Hungarian Stuffed Chicken

In my previous post, you may have noticed, was a sneaky sentence about how matching the sides to the main is important in Hungarian cuisine. And then my sister pointed out, justifiably, where is the recipe for the stuffed chicken that this goes with?

Quite right. My bad.

I luuurve this recipe, but, yes, I realize for some people it can be a hurdle to make a whole chicken if you're not used to it. I didn't realize there were people who were squeamish about this sort of thing at all until I was 20-something years old, when I dated met some of them. I, apparently, grew up in the European tradition of eating animals that, yes, you could tell that they were once animals.

Silly Americans and their silly squeamishness.

On the other hand, the first time I made this, I was quite grossed out by the thought of actually touching a dead animal. Still sort of am. So when I made this recipe for the first time, it was after years of having been a vegetarian, and, instead of being easy on myself and making something that I wouldn't need to touch, like goulash, I jumped right in to whole chicken (see above for why I thought this was normal.) Also for some odd reason, I had friends over when I was cooking. (I think they were 'helping' me.) And one of those friends thought it would be HILARIOUS to open and close the chicken's legs while shouting out 'chicken butt!'

I ran out of the kitchen. I don't know how that chicken got stuffed. But somehow I managed to get it into the oven, and cooked it, and everyone ate it and had a great time. Point is, don't make friends with your food.

Hungarian Stuffed Chicken - Töltött csirke

Ingredients 

Yes, it tends to burn the pan a little. Aluminum helps.

• 3-4 slices old, dry, disgusting, freezer bread
• 3/4 to 1 1/4 cup or 200-300 ml soy milk (or regular milk if you don't keep kosher) 
• a bit of oil or schmaltz
• 1/2 a small onion, chopped small
• bunch of parsley, chopped up
• 2 eggs
• 1 whole chicken, WITH skin
• bit of salt, pepper to taste

1. Make sure to assemble the ingredients before you do anything else. Chop the onion. Chop the parsley. Get out the eggs. You're less likely to forget them that way, like I just did. 
2. Soak the bread in soy milk while you prep the rest of the recipe. Preheat that oven too while you're at it - 200-220C is good, according to my oven manual. 
3. Heat the oil or schmaltz (give yourself a high-five if you're using schmaltz) and fry the onion slightly, until it gets a little yellow.  My recipe says to add liver if you're using it, but I never have, so I can't comment. 
4. Remove onion from heat and add it to the bread. Mix. Add parsley, egg, a bit of salt, pepper if you want (I generally don't) and mash it all up with a fork or your fingers. Don't be concerned if the bread falls apart - you want it to. This is your stuffing.
   

   

   Lotsa parsley
5. Put the chicken on the tray you're going to be baking it in. From the cookbook, "Using your fingers, gently loosen the skin around the neck opening, without damaging the skin." Basically pry the skin away from the chicken. Not all the skin. Mostly the skin around the boobs and/or the back, I find, is the easiest. Yeah, kinda gross. I use gloves. 
6. Take the stuffing and stuff into chicken (still got those gloves on). Under the skin if you can (not that much fits there) and shove the stuffing into the absolute biggest kitchen euphemism I know of - the "cavity." Yeah. That's right. Into the cavity. 



Gloves.




7. Chicken butt.
8. The recipe adds two more steps here that I never ever do, but you can if you want to. One, is use needle and thread to sew chicken closed. Yeah right. Two, is probably a good idea, but I also just have a hard time following instructions, is to then top the chicken with melted butter (or oil. Or schmaltz.) Yeah, that does sound good. Maybe that's a good idea to do. I never have, but maybe I'll start.
9. Stick in oven. I find this chicken takes a good 2 hours to cook, but that depends on the size of the bird. Officially cook until it reaches 180 (that's fahrenheit) on a cooking thermometer, or, you could do what my roommate used to do, and cook until juices run clear when it gets poked. But you probably know how to cook a chicken by this stage in your life, and if you don't, call me. I'll come over with my kitchen thermometer.

