Archive for the ‘Savory Main Dishes’ Category
Lasagna is one of those dishes that seems like it is going to be tricky and time consuming to make, but is actually quite easy to prepare. It makes a big batch, so it is a great dish to make to feed a crowd, but it is also a good option for a smaller group, since you can slice it up and freeze portions, ready to reheat a few days or weeks down the line for a quick (yet still homemade) dinner!
I’m not a big fan of lasagnas that go overboard with cheese. Instead, I prefer lasagnas that have a good balance of meat, veggies and spices in them to keep them interesting. This lasagna is a good example, as it incorporates ground beef, spinach, mushrooms, onions and garlic into it. It isn’t heavy on cheese, although it does use ricotta, mozzarella and parmesan cheeses, which I think keeps it a little lighter and a little healthier than some other recipes. I cheated a little bit and used good quality jarred marinara sauce as a base, as well as no-boil lasagna noodles, which saved on prep time.
About 1 hour after you start cooking, you’ll be ready to sit down to eat. The sauce for this lasagna is meaty and flavorful, with lots of nice garlic flavor and a hint of spice from the red pepper flakes. Add in more pepper when you’re preparing the sauce if you like things spicier. You can actually taste the spinach in the spinach filling because the ricotta and parmesan cheese that it is mixed in with don’t overwhelm it. Mozzarella on top, of course, adds a classic lasagna look to everything.
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Chicken and dumplings is classic American comfort food. It’s one of those dishes that you just want to curl up with on a cold winter night since it’s hearty, flavorful and can be very easy to make. If you’ve never had it, chicken and dumplings is a lot like chicken soup (very heavy on the chicken) with steamed biscuits floating in it. The chicken and broth portion of the dish already has a comforting, homey flavor to it and adding steamed biscuit dough makes the dish filling and lends a nice buttery flavor to everything.
This version of chicken and dumplings – and you should know that there are as many ways to make this dish as there are ways to make a chocolate chip cookie – is a quick one-dish meal that you can make in less than an hour from start to finish. I start with a whole rotisserie chicken and shred the meat. I make a chicken soup base using onions, carrots, celery, garlic and chicken stock (storebought, but homemade is good if you have it) and add the shredded chicken into it. I make homemade biscuit dough, drop it in small chunks into the boiling soup, then put the lid on the pot and cook everything until the biscuits are soft and tender.
I think that the homemade biscuit dough is the key to this dish. The finished dumplings are so buttery and flavorful, and they even have a bit of a flaky texture to them that you’re not going to get from a can of biscuit dough dropped into the soup. It’s worth noting that you’re not going to get the same kind of rich, buttery flavor from canned dough, either, since most are made with shortening. The dumplings will be done when they are cooked through and fluffy, no raw dough in the center; you will probably have to cut one open to double check and can cook the whole dish a few minutes longer if you need to. It reheats well, but is best fresh!
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One of the best things about Thanksgiving dinner is that there are always plenty of leftovers for the next day or two. This means that all the time and effort that went into cooking and cleaning on Thursday makes up for the fact that there is no need to spend much time in the kitchen for at least a day or two. Aside from heating up the leftovers, of course.
It can be a bit boring to just eat plates of the same dinner items over and over again, so I try to repurpose them a little bit. This year, I’m doing Leftover Turkey Sandwiches with Homemade Cranberry Barbecue Sauce. The turkey obviously comes from the bird and you can use either white or dark meat. The cranberry bbq sauce starts out with whole cranberries that are made into a quick sauce (you can substitute 1 1/4 cups leftover cranberry sauce for the first three ingredients in the recipe below), to which some classic barbecue sauce flavors are added. The finished sauce has a nice tang to it and a good amount of sweetness from the cranberry sauce.
The sauce, like the turkey, will keep well in the fridge so feel free to make it in advance and just pull it out when you’re ready to dig in to leftovers.
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There are more ways to cook turkeys for Thanksgiving dinner then there are turkeys being eaten on the last Thursday in November. Everyone – and their mother – has a strategy and the vast majority of them involve the turkey being in the oven for at least a few hours. I don’t think that there is only one perfect way to cook a turkey and so I am very open to trying new methods when I am ready to roast a big bird. I try to aim for a crisp (or at least not soggy) skin, relatively moist breasts and moist, tender dark meat. My usual method of high heat to start followed by a slow roast at a lower temperature works pretty well, but this year I decided to try an ultra-high heat cooking method to see how the turkey would turn out.
The high heat method, which I’ve mostly heard about as a good option for roasting chicken, not turkeys, calls for cooking a turkey at a high heat the entire cooking time. In theory, this seals in the juices while producing a crispy skin – and gets the turkey done in as little as 90 minutes! I skimmed through some of my past notes on the subject and decided to go with an old New York Times article as a guideline. I popped my turkey into the oven at 500F and sat back to watch it cook.
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The Cook’s Illustrated Magazine is a great read, since it really goes into detail about how the cooks in America’s Test Kitchen came up with each recipe. The only problem I have is that their idea of a “perfect” recipe isn’t always in line with mine – but when they are, they are real winners. A good example of this, for me, is their recipe for crunchy, oven-baked pork chops. This recipe was featured on a segment of the America’s Test Kitchen TV show (it was online, but I’m not sure if you’ll be able to access it without a subscription to their website), where it was filmed from start to finish and the recipe, including the amounts, were given.
I liked the idea of the oven-baked pork chops because they’re a little healthier than fried and the test kitchen kitchen crew was very convincing when they said they were just as good. And they were right. These pork chops were easy to make, on the healthier side and absolutely delicious. The crumb coating was crunchy and flavorful while the pork was moist and tender. I’d recommend not going any thicker than 3/4-inch for the pork chops, as I find that thicker chops tend to be a little bit tougher.
The secret to these is the crumb coating. The crumb layer is made with a combination fresh bread crumbs, garlic and shallots that is toasted in the oven in advance. This gives it a great brown color that it wouldn’t get if you put it on the meat untoasted. There is also an extra battering step, where the chops are dipped in a mixture of egg whites, dijon mustard and flour, which really helps the crumbs adhere and also makes the coating a little extra thick (and therefore, extra crunchy!). The whole dish took less than an hour to make, and most of that was the cooking time for the pork chops. It’s an easy, healthy dinner for a weeknight – and leaves you feeling like you can splurge on some cookies or ice cream for dessert!
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