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% [?]

Shish Kebob, Avocado Salad & Red Wheat

I thought of adding a weekly Wordless Friday post (following the same concept from my foodie pal Nicole from her Pinch My Salt blog, to just photograph the dish with no text added, etc.), mainly to keep a track of my meals, that I cook for the house every Friday. Who knows, over time it might become an inspiration for the days you and I need to cook and have no ideas what to prepare.

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Popularity: 12% [?]