Oh, sides - "Serve with potatoes or rice, braised vegetables, and salad. Töltött csirke (don't ask me how to pronounce that, I don't know) is also good served cold."

Notes
- You can tell this recipe is my peeps, right? A "bunch" of parsley. How much? Some. A bunch. If you want it less parsley-y, you use less. More, then you use more. A bunch. 

- Pro-tip - for the first time you make this recipe, yeah, go ahead and use oil. However, in FUTURE times, save the chicken fat drippings* and put it in the freezer, and use that in place of oil. It's much better and it's good sustainable living. Plus it's fancy - like how the French pair the wine with the cheese from the same region. Pair chicken dishes with chicken fat. 
*Do this with a spoon or turkey baster in the first hour of cooking, otherwise it cooks away. 

- Really one of the reasons I love this recipe so much is that it fits perfectly with my food philosophy. Whole chicken is one of the cheapest ways to eat chicken (I think because people are afraid of it), eggs and parsley are cheap, and this recipe is the perfect way to use up all that disgusting old bits and bobs of bread in your freezer, and elevates it to something simply divine. There you go, that's me going all food-blogger speak. 

Confucius say, take off rings when shoving hands into chicken cavity.

Non-snooty Homemade Yogurt

Forgive me, blogging world, for I have sinned. It has been 42 days (!!!) since my last post, and I haven't even fulfilled my promises made for Pesach recipes. (OTOH, I haven't seen any posts claiming that people are starving for lack of Kosher for Pesach vegetarian recipes, so I don't feel too too guilty. Just a little guilty.) Also, I have been privy to some amazing resources for Pesachy food recipes that friends and friends of friends have written, so I don't feel like I necessarily need to reinvent the wheel there.

Frankly, I have been feeling a little disheartened with the blogging thing lately. There are soooooo maaaaaaaany good food blogs out there these days, and I don't know how much I'm going to contribute. Lil 'ol me. Just now, for example, I was scrolling over to Smitten Kitchen looking for sidedishes, and that made me feel bad about myself, and want to kick myself for not putting up my own recipes on the internet since before blogging was big, and how stupid it was that I hadn't gone out and gotten an amazing camera, because isn't she about my age and now she's big and famous and the queen of cooking things at home from scratch and isn't she just doing things that I could have done myself had I thought of it, dammit?

And then I imagine a heavenly voice calling out that reminds me that nobody expected me to be Rav Zusha, just to be me. Which makes me feel a little better, but also a little cynical because I don't believe fairy tales anymore, and I don't have a fancy camera anyway.

Also, blogging has become a lot of work these days. The last few posts I've posted have taken HOURS to write. Cuz, you know, there's the writing part, and that's fairly easy. But then there's the making the recipe, so I can have nice photos to post (I don't know about you all, but when I read food blogs, I don't really read them. I just go for the photos.), and then my crappy camera is really my crappy phone, so I have to instagram or canva the photos to make them somewhat less crappy. And then I have to play with graphics and fidget and stuff and that makes writing blog entries a pain in the butt less fun. Less fun makes me less inclined to blog.

So there you are. It's not that I haven't been cooking. I have been. Most of it has been edible. I just haven't been able to bring myself to invest an entire day in food blogging. Also, I have a thing about inspiration and writing when the mood strikes, which lately it hasn't been. But I do want to be writing more, and for that I think there needs to be fewer pictures so that blogging becomes more fun for me again, less of a hassle. You all okay with that? Okay? Okay.

So I've been making yogurt from scratch, did you know you can do that? You can. It's not difficult. Worst comes to worse you get it wrong and then you just use spoiled milk to make muffins and they come out fine and nobody dies. So I'm going to tell you about yogurt, but there will be no photos. Just imagine something white and milky.

 I has no photos. Here, have a video.

 

Here. Homemade yogurt recipe. Harrumph. 

Hypothetically you do need some specialized equipment for this one, namely a thermometer and a thermos. You might be able to do without the thermometer, just play it by finger; and in place of thermos I've read that you can use a heating blanket or oven. Basically just some way of keeping yogurt at an even temperature for a few hours. Feel free to experiment and let me know what works or didn't. If you want to go to a snooty source which will tell you to buy yogurt cultures and to use a yogurt maker, you can go here. Just take them with grain of salt.

