Crockpot Braised Chicken & Red Cabbage

It's been awhile since I've posted anything here, not because I haven't been cooking but because life has been busy, and I've mostly been retreading familiar recipes...the ones I've posted here!  I've said before that the main reason I started this blog was for my own personal reference, and I've gotten some good mileage on that front in the last few whiles.

The kidlets get bigger and bigger, and they're doing more and more sports/homework/etc. during what used to be my cooking/prep time.  I've been keeping up by using the crockpot, and I'm needing to expand our repertoire.

This is adapted from Blueberry Hill Slow Cooker & Family Recipes.  I prepped it ahead and kept it in the fridge about 3 days before I made it for dinner.  Freezing is always an option, though.  I would definitely saute the veg before freezing it, but not the chicken.  If you don't have a few minutes to brown the chicken before putting it in the crockpot, I think you'll be fine just putting it in unbrowned.  For ease of packaging, freeze extra wine in an ice cube tray and use the frozen cubes for a freezer kit.

If you don't know what else to try juniper berries in, try adding them to sauerbraten.  Or a gin martini.

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Natural Egg Dyes

This is all over Pinterest, but I'm so pleased with the results we had from our natural egg dying, that I want to jot down my notes for next year :)

I used the What's Cooking America website for ideas of materials to try dying with.  We tried spinach, carrot tops, beet peels, paprika, espresso, red wine, red onion skins, yellow onion skins and red cabbage.  Other possibilities include herbals teas (especially rooibos and hibiscus), other spices like cumin, saffron and turmeric and really, anything else you can think of that will turn cooking water a color when it's boiled.

Yellow onion skins, red onion skins, red cabbage, beet peelings, espresso and spinach

The day you decide to make the dye solutions, make sure you have LOTS of pots available and a couple of hours to spare.  I've only got 4 burners on my stove, so I could only boil 4 dye materials at once and had to wash pots out in between batches.

Also when you go to dye the eggs, unless you're going to do a bunch of eggs in a single color, have lots of little containers handy (1/2 pint jars were a great size for a single egg) so your kids can concoct special color combinations for each egg.

I hard-cooked the eggs first, made the dye solutions separately, and soaked the eggs overnight to color them.  If you make your dye solutions, then boil the eggs IN the dye solutions, the colors will turn out much darker and richer.  But then there's no mixing of colors for the kiddos.  And that's no fun.

We dyed 23 eggs in individual cups (you always lose one when you boil a batch, dontcha?) in a total of 3 quarts of dye solution (and actually had some left over).  Probably you'd use less dye solution to cover a bunch of eggs in one bowl than each egg individually ya know?  That's just to give you an idea of what kind of volume of dye solution to shoot for.

3 quarts total dye solutions

To make the dye solutions, I didn't do a lot of measuring.  For vegetal stuff, I put in enough to come about halfway up the sides of my pot (or as much as I had, in the case of the red onion skins and carrot tops), covered with water by about 1/2" and boiled.  For spices, I could only get about 1 tsp to dissolve per cup of water.

So here's my materials rundown:

• Peels, tops and tails from 5 beets (cooked the beets for dinner) --> boil 30 minutes --> 1 quart dye solution
• Skins from 4 yellow onions --> boil 30 minutes --> 1 quart dye solution
• Skins from 1 red onion plus tops and tails --> boil 30 minutes --> 1 pint dye solution
• 4 cups chopped red cabbage --> boil 30 minutes --> 1 pint dye solution (I could have gotten more of this dye with the same amount of vegetable just by using a bigger pot and more water)
• tops from 1 bunch carrots --> boil 30 minutes --> 1 1/2 pints dye solution
• 4 cups spinach leaves, finely chopped --> boil 1/2 the spinach for 30 minutes, add the remaining spinach and boil 30 more minutes --> 1 1/2 pints dye solution 
• 2 tsp paprika --> dissolve in 2 cups boiling water --> 1 pint dye solution
• leftovers from the coffeepot plus water to make 2 cups plus 1 tbsp espresso powder --> 1 pint dye solution
• don't finish the red wine bottle --> 1/2 cup or so dye solution

Boil, strain, put in a jar.  Fridge until needed.

Dying was a lot of fun.  The kids each got a large measuring cup and requested mixtures of colors.  We Grownups poured the colors into the measuring cups to order, then the kids put an egg in a container and poured the mixture over.  No spills, no broken eggs...it was well-nigh an Easter miracle LOL  We poured a bit of vinegar into each cup afterward (about 1 tsp per egg cup), mixed gently with a spoon and let them sit overnight in the fridge.

