southern cooking

It’s mid-February here in New York City, and we still haven’t had a measurable amount of snowfall or any sort of cold weather. I haven’t even had to find my other glove, which has been been lost since last spring.

While this has been great as far as commuting, seasonal depression, and walking to the gym is concerned, the mild weather has really hurt my warm, hearty, comfort food output.

So being hit by a cold front yesterday had one perk — I got to break out one of my favorite dead-of-winter recipes, a mix of my mom’s and my aunt’s chicken pot pie recipe. It isn’t exactly healthy for you - it’s full of tons of lean chicken and veggies, but it’s also covered in gravy and pastry — but it will restore your will to live when the wind chill drops below zero.

•  2-3 pounds of chicken (I use boneless, skinless breasts, but you can use anything, even a whole fryer)
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1/2 teaspoon of pepper
  
• a couple stalks of celery (chopped)
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 medium onion (chopped)
• Enough water to cover the chicken
  
• 2 potatoes, cubed (and peeled if you’d like)
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1.5 teaspoons of salt
• 1/4 teaspoon of thyme
• 1 9-inch pie crust (I buy mine at the store because I’m bad at these things, but you can make your own if you want to show off)
• 1 16-ounce package of frozen veggies (or any combination of fresh or frozen veggies that you feel like  - I do broccoli, peas,  corn, and carrots)
• 1 1/4 teaspoon of pepper
• 1 cup of milk
• 2 hard boiled eggs, sliced
• 1/2 cup of butter

Combine the ingredients in italics in a large dutch over or soup pot. Bring to a boil. Cover, reduce to a simmer and cook for an hour (or until chicken is tender). Remove the chicken, let it cool, and then cut into bite-sized pieces. discard the bay leaf but reserve the broth and veggies in the pot.

With a large spoon, skim the fat off the surface of the broth (if you used chicken breasts, there pretty much won’t be any) and bring the broth back up to a boil. Add the remaining veggies of your choice along with the cubed potatoes. Simmer until everything is cooked and tender (about 10 minutes).

Remove veggies from the broth and put aside. Measure three cups of broth and set aside. Reserve the remaining broth to make a delicious soup with later.

In the now-empty dutch over, melt the butter over low heat. Add the flour and whisk until smooth, stirring constantly. Gradually add the broth and the milk while continually stirring over medium heat — it should get thick and bubbly. Stir in the remaining salt, pepper, and thyme. Stir in the chicken, veggies, and eggs gently until everything is mixed. Spoon mixture into a 13 X 9 X 2 inch cooking dish.

Take your pie crust and roll it out on a lightly-floured surface so that it’s roughly a 15 X 10 inch rectangle. It doesn’t have to be pretty. Place it over your cooking dish, crimping the edges and cutting a few slits in the middle.  Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes or until crust is golden-brown.

Growing up, my favorite thing in the world was my mom’s chicken and dumplings. Notice I didn’t say my favorite food was chicken and dumplings, I said that my favorite thing in the whole wide world was chicken and dumplings.

I can still remember my anticipation for dinner on the nights when it was on the stove. And, to this day, a big pot of it awaits me every time I go home for a visit. It’s just simply that good.

Due to my well-documented fear of preparing dough and basically anything that involves cutting things into flour, I had never made the dish myself. It was almost like a mental block — how could I create something so delicious when I wasn’t my mom?

Once, a few years back, I attempted one of those short-cut recipes for chicken and dumplings that I found online — one of those cheater dishes that uses canned biscuit dough and condensed soup. The result was such a horrible travesty that I didn’t eat more than a bite. I learned my lesson well: you don’t cut corners with this dish unless you want to cut the quality as well.

Over this past Christmas, my mom walked me through the recipe, and it was surprisingly simple and straightforward. It was as if I assumed it was difficult because it tasted so good and perhaps because when I was little it seemed to take about five hours to be ready to eat.

I made it solo today, in time to eat for the Patriots game kickoff. It tasted just as it should — exactly like mom’s.