Ingredients

• milk
• old yogurt - very important that it has active bacteria in it. I think, though I'm not certain, that that's any plain yogurt marked 'bio.'

1. Pour milk into thermos. This isn't necessary for recipe, it's mainly just to measure out how much yogurt your container can handle
2. Pour milk into small pot. Heat until it reaches 185 degrees F. This, like, kills bacteria or something. I've read that if you don't have a thermometer, you can stick your finger into the hot milk, and when it's hot enough that you immediately want to take your finger out (ouch!) it's hot enough. Sounds like fun, eh? Or you could invest in a thermometer.
3. Let it sit until it cools to 110, or "just warm to the touch" in snooty blogger speak. Whisk periodically so it doesn't get that icky foam at top. At this time start your kettle going, to heat some water.
4. Stir yogurt into the milk. How much? Some. I usually use about 2 tbs. Or more. Whatever. Some. 
5. Now, I like to first heat my thermos a little. Dunno how strictly necessary this is. I just pour in some heated water, swoosh it around, and then pour it out. I think it helps the thermos stay hot.
6. Pour runny milk thing into thermos. Close thermos. Let sit somewhere between 4-8 hours. The last time I left it overnight, and it was fine. Delicious, even. 
7.  Cool yogurt in fridge. 
8. Eat yogurt.

 The cons of this yogurt is that it doesn't stay good quite as long as commercial yogurt (duh) and sometimes it's a little piecey or chunky. But the pros are that it's SO MUCH WAY CHEAPER than the store-bought stuff! This is coming from someone who just blew 50 nis on about 3 yogurts the other week. Sheesh. So make this. Then make homemade jam. Then combine the two to make flavored yogurt, and STICK IT TO THE MAN CUZ YOU JUST MADE YOUR OWN HOMEMADE YOGURT.

Oh, and then reserve some yogurt, cuz once you've made it once, you can use the old yogurt to make new yogurt, ad infinitum. It's the gift that keeps on giving, like herpes.

Want a cracker, Polly?

Well hello there faithful readers. As Facebook likes to remind me, "my fans haven't heard from me in some time." Argh, Facebook. Facebook reminders are like the pet who is constantly licking your face while all you're trying to do is eat your breakfast, so that slobber keeps getting into your oatmeal and puts you off your appetite. Go away, Facebook reminders, you're annoying.

Anyhow, the time has come to do two things I probably shouldn't. One, is reveal yet another secret ulterior motive that this blog has (beyond me getting rich and famous and finding fame and fortune through it, I mean); and two, is show you a picture of my fridge.

My fridge is getting scary. Here is a picture of my fridge.
. 

And the scary thing is, I haven't actually even started cleaning for Pesach yet

I may have mentioned, some time ago, that I was going to make an attempt to eat through our pantry. And we did some of that. Our stores of barley, chia seeds, wheat bran and barley are lower than they have ever been before. (We still have so much celery salt. Soooooo muuuuch celery salt.)

So that + the fact that we hosted on Friday and had so many leftovers that we haven't yet finished them + this morbid fascination I have with depression era cooking, has left my fridge looking FRIGHTENINGLY BARE. Like, old mother hubbard bare. Fetch a poor dog a bone and had none kind of bare. I mean that literally - and you know I don't use the word literal lightly. I was actually making vegetable-scrap soup (see last blog post, replace vegetables with scraps, and voila, you have vegetable broth) and I remarked to hubby that a hambone sure would have come in handy, yet oddly enough, our kosher kitchen did not have any hambone in it. (If you know not of the cultural reference that I make, I refer to this song and tradition, and you should definitely read up about it because it's very cool.)

In a previous life I studied typography, can you tell?

