Slow cooker Basque chicken and rice

Since my workplace lacks Dave Care®, I’m forced to leave food so he doesn’t just eat peanut butter sandwiches every night. So the slow cooker gets a workout during the night stints. This recipe comes from one of my favorite crockpot recipe books. (And thanks to Jarrett for clueing me in.)

Basque Chicken and Rice Casserole

From “Ready and Waiting” by Rick Rodgers. See the full original recipe here.

Ingredients:

10 pieces of chicken

1 lemon, juiced

1 cup chopped ham

1 medium onion, chopped

1 red bell pepper, chopped

3 minced garlic cloves

2½ cup water

1¾ cup chicken broth

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 pinch saffron threads

¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

¾ teaspoon salt

2 cups rice

Method:

Brown the chicken pieces in enough hot olive oil to mostly coat the bottom of a large skillet. Remove from pan to a plate. Squeeze lemons over chicken and set aside.

In same pan, add ham, onion, red bell pepper, and garlic, cooking until onions are softened. Transfer that mixture to the slow cooker. Top with water, broth and spices.

Stir in the rice, then top with chicken. (Put white pieces on top of dark, if using.) Cook in slow cooker for 5 to 6 hours on low.

This is from a fun little book with 160 recipes for the slow cooker, and not a cream-of-soup ingredient in sight. All the ones I’ve tried so far are just slow-cooked real food, the kind you’d make in a Dutch oven on the stove top if you were home on a cold winter’s day.

Since I wasn't home for the big reveal, I'll have to take Dave's word on how it turned out originally. I can attest that it made perfectly tasty leftovers even cold when I sampled it when I got home.

Menu planning tips

My new not-so-secret weapon in menu planning: a peel-and-stick chalkboard on the side of the refrigerator.

Next to eating the actual food, planning menus is my next favorite part of cooking. (Certainly beats doing the dishes.) There are so many possibilities, from new recipes to try to old favorites to savor, and figuring out how to combine them is something I really enjoy. But I’ve learned that not everyone shares my love of menu planning, so I thought I’d share my approach to see if it sparks ideas. It’s all pretty much no-brainers, but a few tools help, along with suggestions for ways to make it easier to follow through on your grand plans. Otherwise if you’re like me, you reach meal-prep time exhausted and looking for Plan B (Pizza Luce?) instead of making that recipe that looked so good in this month’s magazine.

Start with what you’ve got: This could mean recipes you’ve wanted to try, leftover bits of something you want to use up, or whatever’s overflowing your garden/CSA share basket at the moment. In summer, I never plan my menus and grocery shopping list until I’ve made a farmers market run and a trip through the back-yard garden, which acts as an agenda setter all its own.

I usually pick the main dish first, but in the case of summer produce season, I’ll upend the drill and figure out what goes with the vegetable side dish. Sometimes I just browse my cookbooks for ideas or pull out old magazines from past years for that month to keep it seasonal. I also keep a tickler file in the computer divided into categories of dishes, from mains to veggies to appetizers and desserts (both the take-to-the-office treats and fancy-dinner finishes). I further divide them into recipes I’m likely to make on a weeknight, Saturday night, Sunday evening or a weekend lunch. I note the source and page number of each recipe, and any special considerations (like good way to use up thus-and-so, or could be made on a weeknight with advance prep).

Within each meal, I try to balance out the flavors, textures and colors, because my mother’s Iowa State food fascist drill still follows me (although I draw the line at turning meat gray). Pairing up your sides with main courses in advance lets you consider whether you’ll need something neutral to soak up a sauce.

Within each week, I try to balance out types of dishes so it’s not chicken every night (although honestly, there are so many different flavor outcomes that wouldn’t be the end of the world), and so I balance out the workload. Back-to-back weeknight meals that involve intensive recipe-following are more likely to make me bail out of a plan.

Take note of what’s on your schedule for the week. No point in planning a meal for a night no one’s going to be there to eat it, and you’ll know when you need to figure on an early pre-theater supper.

Pick a manageable time frame: I usually stick to one week out, or 10 days at most. I’ve sometimes tried a full-month’s approach, but I find that results in more misses than hits; too many things come up that make the plan unworkable, and it’s hard to factor in leftovers.

Find a place to organize your plans: I bought this peel-and-stick chalkboard for the side of my refrigerator to help me keep track of events and menus. I note the source of the recipe and what page it’s on. I used to scribble notes on paper, but then when something came up and I didn’t make a planned meal, all the details about which recipe I bought some specific ingredient for were on the previous week’s scribbled, and often lost, piece of paper, and too often that special ingredient ended up spoiled before I figured out what I bought it for. Now those details are all in one findable spot, and my husband doesn’t have to ask me what’s for dinner. (Although it’s cute that he does, since he’s always happy to find out whatever it is. It’s a thing.)

Put any recipes you’ll need in a findable spot: If there are printouts of Internet recipes I’ll use that week, they go in a folder on top of my refrigerator so they’ll be close at hand. If there are recipes from cookbooks, I stack the pertinent cookbooks on a shelf close to the kitchen so I can take a quick look the night before to refresh my memory about procedure.

Plan your attack: Once I’ve settled on my menus, I create a shopping list, a prep list and a timetable. I list when I need to thaw something for a recipe so my plans aren’t derailed by a frozen chunk of meat when I’m ready to cook. I note which recipes have items that could be prepared ahead, from simple chopping to partial cooking. Anything to make a weeknight easier. I usually spend part of Sunday chopping things ahead for the week, parsing ingredients out into labeled containers.

