Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Chicken Pot Pie

This is one of my favorite recipes from my mom.  I normally pick up a whole roasted chicken at the grocery store, eat the wings, legs, and thighs, and use recipes like this one for the white meat.

Chicken Pot Pie

1 cup cooked chicken
1 9 oz package, mixed veggies
1 can cream of chicken soup
½ cup milk
1 egg
1 cup Bisquick mix

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

In a 9-inch pie plate (I use a glass dish), put in the soup, vegetables, and chicken

In a bowl, mix the egg, milk and Bisquick together.  Pour over the chicken and vegetables. Spread evenly.

Bake 30 minutes or until golden.




Naturally, it's the one in the middle!  The others are rice porridge (l) and chicken fried rice (r)


Shukie

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Greates Love Inspired Deokbokki Recipe



 How many times we have watched a drama and wanted to eat exactly what they were eating?
I know I do it almost all the times. One of those things I often crave, because you can find in almost every single drama and move, is this popular street food. So i decided to start this series about drama inspired recipes with this easy Deokbokki recipe, that you can adapt to your own taste

  • 300grs  aprox. 2 cups  of  rice cakes (Deok=떡
  • 3/4l. aprox. 3 cups of water
  • 7 dried anchovies
  • 1 medium size carrot 
  • 1 small onion
  • 1 small zucchini 
  • 3 green onions
  • 1 tbsp sugar 
  • 1 tbsp of garlic (I used garlic powder)
  • 4-6 tbsp of hot pepper paste (to taste)
  • 1 tbsp of rep pepper flakes (optional)
  • 3 hard boiled eggs cut in half (otional)
  • You can also add clear noodles, and fishcakes  

Slice onion and cut carrots and zucchini into thin 1 inch long sticks. Remove head and gut of the anchovies and add them to a pot with the water. Boil for 10 minutes to make the broth. If you want to make a vegetarian version you can use kelp instead of anchovies. If using fishcakes, you should add them at this moment, and take them out at the same time that the anchovies, to cut them into 1"long by 1/4" wide pieces.
 


After 10 minutes discard the anchovies/kelp and add the Doek, red pepper paste, garlic, and red pepper flakes (if used). Cook for another 10 minutes at medium heat.  Passed that time add the vegetable, you can play around with them. If you don't love them, just add green onions. You can also add some other vegetable you have at home such cabbage. it is at this moment that you should add the clear noodles and/ or fishcakes. Passed 5 minutes, they are ready. Serve in a deep dish or bowl with the eggs. And Enjoy them as our puppy Lee Seong-gi does, as Sun Woo-hwan, in this scene of Shining Inheritance or as Dok Ko-jin ( Cha Seung-won) does up above for The Greatest Love. By the way I see a pattern, in both scenes our boys wanted to be fed by the leading ladies.  We should take note and put into practice when needed.  

By the way, I'm still not used to blogger and the layout is not coming out as I would like ti. Be patience with me ;)












Monday, November 19, 2012

Vegan Ginger Cupcakes


After a few recipes for those meat lovers, I decided to come with one for those sweet lovers and those non meat eaters.
Last year I was looking around for something delicious to make for a friend, who has almost everything he might need. Two years ago I made him a beautiful mix-media collage. We have a regular cake that year, it was before we discovered that milk was behind all his skin problems. Last year I decided to make him a cupcake extravaganza. There were just 3 or 4 kinds of vegan cupcakes.  One of those I made back them, and that had really good critics from all the guest, was this Ginger Cupcake recipe:

Ingredients for the Cupcakes

2 cups Soy Milk
1 tea spoon of apple cider vinegar
2 ½ cups of all-purpose flour
1 ½ cups of sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon of baking soda
3 teaspoons of ground ginger
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
½ teaspoon of ground cloves
½ cup of oil
½ cup of maple syrup

Ingredients for the Frosting

½ cup or 1 stick of vegetable margarine. (I used a soy base margarine)
3 cups of confection sugar
2 teaspoons of lemon extract or to taste
1 teaspoon or more of Soy milk to work on consistency

Directions

Preheat oven at 350 F
Add vinegar to milk, and set a side to curdle.
In a large mixing bowl sift all the dry ingredients.
Add oil and syrup to the milk and mix well.
Slowly add liquid mix to the dry ingredients and keep mixing and adding until it is completely mixed and homogeneous.
Pour mix into cupcake liners. Fill just ¾ of the liner.
Bake for 20, or until done. You can check by inserting tooth pick on cupcakes, if it comes clean, cupcakes are ready.

For the frosting, mix the margarine, at room temperature, with ½ cup of sugar until it becomes a cream keep adding sugar and working the cream. Add the lemon extract and keep mixing the cream. Add a teaspoon of soy milk to the mixing bowl and work the cream until it get the thickness desire. You might have to add more soy milk until that point is reach.
Finally, put icing on top of cooled cupcakes and enjoy.

My apologies, since this post lacks of any illustration, I''ll try to get nice step by step pics for my next one. In any case, I hope you like it.
Creme de Menthe Brownies - a Family Tradition

I have been asked to bring these to holidays, parties and picnics for over 30 years.  Enjoy!