Anyway. So I've been reading various blogs about not spending any money, and eating through pantry as mentioned before, and depression-era cooking and foraging, and I find it SO fascinating. It may be something that's only really feasible in America (motto: Land Where People are Obsessed with Food, Possibly because They Have Way Too Much Of It) because I honestly do not have enough food in my pantry stored to make it through the month - I'm already almost out of flour and oil, and it's only been a week. So I don't know how they do it, but I'm fascinated. It's like watching a cockroach that got flipped on its back in a sink - you know you shouldn't watch, but you really can't seem to look away.

So, without going completely crazed pioneer-women-eating-only-greens-that-I-picked-from-our-lawn kind of frugal, I've been attempting, just a little, to cut back on food-shopping, and making creative things that I wouldn't cook otherwise. And wouldn't you know it? Some of them actually taste good.

And that brings me to my blog's ulterior motive - that this here blog is functioning as my comprehensive cookbook. I own tons of cookbooks. In addition to my cookbooks, I have hand-written recipes. In addition to my hand-written recipes, I have recipes bookmarked in the iPad. In addition to my bookmarked recipes, I have recipes in my email. In addition to my emailed recipes...you begin to understand? Now, I have a remarkable memory, luckily, and can mostly remember where each recipe lives. But I'm going to get old and forget, and I might even die one day, so this blog is a great place to store my recipes. Until Google gets greedy and takes over the world, that is, but we'll probably (hopefully) already be long dead at that point.

To summarize, here is what I made when I had a pretty gosh-darned bare larder, and here I am setting it down in pixels so that I pass on my legacy:

Food! Out of nowhere!

1. Squash - there was a half-consumed, not-quite-dead, raw squash in the fridge. It got peeled, cooked, and deseeded. The cooked part I put away in the fridge, and will become soup or go to the freezer in a day or two. The seeds got cleaned, separated from the strings (not a SINGLE tip on the internet that I could find to make that go easier), and roasted to go on top of salads or bread or something. Finally, the peel got washed and made into...
2. Soup - the squash peel, some onion peel, and some fennel ends got fried and steamed, and are well on their way to becoming a broth. I wish I had a hambone...
3. Bread - made from a fairly simple bread recipe which only needed flour, oil, sugar, salt, yeast. But now I'm out of oil, and running low on flour, so instead of making 100% flour crackers I made...
4. Crackers with flour, buckwheat, rice, and wheat bran. (None of those specific things were necessary - crackers could also have been made out of rice and red lentils. Or red lentils and chickpeas. Or buckwheat and mung beans etc. etc.) I used my crappy blender to blend to a semi-fine flour (read, not fine at all) and mixed with flour, salt, water, and butter. Topped with seeds and coarse salt. Man, those were some good crackers.
5. Coleslaw, made out of the very few bits and bobs of vegetables that I still had, and finally, 
6. Calzone, AKA sambusak, which was basically of pizza dough filled with potato + onion (yeah, depression-era food! Carbs stuffed with more carbs! That's what I'm talkin about!) and  leftover hummus. 

And there you have it. I have officially survived six days without spending money on food. Don't think I can make it to seven, though. We're running low on toilet paper.

Really good cracker recipe

Based off a recipe by Mark Bittman, the man, who has now officially trumped my Alton Brown recipe for crackers.

Ingredients

• 65 grams all-purpose flour, which is about 1/2 a cup
• 65ish grams of rice, buckwheat, or other
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 30 grams melted butter or oil
• 60 ml water or more if needed
• Toppings: fancy salt, chia seeds, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, poppy seeds, or other

1. Preheat oven to 205c. Spray oil a baking sheet (MB says lightly dust with flour. That might work too.) 
2. Measure out appropriate amount of other grain to make into flour (or be lazy and get pre-ground flour in the store.) Grind in crappy blender. Yes, this is essential. No, you cannot use a fancy blender. Must be a crappy one. Make a lot of noise. Scare husband and cat.
3. Take other crappy appliance - food processor - and process flours, salt, and fats together. Then take water and add a tiny bit at a time until it comes together in a round cohesive dough-ball.
4. Sprinkle flour all over your counter, dough, rolling pin, cutting board, shirt. Roll out the dough until it's thin - MB says 5 mm. I dunno what that means. Until thin. 
5. Transfer carefully to baking tray. Top with toppings and use rolling pin to lightly mush them into the dough. Use knife or pizza slicer to slice into cracker shapes. I poked holes in it with fork, too, not sure why MB wanted me to skip this step.
6. Bake for 10ish minutes. Devour, because pioneering is hungry work.

