In praise of boneless, skinless chicken

Boneless, skinless chicken has saved me many a night from having to serve frozen pizza or "freezer-surprise leftovers" for dinner.

I buy them in multi-packs and freeze them. Often is the evening that I've realized,  too late,  I've planned nothing for dinner. Into a bowl of lukewarm water the plastic-wrapped double breast goes (sometimes I'm running so late, I don't bother to dunk it in its defrosting bath). Then, if still frozen, I can cut them sideways into one-inch thick slices and, if there's time, lay them on a plate to defrost a little more.

Even when frozen, they can be sautéed in a pan if cut into smaller chunks.

I generally use the directions for "Sautéed Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breasts (Basic Recipe)"  from the All New Joy of Cooking (p. 587 in my edition). The great thing about this recipe is that it can be adapted wildly.  I've used their basic recipe and then added sherried mushroom sauce (recipe on the cookbook's next page); I've added broccoli and made pasta with broccoli and chicken in a white/cheese sauce; I've added broccoli and ginger and made stir fry.  Even simpler, the sautéed breasts can be served with a squeeze of lemon and a dash of garlic powder over white rice, with a salad on the side.

The other beauty of this recipe is that after the chicken pieces are sautéed, I can set one or two aside for PE and put the rest into a sauce for everyone else.

I also buy boneless, skinless chicken thighs, which are cheaper, and keep them on hand. They're a little darker and meatier, and do better in more stew-like recipes.

Sometimes I miss chicken skin and the good juices that come with it. So, every three or four weeks, I'll make an effort to buy a whole chicken or I'll defrost a cut-up chicken a couple of days in advance in the refrigerator. With that little bit of planning ahead, a whole chicken is faster to prepare than skinless breasts since usually the only preparation required is salting the outside, rubbing it with butter, and sprinkling it with dried herbs before popping it in the oven.

I'm glad that there's a choice (skin or no-skin). Thinking back to my grandmother's day, when preparing a chicken began in the afternoon—chopping off its head, plucking the feathers, and stewing a tough bird a long time—I try to remember to appreciate how easy it is to cook chicken (or almost anything else) now.

In defense of pampering a picky eater

There's been some press lately about how parents shouldn't give into picky eaters. A recent Newsweek article, Help Kids Overcome Picky Eating commands: 

"Don’t fix separate meals. It’s hard to resist when kids are refusing to eat. But it only reinforces their biases."

The article helpfully suggests such strategies as pureeing cauliflower to look like mashed potatoes and concealing as many as eight puréed vegetables along with wheat germ "in a tasty meatball."

Well, that's great, but Picky Eater (usually referred to in this blog as "PE") won't eat mashed potatoes or meatballs. She'll only eat potatoes when they are french fried, on one of our occasional fast food forays. She will eat ground beef only as hamburgers.

For the last couple of nights, I have tried to make meals that would nudge PE towards eating what the rest of us like. The first night I made what I told her was "noodle pizza"--penne noodles squished into the bottom of a casserole dish, topped with pizza sauce and lots of mozzarella cheese.  (I made a separate pan for me, topped with goat cheese and artichoke hearts). PE tore into enthusiastically for the first couple of bites and then began to pick at it, saying she wasn't really hungry.

Last night I made Satay Chicken Stir-Fry with Snow Peas and Cilantro (from RealSimple.com), substituting the snow peas and broccoli with tiny slices of green onions and celery.  When PE asked what the green stuff was I told her "chives" ("chives" is my code name for anything small and green since she likes fresh chives from the garden, for some reason). I served it with sushi rice, which PE only seems to like when we go to Asian restaurants (there not being anything else she will eat there). 

The peanut butter sauce was a little sweet for my taste, so I couldn't see how she wouldn't like it since pb and sugar are her two favorite flavors. But she pushed at it with a worried look on her face and only ate the tiny serving I gave her when I said she absolutely had to finish it if she wanted milk.  (Demanding that kids eat is something the Newsweek article says is a no-no, but I was getting a little desperate). I think she would have drunk the milk and eaten nothing if I had given it to her with her meal.

We are listening to the "Little House" books on tape in the car right now. I was hoping that hearing about the Ingalls family's limited diet would make PE grateful for the abundance of food we have now. But if the Ingalls had had to dine on chicken nuggets and french fries every night, I'm not sure that PE wouldn't have wanted to join them.  That the child is as healthy and energetic as she is, fortunately or unfortunately, attests to the fact that maybe such things aren't so horrible, at least for the few years that she insists on eating them. At least I hope it's a few years...

A 50/50 (organic/non-organic) compromise

I’d like to eat only organic food, but I don’t (as I've said in previous posts)--not only for cost reasons, but also for lack of accessibility and convenience.

Some organic foods are more expensive (see post about organic grapes) than I can justify for the health benefit--I’m not sure it’s all that healthy to buy a couple of pounds of organic grapes and then munch on them with clenched jaw, stressed over the hole they’ve put in the family budget.

And, if I insisted on only eating organic food in restaurants, I would have to travel to downtown D.C. and eat at Restaurant Nora (America’s First Certified Organic Restaurant) or some other such fancy-pants restaurant, meaning that our family of four could only go out to eat once or twice a year. (And PE probably wouldn’t eat anything anyway, unless they offered organic chicken nuggets). Or I wouldn’t be able to eat out at all when traveling to rural North Carolina, where I’m from.

