Ina Garten's Chicken Piccata and Ellie Krieger's Fish Tacos with Chipotle Cream

It's another Thursday double header today, with the Barefoot Bloggers taking on Ina Garten's Chicken Piccata, and the Craving Ellie in my Belly group cooking up Ellie Kreiger's Fish Tacos with Chipotle Cream. I was a bad, bad Barefoot Blogger in February and failed to post either of the February recipes. I actually made the Real Spaghetti and Meatballs (late) but never got around to posting it (I'll cut out all of the extraneous content that would have been in my post and just say that it was great!). The other February Barefoot recipe was Meringues Chantilly, which really sounded wonderful, but ever since January I started to feel like my days were looking like this: wake up, brush teeth, get kids breakfast, run around all day, make dinner, whip egg whites, go to bed. I felt like I had to take some steps to return egg white whipping to its proper place on my schedule; i.e., an event that takes place no more than quarterly. So I hated to miss that one, but I will be sure to try it sometime down the road!


But I vowed to do better this month, and I've started the Barefoot month off right by making Ina's Chicken Piccata, which was chosen by Lindsey of Noodle Nights and Muffin Mornings. This is a simple dish. It does involve breading chicken, which I rank right up there with making meatballs and squeezing frozen spinach as my most dreaded kitchen tasks. While I am an omnivore, I really hate manhandling raw meat. Touching uncooked meat makes me momentarily reconsider my omnivorous habits, but I just try to keep my eyes on the prize and get those babies in the skillet as quickly as possible. The breading assembly line, which included one dish for the flour/salt/pepper mixture, one for the egg/water mixture, and one for the seasoned bread crumbs:


After browning the chicken in the skillet, move them to a baking sheet and finish them off in the oven. I really like this technique. I often have problems with burning the outside of the chicken when I try to cook it through in the skillet, and this method helped me avoid those problems.

The chicken was delicious on its own, and even my kids liked it. But it's the lemon butter sauce that transforms your dinner from "chicken" into "chicken piccata!"


Ina says to use 1/3 cup of lemon juice, or the juice of two lemons. Well, two of my lemons yielded a little more than 1/2 cup of juice. I decided to give greater weight to the "juice of two lemons" part of Ina's instructions than the "1/3 cup lemon juice" part, probably because I am coming off of a recipe (for lemon cup custards) in which the general consensus was that you could stick a whole lemon tree in there and it still wouldn't taste lemony. As it turns out, that was a mistake -- I should have stuck with 1/3 cup, unless I was also going to increase the amount of butter and white wine proportionally. My sauce was a little bit TOO lemony. I think the goal is to achieve a nice balance between the lemon, wine and butter, but the lemon definitely overpowered in my sauce.

I served the chicken piccata over angel hair, and we really enjoyed it, although again, it was a little too lemony. But this is an easy and flavorful dish that I will make again. I'll just keep in mind next time that this is not a lemon cup custard, in which eggs lie in ambush waiting to suck the life out of any other flavors that dare step onto their turf; it's chicken piccata, and with this chicken piccata, anyway, more is not more when it comes to lemon juice.

ELLIE KRIEGER'S FISH TACOS WITH CHIPOTLE CREAM



I was really excited to see that that Sara from imafoodblog chose Ellie's Fish Tacos with Chipotle Cream for CEIMB this week. One of my new year's resolutions is to cook more fish, and this looked like a simple, non-scary recipe to start with. I think that fish tacos are readily available in many regions (Ellie mentions California), but I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I have never had a fish taco. Also, something about saying "fish tacos" makes me laugh. They remind me of "fish sandwiches," which also makes me laugh, probably because David can do a dead-on impression of the classic line from the old SNL sketch, the Ladies' Man: "Hey sweet thang, can I buy you a fish sandwich?" and every time he does it, it's as funny to me as the first time I heard it.



I really don't need lots of different jokes. The same three or four over and over again work for me. That doesn't bode well for the future of my blog, but it does keep me eminently entertainable with minimal effort on the part of my family and friends, which I view as a plus. So while David does have lots of very funny stuff up his sleeves, he knows that if he is feeling lazy one day, he can just break out the fish sandwich line without ever having to look up from the paper, and I'll be good to go.

