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.

If Ya Don't Eat Yer Vegetables Ya Can't Have Any Pesach

Tis the season fa la la la la.....for Jews to go ABSOLUTELY BAT-SHIT CRAZY.

Pesach. Approacheth.

Pesach is my absolute favorite holiday. I love just about everything about it. I love the cleaning (yes, I do. Don't hate me.), I love the clean house that results, I love having a minimalist kitchen for a week, I love the Seder and everything that goes with it, and I LOVE Pesach food.

Which is why I hate it when other people go absolutely crazy and complain there is nothing to eat.

I have ranted about this before, and I'll probably rant about it again, but for now I'm going to spend the the few weeks leading in to Pesach with ideas of what to eat. Here are my guidelines:

1. Food will be mostly healthy - no instant soups or margarine here.
2. Food will be mostly vegetarian.
3. Food will not include kitniyot - no, we don't eat kitniyot. Yes, I believe we could. I see nothing wrong with the idea of it, except I am gosh-darned proud of my Ashkenazi heritage, and if we're going to kill Yiddish, the least we can do is keep our traditions alive. 
4. There will be food other than eggs. 
5. No 'fake chametz' substitutes. So you can't eat pasta or cereal or pizza for a week. DEAL WITH IT. Don't try going all potato-starch on me. That's disgusting. 

I suspect that the problem people have with Pesach is two-fold. One - there is not a lot of grab-and-go food. It's true. It's hard to reach into the fridge and grab something when you're hungry. Cooking is required. And two, and I think this one is key, Jews Don't Eat Vegetables.

I eat vegetables. Does this mean I'm not Jewish?

Not you and I, of course. We're great at it. I mean OTHER Jews. The ones who go on groups and complain that they don't know what to make for shabbat, because they are making a chicken and a kugel and a cholent, and what are they going to serve for a vegetable? And then someone chimes in with 'how about potatoes?' Argh. THOSE Jews.

In order to prove this point, I'm going to borrow a trick that my high school literature teacher taught us when we were learning Crime and Punishment (this was about twenty years ago, mind you, and the fact that I remember it to this day is proof of how cool this teacher was.) We were discussing the crime vs. the punishment, and how it seemed like the punishment didn't really fit the crime. And then, she picked up the book, and held it up sidewise. Looking at the book straight on, about 1 cm of the width was the crime, and the rest of the book, about ten times that, was the punishment.

I will now use that trick to demonstrate how Jews feel about vegetables.

 See?

Of those vegetable recipes, 10% were potato recipes, about 35% were not kosher for pesach due to them being lasagna or pasta, and one of them was a rice and lentils recipe. Huh? Um....

So that was just an experiment with the only Jewy cookbook I own, but I welcome and encourage you to do the same experiment yourself with your own cookbooks and let me know what you find out.

My point is, in order to eat well for Pesach, even to eat vegetarian well, you have to think outside the box of Jew-cooking and start thinking in the box of vegetable cooking. It's doable. I swear. Channel your inner rabbit. Ok, and maybe your inner cat, because you might want to eat more fish.

Here are some ideas, and we'll get talking recipes as we get closer to the holiday.

Behold, my Pesach kitchen from three years ago.

 Pesach Meal Ideas

1. Baked potatoes (Pictured) topped with sour cream/dill/lox/etc.
2. Eggplant Parmesan (homemade tomato sauce pictured)
3. Baked Salmon with lemon and dill (pictured) with sides (green veg/potato/quinoa/salad/coleslaw/etc.)
4. Salad! For example, with Halloumi cheese + pear + walnuts
5. Scrambled Matza Brye with cheese and/or loads of parsley
6. Bell Peppers stuffed with Quinoa 
7. Blintzes filled with mushrooms and ricotta (ok, ok, that one uses potato starch substitute) 
8. Pesach rolls with anything - good for grab and go meals 
9. Steamed fish with vegetables
10. Gnocchi? Might work without flour. I have to experiment with this one. 
11. Ratatouille with fried egg, or on quinoa 

Etc. etc. If you eat legumes, then you should really be able to eat like a king. A vegetarian king.

Actual recipes to follow.

Top 10 Reasons You Should Click on my Bait, Or, How Not to be a First World Douche in the Kitchen

Hello again, dear readers. It's been two weeks and I'm sure you're curious about how my pantry clean is doing. It's going pretty well, I'm happy to say. My pantry is, somehow, STILL bursting at the seams, and I think we still have enough food to feed a small army and/or survive for a good year after the zombie apocalypse.

I managed to use the rye 'berries' (as it turns out they're called. Who knew?) in a pretty good whole-wheat kinda sourdough rye bread (blog post pending), I finished up our barley and our quinoa, I'm slooooowly making a dent into the rice, and I found out that I have another two whole kilos of oatmeal and of whole wheat flour hiding in the pantry.

