Tag: chicken

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Grandma’s chicken and dumplings

I’m posting this to fill a request from someone who read The Power of Food #2 post. . . and because Grandma would be tickled by the thought of me passing it on to the world . . .

Chicken and Dumplings . . . Fegyvernek Style

For the “stew” part:
one chicken, cut up into pieces
a medium onion, yellow or other sharp variety, chopped
a little bacon fat or lard (I use an olive oil/butter mix nowadays)
parsley, fresh or dried (a couple of tablespoons if dried, twice that if fresh)
paprika (sweet, not hot, Hungarian paprika)
salt and pepper
water

For the dumplings (a large batch. You can halve this recipe.)
4 eggs
about 1½ cups of water
½ teaspoon salt
3 to 3½ cups flour

Lightly brown the onion in the fat you’ve chosen in a large pot. Then add the paprika and stir for a minute or so. Add the parsley, chicken pieces, salt and pepper and enough water to barely cover the chicken. Cover and simmer until done, about ½ to 1 hour depending on the size of your chicken pieces. Remove the chicken from the pot and put it in a bowl. Cover to keep it warm.

Add more water to the pot (an inch or so, maybe two or three if you make the whole recipe for dumplings), put the cover on and bring it to a boil as you prepare the dumplings.

Beat the eggs and salt with a fork in a plastic bowl. (You can use any bowl but it’s good if it’s lightweight because you’re going to hold it over the boiling broth as you drop the dumplings into the pot.) Add about 1½ cups water to the eggs mixture and beat again. Add the flour and beat until it has a “sticky” consistency. This is wetter than regular bread dough.

Uncover your pot of boiling broth and hold the bowl of dumpling dough just over it. Tilt it toward the pot. Dip a teaspoon into the hot broth, then go up to the bowl and scoop about ½ teaspoon full of dough and drop it into the broth. Repeat, dipping the spoon into the broth and scooping a little dough into it until all the dough is gone. Move the bowl around so that you drop the dumplings more or less evenly over the whole pot. DO NOT STIR THE DUMPLINGS YET!

Cover the pot and let it boil about 7 to 10 minutes. NOW YOU CAN STIR THE DUMPLINGS. Cook them for another 5 to 10 minutes, add the chicken back into the pot and reheat it for a few minutes. You’re ready to serve. (I like to sprinkle on a little fresh parsley at the end, but Grandma didn’t do that.)

Family food feud

When my dad was alive (he died in 1959) we didn’t eat these at my house. He called this style of  dumplings “bullets” and wasn’t having any of them. As a French-Canadian, he knew dumplings as fluffy clouds that floated over beef stew. But I ate them every time I stayed at Grandma and Grandpa’s and that was often. My mother deferred to Dad’s tastes and always made him his fluffy, with-baking-powder, favorites, and always over beef, not chicken, stew.

I’m not sure why but I never asked Ma how to make fluffy dumplings. But I learned, as a very young girl, how to make bullets because I loved them. In that wonderful alchemy of genetic stew that makes a baby, I ended up with straight blonde hair and blue eyes. My dad had wavy brunette hair and hazel eyes. I adored him . . . but I’ve always loved the bullet dumplings best . . . and I never halve the recipe.

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Dense salads continued . . .

 A pithy review of the last post

Dense salads . . .

  1. consist of small pieces of real food plus a dressing (also real food).
  2. are easy. It’s hard to “make a mistake” while preparing them.
  3. are good “fast food” because they keep in the fridge a few days and we can nosh on them any time. They help keep us out of the cheesecake and chocolate (mostly).
  4. are good for you. You make them out of REAL FOOD.
  5. are infinitely (or close to it) variable so you don’t have to get bored eating them.
  6. can be very economical.
  7. Commercially prepared dense salads (like those in plastic containers or the big grocery chain deli) may have chemicals in them. Yuck! Chemicals taste bad and they are not a food group.
  8. You learned how to make Basic Chicken Salad. If there’s anything you didn’t understand, or any steps you don’t know how to do, write me a comment and I’ll clarify it for you.

I know I didn’t say all those things in exactly those words, but those were the explicit and implicit lessons.

Basic Chicken Salad dressed up to impress the neighbors 

Michelle commented yesterday “Sounds like my “Instant Karma” chicken salad. I add some curry and raisins instead of apples. It’s addicting and good for your soul!” I love that name. She anticipated today’s post . . .

Curried Chicken Salad

“Curry” refers to a savory sauce seasoned with the  yellow powder we associate with sitar music and aging hippies. We aren’t going to make a sauce but we are going to use the powder.

It’s not a spice but a mixture of ground herbs and spices. There are probably as many combinations as there are Indian grandmothers but they all contain turmeric which gives them that yellow color. Other ingredients may include a bunch of C-words—cardamon, coriander, cumin, cayenne, cinnamon, dried chilis—and maybe some ginger and fennel and mustard seeds. You can grind your own but I get it in small amounts from The Food Co-op bulk spices and herbs area though you can buy it at any grocery store. It can be mild or pack a lot of heat. I suggest you buy mild and add cayenne if you want it hotter.

To make “Curried Chicken Salad” follow the basic salad procedure except add some raisins like Michelle, or I like Craisins (sweetened dried cranberries) because I love the dark red with the bright yellow dressing. I usually add coarsely chopped almonds or pecans, and I leave in the apple (if I have one on hand).

