When I’m looking for refreshing, summertime food, I tend to lean towards meals of salads and fresh fruits. This Vietnamese chicken salad is perfect in summertime: fresh, herby, full of chicken and best of all, cold.

My mother-in-law makes her salad without the cabbage, making it more of a hearty dish, but feel free to play around with the ratios of the ingredients to find a mix you like best.

Vietnamese Chicken Salad Recipe

2 cups cooked shredded chicken, cold
1/2 head of a small cabbage, shredded
1/2 cup cilantro, roughly chopped
1/2 cup rau ram (Vietnamese cilantro), roughly chopped
1/2 cup Thai basil, roughly chopped
3/4-1 cup fish sauce
juice of two limes

Mix the fish sauce and lime juice together and toss all the ingredients. Taste and season with more fish sauce is needed. Enjoy cold!

I’m super excited because Mike and I are heading to NYC for the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party! Well, actually, we’re just heading there on vacation, but the block party happens to be the same weekend. Over the next couple of days I won’t be cooking, but you can expect lots of NYC food photos. See you in NYC!

In the meantime, here’s a recipe for my super-simple, easy honey garlic chicken wings!

Honey Garlic Chicken Wing Recipe

1 pound chicken wings
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
3 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

touch of oil for pan frying

Heat up a touch of oil in a wok or frying pan over medium high heat and pan-fry the chicken wings until slightly golden and cooked through. Put the chicken wings in a bowl. Drain the rendered chicken fat into a bowl and wash your pan. You can skip this step if you’re not worried about black bits. Pour the rendered chicken fat back into your clean pan and cook the garlic on medium heat until slightly golden but not brown. Add the honey, soy sauce, pepper and chicken wings and mix well. Turn the heat up to medium high so the honey-soy-mixture bubbles, thickens and starts to turn into delicious caramel-sticky goodness. Enjoy hot!

Most people, when they think of clay-pot chicken rice they imagine glossy brown chicken, sweet and juicy Chinese sausage, and fluffy soy-saucy rice served in a clay pot. I, on the other hand, just picture the rice cooker of my childhood. Growing up, we didn’t have a clay pot, but that didn’t stop my mom from making this traditional Chinese dish. Instead of a clay pot, she’d cook everything in the rice cooker for a fast, one pot meat of tender chicken, sweet sausage, earthy mushrooms and soy-sauce-soaked rice.

Clay-pot chicken rice was and still is, one my favourite comfort food dishes so I was excited to try the Momofuku version I found on gourmet.com. It’s actually a take on a Mexican stew made with Japanese ingredients and while it has some similar ingredients, it tastes nothing like traditional clay pot chicken.

While the clay-pot miso chicken was in the oven, it filled the house with a smoky, earthy, soy-sauce sweet scent that drove us crazy. After an hour of practically salivating at the mere smell, it was finally time to eat. It was definitely worth the wait: the chicken thighs were ridiculously fall-off-the-bone tender and the wood ear mushrooms added the perfect slightly crunchy textural contrast. Gingery, garlicky goodness and the umami of the shiro miso made for a completely satisfying and luxurious meal.

Clay-Pot Miso Chicken Recipe adapted from gourmet.com
serves 2

4 chicken thighs with skin and bone
1/4 cup dried wood ear mushrooms
1 cup chicken stock
1/2 tablespoon canola oil
1/2 a large onion, coarsely chopped
1 cup dried shiitake mushrooms
1 tablespoon finely chopped peeled ginger
1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic
1/4 cup mirin
2 tablespoons shiro miso
2 tablespoons soy sauce
sliced green onions for garnish

Preheat oven to 400°F. Pat chicken dry, then roast, skin side up, shallow baking pan or dish until skin is golden brown, 35 to 40 minutes.
While chicken roasts, soak wood ear mushrooms and shiitakes in hot water until softened. When soft, cut the stems off the shiitakes and slice. Set aside.
Transfer roasted chicken to a bowl and pour pan juices through a fine-mesh sieve into a glass measure. Let stand until fat rises to top, 1 to 2 minutes, then skim off and discard fat. Add enough stock to bring a cup of liquid.
Reduce oven to 300°F.
Heat oil in a small heavy pot over medium-high heat until it shimmers, then sauté onions until softened and beginning to brown. Add ginger, and garlic and sauté until garlic is golden, 3 to 5 minutes.
Add mirin and boil, stirring and scraping up any brown bits, 1 minute. Stir in miso and soy sauce, then stir in chicken, wood ear mushrooms, shiitakes, and stock mixture. Bring to a boil, skimming off any froth.
Cover pot and braise in oven until chicken is tender, about 1 hour.
Serve in shallow bowls with white rice.

