Chicken and Dumplings

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Originally uploaded by craftyasiangirl

This is our dinner from Wednesday night. It's a really terrible picture and you're going to have to trust me that it looked and tasted much better in person. It's adapted from the recipe in The Best Recipes cookbook, which is one of my favorite cookbooks of all time. For those unfamiliar, it's put out by the same people who do the Cook's Illustrated magazine and America's Test Kitchen on PBS. They do tons of testing of variations of a recipe, looking for the "perfect" one. This is damn close.

My main complaint about this recipe is that it's completely from scratch, and thus, very time-consuming. This is one of the few times that I did indeed start with raw chicken parts and make stock, etc., but usually, I cheat big time and use a store-bought rotisserie chicken and some organic chicken broth.

I've been trying to incorporate more veggies into my cooking, so I added fresh green beans and frozen peas this time. I don't think T cared for them, but that's too bad. Oh, and one minor thing: I usually do the dumplings by rolling them out and cutting them into little rectangles, but I was too lazy this time and just took gobs of the dough and rolled them into little balls. I think I like the little rectangular pillows better as they cooked faster and more evenly.

what's for dinner?

(Not the best picture, but I didn't get a chance to take one of an individual plate.)

Tonight I made Chicken Stew with Onions, Tomatoes, and Dijon from the Simply Recipes site. I had to make a few adjustments to the original recipe since I didn't make it to the store to pick up all the ingredients, but it still turned out really great!

First off, I only used 2 1/2 yellow onions instead of the six red onions called for in the recipe. I also was too lazy to deal with roasting garlic, so I just chunked in about 6-8 whole cloves of garlic with the onions and let them kind of "roast" in the pan. I didn't really miss the extra onions (in fact, I think six would have been excessive), although I do think that using red onions instead of yellow would have added more sweetness. I probably also would've let the onions sweat for a bit longer before chunking everything else in, but I had a crying baby to contend with so there wasn't time today. Oh, I'm not much for measuring so I kind of eyeballed the wine and the dijon.

All in all though, it was a very easy recipe to throw together and I love that it's all done in one pot. I made it early in the afternoon, and turned off the heat and just let it sit on the stove till dinnertime. I waited to reduce the liquid and add the dijon till the last minute (after reheating) though because I was afraid the mustard might break if it boiled. Hmmm, what else to say? I cut up a whole chicken this time because that's what I happened to have on hand, but I will probably just do drums and thighs next time if I find them on sale. I served it over steamed rice.

It got good reviews all around, and both from Meighan, T and myself. In fact, T has declared that it should be added to the regular rotation, which is pretty high praise. I liked that it was tomato-y, but not in a 'red sauce' kind of way. And I also liked that there was a good amount of sauce to mix with the rice. To me, sauciness is a key component of any good comfort food. I was also initially worried that the mustard would be overwhelming, but it really wasn't. Definitely will be good when the weather gets colder.