Mom’s Chicken and Dumplings

For broth:

• Use 4 or 5 boneless chicken breasts, or whole breasts with skin and bones (skin adds more fat and flavor - but I use skinless and it works fine)
• 2 t. salt
• 1/2 t. pepper
• 2 or 3 carrots, sliced
• 1 bay leaf
• Several stalks of celery, cut into pieces (I put mine in a food processor)
• 1 medium white onion, chopped
• Enough water to cover chicken
• 3 cups of milk

1. Add all ingredients except milk to a heavy-bottomed large pot; bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer. Cover pot and cook for at least one hour.
2. Remove chicken; cool. Remove bones and skin, if necessary, and cut into bite-size pieces. Set aside.
3. Add 3 cups of milk. Bring to boil and add dumplings (see below) one at a time, keeping the broth at a boil.
4. Cover pot and simmer for10 or 15 minutes or until dumplings are done. Do not lift cover so that the steaming of dumplings occurs.
5. Add chicken pieces, continuing to boil gently.
6. Blend 4 T. flour and 1/2 cold water. Add to broth, gently blending in.
7. Cook and stir until slightly thickened. Simmer (very faint boil) for about 1 hour.
Turn off heat and let stand for another hour.

Dumplings:

2 1/4 c. flour
3 t. baking powder
1 t. salt
5 T. shortening (I use non-transfat Crisco)
1 egg + enough water to equal 3/4 cup

1. Mix flour, baking powder, and salt in large mixing bowl.
2. Cut in shortening with pastry blender or fork.
3. Beat egg and water with fork until blended (about 30 seconds).
4. Add egg mixture gradually into flour mixture while blending with a fork.
5. Use hands to form into a ball.
6. Roll dough out on well-floured surface until 1/8-inch thick using a rolling pin.
7. Cut into rectangles about 2×4 inches in size using a pizza cutter or sharp knife.
8. Let dry at least 30 minutes, uncovered.

Note: You can add additional milk to this dish if the broth is totally absorbed or to achieve the consistency you like.

This is a great meal if you have some ground hamburger, some potatoes, and not much else. Whatever you have lying around you can throw in — onions, celery, green peppers, carrots. Sure, any Sunday dinner that puts the words “hamburger” and “steak” next to each other is sure to be just a little tacky or white trash, but that doesn’t mean it’s not delicious.

Tonight we had an early dinner — and made corn and buttermilk biscuits to go along with the main dishes. Then, due to gravy overdose, I took a nap.

For the steaks and gravy:

• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 white onion
• 1 cap of Kitchen Bouquet (I love this product and use it all the time)
• 1/4 cup oil
• 1/4 cup flour
• 2 cups water

In a large bowl, mix the ground beef with anything you’d like that you can find around your kitchen. For example, today I put in some garlic, some steak seasoning, some rosemary and thyme, some onion, some minced celery, some parsley, some red pepper, some cumin — it should be sort of like an Everything Bagel, except with meat. Don’t go overboard, but have some fun. Once your meat is seasoned, separate it into three or four patties and fry them in a large saucepan.

When the steaks are about 80% cooked, take them out and place them on a plate. Pour you oil into the saucepan and whisk in your flour after the oil starts bubbling. Add the Kitchen Bouquet. After a minute or two, slowly whisk in the water until the gravy is as thick as you’d like it. Add salt and pepper to taste. Place your hamburger steaks back into the gravy, and mix in some of your white onion, which you have cut into wide rings (this way, people who don’t like onions can navigate around them). Cover and simmer for several more minutes.

As for the mashed potatoes, those are pretty run-of-the-mill: cube and boil three or four potatoe until tender (15 minutes or so). Drain the water, add some salt, pepper, milk or sour cream, and a little butter. Mash it all together.

Serve the burgers, gravy and onions on a bed of potatoes. Sop up all extra gravy with buttermilk biscuits. Happily slip into a gravy coma.

Go to last week’s Sunday dinner.