I have to warn you, even if you do get your hands on some meat glue so you can try making brick chicken, you’re going to have another problem: smoke. Chang’s fondness for searing on the element and then finishing in the oven works wonders for meat but will set your fire alarm off not once, but three times.

I honestly can’t recall the number of times my fire alarm has gone off while cooking from Momofuku, but I do know that it hasn’t happened with any of my other cooking. I think it has something to do with the smoke build-up that happens in the oven while roasting. Chang must have some crazy exhaust system; I just have a regular exhaust hood. Thankfully, from the looks of it, I don’t think any of the recipes I have left will set the alarm off.

The brick chicken was worth the three alarms: the crispy skin and succulent moist meat were incredibly good. Minus the de-boning of a bird, the recipe is fairly simple. The chicken is seared in a cast-iron pan, roasted in oven and finished with a thyme and garlic butter sauce.

If you haven’t de-boned a chicken before, I say go for it. It’s not as hard as you think, mostly because you’ve probably eaten all the parts of a chicken, so it’s not difficult to visualize where the bones are. I actually kind of like de-boning chicken, which is funny considering I was so scared of the pig’s head.

Part of this dish is the novelty of no bones. Regardless, I think I’m going to have to try making chicken with bones like this sometime soon. It could have been the butter, but this chicken was amazingly moist and tender.

Meat Glue Week is over, but I still have half a sample bag of meat glue sitting in my freezer, so don’t be surprised if sometime soon there’s something strange in the neighbourhood!

I grew up eating Chicken McNuggets; they were one of the few types of meat I would eat and whenever my mom wanted to get some protein in me, she’d take me to McDonalds. Before Chicken McNuggets were introduced in the eighties, there wasn’t much of a market for boneless chicken, but afterwards, boneless chicken pieces exploded in popularity. McDonald’s created Chicken McNuggets to fill a gap, but what the ended up doing was creating a whole new fast food group.

Say what you want about the evils of McDonalds, but I actually enjoy their food for what it is: fast, convenient and rigourously tested to meet the taste standards of the majority. To me, chicken nuggets taste good and if you believe what McDonald’s tells you, they’re good for you too!

Chicken McNuggets are made with all white meat chicken, but they’re nothing like chicken strips and apparently the reason why is meat glue. The meat glue helps bind together processed chicken so it can be shaped into those iconic McNugget shapes: boot, tombstone, and the oval.

There are quite a few McNugget recipes floating around on the net, but none of them contain meat glue, so I came up with an ad hoc recipe. I mixed up ground chicken with salt, pepper and meat glue then let it set overnight in the fridge. I was hope that the next day the chicken patty would be solid enough to cookie cut out some shapes, but it seemed like the meat glue didn’t do much to the consistency of the meat.

Since I couldn’t cut out shapes, I hand shaped the chicken, then used Thomas Keller’s buttermilk fried chicken recipe to coat. The nuggets were good, but nothing like McNuggets; some how the texture of all white meat McNuggets was different. My nuggets had the distinct feel of ground chicken, whereas McNuggets feel like, well, I can’t describe the texture of McNuggets.

As tasty as these chicken nuggets were, I think I’ll leave nugget making to the professionals!

Once, a very, very long time ago, I made a turducken. If you’re thinking it’s a little excessive to make a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken, it is. Throw in the fact that you need to de-bone three birds, create three different kinds of stuffing, and cook the final product for over 9 hours and I think you’ll agree that turducken is not really worth the effort.

Don’t get me wrong, I think turducken is delicious. So delicious I’ve made turducken roulades out of turkey, duck and chicken breast to minimize de-boning and cooking time. Breasts work great for turducken: you can trim them so they’re the same thickness and rolling them makes for a pretty presentation.

The problem with turducken roulade is that it doesn’t hold together very well. It almost always falls apart, which doesn’t impact the taste, but can make it a little difficult to serve. If you want roulades that stick together, it’s Meat Glue to the rescue!

