A Seasonally Appropriate Menu

Have you noticed that lots of grocery stores only carry apple cider in October?  Or at least, they only display it in areas that are easy to see in October.  I have noticed, because my brain says "Look!  Apple cider!  You should make Chicken with Apple Cider Sauce!"  

The ingredients!  No, I think the lemon juice looks fine.  It must be your monitor.  

I came across this recipe years ago living in my first house with cable (and the Food Network!)  We had cable because my roommate got it.  I guess that How to Boil Water was on at a convenient time, because they made this recipe and they made it look super easy.  So I tried it, and it was awesome.  In fact, I made a whole dinner with roasted asparagus and rice pilaf.  

Look! I remembered to take pictures while cooking!  I'm pretty fancy.

I just checked on the internet and the show is still running!  Wikipedia says it's been going since 1993.  Crazy!  Here's the link: Chicken with Apple Cider Sauce.  

Ta-daa!

Notes:  Even though you use cider to make the sauce, it's not particularly apple-y or cider-y.  You will feel silly for buying a huge thing of apple cider and only using half a cup.  

Secrets: Pan sauces make you look (and feel) super fancy, but they are really super easy.  

Proto-apple dumplings

Still reading?  We had apple dumplings for desert.  These were pretty easy, too.  This recipe came from America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two 2009.  You basically bake apples in a pastry dough, then cover with a cider syrup.  I made one major departure: the recipe called for puff pastry, but they were sold out at the store.  What they did have was single sheet crescent roll dough, so I used that instead.  It worked great!

Apple Dumpling with cider syrup

What 1: Chicken with Apple Cider Sauce
Notes 1: Pretty good.  Let sauce cook down more, use less butter

Where 1: Chicken with Apple Cider Sauce, Food Network: How to Boil Water

What 2: Apple Dumpling
Notes 2: Awesome!  Using crescent roll single sheet dough works great.

Where 2: America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two 2009

Lighter Pasta with Vegetable Sauce

Lighter than what?  Who knows?  But I think it means the sauce is lighter than a standard tomato sauce.

Here's what it looked like in real life:

Beautiful!  Except for, you know, the labels all over it.  I'm not really sure who to credit for this.  The watermark says "Photo by Carl Tremblay."  It's definitely the official America's Test Kitchen photo.  I know this because it's the same photo that's in my cookbook.  

Here's what our pictures looked like:

Shadowy, blurry...oh yeah, I'm awesome.  First, fix the blurry.  No more phone pics.  Use the tripod.  Yeah, I have one of those.  Second, I was going to say fix the lighting, but the "enhance" button in iPhoto mostly fixed that problem.  

The recipe itself turned out to be pretty good.  It's a nice veggie pasta when you're not too hungry.  But!   It involved browning zucchini in the pan, then transferring to a bowl whose sole purpose in this recipe is to hold the cooked zucchini, and browning more veggies in the pan.  I'm against extra dirty dishes.  

Here's what needs to happen:

Just skip the zucchini.  Save time and dishes.  Plus, the recipe only calls for half a zucchini.  What are you going to do with the other half?  

Double the noodles, because noodles are awesome.  

Remember to add the basil.

Note: Fresh basil is awesome.  The so-called "living herb" basil that comes with its own little clod of dirt is not awesome.  I got some once and it was mostly dead after two days.  I swear I followed the directions and watered it correctly, but alas.  Someday we'll have a magic garden (magic because it will have to garden itself) and grow herbs and peppers and other delicious gardeny vegetables.  

Here's the brilliant plan for the left over half zucchini, half red pepper, and half onion:  Nachos!  

What:  Lighter Pasta with Garden Vegetable Sauce

Results: Pretty good

Where: America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two 2009

PS - This is similar to another veggie pasta thing I do where I cook whatever vegetables are around in a mixture of butter and olive oil and then mix it up with noodles.  Yummy!  The biggest difference is that this recipe adds tomato paste (and no butter), which makes it *taste* healthier, but I do *really* like the tomato paste-less version a lot.  

Tortilla Casserole

This recipe was AMAZING.  I started with high expectations (tortilla casserole, hello)  and I had some doubts that it would be worth it at about the time I was trying to peel the chicken off the pan (why you stick to pan, chicken?) but in the end, WOW.  Bonus - no canned soups!  Or cream of X as one of my friends would call it.  Maybe she stills calls it cream of X.  We haven't talked about canned soups in many years.  

I completely forgot to take pictures.  Well, that's not entirely true.  I forgot about taking pictures until I served it, at which point I looked at the pile of goopy, lumpy, mostly brown looking mush, and I knew that no picture I could take at that point would do it justice.   

But, because blogs need pictures, I found some on the internet, just for you.  

This pic comes from The Lazy Housewife Cooks

This one comes from Surly Kitchen

You see the challenge.  

The only question left is what to do with most of a can of chiles in adobo sauce?  Look out - that stuff is HOT!

What: Tortilla Casserole

Results: Yummy!

Source: America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two 2009