Hi!
It felt good to be back in the kitchen this week. I even managed a baking project! Let’s hope the momentum holds.
What I made for dinner
Chicken kheema and cabbage thoran: Our first cookbook club meeting of 2021 wasn’t actually cookbook-based — we took a virtual cooking class with Smita Chutke of Smita’s Cookery! Smita is a recipe developer and chef who also teaches Indian cooking locally in Western New York. Smita outfitted us with her recipes, guidance, spice blends and all the ingredients that we needed and then walked us through how to prepare each dish over Zoom. Seeing as this meal (chicken kheema, cabbage thoran and chai) was reviewed in-house as “better than anything we’ve had in like, a lot of restaurants,” I’m excited to apply what I learned to my cooking in the future. My first step is going to be picking up some of her spice blends when she launches them!
Almond chicken cutlets with white pizza-style kale: Both of these recipes were from Julia Turshen’s new book, “Simply Julia.” In this (newsletter) house we’re big Turshen fans, so I was so excited to dive in as soon as my book arrived last week. After seeing everyone and their mother with advance copies in my Instagram feed making it, I knew the first thing I wanted to cook was the white pizza-style kale. It did not disappoint! I’m linking here to an older recipe of Turshen’s for white pizza-style mustard greens, but the same principles are applied in the book for the kale recipe. Do sprinkle your finished dish with garlic powder, oregano and red pepper flakes — that’s what really brings the pizza vibes. Seeing as it is ingrained in my head that a dinner comprised of entirely greens and cheese is…impractical, I also made the almond chicken cutlets from the book to go along with the kale. They were also great, and I loved the tip to dredge using mayo and dijon instead of egg.
Jalapeno popper stuffed chicken and salad: This dinner was meal #2 from “Simply Julia” and an utter failure, but it was entirely my fault because I didn’t follow the directions. The recipe has you pound chicken breasts thin, stuff them with cheese and jalapeno and then roll them up and secure each with toothpicks before they’re baked in the oven. I did not have toothpicks so I decided to just…put my faith in the chicken’s ability to stay put? Reader, I was wrong. You need toothpicks unless you’d like everything to seep out and create a mess. The filling was great (I tasted it before stuffing the chicken, I’m not here to mess with salmonella) so I’m going to try this again once I stock up on toothpicks.
Ricotta and potato chip fish cakes with peas: You guessed it, “Simply Julia” again! I ate a lot of salmon cakes as a kid, typically made with canned salmon and crushed saltines. They were easy for my mom to make and I was happy to eat them. But these? They use potato chips and are a big improvement on saltines, in my opinion. The book suggests sour cream and onion, but I used plain wavy chips — whatever you have, it’s going to be good. If you plan your weekly grocery trip right you can use the leftover ricotta from white pizza-style kale earlier in the week for the binding in these cakes. While I’m not opposed to using up leftover ricotta in cookies, it felt great to actually use up the tub on two meals. That’s something else that I appreciated as I paged through this cookbook — a lot of the ingredients are repeats for easy grocery list-making, adapted in slightly different ways.
What I made that wasn’t for dinner
Sour cherry pie: It was my dad’s 70th(!) birthday this week so I made and dropped off his favorite, cherry pie. I used Erin Jeanne McDowell’s all-butter pie crust recipe from “The Book on Pie” and the sour cherry filling recipe from “Pie For Everyone.” If you, like me, have always been too chicken to attempt a lattice crust, the step-by-step photo instructions in “The Book on Pie” are helpful for a first-timer.
Other dinner-adjacent things from this week
One of the coolest shops in the world, Now Serving, is having a pie-related sale today only (March 14) in honor of Pi Day. Fruit pies, pizza pies, hand pies, any pie goes. I snatched up a Maida Heatter book I’ve wanted for a while now and the Roberta’s cookbook.
Help, I need this bowl:
See you next week!