I have wanted to try poaching something in olive oil ever since Season 6, Episode 1 of Top Chef, when Kevin Gillespie made his Arctic Char with Salsa Verde of Turnips. The idea of poaching something in olive oil was totally new to me and it sounded delicious.

Fast-forward to this week, when the latest Fine Cooking landed in my mailbox. In it:

• brioche (I really need to start baking my own bread)
• a method for developing your own cheesecake recipes (guess what my mom and I will be doing when she comes to visit!)
• artichokes (love them, never tried cooking them)

…and poaching seafood in olive oil!

The basic method itself is very easy. The total prep time is about 90 minutes, but the active prep time is less than 10.

1. Season the seafood (more on that later) and let stand at room temperature for about an hour.
2. Place rack in center of oven and preheat to 225 degrees F.
3. Pour extra-virgin olive into a straight-sided sauté pan to the same depth as the seafood. Choose a pan that will just hold all the fish in a single layer. Heat the oil to 120 degrees F.
4. Place fish into pan with heated oil, then put the pan in the oven for 25 minutes. Small white droplets will have formed on the surface of the fish.
5. Remove fish from pan (carefully!) and place on rack to drain for a few minutes.
6. Serve.

Once you’re done poaching, you can strain the leftover oil through a coffee filter and re-use it once or twice. Keep it covered in the fridge for up to three weeks.

The sample recipes in the magazine included a couple of rubs (one for shrimp and one for halibut) and a couple of pastes (for salmon and tuna). I opted to make my own. This is a common flavor profile for salmon, but since I was playing it by ear I double-checked the combination in The Flavor Bible:

• 1 tsp. Kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
• Zest of half a lemon
• 1/3 tsp. dried thyme
• 2 sprigs fresh dill, finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic, smashed through a garlic press

This makes enough to season 4 6-oz. salmon fillets. Combine all ingredients in a small bowl, then drizzle in just enough olive oil to make a paste. Rub the paste all over the fish.

Tasting notes:

The texture of the fish was buttery-soft and silky. Delicious. And I think I may have even overcooked the fish a bit, judging from the amount of floaty white bits on the fillets. I was supposed to pull it when there were “a few” small white droplets on the fish, but I let it go for the full 25 minutes which produced the result shown above.

Recipe notes:

I didn’t have enough extra-virgin olive oil, so I just used regular. It came out fine, but I bet it would be even tastier with extra-virgin. Next time I do this, I’m springing for the better quality fish.

I don’t have a pan the right size, so I stuck a 9-inch baking dish into the oven when I preheated it, warming the oil in a non-stick pan on the stove. When the oil reached the right temperature, I took the baking dish out of the oven, poured in the warm oil, laid in the fish fillets, and stuck the baking dish back in the oven. It worked just fine.

I served it over a bed of steamed white rice with asparagus, which I quickly sauteed in olive oil with salt and pepper and then hit with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice at the end.

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I don’t usually pack Western-style bento lunches—heck, I haven’t been packing lunches, bento or not, at all these days—but the leftovers from tonight’s chicken actually fit perfectly into Ms. Bento!

This is also a good example of where packing a good bento can become very, very fussy. See all those celery sticks on the right? The lid wouldn’t close, so I had to take a bunch of them out and cut them precisely to the height of the container. I also had to choose the grape tomatoes and blackberries carefully to make sure they would pack tightly without crushing!

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This is what passes for fine dining in the Gustatory Circuit these days. Also, it takes some practice to get that sauce-smear thing right.

One of the things I enjoy most about cooking is the creative problem-solving/engineering aspect of it. I have ingredients X, Y, and Z and want to eat something resembling dish D. Given what I know about flavors and cooking techniques, how can I get from X, Y, and Z to D?

I was driving home and decided I really wanted to have buffalo chicken wings for dinner.

Solution 1: Heat frozen chicken wings and toss in store-bought buffalo sauce, both things we have on hand.

This solution was dismissed outright for being boring and borderline cheating. Save it for some other night when we’re working late and too lazy to cook. I got home a bit early today and I wanted to cook.

