Honey Mustard Chicken

This is another family favorite recipe. I have no clue where my mom found this recipe. My mom introduced this dish to the family in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s. That is the earliest I remember eating it. It is a fairly easy dish to make.

Typically it is made as a baked dish, but I can see it turned into either a slow cooker or braised dish. We tend to serve it on or with rice. As other side dishes, I can see mustard or other varieties of greens being eaten with this. It is a sweet and sour dish. The sweet comes from the honey and the sourness comes from the mustard.

Honey Mustard Chicken

It is a simple dish with four main ingredients: chicken, mustard, honey, curry powder. I do not see this working well with potato or noodles dishes. Rice seems to work best. The braising version would be to brown the chicken then add sauce and some water and braise it for 30 minutes to an hour.

I finally made this again on September 28, 2015. I used chicken thighs due to finding them on sale. Thighs are able to stand up to the strong flavors of the sauce better than breast meat. I made them in the traditional baked manner.

Honey Mustard Chicken

4 lbs of chicken or one whole chicken cut up into pieces

1 cup Honey

½ cup of Mustard

2 Teaspoons Curry Powder

Pre-heat oven to 350.  Mix sauce together. Pour sauce over chicken. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour. Turn half way through cooking.

Lemongrass Beef

This is the third recipe I have made from Best-Ever: 500 Simply Delicious Recipes cookbook by Bay Books. Not sure of the origin of this dish, I thought it might be Indonesian due to the use of kecap manis, Indonesian sweet soy sauce. The dish consists of sirloin beef, garlic ginger, lemongrass, lime juice, fish sauce, kecap manis, red onion, and green beans. It is to be served on top of rice, preferably a long grain variety.

I made this dish on September 25, 2015. I did not take off the top two layers of the lemongrass or only use the white part. Those two mistakes left some of the more woody parts of the lemongrass in the dish. It was a bit more chewy than needed. I did love the flavors and thought it could use some chilis for heat.

Lemongrass Beef

Kecap manis has become a wonderful new ingredient to my cooking and the Best-Ever cookbook was part of the discovery of that ingredient. I have found a few possible solutions to the lemongrass issue. One idea is putting the lemongrass through a food processor. That seems to be the one I am leaning towards.

This dish had wonderful flavors, the citrus notes from the lemongrass and lime juice with the salty elements from the kecap manis and fish sauce played nicely. There was richness from the beef and herbaceousness from the green beans and lemongrass. Definitely, I need to make this again.

Rick’s Vegetable Lasagna

I wanted to make lasagna, but I was trying to limit my consumption of meat. I remembered I used to eat an eggplant and zucchini bake that I bought from Schwann’s. It was very similar to lasagna with mozzarella, Parmesan cheese, and a tomato sauce. I have issues with wheat and wanted not to use pasta, so the idea was to replace them with thinly sliced zucchini and summer/yellow squash. I also thought that I should replace the meat with sautéed mushrooms.

On September 20, 2015 I began my experiment. I used a lasagna recipe from the cookbook the Frugal Gourmet Cooks Italian as a blueprint. I made a few mistakes in making this dish. The first mistake was I used a pre-made marinara sauce. It turns out it had way too much corn syrup in it. Since then, I make my own marinara. The second mistake was not blanching the zucchini and yellow squash. The third mistake was using yellow squash at all. Its seeds are too big to slice into noodle thickness. The fourth mistake was I layered it too high. The final mistake was not waiting for it to cool before plating.

Rick’s Vegetable Lasagna    

The zucchini had not cooked long enough to be easy to bite through or cut. It was very soupy in consistency. Originally I had thought of doing it Florentine style, meaning adding spinach. With making spanakopita that same month, I decided to remove the spinach element. It had mozzarella, ricotta, zucchini, summer/yellow squash, marinara, and mushrooms. The flavor was spot on.

Next time I will blanch the zucchini for 2 minutes. Hopefully next time I will be able to use a mandoline to slice the zucchini. I used a peeler this time. I will use fewer layers. I will make my own marinara sauce, which I did in October when I made pizza. I also used the marinara with zucchini noodles. I made the zucchini noodles using the Veggetti device. It turns vegetable into pasta shapes. Overall it was a cool experiment. I did not expect to get it right the first time.

Spanakopita with Tzatziki

I do not remember the first time I tried spanakopita, Greek spinach and feta cheese pie. It had to have been sometime when I was in college or just after. I know by the early to mid 1990’s, I was making my own spanakopita with homemade tzatziki. I do remember where I had tzatziki the first time. I had tzatziki on a gyro at a gyro shop in the Centerpoint Mall in Oxnard, California called It’s Greek to Me. When I moved to Oregon, I found similar places in various shopping centers. Tzatziki is a cucumber, yogurt, dill, and garlic sauce used as a standard condiment in many Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisines.

Spanakopita, like mentioned earlier, is a Greek spinach and feta cheese pie. It can be made several ways. It can be made like lasagna layered in a large baking pan. It can be an individual hand roll like a burrito or egg roll. It finally can be made individually in a triangle shape like a turnover. In the early nineties I was using the Frugal Gourmet on Our Immigrant Ancestors cookbook, but it was missing Greek, Italian, and Chinese cuisines. I found out Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet, did a cookbook that included those three cuisines. It was called the Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines: China, Greece, and Rome. I bought that with the intent to add those cuisines to my culinary repertoire. However, it turns out I only made the Greek dishes.

Spanakopita with Tzatziki

The two dishes I made most from that cookbook were spanakopita and tzatziki. When I made the spanakopita, I made them in the triangular turnover shape. I made it at least two or three times before I had my hiatus in cooking. When I came back to cooking for myself I started to make tzatziki on a regular basis. I ate it with pita bread or vegetables. In November or December, I used my Veggetti device, it turns vegetables into noodle shapes, to make a salad inspired by tzatziki. The salad was cucumber noodles with a sauce of yogurt, garlic, dill, and olive oil. By October, I slowed down making tzatziki.

On September 9, 2015 I made spanakopita after over a decade. Unlike before, I used olive oil instead of butter. The darker parts tasted almost burnt. Other than that it was very tasty. I have yet to try again. The oven I am using runs a little hot. I may need to lower the oven rack.