Back to the fish tacos. I am happily married, but back in my single days, I could have totally gotten picked up if someone offered to buy me one of these fish tacos. As with many of Ellie's recipes, they offer big flavor with minimal effort. You marinate the fish (I used tilapia fillets from the Publix fish counter) in a simple marinade of olive oil, lime juice, salt and pepper, and then grill them for a few minutes, until they are cooked through. Flake the fish before filling the corn tortillas, and serve them with corn, lime wedges, sliced lettuce or cabbage, and a seriously delicious chipotle cream, which is a very simple mix of plain nonfat yogurt (I used nonfat Greek yogurt), a couple tablespoons of mayonnaise (I think lowfat would be fine), and a couple of teaspoons of minced up chipotle chile in adobo sauce. The finished product is good enough to hold its own with fresh salsa and guacamole in any chip dip contest. It is fabulous on the fish tacos, and we finished it off tonight with some chicken, black bean and veggie quesadillas. It was great with those, too!

I can't think of too many dinners that are faster to throw together than this one, but these tacos are delicious and satisfying enough to serve guests as well. I feel like I am saying this a lot about Ellie's recipes lately, but this one will most definitely be assuming a prime spot in our regular weeknight dinner rotation.

Lindsey and Sara, thanks for the great picks! We ate well this week thanks to you!

TWD: Savory Corn(less) and Pepper Muffins

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, Savory Corn & Pepper Muffins, was chosen by one of my favorite food bloggers, Rebecca of Ezra Pound Cake. I always know to buckle up and put down my beverage before reading one of Rebecca's posts, because it's sure to be a wild, frolicking ride. If I'm having a bad day, I can just re-read her story about her grandmother correcting her mother's pronunciation of 50 Cent's name ("Fiddy, Sherry. It's Fiddy.") and turn things right around. But unlike some other bloggers I know, ahem, who crack jokes because they have nothing else to bring to the table, Rebecca is an accomplished chef, baker, cake decorator, food stylist and photographer. Ezra Pound Cake is the holy trinity of food blogging -- amazing food, great writing and stunning photography. It's the complete package!

Therefore, I had no doubt that Rebecca would come up with the perfect pick for TWD this week. I was immensely relieved to see these Savory Corn and Pepper Muffins after having stopped just short of actually hooking myself up to an IV sugar drip in December. My plans for these muffins were greatly influenced by my New Year's resolutions. Someday, I will resolve to do something clever and interesting, but until then, every January 1st I will commit to shed a few pounds and get organized, like everyone else. And so I've kicked off Project Miniaturization, in which I will attempt to shrink things in my kitchen in 2009, starting with myself. Dr. Phil says (here is where I embarrass myself with my extensive knowledge of what Dr. Phil says) that in order to succeed with your weight loss goals, you need to create an environment that encourages success. What he probably means is that you should ditch things like the weekly online baking club, but I think that you can liberally interpret his advice to mean that you should make mini muffins instead of regular muffins. So that's what I did.



I've also unveiled Project Chaos-Be-Gone, which is a far more complex and daunting undertaking given the current level of chaos in my household. This project has numerous components, most of which are not relevant to the corn muffins, but dealing with the chaos that swirls around mealtimes in my house is at the very top of my list. I want to prepare healthy, delicious meals for my family, but I have finally accepted that I just can't be chopping vegetables at 5:00 p.m. Mostly because as I chop, the littlest love of my life stands at my feet and does this:



Or, if she is feeling independent, she'll go empty out a cabinet or two:



Or chew on one of the scores of teeny tiny Barbie shoes that infiltrated our house this Christmas:



So I have logged many, many hours in the kitchen with my littlest love on my hip, using my one remaining hand to gather things, measure things, pour things, and stir things. But I draw the line at knives. That's just the kind of mother I am. Also, it occurred to me at some point that restaurant chefs don't see an order for fajitas pop up on the screen and then commence with slicing a green pepper. No, the prep is done well ahead of time. Therefore, I decided that a central component of Project Chaos-Be-Gone would involve prepping ingredients for our dinner either the night before, or earlier in the day. And these corn muffins were my first test case.

Things were calm in the early afternoon the day I planned to make these. I mixed together the dry ingredients. Diced the jalapeno and red pepper. Measured out the liquid ingredients. Started the chili that would accompany these muffins. I was feeling quite self-satisfied as I surveyed my lineup of measured and prepped ingredients. How great would it be later on when all I had to do was mix it all together, throw it in the oven, and be treated to fresh, warm corn muffins in a mere 20 minutes? Well, dinner rolled around, and everything went right according to plan. I had the corn muffins in the oven in 5 minutes flat.

Minus the corn, which I forgot. That was the one ingredient I didn't measure ahead of time; I had just planned to get what I needed straight from the freezer at the last minute. But I failed to do one last "recipe check," and since it was depending entirely on my memory and focus, the corn never stood a chance. Apparently my new system results in cornless corn muffins. Back to the ol' drawing board.