Solution 2: Do something with the package of chicken breasts that’s been defrosting in the fridge and needs to be used up within the next few days.

Making the chicken breasts into something wing-like would be easy enough: cut into wing-sized pieces, marinate, dredge, and pan-fry.

I’ve been on a marinade kick ever since the flavor episode of Worst Cooks in America and I’ve managed to crank out some pretty good ones in the last few weeks. Out came the Pyrex bowl and in went some olive oil, some hot sesame oil, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, five crushed garlic cloves, red chili pepper flakes, salt, and pepper. It smelled and tasted terrific. In went the chicken pieces.

But what about the sauce? I did what any wandering home cook would do: look in the Joy of Cooking index.

Let’s see…chicken…chicken…more chicken…children? Oh, fun recipes for kids…back up…a-ha! Chicken, wings, buffalo. Page 80.

I’d always thought buffalo sauce was some complex concoction, but it turns out it has exactly three ingredients: butter, vinegar, and hot pepper sauce.

I did not have hot pepper sauce, and we’re down to a few drops of Tabasco. Time to improvise.

I opened the fridge and eyed a container of leftover ancho chiles in adobo sauce.

Out came the food processor. In went three chiles, some generous squirts of ketchup, apple cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, and brown sugar. Puree. Taste. Good front of mouth kick, nice spicy finish, but nothing in between. I hoped the butter would take care of that.

I melted 3-4 tablespoons of butter on low heat, then stirred in the mixture from the food processor along with some salt, pepper, and garlic powder (because I forgot to add garlic to the food processor). It was kind of chunky, but I didn’t feel like being fussy and straining it. The butter did round out the flavor nicely and also took down some of the heat.

I quickly dredged the chicken in some seasoned corn starch, then pan-fried them in my cast iron pan and laid them out on paper towels to drain. I served the sauce on the side with some celery sticks, baby carrots, and blue cheese dressing.

Buffalo chicken equation? Solved.

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I watched the steak fajitas episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay a while ago and it stirred up a huge hankering for fajitas. Of course, Houston happens to be having an actual cold spell (current temp: 30°F) so there will be no grilling outside for the time being.

And then my birthday rolled around and with it came a Hamilton Beach MealMaker Express Contact Grill courtesy of my wonderful (and hungry) hubby. This guy is much larger than our old contact grill, which struggled with two paninis at once, and has removable plates for easy cleaning. This grill also opens all the way flat so you can cook different things on each side without pressing. Fajita time!

Sadly, the recipe for Father Leo’s fusion fajitas is not up anywhere on the internet. So I improvised. I put some ground cumin, garlic powder, paprika, crushed garlic, grated ginger, brown sugar, soy sauce, lemon juice, rice vinegar, sesame oil, and olive oil into a giant baggie and threw in a 1-lb. skirt steak to marinate for an hour or so.

Meanwhile, I put two (Japanese) cups of long-grain white rice, some chicken broth, butter, and saffron into the rice cooker. Then I chopped up some peppers and onions and hubby made some guacamole to serve on the side.

I opened the grill flat and sprayed the grill with some nonstick cooking spray, preheated according to instructions, and then plopped the veggies on one side and steak on the other. I got a nice, satisfying sizzle.

The grill does not get super hot when it’s open (or maybe I didn’t preheat long enough), so everything took longer to cook than I thought it would. I also didn’t get a really good sear on the steak, but had to pull it after it hit medium rare.

It was still good.

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Notice anything?

No? Then let’s compare the above photo with this one:

And I’ll give you a hint. The difference doesn’t have anything to do with the subject of the photo.

That’s right…NEW CAMERA!

My trusty old Canon Powershot A20 went into its well-earned retirement on its 10th birthday. The new baby, as you can see, is much better at handling closeups and low light conditions. It also has a built-in image stabilizer.

