Mamaliga

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Cranberry-Walnut Celebration Bread

With three days before Christmas, while the southern plains are pummeled with snow storms, Chicago enjoys a strange mild winter with temperatures in the mid 40s with no precipitations! As much as I enjoy a white Christmas, and believe me, we have quite a bit of those in Chicago, I also appreciate spending time in the kitchen, baking, instead of shoveling snow.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

Pawpaw Fruit

Shrubs, flowers, ornamental trees of all sorts,  are very common to find in a usual suburban backyard but a Pawpaw tree? That’s what you will find if you come to our backyard (actually two of them).

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Popularity: 1% [?]

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% [?]

Newtons Fruit Thins

Look, how can say NO to a chance of reviewing a cookie (or more)? And how can you relax better than sitting down on a summer afternoon, with a bag of Newton Fruit Thins, a real espresso, and a laptop ready for the review? It doesn’t happen often so might as well dig in… Literally.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Here is another of those “oh my, it’s 5.00 pm, and I have no clue what to cook for dinner” meals. Considering of course that you already have a boned chicken, grainy Dijon mustard and of course the new POM pomegranate cranberry juice.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

Chicken Piccata

So we have this new thing going on when I have to take care of dinner three days a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday to be precise. It is something I enjoy, and it’s a way to wind down after a busy day. The problem is that I am a terrible meal planner. I do grocery shopping, and usually get what’s on sale, or what might inspire me to do a certain meal, but I don’t remember ever going with a pre-planned ingredient list for an upcoming meal. And usually what happens is that I wake up, open the fridge to sort of assess the situation of what I have or don’t have or what needs to be gotten rid of, then frantically search the Internet, cooking magazines or cookbooks for something that might resemble a decent dinner. For some strange reason, I always find that I have excessive mushrooms from the previous grocery shopping day. Don’t ask me why.

But I have my staples. I’m not that hopeless. For instance I make sure there are always a couple lemons and limes in the bottom fridge drawer. When skinless, boneless chicken is on sale, I pile up, and divide them up into portions and freeze them. Butter? I need that like gas in our car, okay?  And, look! I have all I need for Chicken Piccata, a sublime marriage between sauteed floured chicken breast cut into thin cutlets and a lemony-buttery-garlicky sauce topped with lemon slices, capers and parsley. To be honest, I inherited this recipe from Steph, since she does the best Chicken Piccata in town. And it’s a big town.

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Popularity: 18% [?]

…but I’ll just eat the Prunus persica (aka peach), thank you! After 3-1/2 years the Madison peach tree that my wife Steph planted is happy and producing more that it can bear (literally). I had to prop up its tiny branches with bungee ropes hooked to an improvised wooden tripod so they won’t break off. It produced abundantly this year (about 50 to 60 peaches) with no pesticides, growth hormones whatsoever. The proof is the worm! Last year we lost all 16 but 2 of them to the bloody squirrels (we hates them!), but this year we observed that if we leave the lawn to grow long enough, they seem to hesitate to walk over it. Not sure how much truth there is in this theory (beside the fact that we have a pretty un-kept back yard lawn), but it looked like each time they wanted to approach the peach tree, they kept stopping by the driveway border then turning back hissing mad as if their evil plan failed. I guess it’s a more humane way to keep them out of our trees than I previous thought of [ahem], and I won’t go into details here.

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Popularity: 5% [?]