For many years my family enjoyed something called “Chiquita’s Chicken,” a recipe we’d gotten from a magazine article by the redoubtable Peg Bracken, author of the I Hate To Cook Book. The article had a little booklet of recipes included which we apparently didn’t keep, although we did write down the one by Chiquita.. I remember that there was something called “Hao Nao Brown Kao” made with ground beef and vaguely Hawaiian or Chinese or some such, and another item called “Gloria’s Good Goulash.” I found HNBK on cooks.com but the other two are lost to posterity. (At least under their original names. Chiquita, whoever she may have been, apparently cribbed her recipe from an almost-identical one for “King Ranch Chicken,” which is very well known.) Since Chiquita’s Chicken relies heavily on canned soup, I looked for something a little more upscale to replace it and found the following. The cream of mushroom soup has been replaced by sour cream and cream cheese, so I guess that’s progress. The cream of chicken soup stayed. The original recipe called for the chicken and cream cheese to be rolled up in individual corn tortillas, something I refuse to do. Any time you’re asked for something that fiddly, just do layers instead. (There are quite a few other fiddly things I do, such as the individual mini-tart shells, but at least there’s some point to them.) So here’s my recipe, adapted from Taste of Home magazine.
Yesterday I wrote about my failure to enjoy the process of preparing for an event in the future. Today I want to look at another mistake that I often make: failing to prepare adequately for that future because of procrastination. I don’t think there’s ever been a meal or reception I’ve prepared that included everything I’d planned. At some point of the procedures I realize that there’s no way I can get everything done and so something gets cut. Usually it’s not a problem, but I have to say that it probably would have been good to include the breadsticks in Tuesday’s dinner. I tend to vastly underestimate how long it will take to prepare the menu. I think I have plenty of time when I don’t. The future has arrived, and I’m not ready.
Yesterday I wrote about what was going on in our lives one year ago as we finally got a diagnosis for our son Gideon and started him on the treatment that cured his cancer. So you’d think that I’d be rejoicing at any and everything that happened this week, since nothing could be as bad as that was. Right? Right. You would think that. And yet, there I was on Tuesday, grumbling and complaining to myself about the dinner I was making for my beloved community chorale’s annual business meeting. “I wish this were over with,” I thought. I had the sensation that I often have when I’m doing something I don’t particularly want to do, feeling as if I’m being dragged along unwillingly towards the event I’m preparing for.
Brownies, or some kind of simple bar cookie, are a great asset to have in your recipe box. You can pull them out, whip them up, and get them to the potluck or party in reasonably short order. You probably have a simple chocolate brownie recipe that you use; these two are a little off the beaten track. I’ve always had good success with them.
Sunday evening was a big get-together over at my in-laws’ house in celebration of four birthdays (mainly my father-in-law’s) and as a farewell to my son Gideon who is leaving for his internship in Seattle at the end of this week. Jan, my mother-in-law, was making pulled pork and various other things and wanted me to make something with sweet potatoes. I am on record as being totally opposed to sweet sweet-potato dishes, especially for Thanksgiving, as I think that they’re too much like dessert. (I always end up being overruled on this at Thanksgiving and people always love what Jan makes; what can you do?) But for this meal I got to choose, so I went looking for a savory sweet-potato dish. The following has been heavily adapted, so I have no problem with posting it as mine. The original recipe called for pancetta. Well, I thought, I’ll use bacon. Then I realized, far too late to do anything about it, that all of my bacon was in a solid block in the freezer. So I left it out. And I have to say, as a committed bacon lover, that it doesn’t need it. It’s also supposed to have a lot of fresh sage, which I didn’t have, and a lot less crumb topping. Gyp! So I doubled the crumb amount and put in more butter. That should make up for any calorie deficit from leaving out the bacon. This is really, really good. I promise.
I love tulips! And if you’re going to grow them you’d better love them, because they give you maybe two weeks (if you’re very lucky) of bloom and then six weeks of dying foliage. If you want them to come back the next year you have to let the leaves stay in place and die back naturally, as that’s how the bulb stores food. You could just whack off the leaves as soon as the flowers are done and then plant new bulbs every fall, but doing that is 1) expensive and 2) lots of work.
When People are Big and God Is Small: Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency, and the Fear of Man by Edward T. Welch, P & R Publishing, 1997. Published in cooperation with The Christian Counseling and Education Foundation.
Just finished a fascinating book mostly about food and our relationship to it. Frank Bruni, who was the restaurant critic for the New York Times from 2004-2009, spent most of his life battling his weight. He grew up in an Italian-American family that put great emphasis on having mounds of food available at any and all times. If there wasn’t enough food on the table to make it sag, then there wasn’t enough. As Bruni moved into young adulthood he tried amphetamines, forced vomiting, and other extremely unhealthy measures to control his weight. After college he became a journalist, and at one point he was following George W. Bush on his campaign trail. He calculated that there were eight meals served daily to the press corps in an effort to keep them (literally) fat and happy so that they’d report positively on the candidate.
I’ve been writing quite a bit recently about two subjects: tools and planning. As I write this I’m facing two frantic days to prepare for tomorrow night’s concert and reception. Yesterday I got all of my grocery shopping done, a task that I would normally have put off until today. So today can be solely dedicated to food prep that can be done ahead, housework, and going over my music. We have our second concert-week rehearsal this evening, which will be fraught with the usual angst over our entrances and exits. (Why we can’t just have a standard procedure that we always follow is beyond me, but I guess it keeps us from getting complacent.)
These are always a great hit when I serve them at parties, as they’re rich and crumbly like shortbread cookies but they aren’t sweet, so they’re nice for people who don’t like sweets or are staying away from them, but they’re still, well, cookies. And there are rarely more than a few left at the end of the evening. They’re no more labor-intensive than regular cookies, especially if you do what I tell you and roll them into balls instead of rolling them out.