Mango and Chicken Stir-fry

This Cat Cora cookbook, Cooking from The Hip, is pretty quickly becoming a favourite cookbook. There's a lot of really tasty things in this book and it really is full of the sort of things that I can make with mostly ingredients that I've already got (or can fairly easily get) and can do in a short enough amount of time that I don't feel like I've wasted a bunch of my day on cooking and then cleaning.

Stir-fry isn't really something that I think of as needing a recipe; the sauce, maybe, but even that doesn't or shouldn't need a lot of work. This is a pretty standard recipe - soy sauce, ginger, garlic and diced serrano pepper to marinate the meat - and then vegetables of choice. She suggests, and I used because I had all of them, carrots, broccoli, and snow peas.

The thing that males this stir-fry interesting is the addition of fruit. Cora suggests peaches or mango, and let's face it: May in Alberta is not exactly peach season. It's not exactly mango season either, since mangoes (like most fruits) don't grow here, but I can get a nicer Mexican mango this time of year than I can get... Chilean peaches any time of year. (They're hard and never ripen properly and why even bother, really?)

Okay, I'm going to interrupt myself for a minute because there's this amusing story my boss likes to tell about bananas. My job - I work in a grocery store - is to deal with signage and labelling, but generally speaking we don't have a lot of control over what's printed on the signs. I mean, we could change most signs to say almost anything we want, but we could also get fired for doing so. And there are people in an office somewhere who get paid to decide what our signs are going to say. So someone, somewhere along the way decided to make the signs for bananas read: "Bananas - Imported." And one day someone came up and read the sign and said, incredulously, to my boss, "Bananas are imported?!" Like, oh my god! I'm never going to buy a banana again if it's not 100% pure Alberta grown banana. Where in Canada did that person think they came from? Our hidden tropics off the coast of Northern Quebec?

Which leads me to something else. Right now, there's a show on TV called The 100 Mile Diet (at least I think it's called that) which deals with a town or a group of people in a town in BC somewhere where they agreed to go on a 100 Mile Diet for a year (I think - I haven't seen the show). And I wonder how that would work in Saskatchewan, where I'm from. I mean... in my backyard we grew very small cherries, smallish plums, and small apples in the summer, but other than that, it's really not a fruit growing region of the world. (We do have wild Saskatoon berries, and presumably blueberries though I've never seen those. And raspberries/strawberries can be grown there.) And it's far too cold to be growing lettuce or other greens during the winter. How on earth would anyone survive such a diet without getting scurvy? I mean, yes, you could can or freeze a lot of produce (now) and obviously the First Nations people survived the winters there (back in the day), but I think it'd be a pretty depressing show wherein all the people on the diet find themselves losing weight, getting ill, and being in general incredibly frustrated by the experience. I don't know. I find the 100 mile diet both intriguing and maybe... pointless. I can imagine every one of those people on the show going out for a Tim Horton's coffee and a bar of chocolate as soon as filming was over.

In any case, what I wanted to say about the mango in my stir-fry was that heated up it became impossibly sweet and delicious. It was like some whole other fruit I'd never tasted before and it was a really delicious addition to the stir-fry. Something I'd try again, for sure.

Fusion Chicken with Citrus Salsa

I don't really like the word fusion as applies to food, but "fusion chicken" was the name given to this recipe by someone at Better Home and Gardens. The recipe for this appears in a diet cookbook for BH&G and it's some of the best diet food going.

So so good. It's a bit sweet and a bit salty and very, very flavourful. My sister and brother-in-law wouldn't eat it with the citrus salsa, but the oranges add a bright, fresh taste to the sauce and I think they're lovely together.

Here's the recipe, which I reproduced in a comment a few days ago. When I made it tonight, my only change was to use a blood orange, a cara cara orange and a tangerine in place of the tangerines the recipe asks for. Oh, and I used apricot jam today, and reduced the amount of sugar. (There's a lot of sugar in Hoisin and in jam; I don't think it's necessary but haven't tried the sauce without it.)

Fusion Chicken. Serves four.