Winter is Coming - Never Fail Soup Recipe

Let's talk about soup.

Soup is good for three reasons that immediately come to mind:

1. It's cheap
2. It's good to eat when it's cold out
3. It saves old vegetables when they're about to die.

In this blog post, forgive me, but I may delve into those horribly irritating superlatives that you often see in food blogs. YUM! Delish! NOMNOMNOM. OMG this is an amazing never-fail soup recipe!

Ok, I hate myself already. I'm going to stop that now.

Back to soup.

I believe there are two types of people reading this entry - those that really do not know how to make soup, and are chomping at the bit to get my soup recipe tips; and those who think they already make the best soup, so why on earth should they read this because they already know how to make amazing soup.

If you are of the second sort and I haven't lost you already (or never had you in the first place) bear with me, this soup technique makes a TRULY DECENT soup that....drum roll please...uses no MSG or broth.

Allow me to get back up on that soap-box of mine for a minute, please? [get up on soap box]. One of my biggest, awfulest, most guaranteed to bug the crap out of me every single time, is PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO MAKE SOUP WITHOUT SOUPMIX. OMG. SERIOUSLY. Soup-mix has not been allowed in my home in years. Years, I tell you. For all you trepidatious readers who do not know for the life of you, what to do when a soup recipe calls for broth, I have three words for you: Just. Add. Water.

There. [gets off soap-box. Or would that be soup-box? heh heh. Get it? Soup box?]

This soup is a blended soup, and it's delicious every time [fights to not slip back into annoying food blogger mode.] Here are the approximate instructions for this soup, and you will see why I love it so much:

1. Take all or most of the vegetables that are about to go bad out of the fridge.
2. Put them in a pot and cook them.
3. Stick into a blender and dzudzh (sp???)
4. Eat soup.  

 In short, this is a great recipe. Bookmark-worthy, even. There. I said it.

Now for the slightly longer version:

Really Decent Vegetable Soup in about 30 minutes

Originally I thought I stole this soup recipe from my guru, Alton Brown, but I just rewatched his soup episode and it turns out that I diverged quite a lot. That's ok - that means this may even be an original recipe! And really no-one better to trust with blended soup recipes than yours truly, considering I had my jaw wired shut for seven weeks (don't worry, it was years ago) and had to live off of blended soup for quite some time.

Ingredients: 

• Oil - a few tbs
• Onion - always an essential to soups, in my not so humble opinion
• Several different kinds of dead or dying vegetables - can include vegetables like: 
• radish (yes, radish! I am so glad I learned that radish makes a good soup, because before I kept thinking I should make it into pickles, never did, and kept throwing them out.) / fennel / tomato / daikon / cabbage / potato or sweet potato / carrot / celery or celery root / turnip
• Probably should not include vegetables like:
• lettuce / cucumber (yes yes, officially it's a fruit. I know. Get over it) / endive
• Can also include spinach or mushroom, but then I wouldn't blend it and/or add them at the end.
• Water
• Kosher salt
• Optional seasonings (turmeric, cumin, nutmeg, that kind of thing)

Directions:

1. Take a medium or large pot, set over medium heat. Add a little bit of oil, just enough to cover the bottom of the pot, and heat. 
2. While the oil is heating, roughly chop the onion and plonk it into the the heated oil.
3. Now, take your time. In order of hardest to softest, roughly chop up your vegetables and chuck into the pot with the onion. When you've got enough veggies in there that the bottom of the pot is covered, add the kosher salt. Stir. Keep adding veggies and stirring every now and again. The heat should be on medium-high, enough to start browning the veggies but not enough to burn them. Keep cooking like this for about 10 min, including chopping time. 
4. This here is the step that I added that I firmly believe makes the soup go from just ok to pretty damn good - clomp on the lid. That's right, no water. Just lid. Turn the heat a bit lower and keep cooking, covered, for another 10-15 minutes. Stir every now and again to make sure it doesn't stick. What this step does is stew the veggies in their own juices - literally - and gets them all nice and tender and tasty. What it also does is trap that steam inside the pot, which probably keeps things hotter and retains the taste. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. 
5. Finally, now that veggies pretty much cooked at this point, add the water and seasonings if you want to. You do NOT want to boil the water. I know many soup recipes tell you to, but this soup doesn't need it, and somehow I think it wouldn't taste as nice. If you want to add some soft veggies, do it now. Cook on a SIMMER, not a boil, for another 10-15 min.
6. At this point the soup is pretty much done. I like it blended, though, so I now take either all or some of the soup, stick it in my plastic blender, and blend. If you only have a glass blender, probably a good idea to wait until the soup cools (but who can wait that long??). Also a hand-blender would do the trick, I just happen to not own one. 
7. Blend. Add salt if needed. Serve. Great soup, every time. I promise. 

Beans Beans the Magical Legume

In other, non-cooking related news, Mr. Better Butter is no longer employed in an actual office where they pay him money in exchange for services rendered.

(This is, actually, going to bring us back to food, and I'll tell you how. Just be patient.)

A strange thing happens when we are both jobless. Despite the fact that I, supposedly, have some earning power and could probably go out and get a crappy desk job fairly immediately, and despite the fact that Mr. Blogger will probably be collecting more unemployment than I could ever earn, and despite the fact that we actually have some money saved - despite all this, when we are both unemployed, I go into what I call EXTREME SAVING MODE. (The good thing is that this fits in nicely with living as a frugal pantry-eating, dumpster-diving, sustainability freak...the bad thing is, like any other extreme diet, it's not actually that sustainable and once we get jobs, I tend to go on teeny tiny crazed spending sprees. It's how we got our lovely couch.)

For now, though, I'm going to try to be über-thrifty in my kitchen. (You know I'm serious because I used an umlaut.)

umlaut = serious

This fits in nicely with the slightly neglected pantry clean, it fits nicely with sustainability, and it fits in wonderfully with clean eating and living from scratch. Not that I don't bake all the bread from scratch anyway, but now there may be more legumes consumed. (Human methane emissions keep you warm, right? Saves on heating bill!! Win-win!)

Beans, beans, they're good for your... pocket

So I'm just going to finish up by giving you an über-savingsy, frugal, clean-living recipe, because that's what I do here on this blog. It is brought to you partially by my recent brain-wash sustainability course, and it's a great last minute 'oh-shit-I've-got-last-minute-guests-coming-what-do-I-feed-them' recipe. It's also a great 'oh-shit-there-is-nothing-in-the-house-but-lentils-what-do-I-eat' recipe. So now, without further ado, I bring you:

Red-lentil Hummus Recipe (Tastes Just Like Real Hummus Recipe)

Note: for this recipe I'm going to do that thing that irritates the crap out of hubby, and not give you precise measurements. The real reason is because I don't know them and I've been making it differently each time, but we can pretend the reason is because I'm assuming all readers are either serious foodies or just here for the jokes. Or both. If you need precise measurements, comment and I'll measure next time.

Ingredients:

• Red lentils
• Tehinna paste
• Lemon juice
• Parsley/coriander/random onion paste you make by chopping up onions, herbs, and olive oil
• Salt
• Spices like chili or cayenne if you import it from America or cumin or something
• Ice-cold water]

1. Soak the red lentils, with intent to sprout them
2. Lose patience after a few hours because it takes too long, and cook them instead - just for a few minutes, until they're soft enough to mash.
3. Stick in food processor. Process. Add other stuff. Taste. Add other stuff except for liquid. Keep tasting and adding until it tastes good. 
4. Add liquid until it gets smooth enough to spread.
5. Serve. Feel snooty that you made red lentil hummus.