Mamaliga

Sun Dried Tomato & Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breast

Looks like I’ve been having my fill of BBQ this summer. Every Friday I pull it out and start improvising with whatever I have at hand that day. So the other day I opened an almost empty, un-inspiring fridge, to discover that I sill have a couple frozen chicken breasts, cream and blue cheese, olives, lemons, parsley and garlic and butter. “Garlic and butter!” I thought to myself… I am saved!

The Art of Slitting

Use this recipe as a guideline for stuffed chicken breasts. You can use whatever you have available to stuff, from spinach to pesto, dried fruit (like figs or apricots), artichoke hearts or asparagus tips. If it comes down to anything that you might have to pay attention to is how to slit the breast to make a nice pocket without ripping it.

The way I found it works is by placing the breast half horizontally on a cutting board and making an incision on the plumpier side of the breast not wider than say 1 inch then carefully making the inside pocket wider, working with the tip of your knife, going as close as possible to the edges without ripping.Once you stuff the breast, seal it with a wooden toothpick and off you go!

The ones here were stuffed with a mix of cream, Parmesan, blue cheese butter and garlic mix, sun dried tomato halves, olives and parsley

I marinated my stuffed chicken breasts in a mixture of olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, parsley and garlic for about 1 hour before they went on a hot charcoal grill. There I had to babysit them pretty often by turning every 5 minutes or so, I got a nice crust and color.

So, really, try your hand at this — you will impress yourself and those around you!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Home Made Cold Smoker

So, yeah… Lately I took on a new habit. Smoking… meat, you silly! The need came as I was prepping some Hungarian Gyulai Sausage (post will follow soon) that needed about 8 hours of cold smoke, at 90 F degrees maximum. I needed a simple device that would house the meat, and where smoke went in then smoke went out. Here’s how I did it!

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Popularity: 11% [?]

Bacon Explosion

Had to do it. I knew it was going to come. The notorious creation of the BBQ Addicts, The Bacon Explosion a scandalous arteries clogging log of sausage, with crispy bacon bits, wrapped in … you guessed a layer of thick bacon! No trace of a vegetable in sight! None.

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Popularity: 40% [?]

This weekend I took a shot at the as-close-as-I-can-get-to American version of the Bistecca Fiorentina, Florence’s signature steak introduced a century ago and made famous by Italy’s greatest food writer, Pellegrino Artusi.

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Popularity: 5% [?]