The food is nothing in particular—a dinner designed for the express purpose of using up pantry ingredients. The rice pilaf is a variation on the sage rice pilaf you see in the second photo. I didn’t have shallots so I threw in half an onion and a bunch of diced baby carrots instead. I actually prefer this version to the original—the carrots add a bit of color and onions are less expensive than shallots.

The chicken is a mindless pan-fried chicken. I took boneless, skinless chicken thighs, trimmed off the excess fat, and butterflied them a bit so they’d lay pretty flat in the pan. Then I put some cornstarch, salt, pepper, and garlic powder in a giant baggie, threw the thighs in, and shook to coat. Pan-fried them in two batches, 3-4 minutes per side, setting them aside on paper towels to drain.

I had all this wonderful fond left at the bottom of the pan, so I deglazed with a bit of chicken stock, let it reduce down a bit, then hit it with a dash of white wine vinegar, salt, and pepper when it was off the heat. Poured the sauce on the chicken, added some oil back to the pan, then quickly sautéed the broccoli while the meat rested.

Snapped a photo (just one!—I would have had to take at least 4 with the old one because camera shake was so bad in low light), then chowed down.

Happy 2010, everybody!

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Here’s the long-overdue photo of last week’s Mapo Tofu bento. It unfortunately looks like a chunky brown mess even though it tasted great. Some chopped scallions, peas, or red peppers would have added some much-needed color.

The green stuff in the corner is sautéed baby bok choy. I cut the bunches in half, then lightly sautéed them with some garlic, salt, and pepper. The meal is rounded out with some grape tomatoes and sweet pickled daikon.

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Tofu is not a meat substitute.
Tofu is not a cheese substitute.
Tofu is not an egg substitute.
Tofu is not health food.

The key to liking tofu is respecting it as an ingredient with its own identity and cooking it in ways that enhance its natural light bean-y flavor and its unique texture. Deep-fried tofu? Delicious. Raw tofu cubes on salad? Vile.

My favorite tofu dish is Mapo Tofu. Please note that Mapo Tofu:

• contains meat
• is full of fat
• is full of salt

I’ve been making a variation of Mapo Tofu for years but wanted to try a slightly different flavor profile. I came across based on this recipe from Just Bento and decided to use it as a jumping-off point for tonight’s dinner (photo of the leftovers will show up in tomorrow’s bento post).

For the sauce I used a big dollop of hot bean paste, a medium dollop of miso, a tiny dollop of Chinese chili paste, soy sauce, sesame oil, a bit of brown sugar, a dash of dried red pepper flakes, low-sodium chicken broth, and water. I seasoned the sauce to taste with garlic powder and freshly ground black pepper. I didn’t really measure anything too closely, just kept adding the ingredients in different amounts, stirring, and tasting until I got the flavor and consistency I wanted. I didn’t have quite enough sauce for the amount of meat and tofu that I had, so I wound up adding another spoonful of hot bean paste and a bit more of chicken broth after I’d added the sauce to the pan.

Other ingredients: about one quarter of an onion, diced, several cloves of garlic, minced, and one package of firm silken tofu, cut into about 1-inch cubes. And one package of ground pork.

Heat some olive oil in a pan on medium-high heat until shimmering, then add the union and cook until translucent. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant. Add the ground pork and cook until mostly brown, breaking up the large chunks and stirring so all sides get exposed to the head.

Add the sauce and the tofu, stirring to combine. Taste and adjust seasonings if necessary. Reduce heat to low and simmer gently for a few minutes. Top with chopped scallions if you have them, and serve over steamed white rice.

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More leftovers! Not that you can really see what’s in the small bowl.

The beef is something my husband makes, so I’m not totally sure what goes into it. I do know he starts with sliced bulgogi beef (fattier cuts are better), adds some grated ginger, soy sauce and…mirin? And then cooks it until the beef starts to brown.

The mushroom mixture is my creation. Slice some shiitake mushrooms fairly thinly—around an eighth of an inch. Heat some oil in a pan over medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms and cook until they start to brown, stirring occasionally. Add a splash of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and a pinch of salt. Toss to combine, then remove from heat and serve.

