Tag: heat

Slow Cooker Pork and Green Chile Stew

Chunks of lean pork, slow cooked in the crock pot with tomatoes, green chiles and jalapeño for a delicious weeknight meal with a little bit of heat!

Serve this with tortillas, or over brown rice with a little light sour cream and a slice of avocado if you wish and you’ll have a delicious meal.

This recipe is really so versatile – you can add more broth if you
want more liquid, you can also add tomatillos, cilantro, and make it
your own. For speed and convenience I used canned green chiles and
jalapeno, but you can certainly use fresh and roast your own. This has a little bit of kick, but you can certainly turn it up by adding more jalapeños or chile powder.

I bought a boneless loin roast and trimmed quite a bit of the fat off before cooking, so keep it in mind that you’ll lose some meat. I
like to brown the meat before adding it to the crock pot for best
results and add a little flour to pork as it browns
before adding it to the crock pot so that it thickens a bit. If you have gluten allergies, you can
skip this step. If you don’t have time to brown your meat no worries, it
will still work out fine. Enjoy!

Slow Cooker Pork and Green Chile Stew
gordon-ramsay-recipe.com
Servings: 6 • Serving Size: little over 3/4 cup • Old Points: 6 pts • Points+: 6 pts
Calories: 253 • Fat: 9 g • Carbs: 5.5 g • Fiber: 0.5 g • Protein: 33 g • Sugar: 1.5 g
Sodium: 836 mg (without salt)

Ingredients:

 2 lbs* boneless pork loin roast, lean, all fat trimmed off
salt and pepper to taste
cooking spray
2 tbsp unbleached all-purpose flour
 3/4 cup diced onion
2 cans (4.25 oz each) whole green chiles, sliced into thick rounds
2 tbsp chopped jalapeño, or more to taste 
10 oz can diced tomatoes and green chilies (Ro*Tel Mild) 
1/2 cup fat-free low-sodium chicken broth
 1 tbsp cumin
1/2 tsp garlic powder 
salt and fresh ground black pepper, to taste

Directions:

Cut pork into 2-inch pieces. Season with salt and pepper.

Heat a large non-stick skillet on high heat; when hot lightly spray the pan with oil and brown the pork over medium heat on all sides, about 3 – 4 minutes total. Sprinkle 1 tbsp of flour over pork and stir to cook 30 seconds, sprinkle remaining flour over pork and cook an additional 30 seconds.

Add browned pork to the crock pot, along with the remaining ingredients.

Cook on LOW for 8 hours or HIGH for 4 houts (if using a Dutch oven, cook on low heat for 3-4 hours). When done, adjust season, salt and pepper to taste if needed.

Makes about 5 cups.

*Weight after all fat is trimmed.

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Chicken Riggies – What if You Never Saw This?

Way back when, the only way you would’ve found out about a
regional recipe like Chicken Riggies, would have been to eat it while traveling
through Central New York.

You would’ve loved it (because there’s nothing not to
love) and maybe even tried to recreate it when you got home, but more likely it
would have ended up fading into nothing more than a pleasant memory;
referred to as “that rigatoni we had in Utica.”

I’m sure you’ll plan a trip through the lovely Utica/Rome
area of New York State eventually, but in the meantime, I offer up my take on
this thoroughly enjoyable plate of pasta. I think it’s fairly authentic, with
two notable exceptions. I use Marsala instead of the standard white wine, and
use roughly chopped thigh meat, instead of the more popular chicken breasts.

This results in a sauce that seems much richer than it
actually is, and I think you’ll love the subtle sweetness the wine imparts,
which works wonderfully with the heat from the peppers. Of course, as I joke
about in the video, forget how tasty the recipe is…it’s worth making just for
the name alone. What’s for dinner? Chicken Riggies! Riggies? Yes, Riggies!

Anyway, if you’re from Central New York, I hope I did your
venerable recipe proud. If you’re not, I hope you give this gorgeous rigatoni
recipe a try, and experience what only a few decades ago, you may not have ever
heard of. Enjoy!

Ingredients for 4 portions:

1 tbsp olive oil

4 oz hot Italian sausage, crumbled

1 onion, sliced or diced

1 cup sliced mushrooms

salt and pepper to taste

1 1/2 pounds boneless skinless chicken thighs, roughly
chopped or cubed

1/2 cup Marsala wine

1 (28-oz) can whole, peeled San Marzano tomatoes, crushed

1 cup chicken broth

1/2 cup heavy cream

1/2 cup water, or as needed

1 1/2 cups chopped hot and/or sweet peppers (any jarred or
fresh peppers will work, but cherry peppers are a good choice)

*if using mild peppers, use chili flakes or chili paste to
increase the spiciness.

1/2 cup pitted, halved Greek olives
3 cloves minced garlic

1/4 cup chopped Italian parsley

1 pound rigatoni

1/2 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Romano cheese

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Poached chicken breast and its sauce for Laura*

Most diet plans and recipes featured in newspaper colour supplements and in magazines will at some point instruct you to eat a poached chicken breast. I am not averse to diet recipes but a poached chicken breast has always struck me as a terrible thing. Tasteless, papery, depressing.