But, before we get more into the whole pantry thing, I feel like I'm getting a bit ahead of myself with this blog.

You see, two things happened this week that made me realize I'm missing a vitally important blog entry.

One is, we went to someone's house over the weekend, and I discussed this whole eating through the pantry thing with the hostess. She was completely overwhelmed by the idea - and that made me so sad! I don't want this blog to be a snobby 'oh look at me and how ammmmmaaazing I am that I make fig jam' blog! I want this to be funny! Down-to-earth! Inspiring! Showing you that you, too, can make random weird meals out of things that you find in your pantry, like the really strange sardine-red-pepper-white cheese on crackers I had for dinner last night!

Objects in photo may taste stranger than they appear

The other thing that happened, is that I came across one of those lists of 'oh look at me and my blog and here are 10 click-baiting things you should know about food!' So I clicked (grrr) and I went to their blog, and wouldn't you know it, it was all about avoiding white flour and only buying organic whole-locally-grown-chickens-who-have-been-fed-nothing-but-chia-seeds and other such stupid first world problems. So I read that, and I thought, GRRR, and then I thought, ok, I better make my list of how my kitchen works. Without further ado, I bring you:

Babka's Top 10 Rules for how not to be a First World Douche in the Kitchen

1. Eat real food. By real I mean ingredients you can pronounce. If you can't pronounce it, you probably shouldn't eat it. That being said, if you do eat it - it probably won't kill you, so stop freaking out about it. 
2. White flour and white sugar are delicious. Eat them. 
3. Salt is delicious. Eat it. If you have a problem with sodium, stop going out to so many fast food joints. If you own one of those stupid cookbooks that recommend low sodium things, I give you permission to throw it across the room, stomp on it, tear it into little pieces, and burn it.
4. Margarine and MSG, otoh, are not real food. EXTERMINATE. EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE. Or see point 1.
5. Organic food and vegetables are great - if you're rich. If you are a starving child in Africa, eat whatever food you can find. Realize that all organic things, however great they might seem, are definitely a First World advantage that you should feel grateful if you have, and not beat yourself up if you don't.
6. Not every frickin' meal has to be animal. Vegetables are delicious and they're cheap. Stop eating so much meat. Not every meal has to involve an animal who died so that you could get fatter. 
7. Quit throwing out so much frickin food. (See 'starving children in Africa.') If you have leftovers in the fridge and aren't sure what to do with them, add an egg and some bread crumbs, fry them, and call it a day. If it's really dead and you can't revive it, however - 
8. Compost, don't throw out. Find a friendly local composter. It's not hard, it's good for the ground, and it saves on those gigantic landfills that aren't going anywhere fast. 
9. If it doesn't have a cape, stop calling it Super! If I'm going to eat super-foods, I fully expect to be able to fly, turn invisible, and to live forever. If it doesn't do that, I want my money back.

And finally, the most important of all:   

1. Be able to play in the kitchen. Yes, I have millet and oats in my kitchen. Possibly even several different kinds of oats. I do this because I like playing. I like being creative. I get strange ingredients and I figure out what I can do with them. Sometimes I'll buy chia, and sometimes I'll buy whole rye. Sometimes I make ketchup from scratch, and sometimes I'll try pickling. But whatever I do, I do it because I enjoy it and it's fun for me. The kitchen should be the place where you feel comfortable to go to get good food. Not the place you feel stressful because your ingredients have to comply with some stupid top ten list that some intern came up with to bait your clicks. If you enjoy playing and want to attempt bread - follow along with me. There will be many mishaps. That's ok. Keep calm and carry on cooking.

I've always wanted to generate one of these!

Mushroom Barley Freezer Soup

I hate to admit it (don't we all?) but sometimes, I'm wrong. Just sometimes.

That is, it wasn't so much that I was *wrong*, but that Pinterest was right. (Even a broken clock is right twice a day.)

I desperately needed to do a Pantry Clean. Just like Pinterest told me to do.

What's a pantry clean and how did this happen?

I blame my sister-in-law, who, a few days ago on Facebook, posted a link about the end of the world and the end of resources in the world (sorry, A.I., I didn't really read more than the title.) That led me to my old fascination with the whole Mormon 'stock for a year's worth of food after the Apocolypse' thing, which I find completely morbid, mind-blowing, and fascinating. And that, dear readers, led me to the Eat Out your Pantry thing on Pinterest.

I stitch all the pictures! I good Pinterest Lady!!

Just trying to explain what a Pantry Clean Challenge is makes my soul weary. Even actually writing Pantry Challenge makes me simultaneously want to puke, have 2.5 kids, and go trot out my red and white polka-dotted poodle skirt. So I'll copy paste, and that's ALL I'm going to do.

