Sadie's Corner: Rosemary Chicken and Corn Quinoa

This Southern Living meal (recipe here) looked really great.  It has a great flavor combination (corn and kale) and good, complimentary herbs (rosemary) for the chicken breast.  However, there are two lessons here that I considered before I tried the recipe, and I wish that I'd listened more closely:

1.  This recipe needs a sauce.  When I was reading the ingredient list, it was clear that there was no sauce component to the dish, just a small amount of lemon juice squeezed over it at the end to boost flavor.  My fears were confirmed when we tried the dish: it really needed a sauce.

2.  Never, ever believe the recipe for the amount of time it will take to cook chicken in a pan.  This particular recipe suggested 6 minutes per side.  I left the chicken in the pan for a total of 18+ minutes and Corey's (which was a thicker chicken breast than mine) was unsafely pink when he cut into it.  There is a very fine line between cooking chicken in a pan thoroughly and either burning it or drying it out.  My advice?  Bake chicken (or pan sear it and then finish it in the oven) when possible.  It will maintain more moisture and stand a better chance of cooking through.

Sadie was very excited that she got to try my chicken.  Doesn't she look deserving of some leftovers?

Sadie's Corner - Baked Risotto

This risotto recipe looked delicious in Martha Stewart Living when I found it.  It even incorporated some of my favorite flavors to accompany pasta (lemon and lots of savory herbs).  What I learned from the experiment was that risotto should not be baked....the rice ends up undercooked.  It should always be made the old fashioned way....on a stovetop with lots of stirring, chicken broth, and arborio rice! 

I have added a couple of great risotto recipes to this blog over the years.  My favorite is Simple Risotto (recipe here).  It has very little butter and oil and pairs great with shellfish such as shrimp with a big salad.

I guess even Martha Stewart gets it wrong some of the time.  Sadie was excited that the recipe failed....she figured she would be the biggest beneficiary of the snafu!  Look....she was licking her lips in anticipation!

Sadie's Corner - Chilled Corn and Crab Salad

Can you tell we've been eating lots of corn this summer? I was very excited about this health-conscious Chilled Corn and Crab Salad (recipe here) from Martha Stewart Living magazine. It was so spicy it was basically inedible....I couldn't even feed it to Sadie!

The culprit? The super-spicy red Thai chile that the recipe called for. Even without the seeds, this little beast made my eyes water uncontrollably.

The lesson? Always be conscious of a recipe calling for hot peppers, even if just a jalapeno.

Sadie's Corner - Chocolate Chip Cookie Brownies

Ok, these brownies from the Betty Crocker Website are a great ideain theory, using boxed mixes and canned frosting for speed of preparation, plus a healthy dose of chocolate. The flavor was truly awesome; however, these still went very very wrong.

I think that the problem lies in the fact that the treat combines two cookie types that require very different individual cooking times: the brownies (for which I tried Ghiradelli - love them!) typically take 30-35 minutes to cook in my oven, while the ready-mix chocolate chip cookies take 12. By the time that my brownie/cookies were 30 minutes in, the chocolate chip cookie portion was getting burned on top, and the top of the brownies looked done, so I assumed we were safe.

However, I found out the next day, when I went to go cut them, that all but the perimeter brownies were basically inedible because they were so undercooked (basically raw). So what's the happy medium? Char the tops of your brownie/cookies so that the whole pan is useable, or leave the center a molten pile of goo and only have the edges to work with? As I mentioned, the flavor was great, but the final product was a big bust.

Sorry little doggie....these are chocolate, and therefore you are not allowed to chow down!

Sadie's Corner - First Hall of Fame Nominee!

Well, every cook has a bad menu night, and I had one last night when I made Pecan-Crusted Trout with Creamy Grits and Sauteed Broccoli Rabe from the most recent month's Cooking Light. Here's what I think went wrong:

• Trout is a very bland, mild fish. With fish of this variety, I think that it is likely impossible to make them taste interesting unless they are doused in butter, oil, or cream. In this case, the Cooking Light-suggested panko, crushed pecans, salt, and pepper combination just wasn't enough.


• Broccoli rabe, as we have now discovered, is incredibly bitter. We will not be having this particular vegetable again.

Below are some pics of Corey feeding Sadie the broccoli rabe. Believe it or not, she actually liked it....a lot!

Introducing Sadie

This is Sadie. She is our yellow lab/sharpei/Jack Russell terrier mix that we adopted last fall from BARC, the Houston City Pound.

"Why is your pup in a cooking blog?" you ask. Because Sadie is going to have a posting that appears occasionally called "Sadie's Corner". Sadie's Corner will feature cooking escapades that went so wrong that the end product was only fit to eat for, that's right, the dog.

I would like to highlight some of these mistakes for you so that you can learn from them. I will try to highlight what went wrong and how you might be able to fix it in future dinner-making endeavors. Hopefully, my mistakes can be a learning experience! (Although Sadie won't eat quite as well, I am afraid.)