1/4 cup water
3 tbsp hoisin sauce
2 tbsp peach preserves (I've used everything from apricot jam to marmalade to passionfruit jam)
1 tbsp sugar
2 tsp soy sauce
4 med. tangerines or 2 lg oranges
3 tbsp cilantro, snipped
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (~1.5 lbs total)
1 tbsp oil

Combine water, hoisin, preserves, sugar and soy sauce in a small bowl. Add 1 tsp rind, finely grated from one of the tangerines. Set aside.

Peel and coarsely chop oranges, removing seeds. Toss oranges with cilantro. Set aside.

In a large skillet, brown the chicken in oil over medium heat, about 5 minutes. Drain the fat. Pour hoisin mixture over chicken. Bring to a boil, reduce heat. Simmer, covered, for 8-10 minutes or until chicken is tender and no longer pink (170F).

Remove chicken from the skillet. Boil sauce gently, uncovered, about 5 minutes or until reduced to 1/3 cup. Return chicken to the skillet. Heat through, turning to coat with sauce.

Serve over hot rice with tangerine mixture.

Hummingbird Cakes

Quite a long while ago I discovered Hummingbird Cake. It's apparently something out of the American South, which might explain why I (coming from the Canadian prairies) had never heard of it. I had been looking for recipes for cupcakes with fruit in them and I found a cupcake blog with a lot of really cool recipes, including this one. Hummingbird cake tastes a lot like a more-cake-than-bread banana bread, with pecan bits and crushed pineapple. And it's ridiculously good.

I've only ever made hummingbird cake as cupcakes - mostly I find them easier to work with. You can share them at work more easily and icing a cupcake is easier than icing a whole cake.

Here's the recipe, for 24 cupcakes:

3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
3 eggs
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1-1/2 tsp vanilla
1 8oz can crushed pineapple, with liquid
2 cups mashed, ripe banana
1 cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 350F.

Mix flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, salt in a good sized bowl. In a second bowl, beat eggs lightly with a whisk. Add oil and vanilla to beaten eggs and mix until combined. Add the liquids to the bowl of dry ingredients. In the now empty egg bowl, mix together pineapple, bananas, pecans until combined. Add to the rest of ingredients and stir to combine.

Bake at 350 F for 20 to 25 minutes, rotating the pan after 15 minutes, until golden and a cake tester comes out clean.

I topped these with cream cheese icing and a half pecan. The icing recipe is as follows:

2 tbsp butter, softened
4 oz/125g cream cheese, softened
2 cups icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Whip the butter until creamy. Then add the cream cheese and beat until combined. Then add the sugar and vanilla; beat until smooth. Either spread or pipe icing onto the cupcakes in a thin layer.

Both of these recipes came from the aforementioned cupcake blog.

Sweet and Sour Curried Pork and Peppers

This photo is a couple days old now, and I wasn't sure about posting it, but I decided to anyway. Mostly because it amuses me and as an object lesson in drawing mental lines and sticking to them.

Let me back up a little. When I first read the recipe for this, I thought to myself gross. It looked like sweet and sour (Chinese?) curry (Indian?) by way of 1950s casserole cookbook for the discerning housewife (Campbell's condensed soup?). Gross.

Which is where I ought to have drawn a mental line and said No, I won't try this. Instead, I thought, Well, it sounds gross, but I can make myself a kind of mushroom gravy in place of the soup and then try it with that inside. Maybe it'll be one of those weird combinations that actually works out. It wasn't. It made a kind of thick pineapple gravy that was sweet and curried and nasty and gross.

I picked all the pork out of it, scrapped off the sauce, diced it smaller and mixed into into some leftover rice and just ate that instead. Maybe I should have made it properly, with a can of soup, and maybe that would have made it better, but I still sort of doubt that.

Ew.

Apple Zucchini Asparagus Pizza

This is, you know, pretty much what it says on the tin. MacIntosh apple slices, zucchini slices, asparagus, and underneath a mound of caramelized onions. It's also got feta, Swiss and Parmesan cheeses.

It was a strange thing, and I didn't really eat it because I over-baked the crust and the skinny little asparagus sticks were remarkably tough to chew through. But I really liked the taste of the cheese baked on the apple with the caramelized onion, so I picked all those tasty bits off and ate them before throwing away the rest.

