Knit Think

Oh, hey!

Guess what!

I finished a pair of socks!

Unfortunately...

 

They don't match.

Even my schlubby, who-cares-how-I-look-at-least-I'm-comfortable self would not go out in public wearing this pair.

Darn that knitter's ADD.

I'm working on it.

 

For those of you who are whinging about the wintry weather we're getting in the Midwest this week, let me offer a ray of hope. The dark blue Thuja socks? I see those as comfy, around-the-house-when-it's-cold-out socks. They knit up very quickly.

In other words, as soon as they're finished and I can wear them, spring will arrive with a vengeance.

You should be cheering me on.

Friday food

Today marks the beginning of our school district's spring break, but the temperature is decidedly winter-ish. No problem (for me). I even liked seeing the fluffy snowflakes fall yesterday. Let's face it: cold weather demands comfort food. And what's more comforting than a hot dish (or casserole, for you more worldly, sophisticated types)?

Minnesota author Beatrice Ojakangas, who a while back wrote an exemplary book about Scandinavian baking (no, I don't like to bake, but I do like to read about baked goods), has a new book out that fits the bill perfectly: The Best Casserole Cookbook Ever.

More than 500 casseroles! I was in heaven. Talk about compelling reading. And for those of you who disdain casseroles because they use copious amounts of canned cream soups, I should point out that the author notes that she does not use canned soups in her recipes, except to list them as an alternative. She either makes sauces from scratch, or does without them.

You should see the chapter on breakfast casseroles.

As good as those sound, the chicken chapter really enthralled me. I chose for my first try a recipe called King Ranch Chicken.

 

It starts with corn tortillas, brushed with oil, and baked for 12 minutes. While those are baking, saute chopped garlic, onions, poblano pepper, and ground cumin in melted butter.

So already we have oil and butter. And guess what! Cheese is coming soon. Now do you see why I picked this recipe??

Once those are soft and your kitchen smells pretty tasty, it's time to add a can of tomatoes and green chiles. Or, if like me you didn't have that particular variety of canned tomatoes, a can of tomatoes and part of a can of diced green chiles. Oh, and some chicken. After all, it's in the name.

 

That's the chicken and veggies in the foreground, with a pan of broken baked corn tortillas in the bake. I may have overdone them, just a little, not irretrievably.

 

Once the chicken is cooked through, you'll add chicken broth and a bit of flour. After cooking for a few minutes, it's time to remove the chicken and veggies from the liquid and spread them out over the broken tortilla pieces. Then--then! It gets better!

You add cream!

So now we have oil, butter, and cream, and we still haven't even gotten to the cheese!

 

See? See??

You're practically done at this point. You stir the sauce until it's thickened, season with salt and pepper, and finish assembling the hot dish. Casserole. Whatever. To do that, you sprinkle 2 cups of shredded Colby Jack cheese over the chicken and veggies, followed by fresh cilantro. Pour the sauce over. Sprinkle more broken up corn tortillas. Then--then! Another 2 cups of cheese! Followed by crunched-up salted tortilla chips (from the store, or at least that's the assumption I made and used Tostitos). Bake for 30 minutes. Sprinkle with more cilantro. Devour.

 

A big hot pan full of bubbly comfort food goodness. March winter has nothing on that.

King Ranch Chicken

From The Best Casserole Cookbook Ever, published by Chronicle Books (2008)

12 corn tortillas (6 inches)

Corn oil for brushing

1 tablespoon butter

2 large cloves garlic, chopped

2 medium onions, chopped

1 poblano pepper, seeded and chopped

2 teaspoons ground cumin

1 can (14 ½ ounces) diced tomatoes and green chiles with their juice

1 ½ pounds boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, halved lengthwise and cut into ½-inch slices

1/3 cup all-purpose flour

3 cups chicken broth

1 cup heavy cream

4 cups shredded Colby Jack cheese

¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro, divided

Salt

Pepper

2 cups salted tortilla chips, crushed

Preheat the oven to 450˚F.

