Feeding Friendship: Beer me!

Welcome to my slightly delayed FF post for this round. After making my stout cake last time around, I got to thinking about all the dishes that can be made with beer and decided to choose it as our featured ingredient. I actually made 2 items because one was stupid easy and I wanted to try the other recipe. Very quickly, I'll show you the Beer Bread recipe I found and then I'll move on to what the author calls "tipsy chicken" and what I'll call Beer-Brined Grilled Chicken with Curry.

First, to the bread. This was probably the easiest recipe for bread I've made. You literally just dump the ingredients in a bowl, give it a good stir and pour the stuff in a bread pan. No fooling around with yeast because you're adding beer. I foolishly bought a case of Woodchuck Hard Cider a while back because I love it so much, but I don't drink that often, so it just sits. I decided that the hard cider would make a great bread because it's lightly sweet and slightly apple-y, and I was right. Here the link to the recipe on AllRecipes.com. I used 3 cups of 50/50 wheat flour (yes, they sell that) instead of 1.5 cups each of white and wheat flours. I'm sure you could go full on wheat and it would be just as good. Here's a short photo montage of the easy process.

dry ingredients in the mixer

mmm Woodchuck

batter is thoroughly mixed

stir a couple tines with a spatula for good measure

into the pan...

out of the oven!

nom nom nom

See how easy? Just don't burn it and you're good to go! On to the main event- the chicken. I had been wanting to try a "beer can chicken" recipe on the grill because I hear it keeps you bird nice and moist, and it generally looks fun. I thought that this was what my recipe was, but I didn't read thoroughly enough, so I failed in my goal to make beer can chicken, but succeeded in making tasty chicken, which is more important. The good news is that you don't have to use a whole bird for this, you can just do various parts, if you prefer. Also, there's no awkward bird propped up on the beer can part, which made me nervous. You can find the full recipe here. You basically just need some chicken, a beer, water, and a bunch of spices. I wanted the chicken to be flavorful, but not super spicy, so I cut the chili powder in half and traded the cayenne pepper for garlic powder. It already had curry, cumin, paprika, and chili powder, so I was certain it wouldn't be bland. 

To start with you soak the chicken (or parts) in a water/beer mixture for an hour or more. I used a whole bird and don't have many big pots, so I thought I could get away with a gallon plastic bag. This is not a good idea without a bowl or some sort of support mechanism, as I learned when my bird listed and poured funky beer/chicken water all over my counter. Sigh. I decided to use Sapporo beer because I like it and there weren't too many choices of craft beers in my store in cans that weren't IPAs or stouts, which I don't love and didn't want to overpower my chicken. Here's my setup for brining. 

remember to use a bowl, this is dumb

spices!

that's a lot more color than I usually use

If you read the recipe, you may be saying to yourself, 2 Tablespoons of curry AND 2 Tbl of cumin? But curry has cumin in it! And you would be right. But I love cumin, and if loving cumin is wrong, I don't want to be right. However, I had quite a bit of the spice rub left over, despite having a bigger bird than they called for, so you could either half the recipe or just save the rest for later. Maybe you'll cover your chicken more thoroughly too. So after I ditched the brine, I decided to rub the bird down with ~1 Tbl of butter. After successfully carrying off a Thanksgiving turkey, I knew that butter is the key to even browning and spice adhesion, so I went off recipe to add it. Then I smeared the spice mix all over the inside and outside of the bird. 

Post-rub chicken

While the bird was brining, I cleaned the grill and prepped the charcoal. I also started some hickory wood chips soaking in water. We kick it old school with the barbecue grill at our house, so if you do too, I highly highly recommend a chimney starter. Apparently making all the coals cuddle up next to each other in the "chimney" helps them spread the heat faster, and gets your fire started better and faster, with no lighter fluid at all. Observe: 

en fuego!

So right before I was ready to bring the bird down, I dumped the coals carefully in 2 strips along the outside of the grill, leaving a space in the center between them. The grilling calls for indirect heat, so that is how to you do it - put the bird in the center above a space and have the heat coming from adjacent coals on either side. A shout out to my Webster's grilling cookbook for that technique! Ideally you would also add you wood chips before you get the bird there so you don't have to stick them through the grate. Ahem. 

our intrepid chicken is ready to go

I love the smoky flavor of hickory or mesquite- flavor you taste and see!

I crossed my fingers, put on the lid, and left it for half an hour. This is what I found when I went to turn the bird: 

Hurray! What a pretty bird!

some nice grill marks too

The part after the turn took a little more than half an hour- probably 45 minutes- to get it up to 165+ internal temperature. Always use a thermometer with whole birds like this- no place for guesswork here on the road to Salmonellaville. After letting the bird rest a bit- not as long as I should have, probably, since we were starving- we cut in. George did the carving after some initial confusion on my part. 

Despite the lack of a beer can in its butt, the bird stayed moist and the rub was really tasty. I think you just have to be careful not to overcook it. 

Here's what our crack team of carnivores did during the carving. 

Yep, hunted for bugs outside. Sheesh. 

