The Lazy Gourmet

[Rusty Edge]

I haven't been enthused about eating and cooking recently, because of having some crowns put in.

Surprisingly, my wife has stepped up. Scrambled eggs and hash browns last night, baked potatoes and chicken Kiev/ Cordon Blue( from frozen ) , and tomorrow will be tacos ( if we don't go out ). I will probably have to dice tomatoes and shred lettuce for that.

The point is that having the mrs. take over cooking is deliciously lazy.

[Rusty Edge]

This has been a peculiar  week. The family has been packing my M-I-L's  stuff/ cleaning her house because she has mixed dementia and moved into a nursing home on Thursday. I've been cooking with no idea how many people will show up. I was needed for the actual move, so I made this because I had most of the ingredients and no time to shop or cook -

http://tiphero.com/creamy-chicken-wild-rice-soup/

Everybody seemed to approve. I used all chicken stock and no water.  I substituted corn for celery, but we all agreed that it would be better with twice as much corn. I thought the black pepper overpowered the more subtle flavors, and it would have been even better with less and the addition of mushrooms. My niece added sirracha  sauce.

Anyway, easy, tasty, made a lot of food. Trust your instincts on the seasoning. It's easier to add to your bowl than remove from the batch. Enjoy!

[Buster's Uncle]

Are put-on-and-leave-cooking-low-for-two-hours recipes right for this thread?  I've mostly posted about grilling, 'cause that was what I did constantly this summer, but I specialize more in leave-cooking dishes...

[Rusty Edge]

Are put-on-and-leave-cooking-low-for-two-hours recipes right for this thread?  I've mostly posted about grilling, 'cause that was what I did constantly this summer, but I specialize more in leave-cooking dishes...

Well, it says "Lazy Gourmet".. I interpret that as easy and tasty. Although usually I maintain that gourmet is a French word for "The chef put his fingers in my food!" In other words, lots of fussing.

That's how I look at it. Grilling can be pretty lazy, but sometimes it requires a lot of fuss/basting/injecting supervision.

Slow cooking can be pretty lazy, provided there aren't too many ingredients to be measured or prepped.

I say, if it's both tasty and easy- share!

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, cooking is NOT one of life's more onerous chores - but I've encouraged my natural laziness there, to cut down on elaborate midnight snacks (used to do midnight frying pan steak a lot) and yeah, my specialties are focused on high return in relation to effort and time spent.

I was thinking about posting my roasted chicken recipe the last time I made it -about a week ago- and thinking that Elok was asking for QUICK stopped me.

[Elok]

Nah, just not Food Network-y "you need twelve obscure ingredients, a bizarre single-purpose kitchen implement, and three hours prep time."

[Buster's Uncle]

Not much to the chicken recipe (protip: main ingredient chicken) then, but not tonight.

Bed's singing to me.

[Buster's Uncle]

I stumbled over this one by accident - there was a bunch of frozen leg quarters in the freezer, I'd been away on the road for over six months doing renfairs, and the freezer was self-cleaning, so the meat was probably bad.  Chicken is incredibly cheap, bought in those big sacks of leg-thigh-back quarters most groceries offer; cheaper than hamburger, so we're not talking about but a few dollars wasted if I had to feed them to the dogs.  However, I don't believe in feeding dogs food any staler than it has to be, so I threw the old quarters onto a pan in the oven and cooked them low for a few hours.

Thing is, after a few hours, it was smelling really good, so I bit into a piece - and the dogs ended up getting nothing.  I've refined the technique considerably since then.



Preheat the oven to bake at approximately 365 degrees - as always with my recipes, I recommend experimentation to suit your own tastes and those of people you cook for; it's how I worked out all my specialties in the first place.

Lightly Pam-spray a roughly 1'x2' pan and place 4-6 frozen leg quarters as separated as they'll fit without touching much.  Salt to taste - unless you just don't like/eat ANY salt, meat needs a little while it's cooking; trying to make up for it at the table on meat cooked completely w/o is never satisfactory.

-The other spices are optional, depending on how much you like pure, crunchy, golden brown chicken, but I worked out my standard spice regime on this dish to suit my sister's more sophisticated tastes - she liked when she came home from work and supper was waiting, provided I could make it so she liked it.  (I like it about equally either way.)  So, a little black pepper, a little garlic (or a lot, depending on what you like), a lot of sage and a little basil.

Two hours should be just about perfect for well-browned, depending on your preferences and altitude.


Optionally, at roughly an hour 1/2, pull out and use a fork to transfer the congealing pan scrapin's on top of the meat before they cook to the pan, to save yourself a lot of trouble later cleaning.  Also optional; Mylochka liked to pour a little bag of mixed frozen vegetables in one corner around 'her' piece at a half hour to completion to cook in the chicken juices.  She said they were delicious, and it gave everything in the pan a sort of Thanksgiving turkey flavor, I thought.

Now, Mom don't like it as crispy as I do, so if you or anyone you cook for feels that way, it's key to pay attention to how long it takes for the water to cook off the broth in the pan, leaving browned scrapin's and fat; it comes out kinda slimy and gross on the bottom if you pull the chicken out before - though it's cooked enough to eat well before the time I give at the temperature I give.  She makes that mistake a lot when she bakes chicken without me.  So the trick is to give it ten-15 minutes to brown on the bottom after the broth's cooked down to just fat as a compromise.  (Note that my way, the meat cooks drier -but still tender and delicious - which resists taking on that refrigerator taste that leftover chicken tends to get, better.)