Do I sometimes still bail on a plan? Absolutely. Sometimes you’re just not in the mood for what’s on the list, and some of my best recipes have come from just deciding to wing it with what’s on hand that I do feel like cooking and eating. I think planning is the incubator of spontaneity.

So what’s on my menus for this next week? For sure something with that last, lone squash I bought at the last farmers market of the year. I’ll pair it with caramelized onions to use up the last of the onions I bought the same day. And I’ve got some leftover Stilton begging to be used. That and some broth to make a sauce, toss in some rosemary and pecans and put it over whole wheat pasta and I’ve got the beginnings of a plan. A spinach-pear salad on the side to use up those pears that were on sale, and we’re pretty much there.

Burritos with rice

One minute in the microwave at work took the chill off. It survived being assembled a few hours in advance.

Burritos

Adapted from “New Dieter’s Cook Book” from Better Homes & Gardens

This is clearly an older school diet cookbook, when fat and cholesterol were the main demons on the horizon, not carbs and gluten. A quick rifle through of the first pages of the book shows processed flour products everywhere. The 1992 edition I have was superseded by another, and even that one looks to be available only used. At this point there are far more and better diet cookbook options out there. But it’s still hanging out on my bookshelf, and out of the several hundred pages of recipes, some of them seem viable take-to-work options.

Ingredients:

½ pound lean ground beef

1 cup chopped onion

1 15-ounce can black beans

1 10-ounce can tomatoes with green chili peppers

1 teaspoon chili powder

Chopped green onion for garnish

2 cups cooked brown rice

1 10-ounce can tomatoes with green chilis

4 flour tortillas

Method:

Cook ground beef with onions until meat is no longer pink and the onions are tender. Add black beans, tomatoes and chili powder. Simmer until the liquid cooks down to a more sauce-like consistency (otherwise you’ll have mushy burritos).

Set aside ¼ cup for topping. Spoon a quarter of the remaining filling into each tortilla, folding into a pocket. Top with some of the reserved filling and serve each with a quarter of the rice-tomato mixture.

I suspect the main thing that makes these burritos qualify as diet food is simple portion control. But they were fast enough to make and something I could heat up at work. Of course, this means now I have to eat it three more days, since all the recipes in this book are designed around a family of four whose mother is making them diet along with her.

Chicken tapenade and green beans gremolata

Chicken Supremes with tapenade and mushroom sauce

Jacques Pepin “More Fast Food My Way”

This recipe calls for putting tapenade into slits in chicken breasts, which are then pan fried. You set aside the cooked chicken in a slow oven to keep warm, and make a sauce of mushrooms, onions and white wine in the pan.

The tapenade was wonderful, a definite keeper with other uses. The chicken didn’t turn out quite as well. It was hard to contain all the tapenade within the slits, so I wound up mixing the remaining tapenade into the mushroom sauce, which was tasty, but not very attractive. Even though I cooked the chicken far longer than called for, it wasn’t done in the middle. 

Tapenade ingredients:

2 dried apricots, 8 anchovy fillets, ¾ cup Kalamata and/or green olives (pitted), 1½ tablespoons capers, 1 minced garlic clove, 2 tablespoons olive oil. Whir together in food processor.

Since I wasn’t in love with the rest of the recipe, I’ll send you here if you’re interested in seeing the full, original recipe.

I had better luck with Green Beans Gremolata from “Barefoot Contessa Foolproof.” This was the second recipe I’ve made from this cookbook this year, so it doesn’t count toward my total quest to cook a new recipe from every cookbook I own, but it was tasty and worth repeating. I didn’t have the pine nuts called for and used slivered almonds instead, but it was still quite fine.

Green beans gremolata

Adapted from “Barefoot Contessa Foolproof.” 

You can find the full, original recipe at the link here.

One package fresh green beans, steamed in the bag, drained and seasoned lightly with salt

Top with gremolata: the zest of 1 large lemon, 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan, 3 tablespoons chopped parsley, 2 minced garlic cloves, a ¼ cup toasted nuts. (The slivered almonds were fine, but I imagine the pine nuts are even better. I reduced the amount of Parmesan cheese because otherwise it seemed likely to overwhelm things)

Fruit salad with goat cheese

Strawberry, green grape and goat cheese salad

Adapted from “Katie Brown’s Outdoor Entertaining”

Ingredients:

1 minced shallot

1 tablespoon olive oil

½ tablespoon honey

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

1 pint strawberries, sliced

1 cup green grapes, sliced in half lengthwise

½ cup crumbled goat cheese

Method:

Combine shallot, oil, vinegar and honey. Salt and pepper to taste. Mix strawberries, grapes and goat cheese in a medium bowl. Toss with vinaigrette mixture.

I made this recipe once as originally written. It met the Dave test, but I wasn’t quite as wowed. I’d wondered if it would have been better with some honeyed goat cheese, and then thought, well, why don’t I just add honey? I like this version better myself. It still makes you pucker up a bit, but tempers the edge.

This is one of those lifestyle cookbooks that I don’t usually do more than glance through. But it was free, and there’s something vaguely voyeuristic about it. Who knows? Maybe some day I'll make that funky copper candelabra. Doubtful, but you never know.