Since I’ve made turducken roulade before, I decided to do a layered meatloaf in the hopes that the cross section would reveal discernibly different layers of meat.

Generally, I don’t buy turkey, except at Thanksgiving and Christmas, so I never really notice if grocery stores have turkey when it’s not turkey season. Luckily they carry turkey year round, and even more luckily, they had turkey scaloppine. The thinly sliced turkey breasts were ideal for my turducken loaf.

I’m pretty sure you can make a turducken loaf without the meat glue if you’re okay with your meats not sticking together. I don’t have much of a recipe though; I just seasoned the meats with salt and pepper, sprinkled on the meat glue, and layered them turkey, chicken, turkey, duck, turkey. I really wanted the duck skin to be super crisp so I glued that to the top layer.

The next day, I baked the turducken loaf in a 350˚F oven. A lot of fat was rendered out of the loaf, mostly from the duck skin, which crisped up into a beautiful mahogany brown. For most of the cooking time, the loaf was cooked in it’s own fat, basically making it a turducken confit.

Cooking the loaf in it’s own fat lead to a super-moist, super-tasty turducken meatloaf. For the most part, the meats glued together properly, except at some points where the gaps between the meat were too large. I should have weighed the loaf down more, which would have helped with adhesion.

Slicing into it, you could really see the different layers of meat. The simple seasoning made it so that you could really taste the essence of each meat as well. Somehow, when chicken’s next to duck and turkey, it tastes more chicken-y and vice versa. The drippings were awesome for gravy and turducken gravy is simply the best.

Here’s how we ended up eating the turducken loaf: corn, a slice of toasted white bread standing in for the stuffing, and turducken gravy slathered on top. It was a home-style hot turkey, duck and chicken sandwich, Momofuku for 2 style. A bit refined, a bit trashy and a lot delicious.

I’m not a big fan of the dumplings in chicken and dumplings, there’s something about filling-less dumplings that doesn’t sit quite right with me. Then again, it could just be that I haven’t had proper chicken and dumplings. When I have had them, the dumplings are dough-y, thick and strangely flavourless. Generally, they taste like un-cooked balls of dough.

I was hoping that Keller’s recipe for Chicken Soup with Dumplings would change all my biases against filling-less dumplings. All of the Ad Hoc recipes I’ve tried so far have been winners, so it was a good bet that this recipe would be a winner as well. The photo of the soup in the book is gorgeous: succulent chicken, creamy soup and dumplings that look like they’re made out of mashed potatoes.

The idea of mashed potato dumplings got me really excited, but that excitement died down quickly after I learned there weren’t any potatoes in the dumplings. From what I can gather, the dumplings in Keller’s recipe aren’t the authentic Southern dumplings found in chicken and dumplings. In true Keller style, the dumplings are quenelled, cooked, and cleaned up by trimming off the uneven edges. The dumplings are made with pâte à choux, which is a cream puff dough.

Most Keller recipes, no matter how simple, are time consuming, and this one was no exception. Chicken stock is flavoured with extra vegetable undertones by simmering gently with butter, slow-roasted leeks, onions, carrots and celery. If you’ve ever made any of Keller’s recipes, you know the next step is to discard the leeks, onions, carrots and celery.

Celery and carrots, sliced on the diagonal are found in the soup, but the vegetables fit for consumption are individually blanched; the celery in sea-salty water and the carrots with honey, bay, thyme and garlic. Individually blanching the vegetables seems like a skip-worthy step, but I find that the celery (which is peeled!) retains it’s crispness and the slight honey sweetness of the carrots adds a lot.

Before the vegetables can be added to the chicken vegetable stock, the stock is elevated to crazy levels of deliciousness by thickening it with a roux. Thickening the stock with roux gives it a creamy luxuriousness that makes you swear half a pint of heavy cream is in the soup. It’s as decadent as chicken soup can get.

This soup took a lot of time, but it was worth it. The dumplings were fantastically savoury and tender; they were so good, Mike I had had to split the last one in two. If you’re looking for a show-stopper chicken soup, this is it.