Since chickens are not all the same size, there is a limit to how much consistency you can get; a little less time or a little lower temperature for smaller leg quarters.  -Cooking's like that, for all my efforts at consistency.

Another thing to experiment with is lower temperatures longer - 260 for three hours will cook but not brown, so hotter than that.

I get stuck a lot having to do this with chicken cut up into discrete thighs and drumsticks -Mom almost always buys the quarters but cuts them up- and it's enormously trickier with smaller pieces.  Big leg quarters are by far the easiest to get good results with.

And again - garlic can really overwhelm a dish, but this is a garlic chicken recipe if you put enough on, or not if just a hint of it.  So that's up to preference.  DO sage the heck out of it.

One last thing:  slop on BBQ sauce (my sauce recipe leads page two of this thread) and cook for ten more minutes, and this is a BBQ Chicken recipe -some lemon juice on the chicken, added to the other pre-cooking spices, goes well with this- one trick a good cook learns is (easy) ways to add variety to the same ol' thing...


Cooks enough to feed me for two days, if I'm doing all the eating alone.

[Buster's Uncle]

I should have said a little more about adapting this recipe for smaller pieces - those will cook too dry, done the same as I instruct for leg quarters.  You need to shave time off and cook hotter to brown the skin without overcooking the meat.  I've never really worked out how much of each, satisfactorily.

I've also never done this with non-frozen chicken; 15-20 minutes less might be necessary to compensate, but a little hotter again might be needed, too.  I'm completely guessing, though.

Cooking skinless I know nothing about, except that it's a bad idea for multiple reasons.  -If anyone wants to be healthy and eat forth-rate-tasting chicken, I would suggest cooking unseasoned with the skin on for the first hour -chicken tastes awful without any of the skinfat- removing the skin, then spicing and cooking the rest of the time.  (A little less time, probably; I imagine it'll cook dry faster without skin.)

[Buster's Uncle]

I've mentioned grilling chicken, I think, but I don't recall having talked about how.

The same aunt who gave us the old gas grill (it was crumbling, and I was given a new one for my birthday in December, something that for family in-joke reasons is called 'giving a football', after a teenage boy on some sitcom who gave his mother a football for Christmas, and they didn't entirely have MY happiness in mind in giving me a new grill to cook for them on) gave us a wire rack that you hang drumsticks on, wide end down.  I didn't think it would work -chicken has the fat in the skin and wants to burn like crazy laying directly on the grill- but it does, and is excellent with a little of my BBQ sauce painted on the last five minutes of grilling and a little more added on the plate.

So, get a rack like I have, cook for about 45 minutes, sauce the last five, hope you guessed the time right to neither over or undercook, manage the possible grease fires and don't burn it much - and enjoy.

I'm really only posting because I cooked Chicken Racku for supper today with more success than usual - and my wiminz always likes it-  and to mention the name.  I'd been watching a lot of subtitled anime at the time, thus the Engrish name.

[Buster's Uncle]

This one's not easy to screw up - don't over-salt it, watch out for overstuffing the pot, causing something to push against the bottom and burn, and you should be golden, provided there's nothing wrong with the ingredients.

Fill one of those two gallon pots about half full and set on the stove at low medium, about one third of the way if your stove has a dial.  Add chunked beef (Mom cuts up a smallish roast for this and freezes.)  Salt and pepper.  Simmer for 1-2 hours, depending on how tender you want the beef - tender enough to not stay together on a fork is more than most people prefer, which should take a bit more time than I'm laying out; almost that tender is usually ideal.  Cut up enough potatoes, carrots, celery (and whatever suits you - at least a little onion, in addition, can be good) to nearly fill the pot -beef stew with vegetables stretches a piece of meat a long way, a common attribute of southern cooking- add, and simmer another hour.  Eat, possibly with broth-soppin' biscuits.

-Optionally, the standard set of spices I put on most meat dishes - a little garlic, a lot of sage, and a little basil.

-I like to throw a couple bullion cubes in to make the broth even richer (without that fake bullion taste), but it doesn't make a huge difference.

-Also optionally; it's not very good with extremely lean meat and no fat.  I actually add a little bacon fat from the grease can, and get very delicious results.  That's possibly more important if you don't put on the optional spices, as boiled dishes can turn out terribly bland.


When spicing, it's better to underdo than over, always, but the vegetables end up being a lot to spice - I go heavier salting/spicing on boiled dishes for that reason.

[Buster's Uncle]

There's a reason I'm always mentioning spicing to taste - and that of others who will eat it.  I like things saltier than anyone I know - Mom likes saltier than most people, and my sister and aunt -who's here for the week- are normal.  I have to always be conscious of not salting to my own taste unless I'm the only one I'm cooking for.  The batch of stew cooking now may be a little too peppery, so when I went to check on it and found Mom had taken care of the vegetables, I chopped up three more potatoes and added to divide the spices that much further.  Aunt Pokey's hard to please, and you definitely have to cook for your audience.

[Buster's Uncle]

...On that last, the post-meal feeback was that the meat and vegetables were perfect, but the both was indeed a tad too peppery - they agreed with my own assessment however, that it was only a tad over; my mouth was a little warmer when I finished my serving than I'd prefer, but not on fire...

[Rusty Edge]

Yes, you have to cook for your audience.

[Buster's Uncle]

-Which a bachelor cooking for himself does instinctively - but if the wife don't like mushrooms, you probably shouldn't be putting mushroom soup into everything.