Mad Color Scientist at work

Getting the wet eggs out of the dye baths requires a bit of gentle handling.  Some of the colors want to rub off very easily while wet (spinach and red cabbage particularly).  Some were sturdier even while wet (beets and the onion skins).  This is where one of those wire egg dippers could come in handy.

Color rubbed off the wet egg where my fingers slipped on it

I put mine on a cooling rack under a ceiling fan for a few hours, turning them once *very* carefully.

Once the eggs are dry though, no more color rub-off.  They will dry more mottled and speckledy than they look while wet, but they're still beautiful!

Beet dye

As far as final color results go, don't be surprised by what you get.  The dye may not be the same color as the plant material (yellow dye from carrot tops, blue-purple dye from red cabbage), the color on the wet egg may not be the same as the dye color, and the dry finished color may be different as well.

The 3 reddish dyes all produced rather different final colors.  The very intense beet dye solution gave a pale mottled pink.  The red onion skin dye gave a deep orangey red.  The yellow onion skin dye gave a solid yellow.

The red cabbage dye was not surprisingly the most striking dye.  Definitely want more of that one next year.  Since red cabbage liquid will turn different colors with acids/bases, I'm curious to try adding baking soda to the dye bath in place of the vinegar (not in addition to!) and see what we get.

Red Cabbage dye

The red wine had an interesting effect...sediment fell out of the wine and crystallized on the eggs, leaving the eggs a surprising mixture of blue, green and wine-purple with sparkles.

Red wine dye

The spinach was fairly pale.  I might try a greener green next year...kale or collards maybe?  When we combined spinach and carrot top dyes, we got more vibrantly colored eggs than using either one alone...perhaps I'll do a mixed batch of spinach-carrot top as well.

Whatever else we think up to try, we will definitely be doing this again next year :)  Happy Easter! Pin It

Gumbo Z'herbes

I saw the original recipe in the May 2013 issue of Food & Wine magazine.  It's a meat 'n' greens stew, and takes advantage of all the tasty spring greens hitting the markets (or coming up in your garden) at this time of year.  As a stew, you can make it in advance very nicely...the first time I tried this recipe, I cooked it fully in the morning and put it in the crockpot to keep warm until we got home that night.  It also freezes beautifully.

Btw, "z'herbes" is shortening of "fines herbes"...a mix of fragrant, flavorful green herbs such as tarragon, rosemary, thyme, parsley, lavender and so on.  It's pronounced "zayrb", if you're a French linguistics nerd like me ;)

The OR calls for particular amounts of particular greens and particular amounts of particular cuts of pork...I think of it more as guidelines ;)  I LOVE that I can throw in that half a head of cabbage that's left after making cabbage 3 different ways for a regular side dish, the rest of the collard greens left over after making sausage-stuffed collards, the nubbin of romaine lettuce left over from 2 salads.  Use turnip greens, beet greens, mustard greens, chard, kale, spinach, collards, spring mix, romaine lettuce, iceberg lettuce...about 3 lbs. of whatever is green in your fridge or garden.

And you can throw in handfuls of oddball greens like carrot tops (if you get carrots with the frondy greens still attached), second-year parsley (oddly, my parsley survived our winter and is coming back up and preparing to bolt as biennial plants do), watercress or arugula that you scavenge out of your early garden.

Clockwise from left: Ham hock, chopped hamsteak
with thyme, andouille

I'm also using up the last of our locally-raised hog.  When you buy a whole animal like that, you wind up with...well...weird bits.  Bacon ends.  Bony sirloin roasts.  Smoked hambones.  Tiny pork chops that are too little to serve by themselves.  I'm throwing all that stuff in this stew.  You can use fresh pork shoulder or loin, smoked pork, sausage links (andouille is traditional, and is the only thing I've bought special for this stew), ham hocks, hamsteak, chopped ham, neck bones...about 3 lbs. total.

When you chop up all those greens, it's a LOT.  You'll need an 8 quart or larger pot.  And then you only add 2 quarts of water to that pile.  It seems like too little.  It's not.  Trust me.  The greens cook down and give off their own liquid to make a flavorful broth that the stew is built on.  You do not want too much water here.  Here's how to tell if your tiny amount of water is boiling when you can't see it under a mess o' greens...put the pot lid on, turn the heat to high, and when there's condensation on the underside of the lid, you're good to go.

Lastly, the OR calls for file powder which I don't keep in my pantry.  File is a flavoring as well as thickening ingredient.  I add extra flour to compensate for the lack of file.  Use 2 tbsp flour instead of 4 tbsp and 1 1/2 tsp file powder if you want.  You can always add some beurre manie at the end if your stew seems too watery.