Ad Hoc Chicken Soup with Dumplings

slightly adapted and scaled down to feed 2

1/2 tbsp butter
1/2 cup thinly sliced carrots
1/2 cup coarsely chopped celery
1/2 cup coarsely chopped onion
1/2 cup coarsely chopped leeks
salt

Melt the butter over medium heat in your stock pot and add the carrots, celery, onions and leeks. Place a cut out circle of parchment paper on top, reduce the heat and cook for 30-35 minutes, stirring occasionally.

When the vegetables are done, add the chicken stock and simmer for about 30 minutes, then strain the soup base into another pot and discard the vegetables.

Dumplings
1/4 cup water
2 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp and 1/4 tsp salt
1/3 cup all purpose flour
1/2 tsp Dijon Mustard
1 large egg
1/2 tablespoon finely chopped flat-leaf parsley

Fill a large pot with salt and water and bring it to a simmer.

Combine the 1/4 cup water, butter and 1/2 tsp salt in a medium saucepan and bring it to a simmer over medium-high heat. Add the flour all at once, reduce the heat to medium and stir rapidly. The dough will come together in a glossy ball. Continue to cook the dough for about 4-5 minutes, stirring constantly. A thin coating of dough will form on the bottom of the pan.

Transfer the dough to a stand mixer and add the mustard, 1/4 tsp salt and mix to incorporate and release some heat. With the mixer on the lowest speed, add the egg and beat until it is completely incorporated. Add the flat-leaf parsley and stir in. If you don’t have a stand mixer, you can do this all by hand, it will just take longer for the egg to mix into the dough.

Shape the dumplings into quenelles using two soup spoons to scrape the dough into oblong football shapes or just drop into the simmering water. Once the dumplings rise to the surface, cook them for 5-6 minutes to ensure that they are cooked. Cut one open to make sure. Set aside.

1 qt chicken stock
3/4 cup peeled celery diagonally sliced into 1 1/2 inch long pieces
3/4 cup carrots, cut into quarters then diced into bite sized pieces
1/2 tsp honey
1 bay leaf
1 sprig of thyme
1 small garlic clove, crushed, skin on
salt and pepper
roux – 4 tbsp butter, 1/4 cup + 1 1/2 tbsp flour
1 cup cooked, shredded chicken
2 tbsp finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
flat-leaf parsley leaves

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. When it is nearly melted, whisk in the four and cook, whisking constantly and adjusting heat as necessary so the roux bubbles but does not brown, about 3 to 4 minutes. Set aside to cool.

Blanch the celery briefly and put in an ice bath. Cover the carrots with water and add the honey, bay leaf, thyme, garlic clove and salt and pepper. Simmer for about 4-5 five minutes, drain and set aside.

Bring the soup base up to a simmer and whisk in the roux a little at a time until the soup is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Simmer and skim for 30 minutes. Add the dumplings, chicken, carrots, celery and chopped parsley. Season to taste and garnish with flat-leaf parsley leaves.

Kimchi stew is what made me fall in love with kimchi – either that or David Chang’s kimchi recipe. Honestly though, I think there’s something about cooking kimchi that mellows out the flavours and makes it more accessible. Kimchi stew is spicy, sweet and one of my favourite fast meals.

Making kimchi stew is fast, especially if you’re willing to use store bought kimchi and chicken broth. Traditionally, kimchi stew is made with pork, but if you don’t eat pork or want a lighter version, chicken is your best bet.

Chicken Kimchi Stew Recipe

serves 2

2 cups of cooked shredded chicken
2 cups chicken broth
1 cup kimchi
1 onion, thinly sliced
5 shiitake mushrooms, rehydrated and thinly sliced
2 tablespoons mirin

salt and pepper to taste
green onions for garnish

Pan-fry the sliced onions in a touch of oil over medium heat until brown and melty. Add the kimchi and heat through. Add the chicken broth, chicken, and mushrooms and bring to a simmer.  Add the mirin. Simmer the stew for at least 30 minutes so all the flavours meld together. Taste, season with salt and pepper if needed, garnish with green onions and serve with rice.

I know you’re probably wondering, when is she going to get back to the Momofuku stuff? Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Chang and his crazy recipes, in fact, I just received my sample size of Activa meat glue in the mail. Meat glue equals Brick Chicken and whatever other weird and wondrous meat monstrosities I can come up with for Meat Glue Week.