1 box family size brownies (along with ingredients required on box)
1/2 cup + 6 tablespoons butter, softened
2 cups powered sugar
2 Tablespoons creme de menthe (can use real or syrup kind found in grocery stores)
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Bake brownies in 13 X 9 inch pas as directed.  Cool.

Mix 1/2 cup butter, powdered sugar and creme de menthe until well blended. Spread on brownies.  Refrigerate.

Melt the choc chips, being careful not to overheat (I find the microwave on medium power works best.)  Immediately mix in the butter till melted.  Carefully spoon over the brownies, tilting the pan to completely cover the mint mixture.  Cool before cutting.

Chicken Monterey?

One of my favourite Mexican restaurants has this dish called Chicken Monterey, so one day I decided to try and make it. So I have no idea how close this actually is, but it tastes good.

I normally start cooking the rice first because it takes a little longer. The actual prep time of the dish is about 25-30 minutes. First chop about half an onion, a green bell pepper (you could probably use any colour pepper, or add extras), a tomato, and some cilantro.

At this point I start melting some butter and add spices to the melting butter. (About 3-4 cloves fresh, crushed garlic, some dehydrated onion, paprika, ginger, cumin, parsley, oregano, celery salt, freshly ground black pepper, crushed red pepper flakes - you can also use a taco seasoning mix if you would like). Add about 2-3 tablespoons of lemon juice.

Start sautéing sliced mushrooms (I like to use portobello mushrooms, but any are fine) and the onions in the butter-spice mixture. I like to make sure the onions are soft and slightly translucent and the mushrooms slightly browned before adding the next ingredients.
Add about a chicken breast to the mixture and let it cook through. The nice thing about this recipe is that you can adjust the amounts to whatever serving size you want.
Once the chicken is cooked through, add the bell peppers and the tomato, and let them get a little cooked. I like to keep them slightly on the crunchy side, but you can cook them longer if you want.
Then add the sour cream and cilantro and stir it in.
 This is more or less what it will look like.
Serve it over rice (this is a new rice blend of wild rice, brown rice, black Japonica rice, and some others I can't remember - I just it tried out - it's delicious!) - any rice is fine. Normally at the Mexican restaurant they also serve this dish with refried beans and tortillas.


Enjoy!


Ricky's Mama's Sweet and Sour Snapper


I just cut and pasted this from the recipe that Ricky emailed me.  Notes from me are in [...]  And, I used talapia filets, because that's what I had.  I drained the canned, cubed pineapple, reserving the juice and used that in the sauce also.   The picture is just the sauce, as I was cooking it in my wok.

Sweet and Sour Snapper
She coats the snapper with some corn flour [I assumed corn starch] and some salt. And she cuts vegetables like cucumber, carrots, green bell peppers, tomatoes and pineapples (if we have any pineapples) into cubes and incorporates them into the dish.  [I used carrots, onions, red bell pepper, yellow bell pepper, canned pineapples, zucchini....tomatoes would've been good, but I have a tomato hater] 
 
Fry the fish until golden (don't overcooked them!)
Drain the oil, leave some to cook the sauce.
Fry some onions (We use a lot of onions) and garlic.
Then the diced veggies go in.
Tomate sauce or ketchup [I used tomato sauce] , some chilli sauce[sambal oolek] to balance out the sourness, some water to make it dilute.
Salt, sugar and pepper to taste.
You can also add some corn flour [starch] to thicken the sauce a bit.
You can reheat the fish by putting it in the pot again with the sauce and veggie.
Serve while hot! 
TA-DA!!!


Chicken Cream Cheese Chili

I made this for the first time today and it was yum, and very easy.  Because when I made this chili this morning I had no idea that I was going to be starting a blog, I don't have a picture.

First:  Put two frozen chicken breasts in the bottom of your crockpot.  Yes, still frozen.

Open and dump over the chicken:  1 can drained and rinsed black beans, 1 can undrained corn, 1 can RoTel tomatoes, 1 envelope Ranch Dressing Mix, 1 Tablespoon Cumin, 1 Teaspoon Chili Powder, 1 Tablespoon Onion Powder (I just threw in a big handful of dried onions).

Then:  Stir it around a bit to mix it all up.  Open an 8 oz package of cream cheese, put it on top, and set it to cook for 6-8 hours on low.  If you're around, stir it every once in awhile to stir the cream cheese in.

Last:  Using tongs or forks or something, fish out the chicken breasts.  Use two forks to shred them up, then throw it back in the pot and stir it up.

It ready to serve like that, or you can serve it over rice.


Sunday, November 18, 2012

The Very First Post

OK, Noonas.  Here's how it works.  (After I get it all set up, I'll delete this post).  I can add anyone as a contributor, you just need a google account.  DM me the email address associated w/your google account and I will add you as a contributor.  If any of you want to link to your blogs on here, that's fine, send me the URL (I know some of them, but not all of them).  Once we get it all set up, then you can come and post a great recipe, or a movie/drama review.  Or an inspirational (ahem!) photo of your fave star every once in awhile.  As long as everyone plays nice, this will be fun, and it's always fun to try new recipes and foods.