But I have to lose some weight. I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve got fatter. I don’t recall eating more, or differently, but some cosmic shift has occurred to make me acquire more weight. I don’t know how much because I don’t weigh myself, but I know that a few months ago all my clothes fit and now they don’t. Specifically certain pairs of jeans. Specifically round my middle. I would go on my own-brand Shitty Food Diet, but it has been failing me. I don’t know why.

Things were made worse recently by going on holiday to a Greek island where among the guests were two 40-year-old women who were in terrific shape. They were lean and mean like Japanese calligraphy; they exercised all the time – running down to the beach at 7am to swim to a neighbouring island and back – and ate practically nothing. AND there was this 18 year old boy who had abs you could grate cheese on. He looked like he’d been Photoshopped. All round it was not a terrific week for feeling hot and sexy and whippet-like. And my hands swelled up so much in the heat that I had to stop wearing my wedding ring.

By the way, don’t all rush to shriek that I am pregnant, because I am not – chance would be a fine thing. (Not quite as easy second time around, it seems.)

Anyway looking pregnant without actually being pregnant is the worst of both worlds. So I have been casting about for things to eat that won’t make me get any fatter and thought that things may have got to such a drastic stage that I will have to give poached chicken breast a whirl.

The thing that made me definitely decide to do this was recalling an interview with Cheryl Cole about two years ago, when we were still in thrall to her and were not yet weary of her chocolatey eyes and perfect teeth and cavernous dimples, where she talked about losing a lot of weight. She would eat for dinner, she said, poached chicken breast (A-HA!) with “some kind of creamy sauce” and steamed vegetables.

The creamy sauce here is key – a rich creamy sauce will liven anything up, even a sodding chicken breast and you can, if you are doing a low-carbohydrate regime, as I am, slobber it all over whatever you’re eating. It will just make everything okay.

Please do not be daunted by the sauce I have invented here. It is the same principle as Hollandaise but very easy as you are not required to do that awful buggery thing where you cook the egg-and-butter mixture only for it to fucking split and make you cry (this may only apply if you have PMT). What you sacrifice for ease and speed is a small amount in the way of consistency, which in the case of this sauce is a little thinner than an echt Hollandaise. But it is the key to being thin. So just do it.

Poached chicken with its sauce
For 2

2 chicken breasts
3 egg yolks
200g butter
a dash of vinegar
salt and pepper
juice of half a lemon
1 tsp of stock powder if you have it, don’t worry if not

1 In a pan large enough to accommodate both chicken breasts heat up about two inches deep of water with your stock powder and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat until it is simmering and then add the chicken. Cook this for 12 minutes, turning occasionally. Try not to let the water hit a rolling boil, or dip below a brisk simmer.

2 If I were you, I would wait until the chicken was cooked then take it out of the pan to rest before you attempt the sauce because although the sauce is not hard, it is best to have no distractions while you are doing it.

(I made sure Kitty and husband were both watching television while doing this and not liable to pester me for biscuits, stickers, hugs or story-reading. Kitty can be pretty demanding, too.)

The chicken needs to rest for a bit anyway. Don’t be put off by how utterly disgusting the chicken looks when cooked – all pale and dead-looking – this will be disguised later; see picture above.

3 For the sauce first melt the butter in a saucepan. If you have one of those marvellous pans with a little pouring lip, use that, if not don’t worry. After it has melted keep it over the lowest flame possible to keep warm. Then separate the three yolks into a small bowl.

4 I have an electric whisk for this step. I’m sure you could do it by hand but it might be tough on the old wrists. So, while continuously beating the yolks, add the melted butter in a thin stream. People make a lot of fuss about how hard this is, it really isn’t, just be careful.

5 Once add the butter has been added, season with salt, pepper, lemon juice and vinegar. Add all these cautiously and taste all the time. Egg yolks are precious; leftover egg whites are a bore – you do not want to have to do the whole thing all over again. I like a very vinegary Hollandaise – or should I say “Hollandaise” – but you might not.

6 You can just eat this now, or if you need to wait a bit while cooking some veg – (I made a broccoli accompaniment *cries* by boiling some broccoli for 5 minutes then tossing in toasted sesame oil, soy sauce and sesame seeds) – then get any old pan, fill it 2 inches with water and then heat to skin temperature and keep it there, then place your “Hollandaise” in the water to keep it a sort of baby-bath temperature, which will stop it from going grainy. Stir every now and again anyway.

7 To serve! (And this is key, for morale) slice the chicken into what is know in the restuarant menu trade as “medallions” and lay out on the plate, slather generously with sauce, and also any accompanying boring vegetables.

Giles, to my total astonishment, declared this “the most delicious thing” I’ve ever cooked. I was stunned. He hasn’t said that for ages. So there you go. Although just between you and me, I think he might have just been trying to be nice because I’m so fat and spotty at the moment.

Happy dieting! 🙁

N.B. I have not been posting because my publisher wants an absolutely terrifying amount of original copy and so I have been sitting in my room in front of my computer not posting anything because any new ideas I have must go into the book… but I haven’t been writing any new copy either. What is wrong with me?

*This post is dedicated to a really terrific girl I know on Twitter, @lauraewelsh, who once said the funniest thing to me ever, which is that the greatest skill a parent can have is to eat an entire packet of crisps with their head in a cupboard. She is on a diet, too.