Tasty Chicken

Eat a lot of chicken, Gentle Reader? Eat a lot of skinless, boneless chicken breasts? Ever get bored of it?

I hear ya. We here at Chez Boeckman-Walker eat a lot of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, so I'm always on the lookout for new, tasty recipes for this hard-working meat. Fortunately, I get a number sent my way from MyRecipes.com and AllRecipes.com. While three-fourths of those recipes are not appealing whatsoever, every now and then I find a good "ethnic" recipe that I bookmark and save for a time when I'm dying to dress up a chicken breast in some new clothes.

Baby, It's Cool Outside!
Autumn has truly come to Central Texas at long last, which means we dip down to 50 degrees overnight. Bone-chilling, I know, Gentle Reader. And when the mercury dips below 60 degrees, I get a hankering for something hearty and chickeny.

And since the husband won't eat beans, making a big pot of white chicken chili is out.

Instead of that trusty, filling pot of goodness, I found a recipe that I thought would offer the same satisfaction but might get down the husband's gullet without too much protest.

Sweet and Spicy Chicken and White Bean Stew2 T canola oil
1/2 t ground cardamom
1/8 t ground cloves
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 C finely chopped onion
1/2 t chili powder
1/4 t ground turmeric
1/2 t ground coriander
15.5 ounces cannellini beans or other white beans, undrained
3/4 lb. skinless, boneless chicken breast halves, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 C light coconut milk
1/2 C water
1 T chopped peeled fresh lemongrass (about 1 stalk)
14.5 ounces fire-roasted diced tomatoes, undrained
8 ounces baking potato, cut into 1/2" cubes
1/4 C chopped fresh cilantro

1. Heat the oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat.
   
2. Add the cardamom, cloves and garlic and cook 30 sec., stirring constantly.
   
3. Add the onion and sauté 8 min. or until tender.
   
4. Add the chili powder, turmeric and coriander and cook 30 sec.
   
5. Add the beans and chicken, stirring to coat.
   
6. Add the milk, water, lemongrass, tomatoes and potato.
   
7. Cover, reduce heat and simmer 30 min. or until potato is tender.
   
8. Serve with cilantro.

Yield: 4 servings of 1 3/4 cups stew and 1 tablespoon cilantro

Nutritional Info
May the FSM bless Cooking Light, where this recipe was originally published a year ago this month, for including the nutritional content of all its recipes. That makes life--and this blog--so much easier.

Calories: 364
Fat: 11.7 g
Sat fat: 3.7 g
Protein: 27.3 g
Carbs: 37.5 g
Fiber: 6.7 g
Cholesterol: 49 mg
Sodium: 544 mg

The Faudie's Futzings
Did you get a look at the ingredients, Gentle Reader? What about the nutritional info, particularly the fat content?

Yeah, I futzed. And I futzed after reading the recipe reviews. Now that I think about it, I heavily revised the recipe. Here goes:

• I doubled all the spices.
  
• I used ground red chili powder in place of regular chili powder, which I still don't have.
  
• I replaced the water and cup of light coconut milk with a cup and a half of low-sodium chicken broth.
  
• I used Great Northern beans because I'd bought two cans in hopes of making white chicken chili some night.
  
• I didn't use 2 tablespoons of oil. Maybe half a tablespoon went into Chive.
  
• No lemongrass went into this stew.
  
• The cilantro I minced was an optional garnish, for the boy won't touch anything that has the tiniest fleck of the stuff.

I can't imagine this stew qualifying as spicy with the minuscule amounts of spices called for in the original. Doubling them really didn't give it much heat, which is what I expect when I encounter a dish dubbed as spicy. I don't think that having a number of spices in it qualifies it as spicy. What do you think, Gentle Reader?

Nor do I quite full comprehend the sweetness either. Sure, there's something...sweet about cardamom, and combining it with ground cloves makes for one powerful memory of sweet, comforting pumpkin-based desserts and the holidays associated with them. But I don't think of cardamom as a sweet flavor. "Sweet" for me comes from sugars--honey, agave nectar, sucrose, fructose and, to a much lesser degree, sucralose (Splenda). Eh, I guess the person(s) who put the recipe together were just trying to be cute and clever with that timeless pairing of sweet and spicey.

That said, the stew had a wonderful aroma, and the flavor wasn't a mish-mash of clashing spices. By the time I'd toasted some of the spices and then added in more, I'd made something like a masala, and the toasting process blended the various flavors together nicely.

I will say, however, that I found the stew at times to have an almost oversalted aftertaste, but I'm not sure that's what I was tasting. Sure, the HEB brand of fire-roasted diced tomatoes (yes, Gentle Reader, I splurged on the 89-cent can instead of using the no-salt-added regular diced stuff I had on hand in my pantry) had 340 or so milligrams of sodium, but that's really not a whole lot. I think that aftertaste might have been my unique reaction to one of the spices since the husband didn't experience it. Eh, the inhaled corticosteroids I take for my asthma, I'm sure, have skewed my taste buds in some way.

You're probably wondering, Gentle Reader, if the husband ate the dish completely without fuss despite the presence of beans. Ha! I wish! No, as the boy and I were finished up our first bowls, I turned and noticed the husband's bowl was still half filled. "You will eat those beans," I told him, brooking no opposition.

"I'll eat your beans for you!" the boy piped up happily.

"I like beans!"

And yes, Gentle Reader, I let the boy eat his father's beans, but on one condition: I got to deride the husband for giving his beans to his nearly 7-year-old son as if he were some nearly 7-year-old picky eater himself. Not that this is the first time I've lamented that I have at times two children to care for....

Given the flavor profile of the finished dish, I plan to use chickpeas instead of white beans the next time I make it. In fact, if you wanted to go full-on vegetarian with the dish, you could probably get away with using just chickpeas. Tasty!

Saffron Surprise
Delighted and inspired by the success of the sweet and spice-filled stew, I dug up another chicken variation for the following night. Like the stew, it was "ethnic" and seemed pretty simple to prepare.

Saffron Chicken and Rice With Dates1 T vegetable oil
1 lb. skinless, boneless chicken breast, cut into bite-sized pieces
1/2 t salt, divided
1/4 t freshly ground black pepper
1 1/2 C chopped onion
1/4 t saffron threads, crushed and divided
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 C tomato juice
6 whole pitted dates, quartered
2 C water
1 C uncooked long-grain rice
3 green onions, thinly sliced
Lemon wedges (optional)

1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat.
   
2. Sprinkle the chicken with 1/4 teaspoon salt and pepper.
   
3. Add the chicken to the pan, sauté it 5 min., browning on all sides, and then remove it and keep warm.
   
4. Add the onion, 1/8 teaspoon saffron and garlic to the pan, sautéing 5 min. or until the onion is tender.
   
5. Stir in the chicken, tomato juice and dates.
   
6. Cover, reduce heat to low and cook 15 min.
   
7. Uncover and cook 10 min.
   
8. Remove the pan from heat and keep warm.
   
9. Combine the remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon saffron with the water and rice in a saucepan
   
10. Bring the water to a boil, then cover, reduce heat and simmer 20 min. or until the rice is tender and the water is absorbed.
    
11. Fluff the rice with a fork.
    
12. Serve the chicken mixture over the rice, and garnish with sliced green onions and lemon wedges, if desired.

Yield: 6 servings of 1/2 cup rice and 2/3 cup chicken mixture

Nutritional Info
Yep, it's another Cooking Light recipe!

Calories: 273
Fat: 3.5 g
Sat fat: 0.7 g
Protein: 20.8 g
Carbs: 38.6 g
Fiber: 2.5 g
Cholesterol: 44 mg
Sodium: 500 mg

The Faudie's Futzings
Maybe I just don't like my rice as mushy as other folks, but two cups of water to one cup of rice is just wacky.

But that wasn't my only futzing:

• As with the sweet and spicy stew, I used maybe half of the oil called for in the recipe.
  
• I very lightly sprinkled the chicken with Morton's Lite salt before browning it. But the bits and pieces definitely got a good peppering!
  
• I didn't measure the saffron I put into both dishes. I took a small pinch from the little tin I have, ground it up and sort of eyeballed it from there. I put in two or three pinches for the chicken and maybe a pinch and a half into the rice. Hey, saffron's expensive stuff!
  
• I doubled the number of dates I used, and I coarsely diced them. The dates I have are pretty big, and I loves me some dates.
  
• I used reduced-sodium tomato juice. Good grief, regular tomato juice has a hell of a lot of salt in it!
  
• Adding salt to water for rice is just...odd and will never be done here at Chez Boeckman-Walker.
  
• The chicken cooked covered only 6 minutes and uncovered only 9. I got a bit of a late start on supper, and I had hungry boys to feed. The chicken was in such small pieces that it didn't need a lot of time to finish cooking, and I didn't think the saffron needed 25 minutes to fully develop.

My first bite of this dish revealed an unanticipated sweetness--the sweetness I'd expected from the sweet and spicy stew. I chalked that sweetness up to the dates, which are pretty high in carbs. And expecting something a bit bland after reading the reviews, I was thrilled to find that with my second bite, the saffron flavor came through without being overpowering. Let's face it--saffron can have quite a bite, sort of in the same vein as asafetida. But no, the saffron flavor was mellow but not so subtle as to go unnoticed.

The boys ate this dish up with many compliments. The boy decided after two bites that he'd be having seconds, maybe even thirds. Trust me, Gentle Reader, that's high praise, and I'll take it.

One final note: I don't understand why both recipes call for putting the garlic into the pot with the onions at the same time. Garlic isn't just a smaller, stinkier onion. It's more delicate, and exposing it to prolonged heat can destroy it. If you have a recipe that calls for sauteing onions and garlic together, do yourself and your palate a flavor favor and saute the onions for at least 30 seconds, if not longer, before adding in the garlic. Your gut will thank you (that is, if you're not like my mom and little sister, who both can't eat much garlic thanks to gut issues) and the money you spent on the garlic won't be wasted.