Spread out the tortillas on 2 baking sheets and brush both sides with corn oil. Bake for 12 minutes, shifting the pans halfway through baking, until the tortillas are crisp. Remove from the oven, cool, and break into pieces (about 1 ½ to 2 inches wide).

Reduce the oven temperature to 350˚F. Coat a 9-by-13-inch baking dish with cooking spray and spread half of the toasted tortilla pieces over the bottom. Set aside the rest.

In a heavy nonstick skillet over medium heat, melt the butter and add the garlic, onions, poblano pepper, and ground cumin. Sauté for 2 or 3 minutes, until the mixture is aromatic and the onions are softened. Add the tomatoes and chiles with their juice and the chicken and cook, stirring, until the chicken is no longer pink. Stir in the flour and slowly add the chicken broth, stirring to remove any lumps. Cook for 3 minutes.

With a slotted spoon, remove the chicken and cooked vegetables from the skillet and spread evenly over the tortilla pieces in the baking dish.

Add the cream to the liquid in the skillet and cook, stirring, until the sauce has thickened, 3 to 4 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste and set aside.

Sprinkle the chicken and vegetables with half of the cheese and half of the chopped cilantro. Pour the thickened sauce over evenly. Top with the reserved toasted tortillas, then with the remaining cheese, and finally with the crushed tortilla chips.

Bake, uncovered, until the filling is bubbling, about 30 minutes. Sprinkle with the remaining cilantro.

(Belated) Friday food

Knittymama left a comment on my blog yesterday that brought up a funny and happy memory, and in lieu of real food, I'll share this instead.

It was Christmas Eve, 1989. Very, very cold. Subzero temps, extreme windchills, not a lot of snow. And on that day, this took place:

 

That's right! We had a Christmas Eve wedding. Look how young and thin we were! We were fortunate to be the latter, as our courtship had involved many evenings watching Star Trek: Next Generation (this was, after all, a long time ago, long before The X-Files and Buffy) and eating way too many of these:

 

Ah, Tombstone frozen pizzas. (By the way, the Kraft Foods website lists an astonishing 42 varieties of Tombstone pizzas.) Those were good times. But when we became engaged and looked at each other's waistlines, we knew something had to give, and it was the Tombstone pizzas. We joined Weight Watchers and became consumers of broiled chicken breasts and steamed veggies, and voila, we lost weight. 

Our wedding night was spent at the now sadly defunct Whitney Hotel in Minneapolis, known not only for its lovely rooms, but for its highly acclaimed restaurant. Of course, this being our wedding night, we totally deserved an outstanding meal, right?

Which is why we brought along our own Tombstone Double Top Pepperoni Pizza and asked the kitchen to bake it for us.

They were bemused, not surprisingly, but they said they would do it.

But what they delivered was a single-top sausage and veggie pizza. 

It was our turn to be bemused. We'd seen the pizza. We knew we bought the right one. How, then, did we get the wrong one cooked and delivered to us? It was late enough on Christmas Eve to assume that all grocery stores were closed, so we decided to laugh it off and make do with the sausage and veggie pizza.

But we always wondered...who ate the double top pepperoni pizza at the Whitney Hotel on Christmas Eve, 1989? 

Friday food

Well, like Miss T., I'm afraid I have come up empty-handed. With the nicer weather, we've grilled a lot, but it hasn't been anything worth blogging about, unless seeing pictures of Johnsonville brats go from package to grill to plate to stomach would excite you. I have new things in mind to try, but it's just not been an innovative week.

OTOH, I did post another installment of Burger Quest on my other blog. You can go there for some serious nom-nom action.

Oh, dear.

Ummm...

Friday food

So our good friends at Cub Foods (you know, the store where the stupid people shop) had another great two-for-one this past week, this time with chicken breasts and thighs. I brought them home and immediately was filled with chicken ennui. That dreaded condition, where you've made so much chicken that suddenly it feels like there is nothing left you can do with it, nor would you want to.