If I only ate organic, I'm afraid I would be like I was after I returned home from my first semester in college--I was a militant vegetarian and a pain in the neck to all. I refused to eat most of my family’s Christmas dinner. I didn’t eat ham or turkey, I wouldn’t eat the rolls because they were made with bleached flour. I probably ate the cooked vegetables (not even knowing the difference between organic and non-organic produce since it wasn’t readily available in N.C. in the 1970s) and maybe one of the whole wheat carob brownies I was always making and carrying around with me then. I remember my grandmother’s hurt look at this or another family dinner, when I again lectured her about the danger of bleached flour and she said, “I thought all food was good.”

Just that one comment had a huge effect on me later in life. I have tried to approach grocery shopping and restaurant eating with that philosophy. In the grocery store, I may steer my way past corn-syrup-laden food (except for cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving…) but I will buy non-organic, canned pinto beans since the organic beans there often run a dollar more; I buy regular whole wheat sliced bread for school lunches when organic bread isn’t available; and I justify eating what I know is not going to be organic chicken or meat in a restaurant because I usually eat organic or free-range meat at home.

I call this approach the 50/50 compromise—what is, essentially, a half-a**ed approach to organic shopping/eating/living (but 50/50 is a nicer tag for our family readers). It allows me to eat almost anywhere (when we occasionally go to McDonald’s, I’ll guiltlessly eat salads or fish sandwiches there, not worrying where the vegetables or meat came from) and to buy groceries from almost any store. There are only a few items I rarely compromise on in the grocery store, like organic milk and free-range eggs. Out of the house, though, I’ve eaten frozen custard and IHOP pancakes, never giving it a thought about where the eggs and milk came from.

Fifty percent (or somewhere thereabouts) organic is better than no organic at all, I tell myself. Maybe only the super-rich and super-sheltered (or people who live on organic farms) can truly afford to be all-organic. The rest of us can do what we can, arriving at whatever ratio of organic/healthy food we can afford or muster, whether it’s 60/40 or 25/75 percent, etc. The 50/50 compromise has helped me think, within certain boundaries, that all food is good.

Weekend cooking

We are fortunate that both D. and M. like to cook. However, after five days of trying to come up with something that everyone will eat, M. is often burned-out, unable to bring herself to go back into the kitchen.

That is when D. steps in. He sees weekend cooking as his chance to try something new, and to eat what he wants, without having to worry whether either or both TA and PE will eat it.

As a result, on weekends, we eat more meat--barbecue, grilled hamburgers, pot roast. And more ethnic food, beyond the usual standbys of pizza, spaghetti and tacos/tortillas filled with various things. We might have borscht, blini, or Mexican food that requires more than shredded cheese and a can of beans. His bread usually comes from the oven, not the bread machine. On Sunday mornings he often makes pancakes or waffles from scratch. He broadens our eating horizons and keeps us from being bored with food.

The only problem in all of this is our unspoken rule that, usually, whoever cooks doesn't have to clean.  D.'s dinners tend to make more mess and, unlike M., he usually doesn't clean up as he goes. Also, since he doesn't figure in the tastes of TA and PE, we often have to scrounge around at the last minute adapting what has been made or finding something else that they'll eat.

But the payoff is on Monday nights, when there are enough leftovers to feed everyone and few dishes to clean, as a result. (This is why our Monday listings usually list leftovers).

It is a lovely system, for the most part, and one that we would invite other families/couples to try.

Intro: Who we are and what we eat

We are four people who get along fairly well except that we all like to eat different things. This makes it challenging at dinnertime, especially if it's getting close to 6 p.m. on a weekday and I haven't already started making dinner.

I also have a tendency to forget what I've made from week to week, so I'm hoping that, if nothing else, this blog will serve as an electronic menu reminder for our family. I hope it benefits you and your family along the way.

Who We Are
The four of us are: Mom (M., principal blogger); Dad (D.); Teenager (TA); and Picky Eater (PE).

What We Like

• D. likes super spicy food and can/will eat almost anything. 
• M. has a few food allergies/sensitivities we have to work around including an inability to digest all cheeses except swiss, goat and sheep's cheese.
  
• TA likes sushi, hates cooked fish, has cravings for olives and stuffed grape leaves but won't eat things like white rice or eggs.
  
• PE's favorite foods are chicken nuggets, pizza and scrambled eggs; for vegetables, she will only eat corn and raw carrots, celery, and peas in the pod, but she loves almost all fruits. (We've tried to get her to eat what's being made for everyone else, but then she just doesn't eat. She once held out for two nights in a row. Since she's very skinny, we've decided to set aside and adapt part of what we're cooking each night in order to make something she'll actually eat.)
  

Our Diet

We are all omnivores, but we usually eat small portions of meat and also often eat vegetarian meals. M. and D. tend to like ethnic foods of all varieties, and would cook more of them in TA and PE would eat them.

In addition, we try to buy organic milk; cage-free eggs (organic if they're on sale); cheese without BGH (organic usually too expensive); meat raised without hormones or antibiotics; and organic fruits and vegies, when possible. 

We never buy soda (except maybe for parties, when other people expect it), and rarely buy junk food, although we've been known to buy Dorito's. We feel no guilt whatsoever about eating small portions of ice cream whenever the mood strikes us.