Breakfast — Sri Lankan-style scrambled eggs on a street taco with melted cheese and green MD sauce. Eggs can be made in a batch and then they reheat well for the next few days.
Kavi messaged from college and asked for the recipe for the creamy chicken she likes me to make for her. She made it — well, a quarter-recipe, because the dorm pots and pans are so tiny she couldn’t even do that half recipe below, we have to get her some decent-sized pots and pans — and said it came out yummy, so we are feeling triumphant.
Passing the recipe along — it’s a pretty basic creamy chicken with pasta. She’s not really comfortable cutting up raw meat, so I told her to have the Safeway butcher cut it up for her, and she really suffers from cutting up onions, so I had her buy the fresh chopped onions.
(If she wants to be a Sri Lankan girl, she’s going to have to make her peace with chopping onions, but that can happen later.)
***
Remember that t. is teaspoon and T is Tablespoon.
1/2 Recipe for Creamy Chicken with Pasta
(makes 2-3 servings, 30 minutes if you know what you’re doing, probably more like 60 minutes if you’re just learning to cook)
1/4 c. olive oil
6 oz. (about 1 medium) chopped onion
3 cloves garlic, chopped
3 boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into bite-size pieces
salt to taste (start with about 1/2 t., add more at end if you want after tasting)
1/2 t. ground black pepper (optional)
1/2 c. liquid (sherry or white wine or water) for deglazing the pan
1/2 c. heavy cream
1/2 box pasta (usually we use penne, but whatever you like)
(In a large pot, set water to boiling for pasta, along with 1 t. salt. (If it’s going to stress you out to try to track both, you can do the pasta first and just set it aside until you’re done with the chicken, but I’ll give it to you the way I usually do it.))
1. In a large frying pan, heat olive oil on medium-high. Add chopped onions, stir them in. After a few minutes, add chopped garlic. (If you put the garlic in at the beginning, it’s likely to burn — garlic is more delicate than onions.) Cook, stirring as needed, until onions are golden-translucent (about 5-10 minutes?)
2. Add cut-up chicken, salt, and pepper. Sauté on medium-high, stirring occasionally. You want to let the chicken sit a little bit, so it browns on the bottom, because that adds flavor. But don’t burn it. Cook about ten minutes, until chicken is cooked through and lightly seared.
(Somewhere around here, your pasta water should be boiling. Add 1/2 box pasta to it, stir it in, check box for timing, set timer for appropriate time. I’d put a strainer in the sink at this point, so when the timer goes off, it’s easy to just dump the pasta in the sink.)
3. Add 1/2 c. liquid (sherry, white wine, or water) to the pan. It’ll probably hiss a little and if you dump it all in, it might splash, so pour gently. Scrape up (easier with wooden spoon than soft spatula) any browned bits sticking to the bottom (that’s called ‘fond’ and is a lot of what makes this tasty. We love fond).
4. Simmer another 5-10 minutes, stirring, letting the fond and liquid blend with the onions and garlic to make a nice sauce.
(Has your pasta timer gone off yet? Drain pasta in sink, then put pasta back in pot with a little bit of olive oil, stirring — that’ll keep it from becoming a sticky clump. Set aside until you’re done with chicken.)
5. Almost done! Add heavy cream, stirring it in, and then simmer another 5-10 minutes until it’s the texture you want. (I’d aim for fairly liquid-y, because it’ll thicken some when it’s mixed with the pasta.) Taste and adjust seasonings — this is where you add a little more salt if you want.
6. Carefully pour creamy chicken into pasta in pot, stir until well-blended. Enjoy!
(If you don’t have heavy cream, you can use butter and flour to make a roux, add milk, and then this sauce is called a béchamel. But that’s a lesson for another day. 😊)
(I don’t have a photo of the food, so here is a pic of me and Kavi that my dad posted recently.)
1 medium onion, chopped fine
2 T vegetable oil
1/4 t. cumin seeds
1/4 t. mustard seeds
1/2 lb. beets, chopped into matchsticks
2-3 green chilies, seeds removed, chopped fine
1/4 t. salt, or to taste
1 t. lime juice, or to taste
8 slices bread (wheat, white, or multigrain, your choice)
1. Sauté onions with oil, cumin seed, and mustard seed until golden-translucent.
2. Add beets, green chilies, and salt and cook on medium-high, stirring as needed, until beets are cooked through and starting to caramelize, which will bring out the flavor.