I think it would be really great reworked as a tart of some sort, minus the zucchini and asparagus. I'll have to think about it, see if I can talk myself into making pastry dough one day.

Pignoli-Coconut Crusted Salmon with Steamed Boy Choy

It's been ages again since I cooked fish, so I thought it was probably time I sucked it up and cooked it again. I really don't understand why I have such difficulty with fish because it always tastes good and it's easy to cook. And yet I hum and haw about cooking it and sometimes can't talk myself into buying it. It's completely ridiculous.

Never mind that, though. This was really quite good. I singed it a little bit and so I was worried it would taste like burned nuts, since it's crusted with ground pine nuts and coconut, but it was really just wonderful. The fish was really moist and cooked perfectly. The sweetness of the salsa was a nice compliment to the salmon.

I didn't wind up eating much of the bok choy because it got cold very quickly while I was taking my pictures. I thought about reheating them, but didn't bother because I didn't think they'd taste very good reheated. Shame about the missed opportunity, though, as I love bok choy.

Sweet and Sour Chicken

This is the last of my backlog of photos to post, except for one that I'm skipping over (a soup and pizza combo, because you can't get a good enough look at the soup, which is the only interesting thing, and that not very. This I made... on Sunday and because it's a sloppy mess, it would be a good guess that it's a Sandi Richard recipe, from Dinner Survival.

Like many of her sloppy mess dinners, it tastes pretty good, but it also pretty sweet. I think I need to learn just to cut back on the sweet parts of her recipes and add more sweetness later, if it seems to need it. It did taste better on the second day, when the sauce had a chance to turn saucy, and somehow the sweetness seemed less overwhelming. (There still wasn't enough sour to balance it, but it wasn't so sickly sweet.)

I had used chicken thighs in this recipe and ugh... was that a gross experience. I had forgotten how much fattier than chicken breast they are, and how much more work you need to do to make them edible. (Or how much work I need to do, anyway, since I have a thing about always cutting off the fat and making sure there aren't veins and things.) It's just that they're cheaper and in some dishes much tastier (because they are so fatty, I suppose) and if they came without so much excess fat on them I'd probably cook them more often.

Apricot-glazed Ham with Sautéed Spicy Green Beans

I'm trying this week to eat no added sugar because I've found myself having weeks where every day I need a mid-morning pick-me-up donut and I hate that. So this week, it's all very explicitly planned meals.

I'm also trying to keep using up food that I've got in the freezer. I don't really like things that have been frozen, somehow, so it bothers me that I just keep on buying things that are frozen and then leaving them to sit for half an age. (I have a box of chicken burgers, unopened, in my freezer that I've had since I moved here. In February 2007.) I tend to freeze leftovers a lot too, but once they disappear into the freezer, I sometimes forget about that.

This black forest ham was one of those forgotten things. When I was looking for healthy recipes for the week (though this one does contain sugar, the very thing I was trying so hard to avoid!) I ran across a recipe for baked ham and suddenly remembered the dish in the freezer. The meat, on inspection, was a bit freezer burnt, but otherwise fine. It smelled, from the first cook-through, of cloves, but that was okay because the recipe also contains cloves.

This apricot glaze smells and tastes like fall to me. It's sweet and sticky and fruity and tastes of cloves and cinnamon. It'd be perfect for a fall dinner, Thanksgiving maybe, followed up by a spicy pumpkin pie with mounds of whipped cream. (Oh, wait. Probably not so much, if I'm aiming for healthy, eh?)

The ham looks so prominent in the picture because it's propped up on a pile of deliciously spicy green beans. I just steam them lightly, then sauté quickly with a dash of oil and some red pepper flakes. Wonderful.

Recipe: Balsamic Lime Chicken with Fruit and Greens

This recipe comes from the diet/cook book The Fiber 35 Diet by Brenda Watson. It recommends this as a lunch or with brown rice for dinner, but I found it filling enough on its own - salad and chicken - for dinner. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I did find the dressing for the salad a tiny bit... boring. It all tastes good together, particularly if you have a little bite of each thing at once, but if you've got some lettuce on it's own it's just... boring. It maybe just needs something to perk it up a little bit, like some garlic maybe.


