I make a darn good chicken stew

So the last couple weeks have been decidedly not-normal in the whole $30/week thing. Mostly its been because we've had friends in Amherst, and dinners at Peter and Gail's house, and Ali's house, and eating out way too much, and then a sudden trip to Boston to go vote, and basically, life just got crazy. I have been shopping, last week I bought corn flakes, and this week I bought two boxes of corn flakes (buy one get one free!). Yeah, basically I've just been scrounging around and coming up with food, somehow. Sometimes, its cereal for dinner. I have actually cooked things, and we've cooked things at home too, but with no camera, it just doesn't seem worth writing about. Sirloin tips - get some sirloin tips, those were delicious, and only $6/lb from Whole Foods, when all Ed and I could agree on for dinner was that we wanted something bloody.

Anyway, today I took a photo, and it was actually a very tasty recipe. I had some frozen chicken drumsticks, from when Ed went to the fresh-killed poultry place, and I also had some very floppy and almost dead celery and carrots. So, chicken stew it became. I think this would get a good Ed-rating, but he isn't in Amherst, so all I can do is guess. But its plenty rich (I DO have butter), and a bit spicy thanks to the floppy jalapeno I found in the carrot bag, and quite delicious paired with crunchy-on-the-outside, flaky-and-tender-on-the-inside biscuits. This was a darn good meal!


Chicken Stew with biscuits
Made 2-3 servings, depends how hungry you are

2 drumsticks
3 carrots
3 sticks of celery
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
olive oil
1 zucchini
rosemary
1 jalapeno
chicken stock (or water)
1 bay leaf
1/2 potato
2 tbs butter
2-3 tbs flour

First things first, get about two cups of chicken stock (or water) boiling in a medium-sized pot. Once its boiling, add the bay leaf, the drumsticks, one carrot broken into 3-4 chunks, and the flowery tops of the celery that you'd normally not eat. You'll pull out the carrot and celery chunks in a bit. Reduce the heat from boiling to simmering, and leave it be for ~30min.

For the veggies, heat some oil in a pan, then add the diced onion. Once that is sweated, add the finely diced garlic and about a tablespoon of rosemary. Stir that around until it smells fragrant. Add the diced pepper, which is totally optional, by the way, but I liked the heat it added. Add the chopped celery and carrots, and let that cook away until the carrots are soft. Then you can add the zucchini. Take that pan off the heat once things are cooked.

As all this stuff cooks, prepare the BISCUITS! Apparently, I've never written about biscuits on this blog, so the recipe I used is below. It loosely follows Alton Brown's biscuit recipe, which I'm sure is much better, but, I didn't feel like looking it up, so I just used this one, which worked.


Biscuits
Made 12 lumpy biscuits

2C all purpose flour
1tbs baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 stick butter - grated
3 egg yolks *
1C milk (skim)

*Use 2 eggs, normally. I just happened to make cookies that called for 3 egg whites early today, so I had extra egg yolks, and figured I'd use them up.

Mix together the flour, salt, and baking powder in a big bowl. Using the big holes on a square cheese grater, grate the butter into the flour. This puts it into little chunks, or if you have a pastry cutter, I hear those work, too. Use your fingers and work the butter and flour together with your finger tips, for exactly 37 seconds (this is according to Alton Brown). The butter grates better if it is frozen, but mine was only refrigerated, and it worked out.

In a separate bowl, mix the eggs and milk. Dump that into the dry stuff. Mix just until its combined, no longer. Plop 12 little heaps of biscuit batter on a greased baking sheet, and bake for, oh, 20 minutes or so, at 400F. Keep checking after 15 minutes, and take the biscuits out when they are golden brown, and the chunky bits are darker brown. They'll be crispy on the outside, and flaky and tender on the inside. Delicious!

Now back to the stew. When you deem the chicken to be cooked, take out the celery and carrot chunks, and drop the diced, half a potato into the pot. Meanwhile, make a roue. Melt the 2tbs of butter, and whisk in about 2 tbs of flour. I eyeballed it. It turned into a thick pate a choux, I think that is what its called - looked like batter of some sort. I dumped that into the stew, and whisked for a while, and the broth got thicker. Then I took out the chicken, used two forks to remove the meat from the bones, and dumped in the veggies. Voila! Chicken stew. Serve with biscuits. Perfect for cold, rainy days like this one...