Some furikake on the rice, a hard-boiled egg, grape tomatoes, and a few strawberries, and we have a nice, filling meal.

This was actually yesterday’s bento. Today’s “bento” was yakisoba-from-a-box (not the mac-and-cheese kind).

Tomorrow’s bento proves to be more promising.

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I made tonkatsu and dengaku-style roasted eggplant, both recipes from Harumi’s Japanese Home Cooking, along with the same sautéed baby bok choy from my first bento.

I had the long, Chinese-style eggplants, so instead of cooking them whole like the recipe calls for, I cut them into large chunks and pan-roasted them that in an oven-safe pan, taking care to brown all the fleshy sides. Then I stuck the whole thing under the broiler for four minutes instead of putting them on the (nonexistent) grill.

I skipped pounding the pork cutlets and I dredged them in corn starch because we were out of flour. And instead of deep-frying them, I pan-fried them in about a quarter-inch of oil.

The whole meal was very tasty and the leftovers fit nicely into Ms. Bento.

The top side bowl contains some sweet pickled daikon, a hard-boiled egg, grape tomatoes, and strawberries, along with two tiny bottles of katsu sauce.

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Prep time: 45 mins
Cook time: 30 mins
Serves: 4-6

This was nom nom nom. Look at this chicken, don’t you want to gobble it?

You could use chicken breasts here, but with the following changes: cook only until the internal temperature is 160 degrees (which might take up to 20 minutes, depending on their thickness), and do not simmer with the sauce. Instead, stir the chicken pieces in at the very end, with the garam masala. Chicken thighs can stand up to more cooking because of the higher fat content.

Other than that, there’s been virtually no cooking around here as I was writing my dissertation. And now I’m recovering from writing my dissertation. I did make a lasagna one night (mediocre), and my husband made Japanese-style hamburger last weekend (yum). Yesterday’s dinner was grilled kielbasa with sautéed broccolini over white rice. Total prep time: 10 minutes. Tonight? Probably frozen gyoza.

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As I mentioned in the first post, this blog is supposed to be from the perspective of a fairly novice home cook. If you were looking for polished recipes and beautiful photography (Me? I’m using a digicam from 1999. Yeah, that’s right, this camera is OLDER THAN A THIRD GRADER), you might want to check out Smitten Kitchen instead. I mean, I can usually execute a fairly complex recipe just fine, but sometimes things just turn out weird.

Like this:

This was supposed to be the Chicken Tikka Masala from the Sept/Oct 2007 issue of Cook’s Illustrated. Now I have made a good chicken tikka masala before; you saw it in the first post. But that recipe, from Fine Cooking October 2006, takes four hours.

This recipe is definitely much quicker (just over an hour total), but it’s also…not chicken tikka masala. Now, I admit part of that is my fault. I was missing two notoriously hard-to-substitute ingredients, tomato paste and heavy cream, and tried to make do with ketchup and yogurt. Oh, and my serrano chile was way past its prime so I used half a spoonful of Chinese hot sauce instead. Still edible, and perhaps even tasty, but the flavors were slightly off from where they should be.

A much bigger problem was the texture of the dish. Whenever I’ve had chicken tikka masala in a restaurant, the sauce has been silky smooth. This sauce was chunky, like marinara, and that’s not really my fault, though the heavy cream probably would have helped. The diced onion has to go, though.

I will say the chicken from this recipe is very, very good and much quicker than the Fine Cooking recipe. You salt and spice the chicken, refrigerate for half an hour while you do the rest of the prep, dip in a yogurt sauce and broil. After the chicken rests, cut it into chunks.

Since I have a bunch of leftover yogurt, I think I’ll try again this week, making the chicken the Cook’s Illustrated way (but with boneless, skinless thighs instead of chicken breasts) and the sauce the Fine Cooking way. I’ll keep you posted.