To serve two.
Ingredients:
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp lime juice
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tbsp dried thyme
1 small red chili, chopped [I used a couple dashes red pepper flakes as I couldn't find a chili]
2 chicken breasts
spray oil
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp Dijon mustard
salt and pepper
2 1/2 cups spinach [I used a romaine/butter lettuce mix]
1 pear, cored and cubed
1/2 cup fresh raspberries


Instructions:
Mix 1 tbsp vinegar with lime juice, garlic, half the thyme (~1-1/2 tsp) and chili into a large ziplock bag or a bowl with the chicken. Refrigerate for about 2 hours to marinate. When ready to use, remove the chicken and discard the remaining marinade.

Preheat oven to 350F/180C. On the stove top, heat an oven-proof frying pan, coat lightly with spray oil, and sear chicken for 3 minutes on each side. Place pan in the oven until chicken is cooked through [~15 to 20 minutes, I think, I forget what I did]. Allow chicken to rest, then slice.

Combine and mix until emulsified the olive oil, 1 tbsp vinegar, remaining (~1 1/2tsp) thyme, mustard, salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle over plated spinach and cubed pear (or toss, like I did, but it doesn't look as pretty). Top with chicken and finish with raspberries.

Balsamic Lime Chicken with Fruit and Greens

Over two weeks since my last post - shame on me. It's not that I haven't been cooking. Well, no, okay, it's partly that I haven't been cooking. But also that the things I've been cooking haven't been very interesting - stir-fry, chili, stuff from the freezer... There's just nothing interesting about a barbecued burger or sausage. I've taken a few photos of things, but nothing that's stood out, so I haven't put anything up.

This stands out though. For me, anyway. It's just so pretty! (Shame I tossed the salad with the dressing like it said - it'd look nicer if I'd just drizzled some on.) The raspberries look amazing and they tasted amazing.

Actually, the whole thing tasted amazing - a bit of chicken with a bit of pear and lettuce and a raspberry all at once. Just delicious. And definitely a Make Again sort of recipe.

Pork with Balsamic-Basil Macerated Strawberries, Parmesan Risotto and Tomato with Caciocavollo

This photo is a few days old now, as I made this dinner on Thursday, but it was a busy weekend, so I haven't really had time to update. I need to now though because I have something new from today to update with, though I haven't edited the photo yet, and I plan to make something new tomorrow, so that'll be another update, if I manage to get it all done.

So this. This is a pork dish that sounded so interesting to me the first time I saw the recipe. It's a Rachael Ray recipe that she calls Columbus's Chops or something along those lines because the recipe is a take on a recipe that goes back to the 1400s.

Like all Rachael Ray's foods, it was quick and easy to make - the sliced strawberries sit in a balsamic vinegar bath with some torn up basil while you cook the pork, and then you mound them on top of the meat and eat. Easy as anything. It tasted really wonderful as well - I wasn't totally sold on the idea of strawberries on pork, but pork does really well with other fruits, so it's not surprising really that strawberries work as well. And then, too, the balsamic vinegar somehow pulls out the most amazing sweetness from the berries. It's like eating a whole different sort of fruit.

The risotto, I'm only minorly ashamed to admit, came from a box. Lundberg has a couple 25 minute risottos and this is my favourite of the two I've tried. It's probably a bit heavy go with something as delicate and lovely as the strawberries and pork, but I didn't have any other white rice, so I made it anyway.

And finally, the tomatoes and cheese. Another very simple side dish - just sliced tomatoes with a little salt on them, layered with sliced smoked Caciocavollo cheese, then topped with fresh grated black pepper and a quick drizzle of olive oil. The cheese is amazing with just a hint of pepper and oil.

Five-spice Pork with Citrus-Mango Salsa on Cinnamon-scented Rice

I seem to be craving citrus the last few days. Mostly I don't eat citrus fruit - when I think of oranges, I think of my parents making me eat one every single night ever before I went to bed. It made me never want to eat oranges again. So even though I don't dislike the taste of oranges, I never actually want to eat them. (I make an exception for Mandarin Oranges, but they're almost like candy at Christmas.)

