Week 21: Not Your Mother’s Chicken and Rice

I remember my mother making chicken and rice dishes, mostly casseroles that were heavy on some sort of canned creamed soup. Edible but not terribly flavorful, they were a staple in most households in the 1960s and 1970s. Given my subsequent aversion to casseroles and anything containing a creamed soup, I have avoided such dishes for 30+ years…until now.

In the most recent Sunset magazine, I found a recipe for Chicken Steamed Over Ginger-Garlic Rice. Full of flavor, utilizing only one pot and taking only 30 minutes, the family has determined the recipe a keeper and I can now proudly cook chicken and rice casserole.

Rather boring in color, due to the dual colors of white (rice, chicken) and green (sauce), it is anything but bland. The recipe contains bold flavors—ginger, garlic, cilantro, sesame oil and jalapeno—that give the moist steamed chicken a great kick, although not so spicy that children won’t eat it.

The recipe is low in salt, easy to prepare and a quick and hearty weeknight meal. While the recipe says it yields four servings that would be a huge amount of rice per person. I used 2 pounds of chicken (rather than the 1 1/2 it called for) and it served 5 adults, with enough leftover for one lunch. I have adjusted a few things in the recipe to satisfy our palate, but if you want the original recipe, you can find it here.

Butcher Son and Mr. B added some sriracha to up the heat quotient, our guest tried it with a bit of soy, but Brilliant Daughter and I found it perfect just as it is. Now it’s your turn to debunk the myth that chicken and rice casseroles have to include creamed soups!

Recipe on the next page...

Week 12: Mini Lamb Meatballs with Pilaf

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I know how hard it is to come up with a quick meal that can be fixed in 30 minutes or less. Having had 3 children with various school, work, and activity schedules on top of my own work schedule made it difficult for us all to sit down together every night, but I made it work utilizing two methods. One, I shopped every Sunday morning then settled into the kitchen for 2-3 hours cooking meals for the week. Soups, stews, roasted chicken, meatloaf, whatever I could make that could be cooked or reheated quickly once we were all at home. Two, finding recipes that were easy to make and quick to cook for weekday meals.

One of those quick recipes is a lamb pilaf. I wrote a post about it back in 2006, which caused me to be somewhat nostalgic when I read it. The gist of the post was that I felt it necessary that my children be able to cook once they lived on their own. Brilliant Daughter is an excellent cook, trying new recipes, modifying old ones, devising new ones, while Electrician Son relies primarily on a few standards and lots of grilling. At the time of the post, Butcher Son, my youngest, was just embarking on his career as a butcher and was only adept at breakfast foods. The post was an attempt to teach him how to cook something new and easy, so he wouldn’t have to rely on eggs and toast.

Eight years later, he has far surpassed my expectations. In fact, he has gotten together with friends every Monday night for the past two or three years to prepare feasts to share. One person decides the menu and they all pitch in on the cooking end of things. And we are not talking burgers and fries here; they make meals centered around Steak Diane, horseradish-crusted beef tenderloin, and stuffed chicken breasts, among other things. Ahhh, but I digress.

That original lamb pilaf recipe, which takes about 30 minutes start to finish, pays homage to my husband’s family, half of which are Lebanese. Lamb and rice were a part of his childhood and became part of our repertoire. But cooking lamb takes hours, and even shish kebab requires marinating to impart flavors into the meat. So the lamb pilaf recipe was a way to get the flavor we loved without the long preparation or cooking time. And while we still cook the pilaf at least once a month, I thought it needed an update, a new twist. So I took the basic ingredients and changed them up a bit. What I came up with is mini lamb meatballs served on top of the pilaf with a lemon-mint yogurt sauce. The preparation time is still around the half-hour mark, easy enough for anyone to do (in fact, you can get the kids involved in rolling the meatballs), and it’s just as tasty as the original version.

Oh, and for the record, I am very proud of my children, not just for their culinary prowess but also for the very special people they have become. I am one lucky mama!

Recipe after the jump....