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Prep time: 45 mins
Cook time: 45 mins
Serves: 4

Eggplant is my favorite vegetable and eggplant parmesan is my favorite eggplant dish. There was a little Italian take-out place down the street from where I used to live in Pittsburgh and I would indulge in their eggplant parmesan dinner regularly. A big foil dish of eggplant parmesan, garlic bread, and a side salad, all for $9 and fifteen minutes of wait time.

While $9 of fresh ingredients can make a lot more eggplant parmesan, it also takes up almost two hours of your life. Because of this:

This recipe doesn’t even make you salt and drain the eggplant first and it still takes forever! I would love to be able to get my hands on some frozen eggplant cutlets from Trader Joe’s and use them instead, but alas, no Trader Joe’s in Texas.

The recipe did turn out pretty well though, much better than my previous attempts at making eggplant parmesan.

Next time I might add some red pepper flakes or hot sauce to the tomato sauce for a little extra kick.

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Prep time: 30 mins
Cook time: 30 mins
Serves: 4

So I went grocery shopping yesterday, all proud of myself that I’d remembered our re-usable grocery bags. I happily loaded stuff into my cart, despaired over the lack of shiitakes and garam masala, and then headed for the checkout.

Only to discover I’d forgotten my wallet. I put everything back, sniffing that maybe I didn’t want to buy a roast chicken anyways. We had frozen gyoza for dinner last night.

Today’s grocery shopping was a bit more successful, not least because I went to a different store that does carry shiitakes (but still no garam masala). Got home, whipped the stuff into the fridge/pantry, and set to work making dinner.

This is based an Emeril recipe. Now, I find his on-screen persona to be as appealing as the love child of a walrus and a woodpecker, but his food is really good. But I still took it upon myself to change up the recipe a little.

That’s the way I made it tonight. I like the tomatoes for a little extra color and nutrition. In the past I’ve also added a can of drained chunk pineapple for some sweetness.

I use the pre-made red curry paste from Thai Kitchen, mostly because it’s easy (to use and to find in a grocery store). But once I made my own curry paste from scratch using the recipe from Emeril, and oh man, does it make a difference. I’m going to have to do that again one of these days.

This meal comes to about $6 per serving. Here’s the budget breakdown:

Pantry ingredients: Garlic, oil, spices
Leftover ingredients: Basil, chicken broth

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Prep time: 45 mins
Cook time: 1 hour
Serves: 4

Don’t ask me why I keep making comfort food in the heat of summer. I don’t know! I love this risotto so much, and it’s perfect for those days when your oregano needs a little trimming.

I don’t think removing the sausage casings is entirely necessary, but I do prefer crumbled sausage for the risotto. The easiest way to remove the casings that I’ve found is to slice each sausage in half lengthwise, then to take a knife or bench scraper and scrape it out of the casing.

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Prep time: 1 hour
Cook time: 1 hour
Serves: 4-6

We harvested some herbs this week in the Gustatory Circuit. First, our sage plant had become completely overgrown and wanted a haircut. It grows so fast, even indoors! I took enough for three tablespoons, chopped, and it barely made a dent. I hate to see what it would do if the pot would fit on our tiny excuse for a balcony.

This is a very luxurious meal (what do you expect when the chicken recipe comes from the Comfort Food special issue of Fine Cooking?. I recommend serving it with a nice green salad to balance out the richness.

Having two hands in the kitchen would definitely help with getting the timing to come out right on these two recipes. You’ll want to start the rice pilaf after you finish browning the chicken so that they finish at about the same time.

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Prep time: 45 mins
Cook time: 45 mins
Serves: 4

I love braising, especially chicken thighs, and I love an excuse to put olives in my food, so when I saw this recipe in my free trial issue of Cuisine at Home, I had to try it.

But.

The original recipe only make 4 thighs. In my household that serves two people. Which is one meal. If I’m going to slave in the kitchen for two hours from prep to cleanup (Cuisine at Home says total time 45 minutes, to which I say, yeah right, the stovetop time is already 45 minutes), it better feed us for more than one meal and I suspect most of you feel the same. So I doubled the recipe and did a little tweaking of the seasonings and this is what I came up with.