3. Stir in lime juice and simmer 5-10 minutes more. Taste and adjust seasonings as desired.
NOTE: If you want the spread to be very fine, let cool, then process in food processor. Sometimes I do this, sometimes I go with a more rustic tea sandwich, usually depending on what kind of bread I’m using.
4. Spread curried beets on four slices of bread; top with other four slices.
5. Trim off edges, and then slice in quarters (use a damp paper towel to clean the knife before and between quartering cuts for a pristine appearance).
NOTE: Curried beets can be made a day in advance; it’s best to assemble sandwiches just before serving.
1/2 lb. mushrooms, chopped fine
3 T stick unsalted butter
1/4 t. salt, or to taste
1 t. black pepper
1/4 – 1/2 t. Sri Lankan curry powder
1 t. lime juice, or to taste
1/2 c. heavy cream or coconut milk
8 slices bread (wheat, white, or multigrain, your choice)
1. Sauté mushrooms in butter and salt and cook on high heat until quite reduced, stirring frequently.
2. Add curry powder, pepper, and lime juice and cook until juice is absorbed. Mushrooms should be glistening and slightly fried, not sitting in liquid.
3. Stir in cream or coconut milk and simmer another 10-15 minutes, until liquid has thickened and you have a spreadable paste. Taste and adjust seasonings as desired.
NOTE: If you want the spread to be very fine, let cool, then process in food processor. Sometimes I do this, sometimes I go with a more rustic tea sandwich, usually depending on what kind of bread I’m using.
4. Spread curried mushrooms on four slices of bread; top with other four slices.
5. Trim off edges, and then slice in quarters (use a damp paper towel to clean the knife before and between quartering cuts for a pristine appearance).
NOTE: Curried mushrooms can be made a day in advance; it’s best to assemble sandwiches just before serving.
I promised a tea party digital cookbook as a stretch goal on Vegan Serendib, and it’s been holding me up on starting a Kickstarter for Gluten-Free Serendib, so I’m trying very hard to finish that little cookbook up.
Which means making lots of tea sandwiches, because I apparently have no good photos of many of them, and some of them, I don’t even have recipes written down for. Pity me — I have to eat lots of delicious little sandwiches in the next few weeks…
The following is a very basic recipe — not particularly Sri Lankan! Though we do eat them — thanks, colonialism!
Egg salad tea sandwiches are much the same the world over, I suspect. I don’t usually use the curry powder for these myself.
*****
Egg Salad Tea Sandwich (30 minutes, makes 16 tea sandwiches)
4 large eggs, hard-boiled and peeled
1/4 c. mayonnaise
2 T Dijon mustard
1/4 onion, diced
1 t. fresh chives, chopped
1/4 t. curry powder, optional
Salt, to taste
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
8 slices bread (I like multi-grain with egg salad, but wheat or white is fine)
1. Mash eggs with mayo and Dijon; a potato masher works well, but a fork is just fine.
2. Stir in onions and chives (reserving a small portion of chives for sprinkling at end), curry powder if using, salt, black pepper.
3. Spread egg salad on four slices of bread; top with other four slices.
4. Trim off edges, and then slice in quarters (use a damp paper towel to clean the knife before and between quartering cuts for a pristine appearance).
5. Sprinkle with chives and serve.
NOTE: Egg salad can be made a day in advance; it’s best to assemble sandwiches just before serving.
Kavi is napping beside me, so y’all may get a photo dump. This came out pretty well — strawberry-soursop marshmallows. I used frozen soursop puree as the base, then added some pureed fresh strawberries. Made that into marshmallows, then swirled a little more strawberry puree into the marshmallows.
They’re yummy, but I’m not sure if it’s safe to ship them to my Patreon folks (you have been SO patient with me, I am planning to get the next boxes out this coming week if nothing else goes wrong). I froze them immediately, and I ship them with ice packs, but would the strawberry puree be unsafe after, say, two days in transit? (I don’t ship outside the U.S.). This was not covered in my food safety certification class.
I might just save these to serve at a local event instead, just to be safe.