In the mean time, I’m still recuperating from my lingering cough with my seemingly endless chicken soups. Miso chicken ramen is one of my favourites and one that you can definitely make with pre-home-made or store-bought chicken stock.

Chicken ramen, the instant kind, is my kind of trashy comfort food. Before I really started cooking, Sapporo chicken flavoured instant noodles used to be my go-to after school snack. Now I know better; the neon yellow of instant noodle broth can’t be good for me.

I still love chicken ramen though. There’s a lightness to the broth that you don’t get with the heavier pork bone ramen broths. Adding miso to chicken stock adds a little bit of depth, but there’s a play between lightness of the stock and the umami packed flavour of miso. The earthiness of the miso with the sweet crunch of corn is utterly delicious.

Chicken miso ramen can be as simple as noodles topped with chicken broth with a spoon of white miso stirred in, or it can be as complex as home made broth and carefully thought out toppings. I like to top my ramen with shredded dark meat chicken, corn pan-fried in butter, thinly sliced onions, some greens, a soft boiled egg, and green onions. Now there’s real comfort food!

Chicken Miso Ramen Recipe
Serves 2

4 cups of chicken stock (I used some leftover chicken-ginger stock)
2 tablespoons shiro miso (white miso)
1 1/2 cups shredded chicken
1 onion, thinly sliced
1 cup of corn
1 tablespoon of butter
2 cups spinach
2 eggs
2 servings of ramen noodles

Optional Garnish:
sliced green onions
nori
sesame seeds

Heat up your chicken stock and gently stir in the miso until it is mixed in. Taste and add more miso if needed. Miso pastes vary in saltiness, so adjust accordingly.

Bring a pot of water to boil for the eggs. Gently lower them into the boiling water and cook for 6 minutes. Remove from the water and run them under cold tap water until they are cool to the touch. Peel and slice in half.

Heat the butter over medium heat and add the corn. Stir to coat each kernel of corn in butter. Set aside.

Blanch the spinach in salted boiling water until just wilted. Remove from the water and set aside.

Cook the ramen noodles according to the package, drain and place in the bottom of two large bowls.

Top the ramen with the shredded chicken, thinly sliced onions, egg, corn, spinach and a sprinkling of garnish. Enjoy!

Don’t worry, this soup doesn’t have any alligator meat it in, just alligator noodles. When Mike was young, he was obsessed with eating Lipton’s Alligator Soup, an instant chicken noodle soup with alligator shaped noodles. They’ve discontinued the soup, but Mike craves it in that way you crave food from your childhood.

I thought it would be fun to make a simple chicken noodle soup with home made noodles in alligator shapes. The alligator noodles I would make would be 1000 times larger than those in alligator soup, but much like I like mini food, I like giant food as well.

I’ve never made noodles before, but I have fond memories of my dad making noodles when I was a kid. Noodles were my dad’s speciality. Almost every weekend, there’d be flour flying everywhere and piles and piles of noodles on every available surface.

Sometimes my dad would let my brother and I roll out the noodles, but mine usually turned out uneven and strange looking. I should have took that as a sign: I’m a noodle eater, not a noodle maker.

When I decided to make the noodles, I didn’t want to go out and buy a pasta machine, so I went to my parents’ place in hopes that they still had the pasta roller from my childhood. Of course they had it; my mom doesn’t throw away kitchen gadgets. She pulled it out of a cupboard, still in it’s original packaging.

When I opened up the box, I found the credit card slip receipt from Canadian Tire. The pasta machine was on sale from $24.99 for $14.88. For a machine from the 80s, it was in amazing condition. It’s too bad my pasta wasn’t amazing.

I tried an egg yolk pasta recipe that I’m not going to reproduce here; it was that bad. It’s funny though because essentially all noodle recipes are the same. While at dinner the other day I asked my dad what his noodle recipe was.

Dad: I tell you my recipe, it’s easy: flour, eggs, water.
Me: But how much flour, how many eggs, how much water?
Dad: You just look at it and you know. You mix it up and that’s it.
Me: Oh. Thanks Dad.

Of course his recipe would be one of those recipes. I can’t complain too much though, I’m kind of like that too; if I’m just cooking for myself I hardly ever measure things. I did measure everything for the noodles I found on All Recipes, but the noodles still ended up tough and really not that edible.

I guess I’ll have to try my dad’s “recipe” one of these days.