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Dim Sum

If you've ever had an appetizer and said "I could make a meal of that", this is the post for you!  We've got names for this concept from a variety of culinary cultures...Spanish tapas, Italian antipasti, Chinese dim sum...making a meal of several small plates of varying foods. 

These recipes are adapted from the Frugal Gourmet's Three Ancient Cuisines.  In spite of being a meal composed of multiple attention-needing dishes (I don't usually plan to give significant attention to more than 1 dish in a meal), it came together pretty quickly and with a lot fewer swear words than I expected.

Steamer basket workaround

One of the beauties of dim sum is how easily the recipes lend themselves to prepping or making ahead.  I prepped all the sauces the night before (chopped/measured/combined ingredients), made the dumpling dough the night before, formed the dumplings right before dinner (but could have prepped them earlier if the dough was ready) and was able to cook everything in 15 inattentive minutes at the last minute.  All these dishes could have been prepped and frozen ahead as well, or fully cooked ahead and reheated in a steamer.

Speaking of steamers, the stacked bamboo steamer is apparently a staple in a Chinese kitchen.  I don't have one.  I do have a variety of metal steaming baskets, cooling racks, and ceramic ramekins that I assembled into a 3-tier arrangement inside of a large stock pot.  Work with what you've got!

The squid/calamari recipe originally calls for plain, cleaned squid to be stirfried with aromatics and sauce.  My grocery store only had pre-breaded calamari, so I decided to oven-bake the calamari and toss it with the sauce which I prepared using the microwave. 

Calamari, dumplings and meatballs

The dumpling filling calls for using leftover Chinese BBQ pork and a bit of napa cabbage, but you could use any combination of cooked meat and vegetable you want (or go totally vegetarian and skip the meat).  If you've got a small serving of leftover steamed veg of any type, I'd use that rather than cooking additional vegetables for the filling.  Also, if you have a premade stirfry sauce, you can use about 3 tbsp of that rather than measuring half-teaspoons of all the ingredients listed below.  Just add a bit of cornstarch if necessary to thicken the mixture.  Again, I made use of the microwave to deal with what is really a small bit of filling.

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Beef Cabbage Casserole

I loves me some cabbage rolls, but the head of cabbage I had in the fridge wasn't really big enough to get decent-sized leaves off of for rolling.  Besides, I'd just spent the afternoon throwing together the next couple of weeks' worth of freezer meals and I was pooped.  So I decided to make "deconstructed" cabbage rolls instead.  A bonus of making this casserole instead of regular cabbage rolls is that you aren't left with that tiny ball of cabbage that you can't get any more decent-sized leaves from.  While it most certainly can be shredded and repurposed into a recipe for coleslaw or salad, some days that's just too much bother.  And it's as easy to make two of these casseroles as to make one.

This recipe can be cooked from a frozen state but it will take at least 2 hours in the oven.  If you want to do this, be sure to assemble the casseroles in metal pans (disposal or regular metal baking pans), NOT in ceramic or glass pans!!!  Ceramic and glass will be fine if you thaw the casserole first, though I'd still leave the dish on the counter for 30 minutes or so to avoid cold-glass-meets-hot-oven fireworks.  With *really* good planning, this can be a crockpot meal as well...just be sure to assemble and freeze the casserole in a pan that is smaller than your crockpot insert (a small cake pan works for mine) or put 1/2 the following recipe directly into the crockpot insert for next-day cooking.

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Savoy Cabbage Rolls

The first time my parents went out of town and left my teenaged brother and I home alone for the night, I seized freedom with both hands and...cooked cabbage rolls.  What a rebel I was ;)  I have ever since had a soft spot for all sorts of cabbage rolls, as I mark that recipe as the first time I ever *really* planned and cooked a meal.

The original recipe comes from the behemoth European cookbook "The Silver Spoon", though I have experimented wildly with storage and delayed-cookery options, rewrote the recipe to use less weird measurements and upped the vegetable ante.  SS assumes that you will have time to prepare the leaves, prepare the filling, roll the rolls and cook them all at once.  Bwahahahahahaha!  I made the rolls and froze them individually, then cooked mine from the frozen state on the stovetop.  Turned out really well.  I'd guess that the crockpot will work just as well, though thawing the rolls first would make fitting them into the pot (on the stovetop or in the crockpot) easier.  You can also bake them in the oven, but that will take longer and you really will need to thaw them first. 

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