A couple thoughts for mods: if you have a Dutch oven, use it instead of the saute pan. Everything barely fit into my 3-quart pan; a 5-quart Dutch oven should give you plenty of room as long as you brown the chicken in two batches at the beginning.

The original recipe calls for ground cinnamon and cinnamon sticks, but I didn’t have any on hand. Hence, the use of Chinese 5-spice powder (which contains cinnamon) and star anise. If you want, use 1/2 t. ground cinnamon instead of the 5-spice powder and 2 cinnamon sticks instead of the star anise. Leave the cinnamon sticks in for the duration of cooking; I remove the star anise early because it has such a strong flavor and because they can come apart during stewing and I really dislike picking out little star bits from my food.

My stew was already plenty salty, thanks to the chickpeas and olives, but you may want to add salt to taste at the end.

Try serving it with pita bread!

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Prep time: 15 mins
Cook time: 25 mins
Serves: 4

Fine Cooking calls this Vietnamese-style; my husband thought it tasted very Japanese; if you forced me to pick a cuisine, I’d have to go with Thai. So let’s just call it Generic Asian-Style Caramel-Braised Chicken.

This was my first try at making a caramel. The good news: I didn’t burn it. The bad news: I think, in my eagerness not to burn it, that I didn’t leave it on the heat long enough. There wasn’t much in the way of caramel flavor in the finished chicken.

The original recipe calls for sprinkling the chicken with chopped fresh cilantro before serving. I hate fresh cilantro, so I skipped it. On the other hand, it would probably have made the chicken taste more Vietnamese.

An alternate way of preparing the bok choy is to pull apart all the leaves and cut each one in half, separating the thick white stem from the leafy green top. Stir-fry the stem ends first, as they take longer to cook, and add the leafy tops in the last minute or so of cooking, stir-frying until they are just wilted.

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Active prep time: 20 mins
Cook time: 25-30 mins
Serves: 4

Someone from Louisiana freaked out (nicely) at my use of kielbasa in jambalaya and strongly suggested that I try it with andouille for proper Cajun eating. So I did!

Verdict: yum. Still yum after a comedy of errors during the cooking. Don’t forget to add the garlic until the end! I did also make a couple (intentional) adjustments to the recipe, re-posted below.

Andouille is spicy, so if you don’t have much of a heat tolerance you may still want to go with kielbasa and optionally heat it up with Tabasco to taste.

I’m a bit behind on blogging this week; got laid pretty flat by mono’s diminuitive second cousin. Stay tuned—posting will be rapid-fire this weekend as I catch up!

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Prep time: 30 mins
Active cook time: 20 mins
Inactive cook time: 2-2 1/2 hours on the stove or 4-8 hours in the slow cooker
Serves: 6

This is the one and only Indian dish I know how to make, but it is so, so, good. Simmer on the stovetop or dump the whole thing into a slow cooker. Great in the heat of summer or the dead of winter.

Don’t you love the colors in this photo?

I almost always stew with brisket, but beef shank or even chuck roast will do. Just don’t buy the pre-cut stew meat; the pieces are too small and who knows what part of the cow they came from.

I used grapeseed oil because that’s what I have, but canola, vegetable, or some other oil with a high smoke point should be fine.

Use a spice ball or spice pouch if you don’t want to be picking cloves, bits of star anise, and the bay leaf out of the curry.

If you can’t find Major Grey chutney, get some kind of fruit-based chutney. I’ve used both peach and mango chutney with good results.

Budget:

Pantry ingredients: Grapeseed oil, garlic, Chinese 5-spice powder, star anise, bay leaf, dried red pepper flakes, salt, pepper, rice

Leftover ingredients: Cloves, chutney, ginger, curry powder

If you don’t already have the necessary spices/flavoring agents on hand, this recipe will drive up your grocery bill. But things like curry powder and chutney can go a pretty long way and I think you’ll probably be making this more than once. If you have most of the spices already, this is pretty economical. In my case, about $4 per serving.