I know intellectually that's not true. Chicken is very versatile. But between Cub and Costco, I seem to have a rather vast quantity of it in my freezer as of late. I poked around the internets, looking for something new and interesting to do, and found Slow Cooker Latin Chicken. It seemed like just the thing for these last cold days of winter. 

First you brown some chicken thighs, sprinkled with salt, pepper, and fresh cilantro. 

I just love fresh cilantro. Sometimes when I buy it at the store, I stand there and inhale its fragrance, like it's a beautiful flower. This has on occasion generated some odd looks in my direction.

   

When they're all browned, put them in the crockpot, and cover them with diced sweet potatoes, sliced red peppers, and canned black beans. I wasn't so sure about that whole sweet potato thing--when I think about sweet potatoes, I think about cooked and sliced sweet potatoes fried in butter and brown sugar, like we do for Thanksgiving. But I was willing to give it a try.

 

Very festive!

While the chicken browns, mix together some hot jarred salsa (I used Tostito's chunky), more cilantro--mmm, cilantro--chicken broth, garlic, cumin, and allspice.

 

--and pour it over the food in the crockpot. Cover. Cook on low for 4 hours.

Voila!

 

Very yummy! I think I would use a slightly less spicy salsa next time, because certain family members were acting like wimps. I think I would also add some onion to the veggies. There just wasn't enough in the jarred salsa. I would also make sure to submerge the sweet potato chunks, because those that sat on top didn't get cooked all the way, whereas everything else was perfect. For the record, I loved the sweet potatoes this way--their sweetness was a nice offset to the savory and spice. I think I would also top it off with some avocado.

In other words, I would definitely make it again.

So, yeah.

Well. What's been happening?

Not much.

I finished a book in the Chunkster Challenge. I read Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos, which I liked very much, but I've read two books since, and since my brain has limited storage space, I don't remember much about it. There were tornados. And three dysfunctional siblings, whose mother disappeared in a tornado and whose father had an emotionally draining secret. And in spite of being 500+ pages long, I could hardly put it down. But now? Remembering details? Nope. And sadly, this is often typical of my reading retention. As Flannery O'Connor once said, "I have been blessed with the gift of non-retention."

That's OK, because the person running that challenge hasn't updated their website in a month and a half. Figures. I actually follow through on one of these commitments, and it looks like it's drying up.

I have been knitting. See?

 

Doesn't look like much right now, but it's the Juno Regina in Malabrigo lace. I am attempting two things here: I am using my new square needles, and I am trying to use a chart. Charts confound me. That whole thing with limited brain storage space? Charts take a lot of memory. I have to look at a symbol--say this one:

/

And I have to remember what that means. Or in my case, I don't remember what that means, so I have to go back to the key. Then knit the stitch. Then look at the next symbol, which I also don't remember, and go back to the key. Repeat, repeat, repeat, ad infinitum. My wiser knitting friends have said, hey, just look at the / and know it's a right-leaning decrease. But you know what? I can't ever remember if a K2tog or a SSK is a right-leaning decrease. So, not so much with the helpful there.

I thought by now I'd have memorized the symbols. I was wrong.

To have something else to work on that, thankfully, came in a written-out pattern in larger yarn and faster knitting time (plus excellent TV-watching yarn, Juno not being something I can work on without complete concentration), I started Thuja in Artyarns.

 

One needs a gratifying project when one is being made to feel like an idiot by charts.

Oh! And more Nefarious yarn arrived.

 

This one is named after the Countess Elizabeth of Bathory, who, back in the 1600's, had quite the unhealthy appetite for torturing Gypsy girls and low-level royalty. Legend has it--heavy emphasis on the word "legend"--that she used to use her victims' blood to bathe in, because she felt it helped maintain her youthful appearance. There's nothing to corroborate that story, but it earned her the nickname of the "Blood Countess." And, I guess, explains where the phrase "bloodbath" came from.

Did I mention it's 20% cashmere?

Friday food

But first, I have been indoctrinated into a special society by the lovely Miss T:

 

What can I say. The deadly onion did indeed make me cry. But hey! We've had 14 whole days without injury resulting in loss of cooking time in our kitchen! We prize safety here at Chez Knit Think.