While I really did miss the corn in these, I thought these were great savory muffins. They definitely had a kick to them, which I loved. If you need something to neutralize your spicy chili, this might not be your corn muffin, but I was perfectly fine with the heat-on-heat situation that we had going on there. David said that he really liked these muffins as well, but I think that he is a little bit afraid of me after the banana pancake post, so I'm not sure if he is telling the truth. Believe me, I do not want to be surrounded by a bunch of yes-men in my kitchen. I've carefully attempted to assemble a "Team of Rivals" who will critically evaluate my cooking and provide me with candid, constructive feedback. And I've been spectacularly successful with that up until this point; some days people in my house actually line up to offer me constructive criticism, in fact. Which is great, because this is how I'll become a better cook -- so I'd hate to think that I undermined that by going off and being a loose cannon. That said, I really do think that David liked these muffins as much as I did!

On a topic unrelated to corn muffins (but related to TWD), my older daughter just turned 4. I thought that with all of the baking that I do, SURELY I could make my own kid's birthday cake. But for the past 8 months, every time we've entered the Publix bakery section, Elizabeth has begged for this bedazzling spectacle of Disney marketing brilliance:

Yes, that's a cake. And we did get it for her for her birthday party with her friends at the Hall 'o Giant Inflatables. But I still wanted to make her a cake, so I decided to make one for our family dinner on her actual birthday. I found a Wilton castle cake pan that looked like it could be decorated to suit her divalicious tastes, and decided to make Dorie's Perfect Party Cake with Buttercream Frosting. Back in August, right after I first joined TWD, I attempted to make the Perfect Party Cake for my parents' birthdays, and it was a royal flop. The cake did not rise and was not even remotely edible. But this time, the cake did exactly what it was supposed to do:



which I view as a testament to the fabulousness of TWD and all that I have learned from my fellow bakers over the past six months. We loved this cake. And it would be even better as a layer cake with raspberry filling (as is shown in the book). As my son (and helper) pointed out several times as I was decorating this, the cake is not nearly as good as the one in the picture that came with the cake pan (nope, you never need to worry about my ego getting too big), but it tasted great, and my birthday girl liked it, so I'm calling it a success!

Thanks for the picking these fabulous corn muffins, Rebecca! I know that I will be reaching for this recipe whenever I need a little extra heat with my fire.

Barefoot Bloggers: Mexican Chicken Soup

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! And since nothing says "Thanksgiving" quite like Mexican Chicken Soup, I am particularly excited about today's Barefoot Bloggers selection, chosen by Judy of Judy's Gross Eats. I only have about a 50/50 success rate when I try to schedule posts (it's that darn AM/PM thing, it gets me every time!), so I am hoping that this posts on time. And I will look forward to coming around and seeing all of my fellow Barefoot cook's creations when I am back in front of a reliable (or any) internet connection!

This was such a great recipe. It is nice to see a tex-mex soup that is so relatively heavy on the veggies. Start out by sauteing onions, carrots, celery, garlic, and jalapenos, and then add your stock and seasonings:



I used leftover stock that I froze after making it for that awesome Butternut Squash Risotto. I tried halfheartedly to defrost it under running water at the kitchen sink, and then got lazy and just added the ice blocks to the pot. Can I do that? Well, I did. And my soup did not seem to suffer.



This is a wonderful soup, and a great addition to any "Mexican soup" arsenal. The flavors here were subtle -- definitely Mexican (I said "ole!" I really did!) but not overpowering. Cumin often seems to dominate in soups like this, but that wasn't the case here. Obviously, it can easily be spiced up to suit personal taste if you like a little more heat and a little less subtlety. Adding the corn tortilla strips straight to the broth is a brilliant idea -- it gives the soup a little extra "heft" without actually turning it into a heavy soup. I topped mine with copious amount of chopped cilantro, because I think cilantro makes everything taste better. David, on the other hand, thinks that cilantro makes everything taste soapier, so he skipped it. We ate this the first night I made it -- David is not as much of a "soup" person as I am, in the sense that I think when I make soup for dinner, he wonders where the rest of dinner is. But he definitely liked this, and thought it was a great appetizer course with some enchiladas! I gave some of it to my good friend and carpool partner, Elizabeth, and pretty much ate the rest of it myself over the course of a week. And this is such a healthy soup that I didn't even feel one moment of regret that I ATE THE WHOLE POT.

I hope that everyone is enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving day with their loved ones. I am thankful for the fabulous food, creative cooking ideas, and fun community spirit that I enjoy every day with my blogging friends. And I am thankful for the food on my table, the kitchen I have to cook it in, and, most of all, the family and friends with whom I am richly blessed to share it.