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Prep time: 5 mins
Cook time: 15 mins
Serves: 4

This one rates pretty high on my effortless-but-tasty dinner list. The salmon here is half the giant fillet I bought during my day of gluttony at Costco.* As usual, I was too lazy to portion the salmon so I served it family style.

Today I served the salmon and asparagus with a simple salad—mixed greens, toasted walnuts, and grated pecorino romano (left over from Pasta alla Norma)—for a very nice low-carb meal. I whipped up a quick vinaigrette with balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, salt and pepper, a bit of dried dill, a pinch of lemon zest, and extra-virgin olive oil. If you don’t like low-carb, it’s also good with rice.

Budget:

Pantry ingredients: Olive oils, salt and pepper, dried dill

Yeah, you’re not going to be able to get salmon in a restaurant for $5 a serving.

*Speaking of Costco, we were there today and I picked up a double-pack of The Best of Fine Cooking: Fresh and The Best of Fine Cooking: Comfort Food for just over $9. A steal.

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Prep time: 10 mins
Cook time: 15 mins
Serves: 4

Yep, that’s the spicy crab and avocado salad from yesterday. I made another batch to go with this easy peasy chicken. I was a bit sloppy about it today, just throwing everything together and mixing, rather than prepping the sauce first and gently tossing in the crab and avocado chunk. End result was gloppy-looking, but still tasty.

The original chicken recipe calls for some sour cream with poblano peppers, but that part proved to be a lot of work and made a lot of mess for a weeknight, what with the broiling, peeling, and dicing of the peppers. I didn’t think the sour cream added that much to the dish, but the chicken by itself was yummy.

You can easily make the entire spicy crab and avocado salad while the chicken broils.

Total cost of chicken: $3.32 for $0.83 per serving. Add it to the cost of the spicy crab and avocado salad and tonight’s dinner was $6.83 per serving. Not as much as dinner out, but not the best choice if the budget is really tight.

On the other hand, this is a really good choice if you have no time. Less than 30 minutes of work and very few dirty dishes.

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Active prep: 10 mins
Cook time: 20 mins
Serves: 4-6

This is the kind of recipe that makes me wonder why Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee is such a hit. I mean, don’t want to make your own curry paste, use pre-made stuff from a jar. Duh, right? This recipe is dead easy because mostly you’re just dumping stuff out of cans and jars into a pot and stirring. You don’t need a TV show to tell you how to do that!

I started with a recipe from Thai: The Essence of Asian Cooking by Judy Bastyra (this book seems to no longer be available, but the author has two other Thai books out: Thai Cooking and Thai Food and Cooking) and improvised a bit. I’ll post what I actually did below and then follow up with my suggested tweaks.

This was plenty good as is (I ate two bowls of it), but I think it could be even better.

Suggested changes: more chicken (at least another 1/2 lb.), more fish sauce (one more tablespoon, maybe stirred in at the very end with the lime juice), more bamboo shoots. I’d also consider throwing in some grape tomatoes or canned pineapple chunks. In that case, I’d probably cut back on the brown sugar or eliminate it entirely.

To give the curry more depth of flavor, next time I’ll probably brown the chicken in oil first (perhaps throw some ground cumin and coriander into the seasonings?), set it aside, and saute some onions/shallots before pouring in the coconut milk. There’s lots of room for experimentation while keeping it a fast and easy meal.

Budget:

Pantry ingredients: Chicken broth, curry paste, fish sauce, brown sugar, sugar snap peas and 1/2 lime squeezed for juice (both left over from the bison curry), basil from the balcony herb garden, and rice.

It looks like we’ll get five servings out of what I made today (two dinners for two people, plus tomorrow’s lunch for me). I think the actual cost of the pantry ingredients here is pretty minimal, but even if you round the total up to $15, that’s still only $3 per serving and therefore pretty economical.

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Active prep: 20 mins
Active cook time: 25 mins
Inactive cook time: 50 mins
Serves: 4

This issue of Fine Cooking calls this a “weeknight” chicken braise, but I’d only attempt this on a weeknight if you don’t mind waiting 2 hours for dinner.