Over the weekend, I saw tangelos at the grocery store and bought them on a whim. And then yesterday my sister was trying to talk herself out of cooking because her recipe seemed too complicated and I made the orange salsa for her so that she couldn't use the excuse. Well, I cut up the tangelos for her salsa (since the oranges we had didn't look as nice) and with the cilantro on it, it was so good! So I had to make my own citrus salsa for dinner today.

The tangelos at my work looked awful, but while I was looking for oranges I found blood oranges! I'd never actually seen one before, so I had to buy a couple. And then one of the produce guys told me he'd get some Cara Cara oranges out of the back for me to buy as well. They're a bit like a pink grapefruit in colour, but are very sweet and so good, even to a non-citrus lover like me.

Anyway, I found a recipe for a 5-spice pork tenderloin with a mango salsa that you're meant to eat wrapped in an egg-coated tortilla (kind of like French toast, I guess...), so I picked and chose bits of the recipe to use. The meat was really fantastic, and it tasted great with the salsa and the cinnamon rice, which had been frozen from something I made a while ago. I think the cinnamon flavour was much more apparent with this recipe than it was in the meal for which it was intended. Definitely a good thing that I had so much of it left-over.

Recipe: Apricot-topped Curry Burger

I've been sick, which is why I haven't really been making anything to post. Last Wednesday I'd taken out a pork loin chop to make ginger pork, and beef to thaw for making into a meatloaf on Thursday, but I wound up so sick I spent all of Wednesday in bed and I skipped work on Thursday. I ate crackers and chicken soup.

On Thursday I made the ginger pork, just because I didn't want the meat to go to waste, but I couldn't taste anything and it hurt to swallow, so I wound up throwing it out. Friday, fortunately, I felt a fair bit better, so I decided to make the meatloaf. We always go out for dinner on Fridays, though, and I decided to make burgers instead as they'd cook faster and I didn't want to be stuck with food in the oven when my sister and brother-in-law wanted to leave.

I had to cut one apart to be sure they were cooked since our meat thermometre seems determined not to read anything above 100F, so I took a bite of that cut one that day. And oh my god, so good. Both pictures since have been microwave reheated, which is not my favourite thing to do to meat, but these burgers were so moist and juicy that even the microwave couldn't sap the goodness out of them.

So this recipe is kind of a hack job, taking parts of a meatloaf recipe from Sandi Richard's The Dinner Fix and adapting parts of a chicken recipe from YOU: On a Diet. Richard likes to cook with jams and chutneys and things like that, but I can't and won't buy one of every flavour of jam out there just so that when her recipe asks for plum sauce mixed with peach jam I'll be set. So I decided to use the topping from this chicken recipe. It was a smart move, I think.

Apricot topping
8 dried apricots
2 shallots
1 tbsp + 1tsp olive oil
2 tbsp white wine
1/4 tsp curry powder
1/8 tsp cinnamon

Chop up the apricots and shallots, making them fairly fine. Add ingredients to a hot frying pan and cook, stirring, until most of the liquid has cooked away. Set aside. If you want, you can process or blend the mixture until smooth, or just leave it chunky as in the picture. (I processed it when I used it as a chicken topper.)

I didn't have white wine, so I used a tiny little splash of white wine vinegar and 2 tbsp of water. I don't know what difference that makes for the recipe, but it would probably be better with the wine. It uses a lot of oil, which comes directly from YOU, and I considered using less, but I used it all anyway because I thought it maybe helps keep the burger moist. A fair bit of the oil cooked off in the oven, and it doesn't taste or feel oily, so I don't think it hurts to use it all.

Burgers or Meatloaf
1 lb extra lean ground beef
salt, fresh ground black pepper
1 egg
1/4 c fine breadcrumbs
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tsp garam masala
1 tbsp Madras curry paste (I used Patak's brand, which is quite spicy, but I imagine you could use whatever type and brand of curry paste you like or already have; the recipe asks for Tandoori curry paste, but I had Madras, so that's what I used.)