Add some of the curry powder (a spoonful or two) to your mayo, blend it well, scrape it into the bowl with the small food chunks and toss the whole thing. By that I mean toss the ingredients in the bowl until everything is covered more or less evenly. Use a couple of forks or a spoon and fork. You want it sort of “fluffed up.” (I know, how can a dense salad be fluffy? The ingredients are dense, the salad is lightly combined. Don’t push all the air out of to stuff it into a container, for example.)

If you present this in a pretty bowl lined with lettuce leaves your neighbors at the annual close-off-the-street-potluck will be so impressed that they’ll smile and wave every time they see you for the rest of the year.

On second thought, it may not fly in some neighborhoods, but it’s very pretty nonetheless and when it comes to food . . .  beauty counts.

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Opportunistic eating #1: dense salads-chicken

Opportunistic Eating (Noshing)

Unless I’m with friends or family I seldom eat “a meal.” Instead, I nosh. That’s a Yiddish word for grazing or grabbing a snack like a bowl of soup or a chunk of chocolate (organic dark).

When I feel a hunger tug I do not want to wash lettuce, spin it dry, tear it up, chop accompanying veggies, make the vinaigrette, etc. I just want to eat and I’ll go for the chocolate every time unless I have cheesecake in the house. In other words, when it comes to food I’m like a Beluga whale, an opportunistic feeder. I eat almost any real food and will choose the most available thing that I can find at the moment.

And because I want to stay healthy and keep my weight reasonable, I’ve devised strategies to keep me out of the cheesecake (which is about the easiest thing in the world to nosh. You just go after it with a fork.) In cold weather I make big pots of soupstews (thick, savory, creative pots o’ goodness.) In warm weather I make big bowls of “dense salads.” I keep them in the fridge, front and center.

Introducing “The Dense Salad”

A dense salad is a mixture of  veggies, meat, fish, grains, fruit, pasta, cheese, legumes, hard-boiled eggs, all cut into small pieces and tied together with a “dressing.” You don’t put all those things into one salad. You just pick a few things that go well together and dress them properly.

Go to the deli department of the supermarket and you’ll see many combos. They’re pricey and the dressings are “prepared,” meaning I can taste chemicals and weird non-real-food aftertastes. So today we have our first lesson on dense salads . . . .

Your Basic Chicken Salad

Chicken breasts are widely available. They’re not very flavorful which makes them a perfect choice for salad. The boneless, skinless kind are the most expensive, but probably the easiest to try if you feel unsure about setting out on this adventure. If you’re willing to pick over the meat to remove the bones and skin, you can save money.

Get out a wide, flat saucepan or fry pan with a cover. Rinse the chicken breasts and put them in it with about 1/4 inch of water. Cover, turn the heat on and bring to a boil. When it gets there (it depends on your heat source for the time so you need to pay attention. When you have constant big bubbles and lots of steam, that’s a boil) turn the heat way down. After a couple of minutes it will settle into a gentler bubbling called a simmer. Simmer for about 15 minutes.

You can insert meat thermometers (160 degrees) and all that to see if your food is safe to eat but just use common sense. Does it look like “cooked chicken” all the way through? If you can see any transparency or red or blood when you cut into it, simmer some more. Don’t simmer it for hours or it will be as tough as an old fighting cock, though even that doesn’t matter much when you’re making a salad.

What to do once the chicken is cooked

Cool it. The chicken, I mean. Remove it from the pan and put it into a bowl. Put the bowl in the fridge after you cover it with plastic wrap or a big plate.

While it’s cooling let’s see what you have in the larder that goes with it. Celery and onion are the most important. They both keep a long time so I always have them on hand. The only caveat is that the onion needs to be sweet or light. That would be “green onions” or scallions which are short lived, red onions which last longer but have more bite, or one of the “sweets,” Vidalia, Walla Walla, Burmuda or some others I don’t know.

Wash and chop up some celery and put it in a big bowl. Glass or ceramic is best. Chop up some onion and add it to the celery.

I know I haven’t given you amounts, like a cup of this and a pound of that. I learned to cook from my Grandma and Mom and other old ladies who seldom used recipes. And that’s a key to learning to feed yourself well. Pay attention to what’s in front of you not what’s on paper. So you got too much onion or it’s chopped too big . . . so what? This is not open-heart surgery. No one will die from it and next time you’ll adjust it a little to suit you better.

How to peel an onion or chop celery? Google them. There are tons of resources that already teach that. My goal is not to duplicate that information but to adjust your attitude toward “cooking” and eating.

[onion addendum added in 2022: I forgot to tell you this earlier even though it’s a technique I’ve used for years.. Chop or slice your bulb onion of any sort (i.e. not scallions) and put the pieces onto a bowl. Cover in cold water and let them float around for about 15 minutes. Drain the onions well and then add to the salad. This takes some of the bite out. As I’ve gotten older I like raw onion to be a little more gentle.]

Off the soapbox and back to the bowl

Time to take out the chicken and chop it up and put it into the bowl with the celery and onions.

Other things you might add

. . . a chopped up apple, especially a green one, chopped dill or sweet pickle or cucumber.

Time for the dressing

Lot’s of choices here. The quick and dirty (and delicious) first choice is to dollop in some GOOD, REAL mayonnaise. How much? Well, you don’t want it swimming in it and you don’t want it dry. Again, use your judgment. You can’t start to trust it until you exercise it. Add some salt and pepper (that will be a whole blog entry by itself but I’m in a hurry tonight). Toss it all together and serve on a lettuce leaf or eat it out of the bowl with a fork.

I’m starting a theme here and it is always and foremost EAT REAL FOOD.