When we had carved as much as we reasonably could off the bird, I started to pitch the carcass and George started making a joke about what his dad would say about us wasting "half the chicken." Then I realized that, duh, I was wasting the chicken! I plopped the rest in a stock pot with some onion, carrot, garlic, bay leaves, salt and pepper and let it boil a few hours for chicken stock. Smells great and will be lots of soup stock later! Anyway, I would definitely recommend this recipe. Lots of flavor and on the whole not that much labor. 

future soup

Feeding Friendship: Greek Yogurt

Our ingredient for this challenge, as chosen by Veronica, is Greek Yogurt. I was intrigued by this choice, since I knew there would be a lot of options for what type of meal I could make, and yogurt is very good for you, but I don't eat enough because I don't like it straight up. I found lots of great ways that you can substitute Greek yogurt for sour cream in a lot of recipes, but I didn't end up doing that. I also decided that I'd made enough dessert in December for a while and that I wanted to make something savory.

I've been fairly active on Pinterest lately, and I've been using it as both a source of recipes and a good place to save recipes I find on the far corners of the Internet. (for those of you who aren't familiar, Pinterest is a place to "pin" pictures and links on a series of virtual bulletin boards and then share them in a social networking kind of way. You can follow my pins if you care- I'm sarahmk16). Some random person had pinned a slow cooker Chicken Tikka Masala recipe from a blog called Smells Like Home. This is my favorite Indian dish, and I knew that if I made it that I could control the level of spiciness. Plus, I got to use my crock pot, which is one of my favorite ways to cook since it produces such tender meat and magically has dinner ready when you want it.

Here is the link to the original recipe she posted. It made me feel good that this cook and blogger is not someone who fixes Indian food a lot, so I thought that lowered my chances of messing it up. I followed her process exactly, but made a few key substitutions. First, I halved the recipe, as she said she did. I also used 3 large chicken breasts cut into roughly 1-inch chunks because I don't cook much with chicken thighs and had a lot of chicken breasts in the freezer. I also substituted some leftover diced green chilis from a can instead of using a jalapeno, since it scared me. Here are the ingredients for the dish as I made it:

For the chicken:

• 3 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 1/2 tbsp ground coriander
• 1/2 tbsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt
• 7 0z 2% Greek Yogurt
• 1 Tbsp diced green chilis (or use 1 whole jalapeno, piereced several times with a knife)

For the Sauce:

• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1/2 large onion, diced
• 3 cloves equivalent of minced garlic
• 1/2 tbsp of kosher salt
• 1 1/2 tbsp garam masala spice
• 1 piece of fresh ginger about 1/5 inches long, grated (freeze first to make grating easier) 
• 2 cups crushed tomatoes (I used fire roasted Muir Glen brand) 
• 1/2 tbsp sugar
• 1 1/2 tbsp heavy cream 

To Serve:

• 2+ cups cooked rice
• cilantro garnish (if you want) 

I started out by chopping up the chicken breasts into bite-sized chunks. I dumped these into the crock pot bowl, sprinkled in the coriander, cumin, and salt, and gave it a good stir to try to coat all the pieces with spices.

Next, I added the yogurt and combined it with the chicken evenly.

Once I stirred in the yogurt, I put the peppers on top. 

Then I got all my elements for the sauce ready to go- diced the onion, minced the ginger, and got out the garlic, butter and spices. You may want to open your tomato can ahead too, just to save time. Then I melted the butter in the pan and then sautéed the onion, garlic and salt on medium high until it started to brown. I turned the heat down a touch because it seemed like the butter was cooking pretty hard.  

After the onion looked slightly browned, I stirred in the garam masala. I thought my go-to spice store would have it, but their website doesn't list it, so I just got some at the grocery store.  

That put some scent in the house, let me tell you! A minute later, I added the crushed tomato and sugar. Stir it all up, making sure to scrape any caramelized action off of the bottom of the pan. Mine looked like this: 

...and smelled amazing. Now, into the crock pot! Resist the urge to stir, readers! You don't need to mix the yogurt chicken and the tomato sauce at this point. 

The recipe called for 5 hours on low. I started a little late in the day, so I cheated with an hour and a half on high and then 2 hours on low. Let me say that this is not a meal you're going to cook on the sly or not notice. It announces: Indian food! all day long, so it makes it hard to wait until it's done. Your neighbors may smell it too ;) During the last hour, or last 15 minutes (depending upon whether you have minute rice or not), make rice to go along with the chicken. I made 4 "servings" of rice, since you can always repurpose it later if you have too much. I had brown minute rice, but you could use just about any long-grain variety. Once your chicken and sauce has been in long enough, or you can't wait anymore, give it all a good stir to combine the chicken and tomato elements. Then the recipe said to add in the heavy cream, stir again, and cook for another 10 minutes. Honestly, I completely forgot about this part with no ill effect, in my opinion. It does account for why her sauce looks a little more orange and mine a little more red though. Here's how it turned out: 

It was delicious! It had a ton of flavor without being too terribly spicy. As a person who is a little timid about cooking Indian dishes, I was really pleased at how it came out. You should try it!