On to the food part of this week. Here's the deal. Familia Knit Think likes to have movie nights. We usually eat something that doesn't quite qualify as healthy while staring at the TV screen. Lately we have been on a quest: we are determined to watch the 100 Best Horror Movies. Some we'd already seen as a family, notably The Amityville Horror, which we watched in a hotel room in Madison, WI, and may have been the kids' first experience with horror flicks. But what an introduction! A house with poltergeists and bleeding walls!

We're randomly going through the list, but saving the top 10 for last. It's interesting what made the list. Some really oldies-but-goodies; some oldies that were probably really good back in the day, but today? Not so much. I'm talking about you, 1978's Friday the Thirteenth. Not only were we not scared, we were roaring with laughter and screaming at the TV, "Why won't you just DIE!!!" Some are horror comedies, an odd genre, but Shaun of the Dead is one of my favorite movies of all times.

Last week we watched 2004's Dawn of the Dead. I'd never seen a Dawn of the Dead movie (there are several variations) and hadn't any interest before (other than the aforementioned Shaun), but you know what? It was pretty good. There was even some humor involving a sharpshooter picking off celebrity zombies, like Jay Leno and Rosie O'Donnell. It had just enough quirkiness to be surprising, like having the opening credits accompanied by a Johnny Cash song. And having the Disturbed song "Down With the Sickness" performed by a lounge singer.

It's been a lot of fun, except maybe for Rosemary's Baby, which suffered from old-school acting techniques.

I've been trying to find interesting things to eat that feel movie night-ish but are different than our same-old, same-old. I found a little recipe in the most recent Kowalski's magazine that looked to fit the bill.

 

Pepperoni Stromboli. Involving frozen bread dough, pizza sauce, pepperoni, cheese, and other assorted goodies (at least for the adults).

This did require me to get out my rolling pin, and you know what? I don't like rolling things out. Partly because I'm not very good at it, and partly because it smacks of baking.

In case you're wondering why someone who doesn't like to bake or roll things out owns not only a rolling pin, but a pastry board and a fancy-dancy pastry turner, those latter items were courtesy of my parents, who frequently make pie when they come to visit and were aghast at my lack of proper equipment. I know the dough doesn't look too bad up there, but it's supposed to be a rectangle, not a circle.

 

That's pretty embarrassing.

Let's focus on what happened after all the rolling and swearing. I spread pizza sauce on half of each--um--blob. Then I put a boatload of cheese, followed by basil, sun-dried tomatoes, marinated artichoke hearts, and green olives.

 

Then I folded them closed, at which point they at least looked better. Oh--and I brushed water along the border before pressing the crust together. Then I mixed an egg yolk with some water and brushed that over the top before cutting slits in each piece and popping them in the oven.

 

As you see, the crust got nice and brown, light and crispy. And the cheese got all melty. And it was absolutely yummy. This will definitely go onto the movie night rotation, even with rolling pins. But next time, I have to make more for the kids--they could easily have eaten two.

What's your favorite movie night food?

Pepperoni Stromboli

1 loaf frozen bread dough, thawed according to pkg. directions

1 cup pizza sauce, divided

32 pepperoni slices, divided

1 cup chopped marinated artichoke hearts, divided

1 cup finely shredded 6 Italian cheese blend, divided

8 pitted olives of your choice, sliced, divided

¼ cup julienne-cut sun-dried tomatoes, drained, blotted dry, divided

4 fresh basil leaves, chopped, divided

1 egg yolk

1 tbsp. water

Divide dough into 4 equal pieces; roll each on lightly floured surface into a 6”x8” rectangle. (A blob is fine too.) Arrange toppings in order given over half of each rectangle, leaving a ½” border. Wet edges of dough with water; fold dough over fillings, pressing with fork to seal. In small bowl, combine egg and water; brush over top of dough with a pastry brush. With a sharp knife, cut 3 1”-slits in the top of each roll. Place on parchment-lined baking sheet; bake in a preheated 375˚F oven until golden brown (20-25 minutes). Serve immediately.