"A pantry challenge is a focused, but limited, time to “eat from the pantry.” Rather than buying groceries like I normally would, I focus on what we already have. I build my menus around the ingredients I’ve been avoiding using. Sometimes this is something that is cumbersome to prepare or something that I’ve been too lazy to be creative with.... I end up saving money because I’m not buying more; I’m using up what I’ve already purchased."

Cheap. I like that. Ok. Fine. I can use up what I've already purchased.

These are a few of the things I have in my pantry that desperately need using up (just to show you that I have not earned yet earned my polka dots, self-published book, or the 'Best Homeschooling DIYer Mom Trophy):

• A jar of buckwheat that I'm pretty sure we got as a wedding present six years ago
• An ever hopeful jar of brown rice
• Mung beans. Don't even ask.
• Millet (oh hey, I actually used that once. For a blog post, even.)
•  Cashews. I don't even *like* cashews.
• shiitake mushrooms that I sincerely hope aren't the same mushrooms that came back with us from our trip to China 3 years ago. 

...And even more in the freezer.

So I'm gonna do this thing. I'm going to cook through my pantry. (I'm still going to buy things from the store, like fresh fruit and veg and whatnot.) I'm NOT going to make this one of those 'Oh Look At Me While I Cook Through My Pantry Day 11 of 7632!' kind of things.

At least, that's the goal.

I'm also planning to cook consecutively through all of my cookbooks.

(Um, yeah. One day.)

Mushroom Barley Freezer Soup

Ingredients

• all the barley in your pantry
• pre-chopped onion that you wisely once chopped and stuck in your freezer 
• a bunch of celery that has a truly unfortunate amount of freezer burn
• shiitake mushrooms that may or may not be from China, soaked in warm water
• all the garlic that got stuck at the bottom of the fancy-shmancy 'garlic-salt' 
• water

Erstwhile Instructions: 

1. Soak shiitake mushrooms in water.
2. Chop all the things.
3. Heat oil.
4. Put all the things in a pot, throw a little bit of salt in, clamp lid on and let steam for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
5. Add water and cook.
6.  Good luck.



How about 'dat. It actually looks edible.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Food Photography (in which I use the word 'damn' a lot)

I've been giving a lot of thought recently to photography and food photography. Specifically, how it plays into our whole 'lies damned lies and Pinterest' theme.

Consider, for example, yesterday's dinner.

Yesterday's dinner was millet patties. Or, if you wanna get all fancy and pinteresty about it, "Savory Millet Cakes."Oooo lala. Doesn't that sound waaaaaay better than patties?

So back to photography. I took a couple of pictures of said cakes (because now I'm a food blogger and am virtually incapable of simply cooking and enjoying my food without taking a goddam picture of it). Consider, if you will, this:

It's got a certain 1970s quality, don't you think?

vs this:

I call this 'patties, deconstructed'

Here's the thing. IT'S THE SAME DAMN DISH. Exactly the same. Same taste. Same recipe. It's even the same view from the top of the plate (which I've recently learned is the thing to do in food pinteresty photos.

The difference? One got stylized, one did not. One got instagramed, one did not. One is square, the other is a rectangle. Same same.

And I'm fooled as much as the next guy. I think the first picture looks way more appealing than the second. If it were a cookbook, I would make the first dish over the second, anytime.

Dear readers, I'm torn. On the one hand, I want to EXPOSE ALL THE LIES on the pinterest, and show you that it's the FOOD and the TASTE that matters, and you should ignore the fancy photography and see it for the lies it really is!

On the other, I am tempted to go out right now and buy a fancy shmancy camera so my blog can get big and famous and I will write a book and then sell the movie rights and I will be played by Meryl Streep because I'll be old by then and I sure hope that she'll still be alive.

It's a quandary.One that might end up costing me a good thousand sheckels, at least. But the true cost is my SOUL. (Unless anyone wants to donate a fancy camera that they're not using?)

For now, I give you

Savory Millet Patties Stuff

(loosely based off of Eatingwell's Savory Millet cakes)

I like making millet sometimes so that I can get away from the trifecta of wheat, rice, and potato. That being said, it *is* hard to find millet outside of health food stores. So don't say I lied to you and claimed this was easy to find. Rice or potato would probably be an ok substitute.)

• a few lugs of oil, maybe butter too
• about 1/2 an onion
• 1 cup millet
• 2 cups water
• 1 egg (optional)
• some flour, wheat semolina, matza meal, or bread crumbs (optional, but good if you've added the egg)
• green things
• a bunch of cheese
• 1 grated zucchini
• about a tsp paprika
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• salt

1. Boil the millet like you would rice - put some oil in a pot, heat, and fry the millet a tiny bit. In the meanwhile put the kettle up to boil. Stir the millet around in the oil for a minute or two, making sure not to burn. Then add 1 tsp salt and the boiling water - CAREFULLY. (Last night it splashed and got a bit of boiling water-millet all over the store that I have yet to clean up.) Turn to low, and cook until the water has completely evaporated but the millet is still mushy. Set aside.
2. While the millet is cooling enough to handle, take a look at what you have in your fridge and/or freezer. (I like to keep cheese in my freezer, because it keeps forever and is just fine for cooking with.) Got some kind of cheese? Great, use it. Got some parsley that's almost dead? Great, use that too. Got some strange kind of chives that you're not sure what they're good for? Yogurt that's about to go bad but isn't yet? They can go in. Etc. This is a 'finish all the leftovers' kind of dish - it's (almost) all good. (Significant Other would accuse me here of lying, because he would try doing things like putting strawberry yogurt in, and then being very confused when I gag in disgust, and protest that I said it's all good. Hence 'almost.' If you're not sure, ask your local cooking expert.)
3. Mix all the things except the oil/butter into a bowl and mash it together. I added an egg, but it really wasn't necessary, and then once I added the egg I needed to add some flour so it would stick together. If I did it again I'd skip the egg. 
4. Fry, 3-4 minutes on each side. The trick to frying, I've learned, is a) NON-STICK PAN, because if you have a sticky pan, it almost always sticks. No way around it that I've found. I'd be happy to hear otherwise if you have; and b) Don't move the patties until they're nice and browned on each side. 
5. Serve on bed of spinach to look fancy. Or with salad on side. Or with a fried egg on top. (But NOT with soy-milk fruit juice on the side. Turns out that's disgusting.)
6. Eat. But not before you've made it look fancy and taken pictures of it.

What's for Dinner, Ma (or, What I Would Have Named This Blog in an Alternate Universe)

Have you ever opened the fridge and realized that, even though it's full, there is nothing to eat? 

I know I have. 

It used to happen all the time when I was a kid (and would, invariably, end up in a parent answering back "There's lots of food! Open your eyes! And shut the fridge, you're wasting electricity!") and now, even though I am what some would claim to be a full-fledged adult, it still happens. 

I think the problem is that much of the kind of food I make (or claim to make) takes HOURS to cook - beans from scratch, brown rice, that sort of thing. So, because nobody wants to make food when they're not actually hungry, I don't think about it until it's too late, and then I end up making pasta and white rice. Ok. Not really. Not together, that is. Rice and vegetables. Or pasta and stuff. Unfortunately, this is really not an ideal diet, and also tends to happen when it's gotten late and I'm hangry, cranky, and about to eat our cat.

For years, I've been trying to combat this phenomenon, in a number of failed ways. I have tried: 

sooo muuuccch tunaaaaa....

- making weekly menus 

- an app with ideas of what's for dinner, so I can come up with menus on the fly

- notebooks with said dinner ideas

- creating a fb group called "what's for dinner," which failed miserably because most people (myself included) were too embarrassed to write down that what they had had for dinner was an egg on toast. 

There is another 'what's for dinner' group on fb, and, with all due love and respect to my friends in that group, it is seriously NOT what's actually for dinner. What it is, is another form of Pinterest Lying - Facebook Bragging. 'I made a chilled tomato bisque with tomatoes that I grew from scratch organically in my back yard, coq au vin with a chicken I raised myself, melon-endives-asparagus salad, and fresh sorbet made with the tears of the starving children in Africa. Oh, and I made all that while homeschooling my 8 children.' 

Show-offs. 

Anyway, I'm writing this post before I go try to get some beans cooked before I starve and get cranky and eat the cat, but in the meanwhile, I will share with you what is, actually, for dinner more often than not.

Pasta with Stuff

Ingredients:

Pasta

Salt 

Stuff 

1. Heat water in your electric water kettle, in case it goes faster than on the stovetop, because you're starving and 2 minutes might be the difference between death and eating your cat. 
2. Pour almost boiling water into pot. Add tsp of salt. Boil.
3. Cook pasta according to cooking instructions if you like it slightly raw (aka al dente), more if you want it well done.
4. Top with olive oil, garlic, and dried parsley (if you're feeling fancy, cook garlic in butter first); OR mix in soy sauce, peanut butter, and ginger; OR cottage cheese; OR  regular cheese; OR if you're feeling SUPER fancy and aren't starving, make a roux, add tuna, and make a lazy man's tuna casserole thing (do I need to give further explanations for that? Let me know and I will.) 
5. Eat. (The pasta. Not the cat.)