  Okay so once you do that, squeeze on juice from one lemon and one mandarin orange — which you can see in the picture.

Stuff the cavity with the squeezed lemon and orange halves.  Also throw in a sprig or 2 of rosemary.  Then you will lift up the top layer of skin and rub with oil and salt and pepper and garlic.  I had to cut the center membrane a little bit, but it worked.  Now, your chicken should be ready to go.

This was my creative inspiration for the day.  Instead of using yarn (I know, you are supposed to use kitchen twine, but yarn is what I always have on hand) to tie the legs together, cut a little hole in the skin on one drumstick.  You can now stick the other leg through it.  This was accidental genius – and I’m sure it’s like really really bad to do in a professional kitchen, but it works just fine in mine!

There is our chicken, ready to go.  At this point, you will still be cursing the fact that your good roasting pan is nowhere to be found (you may or may not find it RIGHT WHERE YOU LOOKED in the garage a few days later), but decide that you want the chicken & potatoes to cook in the juices.  So you remove the little broiler rack which you had left in the pan.  Marvel at your leg holding genius.

Cut the potatoes into fourths and throw in the pan around the bird.  Drizzle some EVOO and salt and pepper on top of the potatoes.  Then cut up a few more of those lemons and mandarins and squeeze the juice on the potatoes.  Leave the squeezed fruit in the pan as well.

This is how it will look right as you put it in the oven.  Can you spy the rosemary sticking out of the chicken’s butt? I can. haha.

And here you have it — your complete chicken!  You will have baked it at 400 degrees for about an hour, or until a meat thermometer reads 170 degrees.

I had to go to Bible Study before this bad boy was finished, so I asked Matt if he would please take some pictures of it once it was finished.  But I did have leftovers, and the chicken was delicious.  Incredibly juicy.

Now, I said I would include the Gluehwein recipe as well, as it actually includes tangerines.  This is a recipe that I have been making for a few years now, I think I found the original at allrecipes.com, but I cannot be sure.  I was at the grocery store on Sunday, to pick up my tangerines, when I noticed how yucky it was outside.  On a whim, I decided to buy a cheapish bottle of red wine and make some gluehwein.  And you know what — I think I like the recipe even better with tangerines (I originally used oranges).  It was the perfect drink for a drizzly Sunday afternoon.

Doesn’t it look yummy simmering in the pot here?  I first tasted this in the Austrian Alps and fell in love with it — your friends will love it too!

Gluehwein
Ingredients

• 5 Tangerines
• approximately 1/4 cup Water
• 3/4 cup White Sugar
• 1 Cinnamon Stick
• 10 whole Cloves
• 1 bottle Red Wine (I use Merlot)

Squeeze the tangerines into a measuring cup, saving 2 squeezes halves. Fill up the cup with water until you have 3/4 cup liquid.  I had about 1/2 cup tangerine juice, and 1/4 cup water.  Combine that with the sugar and cinnamon stick in a saucepan.  Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer. Push cloves into the outside of those 2 tangerine halves and drop in the pot.  Simmer for 30 minutes, or until syrupy.  Add wine and heat until steaming, but not simmering.  Remove the oranges and serve.

When serving this for a group, I double or triple the recipe and transfer to a crockpot once you add the wine.

This is definitely a winter recipe, but as it was a wintery day last week, it hit the spot!  What do you think of the recipe?  Will you give it a try?

You know by now that we went away for the weekend. When I came back, my tangerines grew like crazy … in the bowl … which is why they’re so much bigger in the picture below. No, actually that’s not the case. The tangerines got somewhat smaller and greener, as in rotten. Yuck. So, in the spirit of cousins, we’re going to use a close relative of the tangerine this week: an orange. (Please, aggies, don’t tell me an orange is not a cousin to the tangerine. I can’t take it. It makes sense and cousins are awesome!)

This is actually one of my favorite recipes, though I modified it a bit. It comes from Rachael Ray’s magazine, which Megan got for me after she found a year subscription for only $1!  The recipe sounded easy enough and, as is the deciding factor in most of what I cook, I had the ingredients on hand. Rachael’s version is slightly different — calling for polenta, asparagus and green beans. While I usually make it with at least one of the two latter items, I had mashed potatoes on hand. (In the spirit of full disclosure, it’s the potato flake stuff. Guilty as charged.)

Rachael Ray’s Orange-Balsamic Chicken

Ingredients:

• 4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts
• salt and pepper
• 2 tablespoons evoo
• 1 c chicken broth
• juice of one orange
• zest from one orange
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

1. Season chicken with salt and pepper. In a large skillet, heat evoo over medium/high heat. Add chicken and cook, turning once for about 12-14 minutes, depending on thickness. Transfer to plate and cover with foil.
2. In a skillet, melt butter. Whisk in flour and cook for 1 minute. Whisk in vinegar, orange juice and chicken broth. Simmer until slightly reduced, about 2-3 minutes. Stir in juices from chicken and season with salt and pepper.
3. Drizzle sauce on top and serve.

Hopefully, this will be good enough to make you forget about the little tangerine-orange switch. In case you have a ton of tangerines, I suspect that substituting them for the oranges would taste very good, too.

Chicken Chardonnay

Salt & Pepper
Flour
2 – 4 Chicken Breasts
Butter
1/4 cup minced Shallots
12 oz sliced Mushrooms (I use white button)
1/2 cup White Wine
3/4 cup Chicken Stock
3/4 cup Heavy Cream
parsley, finely chopped (as needed)

To prepare chicken: pat dry, season with salt and pepper, dip in flour and shake off excess flour. Heat saute pan to just above medium, melt butter add chicken with tongs.  Saute chicken breast until golden brown. Turn and saute second side. Remove breasts, place in baking pan and finish in 350 degree oven (thermometer should read 165F).

Meanwhile, in the same saute pan add or remove butter as needed; add shallots and mushrooms and saute 3-5 minutes. Add wine and reduce by half; add stock and reduce by half; add heavy cream and reduce by half (to thicken). Season with salt & pepper to taste; garnish with parsley. Choose your consistency; if it gets too thick, continue to add broth and/or cream. Do not add wine at end as the alcohol flavor won’t have time to burn off/integrate.

Notes: This recipe is easy, but looks and tastes fantastic.  I served it with a white rice rissotto (basically rice with extra water/chicken broth, so it’s juicier and not sticky) and Pioneer Woman’s Bacon Onion Cheddar Biscuits.