This is a recipe that I adapted from one I found in a Jaime Oliver magazine a while back. I remember loving the picture that accompanied the dish, and while I no longer have the recipe on-hand I did remember enough about the elements to pretty successfully recreate it here (I think).
Entrees
Pork Tenderloin Paprikash
Chicken Paprikash is practically Hungary's national dish, and while I've enjoyed it made with veal before I've never had a pork paprikash until I tried this great recipe from my friends over at Cooking Light Magazine. The traditional chicken version of this dish is a braise of whole chicken parts with the skin and on the bone, and delicious as it is, I have to say I really like CL's take on it calling for cubed pork tenderloin to be used instead. Not only does this version eliminate the fat of the chicken skin, but cubing the pork makes it so much easier to eat, and this dish is so tasty you're not going to want to be spending time cutting meat from bone when you could just be shoveling it straight in! You hear what I'm sayin'?
Cod with Sauteed Mushrooms and Polenta Fries
Ok….now that y'all know how to make polenta fries, how about taking a crack at this superb fish dish to serve them along side. The mushroom "sauce" may strike some of you as a little heavy-handed, especially given the delicacy of the cod I served it over but trust me, this is a surf and turf combo made in heaven.
Stuffed Chicken and Herb Gravy
This is another super easy and flavorful dish from my friends at Cooking Light Magazine. Published in their January issue, this recipe originally calls for making a quick batch of polenta to go with the chicken, but I had some left-over simply mashed spuds in my fridge so I used them instead.
Spicy Tamarind Skirt Steak
As I've mentioned on more than one occasion here, I am a junkie for skirt steak. So quick to cook, loaded with great beef flavor and chew, and easy on the wallet….what's not to love. It used to be that skirt steak was a special request item from the butcher, but no longer. A long, well-grained strip of a thing that is cut from the flank, the skirt steak is actually the diaphragm muscle that sits between the abdomen and chest cavity of the cattle. It became famous a number of years ago as the preferred cut of meat to use in fajitas and ever since has become a more prominent fixture in local markets.
Duck Breast with Orange-Chipotle Sauce
I LOVE DUCK!
Cooked in it's own fat to confit, lacquered with Asian spices as a Peking Duck, ground into sausages, transformed into duck prosciutto, or as it is most often offered at restaurants here in the US, a boneless breast seared, sliced and served medium-rare. Yes, I love it all these ways and more.
Penne with Sausage, Fennel and Pecorino
One of my favorite pasta dishes is pasta with broccoli rabe and sausage, and while this dish falls just short of that one's magnificence (in my humble opinion), it comes in a pretty close second. When it came to everyone else around my table though, this was even more beloved than my fave because for the most part the broccoli rabe is a little too bitter for the kids. They much prefer the sweet, caramelized anise flavor of the fennel to the bitter, GREEN vibe of the rapini. Oh well, to each his own.
Caramel Chicken
Sometimes the name of a recipe is enough to make you want to try it.
Caramel Chicken…..uh, hello?
In this case, if the name weren't enough, then the photo that accompanied the recipe in a recent issue of Bon Appétit certainly closed the deal. The shot, not unlike the one above, showing the chicken nestled in a rich, salty-sweet sauce surrounded by caramelized garlic and topped with vibrant slices of scallion almost stopped my heart.
Bistro Roast Chicken
Cooking Light Magazine ran a feature in their October 2013 issue highlighting their 25 Favorite Recipes. I'm sure that eventually I'll end up cooking them all, but I started with this super flavorful and EASY roast chicken. Of course, there are as many ways to roast a chicken as there are cooks. Some recipes call for little more than salt and pepper seasoning on the bird, others for elaborate stuffing, seasoning, and glazes. This roast falls somewhere in-between.
Garlicky Chicken with Lemon-Anchovy Sauce
My old high school/college buddy, Dave, wrote to me the other day to ask if I had heard of this recipe. He had seen it published in the NY Times and had been cooking it pretty much non-stop ever since. Declaring it his favorite recipe of 2013, he went on to tell me that the dish was better than any "illicit drugs the 80s offered" (not that he or I had any direct experience with said drugs, it was more a figure of speech).