Shabbat - Chicken nuggets and more

This past Shabbat, we were hosting both Friday night dinner and Shabbat lunch. For dinner we made chicken and potatoes, sushi, green beans and salad. For lunch, we made chicken nuggets, cornbread, spinach bourekas, broccoli, coleslaw, and more salad.

Chicken and potatoes

This is one of our favorites. The way it works is you build three layers in a Pyrex pan (or any other pan). First, you slice onions and make a layer of those. Next, you slice potatoes and make a layer of those. Lastly, you arrange chicken (dark meat works best) on top. Then you pour some kind of sauce over the whole thing, and bake it until the chicken is falling off the bone. [note: if you cook white meat this long, it will dry out. That's why we use dark meat]

Usually I make a ketchup based sauce, but this time I experimented. I mixed up a whole bunch of savory spices (see the steak post) and rubbed them all over the chicken. There were a TON of spices on the chicken. Then I put the chicken in a ziplock bag, poured red wine in and sealed it in the fridge overnight. The next day we took it out, lay the chicken on top, mixed more spices (mostly mustard seed) with the wine to make a sauce, poured it over and baked it.

The chicken itself was pretty good and flavorful, but the potatoes and onions were so loaded with mustard and other spices that they were pretty much inedible. Lesson learned - don't put too many spices in the potatoes.

Sushi

Nothing special here. I made sushi rice, put it on some nori, filled it with mock shrimp and avocado, and wrapped it up. Making good sushi has nothing to do with recipe and everything to do with dexterity. I'm getting better at it, but I'm still not so good. One thing I will try to do next time is wash the rice better. I think my rice is too sticky.

Green beans

I sauteed some onions and garlic, and then added green beans with some water. I wasn't paying attention and the water boiled away and the beans started to burn, but they still tasted ok. Pay attention to your beans is the lesson of this story.

Salad

We go for pretty basic salads - iceberg, tomato, cuke, maybe some carrot. Our big thing is to throw in some of those salty Israeli pickles. Give it a try.

Broccoli

This was the same as in this post, minus the cheese. I didn't burn it this time, so it was good.

Chicken nuggets

We chopped up chicken breasts into small pieces. We dredged each piece in flour, then egg, then breadcrumbs - we flavored both the flour and breadcrumbs with salt, pepper, garlic, paprika, chili powder, etc. We often then fry them, but this time we baked them.

When you make breaded things, you often find that your hands start getting caked with the breading. To avoid this, do the following: use your right hand to drop the chicken into the flour (but don't touch the flour with your right hand). With your left hand, cover the chicken with flour until coated, then shake off the excess flour. Then drop the chicken into the egg (but don't touch the egg with your left hand). Then, cover the chicken with egg using your right hand. Then, drop the eggy chicken into the breadcrumbs (but don't touch the breadcrumbs with your right hand). Roll the chicken around in the breadcrumbs with your left hand, shake off the excess, and set aside. This way, your left hand only touches dry ingredients, and your right hand only touches wet ingredients.

Then we usually make a "buffalo" sauce to go on top. If you were making buffalo wings, the classic buffalo wing sauce consists of one part hot sauce (like Frank's) to one part margarine, plus a little salt and sugar to taste. We replaced the regular hot sauce with a mixture of two Goya hot sauces - ancho and chipotle (again, see previous post). They were great, and we made a ton so we had leftovers, too.

Cornbread

I followed some generic recipe on the internet - mostly corn meal with a little flour, some baking powder, salt, sugar, etc. They call for buttermilk, which I tried replacing with soy milk. Not the same; buttermilk is really thick and flavorful so it's hard to replace. I added chopped jalapenos to my cornbread batter. Then, I heated up my CIS (cast iron skillet - keep an eye out for this abbreviation in future posts) in the oven with some veg oil (2 tablespoons). Then, I sliced some soft salami real thin and fried them until they were crispy. I took the CIS out of the oven, and poured the batter right in. I topped it off with the crispy salami and baked until done.

The cornbread wasn't great. It was kind of hard and crumbly. Maybe that's just how cornbread is supposed to taste. Next time I make cornbread, though, I'm going to add more wheat flour and more sugar. Truth is, though, I had to substitute soy milk for buttermilk, and you can't really expect to get the same results.

Spinach bourekas

I sauteed some onion and garlic and then added a pound of fresh spinach. That stuff cooks down like nobody's business. I then poured the whole mess into a food processor, chopped it up and added 2 eggs. I took a sheet of puff pastry and, while it was still pretty hard, broke it into 3 pieces along the seam that it comes with. Then, when each of those pieces thawed, I rolled each one out so that it became much wider and thinner (Z axis) - to do this you need to have flour on hand for the dough and your rolling pin. Then I filled each long rectangle with spinach, covered it over and pinched it. I now had 3 very long bourekas. I cut them into squares to serve.

The bourekas came out very tasty. Next time I would leave out the eggs, because it made the filling too runny. But I highly recommend rolling out puff pastry whenever using it to house some kind of filling, be it dessert, meat or vegetable. Just use flour.

Coleslaw

Rachel made a light mayo and vinegar dressing for the coleslaw, which we picked up in the bag form, because we didn't feel like shredding cabbage and carrot by hand, but you could if you wanted I suppose.