It is totally worth it for a weekend meal though, especially if you consider that only needs one pot and less than an hour of actual work; the rest of the time the chicken is just sitting in the oven.

We’re Asian, so we usually eat this with plain steamed white rice. The serving suggestion in the magazine is to serve with noodles or mashed potatoes, but I don’t think I would do that. This is a fairly rich and extremely full-flavored dish to begin with; I think mashed potatoes would make the whole meal too heavy. Noodles might be ok if they weren’t buttered. It’s also good (and more low-carb-friendly) just by itself, which is how we ate it this week.

This dish only uses about half a tin of anchovies, so if you’re anchovy lovers like us, try warming a few leftover fillets in the sauce and eating them.

If you’re an anchovy hater, don’t worry. The anchovies lend a nice saltiness to the dish, but it doesn’t taste fishy.

Budget:

Pantry/freezer ingredients: Garlic, rosemary (from balcony herb garden), chicken broth, chicken thighs, salt and pepper, grapeseed oil, red wine
Leftover ingredients: Anchovies, red-wine vinegar

Let’s bump this up to $12 total to account for the chicken from the freezer and the red wine (left over from a bottle we drank), so that’s $3-ish per serving. Not bad, not bad at all.

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Active prep: 20 mins
Cook time: 30 mins
Serves: 4

The original version of this recipe calls for beef sirloin tips, but the grocery store was out. But I noticed they had bison sirloin tips in the amount I needed, so I thought I’d give it a shot. Because bison is so much leaner than beef, I adjusted the cooking time down a bit to avoid overcooking it. I also reduced the amount of ginger in the recipe because I hate eating tiny ginger bits, but am too lazy to pick it all out (and uh, because I didn’t have more than that on hand).

Budget:

Pantry ingredients: Grapeseed oil, salt and pepper, shallots (left over from the pan-seared salmon), ginger, curry paste, chicken broth, coconut milk, fish sauce, basil
Leftover ingredients: Sugar snap peas

Given the massive use of pantry items here, I’ll round this up to $20 total, but it’s still fairly budget-friendly at $5 per serving. You could save a little money by using beef. If using beef, increase the simmering time to 8-12 minutes.

The curry base is delicious—I’ll probably try it out with different meats and veggies.

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Active prep: 10 minutes
Cook time: 20 minutes
Serves: 3

This recipe supposedly serves 4, but despite using more of pretty much everything, we’re barely going to eke out two meals from this. So I’m going to say it really serves three. I also opted to serve it family style because I’m lazy. Bonus: my husband did not abscond with the entire platter the second I snapped one photo.

This is another recipe from Fine Cooking‘s “Make It Tonight” (formerly “Quick & Delicious”) section and whips up in about 30 minutes. The original recipe calls for shiitakes but the grocery store was out so I substituted creminis instead.

I also swapped in dried thyme for fresh since I hate buying a whole pack to use one sprig and we have yet to add a thyme plant to the balcony herb garden.

An instant-read thermometer is a must-have for this recipe. I have the Thermapen and I’m not sure how I ever cooked without it. My salmon fillets were quite thick so they took an extra 4 minutes to reach the correct temperature. Without my thermometer, I would have served undercooked fish.

This is not the most budget-friendly meal, though you could make it more budget-friendly by getting less expensive salmon and non-organic produce. I bought the Atlantic farm-raised salmon because it was noticeably fresher than the least expensive salmon the store had in stock, but not quite as expensive as the wild-caught sockeye (though the sockeye looked really delicious).

Pantry ingredients: Lemon juice, thyme, salt, pepper
Leftover ingredients: Spinach, shallots, heavy cream

Divided by 3 servings, that comes out to $10.79 per person per meal (divided by 4, it’s $8.09). Still less than what you’d pay in a restaurant for an equivalent dish, but not cheap. Buying the least expensive salmon instead would have saved me almost $9 overall.

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