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Shape into a long flat meatloaf or into four burgers. Place on a baking sheet. Top with apricot topping. Bake in a 350F oven until cooked through. It's done when a thermometre reads 180F. (My burgers took about 25 minutes, but we've an oven liner in the oven at the moment that seems to add to the cooking time. Though it does keep the oven clean. The recipe, which is for a 2-lb meatloaf, says it requires a 50 minute cooking time.)

My burgers were moist and juicy and delicious. A little bit spicy and a little bit sweet and just really good.

Red Snapper with Pineapple Salsa, Pecan Wild Rice, and Sautéed

Cooking fish makes me nervous. Actually, just eating fish sort of makes me nervous. It somehow seems impossibly hard to cook, and I always always assume that I won't like it, even though I haven't run into that many fish dishes that I've not liked.

It's probably partly that I'm scared of fish - I can barely look at them, from larger dead ones in the store to goldfishes in a fishbowl - and partly that my main experiences with fish when I was younger weren't too great. And, too, I come from the prairies. The ocean was a two day drive away. Fish wasn't (and still isn't) a terribly common protein choice. Of the four large grocery stores in my hometown, none have a fresh fish counter. When my mom cooked fish, it came out of a box that said "Highliner" or "Bluewater" on the side.

And then my other experience was going to an uncle's place in BC and my mom canning salmon there. They took this giant, freezer length salmon out of the freezer, and did whatever they did and we can home with jars upon jars of the stuff. I hated it. (My sister still refuses to eat salmon.)

Since then I've had it a few times. Once at a nice restaurant here in Calgary (Chicago Chophouse, what I had is no longer on the menu, though), and I've made it a couple times. This is probably the best fish I've ever made.

I really liked the texture of this fish, and the taste, with or without the salsa. I found the salsa a bit too sweet, but it was just spicy enough. I was a little worried about the salsa because it asked for "hot curry paste" and I never quite know what to use. I had Thai red curry paste, Tikka curry paste, and Butter Chicken curry paste in the fridge, but I always wonder what sort of curry paste they're actually asking for. (I used the Thai one.)

I found the rice a little boring. The pecans were an essentially useless addition, since I neither tasted them nor felt them when I was eating. I can't actually remember biting into a piece of it. I was supposed to use a white and wild rice blend, but I already had a brown and wild rice blend, so I used that. I don't know if that affected the outcome, but it might have, since the brown blend has a stronger flavour of its own than a white blend might have had.

I was going to serve green beans with this, which I think would have looked nicer (too much chopped stuff all over the place in this picture), but I had half a green pepper and an ageing tomato hanging out in the crisper, so I thought I'd better use it up before it went bad. I just very quickly sautéed them with some onion, thyme and basil.

Anyway, this is another of the Sandi Richard recipes, and I think it's a keeper.

Apple-Walnut Amaranth

Today I started doing a week long detox program that eliminates food allergens like gluten and eggs and dairy and so on. And this was my first breakfast. (Oh how I shall miss my Fibre One/Cheerios with milk each morning...)

It looks kind of gross - very bland colour and the texture doesn't really look that great either - but it was quite tasty, and very filling. This cooked up quite a bit like rice, though it doesn't absorb quite so much liquid. It reminded me a bit of oatmeal, but I suppose that's only because it's the nearest comparison that the average North American can probably make. How often do we eat cooked grains other than oatmeal?

I cooked this with chopped apple (and cinnamon), but I think when I make this again, I'll stir in fresh apple after it is cooked - I think I'd prefer to have a crunch of apple rather than the soft bits of apple you get from cooking it.

Lentil-Basmati Rice Croquettes with Mango-Lime Salad

My dinner is ethnically confused - I used tzatziki again in place of raita. (Still too lazy to make my own. And also, I always just end up throwing away the remainder of the tub of plain yogurt. Why can't I buy small containers in the stores here, hm?)

Anyway, this was so ridiculously delicious and it's such a damn shame that the lighting was so bad because it was completely gorgeous on top of being completely tasty and this picture doesn't do it justice at all.

This recipe came from Jack Bishop's A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen.