The sad-yet-happy tale of chicken with homemade Rice-A-Roni

Chicken and rice - with homemade Rice-A-Roni

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cook Time: 4 1/2 hours

Servings: 4

Difficulty: Easy

Ingredients:

2 pounds chicken, cubed

1 can cream of chicken soup

4 1/4 cup water

4 1/4 tsp chicken bouillon

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp black pepper

1/4 tsp Italian seasoning

1/4 tsp paprika

1/4 lb. spaghetti, angel hair or vermicelli pasta, broken into small pieces

1 cup rice

4 tbs butter (1/2 stick)

Directions:

Spray crockpot with cooking spray, then preheat while you prepare the chicken.

Cut chicken into small cubes, then place in crock pot.

Add soup, water, bouillon, and spices, then stir

Cover and cook on high for 4 hours (or on low for 7 hours).

When the time’s up add pasta, rice, and butter, stirring well. Turn crockpot to low (if needed) then cook an additional 20 to 30 minutes until rice is done, stirring several times.

I usually actually get a little over 2 pounds of chicken, maybe 2 1/4 pounds. I usually end up trimming a bit off so I like to start with some extra. Also, although you can get the chicken pre-cubed it’s a lot less expensive to get whole boneless breasts. It takes more time to prepare it but it will definitely save you some money. I said the prep time is only 5 minutes but that sort of assumes you cut up the chicken in advance. If you buy large packages of chicken you can slice it up and then freeze it, then just put it in the fridge the day before you’re going to cook it so it has time to defrost. I usually try to put the chicken chunks in a freezer bag in a single layer and not packed tightly. I also move the pieces around every now and then as they freeze to keep them separated rather than having them end up in a huge frozen clump. It’s actually quite possible to just put the frozen pieces straight in the crockpot but you might have to adjust the cooking time. I’ve not actually tried that yet so I can’t personally testify as to how it might change things.

So I’ve made this a bunch of times as it’s easy and darn good. As a bonus it also freezes pretty well. Also, I find I almost always need 30 minutes for the rice to fully cook, although of course your mileage may vary. And I usually take out the butter in advance so it can soften as well. I used to make it with store-bought Rice-a-Roni® but it’s hardly any more difficult making it from scratch. And actually, I now have a simple cream of chicken soup recipe so next time I’m going to go one step deeper into “from scratch.”

However. (For some reason, there always seems to be a however in these things. Or perhaps it’s just me, which is probably much more likely.) However, in an effort to pre-make things as much as possible, I decided to measure out the rice and the pasta into ziplocs so I could just pour them into the crockpot at the appropriate time without having to measure things in the heat of the moment. Great idea! However (darn it, there it is again!) it’s really surprisingly hard to break pasta. Well, it’s not that it’s hard to do but it turns out that spaghetti is sharp and pointy and hurts your poor little fingers after a time. Actually, after a rather short time, in fact. Nope, not me, I’m never going to do that again. I’m way too smart for that, yessir. 

So I figured I’d get a mortar and pestle. Yeah, I’ve seen them in countless movies, it’ll be great. Except I couldn’t seem to find them any bigger than a baseball, for spices apparently. I just assumed they’d be volleyball sized, so I could put spaghetti in and bust it up good with the pestle. Or perhaps the mortar. Hard to keep them straight. Maybe I need to go to a good restaurant supply place on the Bowery, or perhaps spend multiple hundreds of dollars on a fine Vermont granite one that I happened to find somewhere online that was of sufficient size. But in the meantime, I had yet another brilliant idea! Yup, I figured instead of using my dainty little fingers to break the pasta I’d be super-smart and use two nested mixing bowls. Sheer genius! Except, uh, have you ever tried to do that? I don’t think you have, and in fact neither had I. Turns out it works great. Except for the part where the broken (and sharp!) pasta goes flying all over the place. It seems that breaking spaghetti between two slightly different size stainless steel mixing bowls unleashes the heretofore unknown-to-science pasta spring force. Apparently coiled within each strand of uncooked spaghetti is a microscopic spring of savage power. Who knew?!? Not only did the now-short spaghetti fragments fly all over my kitchen but there were a few that perversely headed straight for my eyeballs. Just like my mom had always warned me about! It was the most hazardous meal I’ve prepared in a good long while.

I have, however, solved the problem in the traditional American way. With money. It seems there’s a thing called fideo, which in the store I thought was a made-up fake pasta name but it turns out it’s Spanish for noodle. I had no idea, but it’s basically the same broken up spaghetti for which I’d ruined my poor fingers the first time and with which I'd splattered my kitchen the second time, all for a modest sum of US$1.69 for a pound of the wondrous stuff. And in fact, unbeknownst to me it was actually on sale for $1.25. Even better!

So I close this sad-yet-happily-concluded tale with some sage advice that I’m going to falsely claim was first said by Ben Franklin: you don’t need to bust up your own spaghetti.

The end.

Cost for four meals, about $10. 

Also, seriously Apple? Rice-A-Rona? Or perhaps even worse, Rice-A-Ron?

Beef Stroganoff

I have to say, this has become one of my favorite things to eat. I also have to say that I may not a great cook, but this seems to me to be just a great combination of different flavors and textures. And heck, it just smells so good when it’s cooking. I guess this is just one of my comfort foods.

It’s also a bit of a long story. And as most long stories do, this one too begins with Hamburger Helper. 

I used to make Hamburger Helper. For my kids, of course. Yeah, that’s it, for my kids. Who are now grown, which frankly feels really odd to say. But good to say as well. Anyways, Hamburger Helper is quick and easy to make and tastes pretty good. Mostly not a huge fan but I have to say I do like the beef stroganoff variety. And in a way, that’s what started me on “this cooking thing” in some ways. I also like to make things from scratch, so I figured I’d just look up some recipes and see what happened. In a way that’s a topic for another post, but the short version is that after a good bit of looking and not being thrilled I sat down one day and said, “heck with this, let me make the real version.” So that started off an entirely different round of recipe searching. 

Looks like I’ve said “in a way” two or three times in my long story, so perhaps it’s time to get down to business. 

One of the “secrets” to my beef stroganoff is to get better beef than you might think to get. You can find stew beef in any supermarket, and that’d be fine. Or you can go to a meat market and they’ll sell you chuck roast and tell you it’ll be great. But what I’d recommend is a chuck tender. It’s a lot less like stringy stew and a lot more like steak and to me it makes a big difference. It’s not really all that easy to find, at least not where I’m from, but it’s worth finding a butcher who knows what you’re talking about and won’t try to talk you into something else. And once you find a place that’ll steer you right on this they’ll probably steer you right on other things as well. In case you have trouble finding chuck tender it goes by many names: chuck eye, mock tender, chuck fillet, chuck filet, Scotch tender. 

I’ve changed the recipe I started out with quite substantially. It’s got cream cheese and sour cream, which I added to extra tanginess. Which is funny because I took the sour cream out of one of my chicken recipes because I didn’t like the extra tanginess. I also added onion soup mix to pump things up, but then I got tired of packaged mixes and now make my own from scratch. Not at all difficult, and as always, it just feels good to know what’s going into your food. 

It’s also pretty easy to make. Toss everything in the crockpot except the cream cheese and sour cream, then come back when it’s ready, toss in the dairy stuff, then pour over noodles. Slightly more detailed instructions below. Makes four servings, freezes nicely.

Beef Stroganoff

Prep Time: 20 min

Cook Time: 5 hr

Servings: 4

Difficulty: Easy

Ingredients:

2 1/2 pounds cubed beef stew meat (chuck tender)

1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed golden mushroom soup

1/2 cup chopped onion

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

1/4 tsp garlic powder

1/4 cup dried onion flakes

2 tablespoons beef bouillon powder

1/4 teaspoon onion powder

1/4 teaspoon parsley flakes

1/8 teaspoon celery seed

1/8 teaspoon paprika

4 ounces cream cheese

8 ounce container sour cream

Directions:

- take stew beef out of refrigerator while you prepare the rest of the ingredients

- spray slow cooker with vegetable oil spray, then preheat on low

- chop onion

- combine the soup, onion, Worcestershire sauce, and spices in a medium size mixing bowl

- put stew beef in slow cooker, then stir in the soup/spice mixture

- cook on Low setting for 5 hours

- after 4 hours take sour cream and cream cheese out of refrigerator to warm slightly

- stir in cream cheese and sour cream just before serving

- Serve over egg noodles.

Starting point for this recipe: Allrecipes.com

List of alternate chuck tender names came from The Cook's Thesaurus, which I find to be pretty darn useful at times.

Practical Cooking for Regular People

So I’m starting a new blog, surprisingly about cooking as opposed to synthesizers, which is what I more usually write about. I’m not a chef or a gourmet cook, I’m just a regular guy who likes homemade food. And I don’t have a ton of time (who does?) so I tend to make a lot at once so I can eat for a few days rather than just making a single meal. I also tend to use tools that do the work for me if I can, things like crockpots and bread machines. Some may see that as cheating, and in some ways I agree. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with a house full of beef stroganoff smells, especially when I can cook once and eat four times.

I’ve always liked cooking from scratch, and in some ways it all goes back to when a friend’s father showed us how to bake bread one summer. No idea when that was. Perhaps I was 10? 1970? Couldn’t reliably say. Regardless, the guy was kind of cool. He kept bees, baked bread, grew vegetables, etc. My parents did cook as well, but let’s just say there was a sizable amount of canned vegetables in my youth. To be fair there was also a good amount of fresh farm-stand food too as we spent summers in rural upstate New York. But perhaps it was because I was aware of the difference between canned peas versus peas picked off the vines in garden that’s made me like actual ingredients as opposed to boxed food. Or that one summer when I grew my own tomatoes. There is just nothing like picking a tomato or two and having them in a salad 10 minutes later. I mean, it’s just not that difficult to make a cake using flour and sugar, and it’s probably a thousand times better tasting than a box cake. Or cranberry sauce made from cranberries as opposed to coming from an opened can. Or the way people marvel at my “famous” homemade lasagna. It’s just noodles, sauce, and cheese, people! 

And my dad would make pancakes from scratch. I remember it as being all the time but perhaps he only did it once in a while. I make pancakes too, but although people have been known to rave about them, which always makes me just shake my head as they’re just pancakes, somehow I’ve never been able to figure out my dad’s technique, and alas mine are just not the same. Mine are darn good, but they’re just pancakes. Or even just his scrambled eggs. He somehow put milk and Worcestershire sauce in them but I’ve never been able to figure out the magic formula. 

And my mom, well, she’s a whole ’nother story. In fact, she’s many family stories. Many of which she told herself, with gusto. One of them was how she tried to make frozen peas and burned the same water three times. Things like that. But she also made the most amazing Thanksgiving dinners, for 20 people, from scratch, more or less by herself. And she catered my sister’s wedding, which I remember as amazing, although I’m going to call my sister and get a second opinion on that as I was just a kid.

So I never intended this to be any sort of an essay as it was just supposed to be a brief introduction. I was just intending this to be more along the lines of, “hey, I’ll be putting up posts about my recipes, the tools I use, and the occasional philosophical discussion about how the refrigerator’s radically changed western culture.” That sort of thing. And now I’m off to the supermarket to get the last few ingredients I need for my stroganoff. Perhaps I’ll post the results later today.