The recipe is inspired by Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours. I won’t give you her recipe – you should buy her book. Here’s what I did – from memory, so your results may vary.

Cut up a sweet potato, three stalks of celery, four carrots, and a couple red potatoes. Peel half a pound of small onions and the cloves from three heads of garlic. Yes, it’s a lot of garlic – don’t worry, it will be good. Chop up a raw chicken (breasts, thighs, wings, drum sticks – you know the drill).

Brown all these things in a large frying pan with some olive oil, salt, and pepper over medium heat. You’ll need to do half of it at a time unless you have a huge pan. I have a big pan, and it wasn’t big enough.

Put your dutch oven on another burner over low heat. Add half a bottle of Pinot Grigio, a couple cups of chicken broth, half a cup of flour, and the juice of a full lemon. Once it’s all warm and good, put the rest of the ingredients in the dutch oven. Add some fresh rosemary, sage, and thyme (the photo shows parsley instead of sage, but I like it better with sage).

Wrap the rim of your dutch oven with a ball of pizza dough from your grocery store or local pizza joint. When you put the lid of your pot on the dutch oven, the dough will form a seal. Cover the dough with a band of foil and bake at 400 degrees for one hour.

Dorie suggests you put this on the table and break the lid free with a flat screw driver. It will be messy, but everyone will enjoy the amazing aroma that comes from your dutch oven.

Break the dough into pieces for everyone at your table. Serve the chicken and vegetables into shallow bowls with a healthy scoop of broth – and dip your dough crust in the pot for a delicious treat!

Enjoy!

Dutch oven chicken and vegetables is brought to you by j.ronald.lee - photography / journal

We didn’t have a great season in the garden this year, but for a couple glorious weeks, the tomatoes were out of control. Mortgage Savers. Cherokee Purples. Lillian’s Yellow Heirlooms. Plus, some new breeds like Orange Bananas and Sun Sugars. Chop it all up with some basil, parsley, garlic, and olive oil, then serve with sliced baguette with melted Parmesan and Romano cheese.

Yes, that’s crab dip in the background – more about that in another offering.

Heirloom and Hybrid Bruschetta is brought to you by j.ronald.lee - photography / journal

I’ve made this recipe a couple of times, and be forewarned: The champaign makes a huge difference. Choose something very dry… any sweetness will cause you some grief and a lot of regret.

I think you could skip that regret if you used Pinot Grigio, perhaps cut the amount in half (and replaced the lost liquid with chicken stock). You could use that same wine when cooking the onions, garlic, and mushrooms. I’ll try that next time.

Okay, enough yammering. Here we go… recipe time!

Recipe

Broil 4 chicken breasts until almost completely cooked (about 6 minutes on high, then flip and an additional six minutes).

Sauté mushrooms, green onions (the white part), and a couple minced garlic cloves. Add a glass of dry white wine to the pan and reduce until liquid is almost gone.

Add fresh spinach to mushroom/onion/garlic mixture, and as soon as leaves begin to wilt place mixture on top of chicken breasts.

Wrap chicken breasts in puff pastry (I save back a little to make leaves to make it pretty). Brush with mixture of one tablespoon water and one beaten egg to glaze pastry, and bake for 30 minutes at 375.

Sauce:

Sauté 1/4 cup green onions in one T butter. Add 1 1/4 cup dry (NOT sweet) champagne and 1 1/4 cup chicken broth. Thicken with 1 T flour. Pour sauce over plate, then add sprinkling of green onions on top for color.

Chicken Wellington with Champaign Sauce is brought to you by j.ronald.lee - photography / journal

Another shot from last weekend, as Claire and I prepared Chuck’s macaroni and cheese. According to Williams Sonoma, “Freshly made bread crumbs are the key to achieving a crisp, golden crust.”

After trying this recipe, I’d say freshly made bread crumbs are the key to making macaroni and cheese with crumbs on it. If that doesn’t sound good to you… well… it wasn’t good.

We’ve discussed what worked and what didn’t. We decided the following would have made a difference:

1. The recipe didn’t call to mix the sauce and the noodles… just spoon the sauce over the noodles in the pan. This left dry areas, and the noodles ended up crunchy and hard in places. Next time we’ll mix the noodles into the cheese sauce, then transfer the well coated macaroni to the dish.
2. Bread crumbs are out. We like our macaroni and cheese to have a crispy cheesy crust on top.
3. More cheese in the sauce. This recipe called for one cup of shredded cheese. I doubled that. It wasn’t enough.
4. Sharper cheddar. I was too cheap when I bought the cheese.

We’re also considering mincing a bit of onion to go in the cheese sauce. I think it might add to the bite ever so slightly.

Regardless of how it goes, you’ll read about it here.

What’s Cooking? is brought to you by j.ronald.lee - photography / journal

The chestnut bacon stuffing recipe is from Chestnut Farms. The contents are 1/2 pound crumbled bacon, 3 chopped celery stalks, 1 finely chopped onion, 2 1/4 finely chopped boiled chestnuts, 4 cups fresh breadcrumbs, juice and zest of 1 lemon, juice and zest of 1 orange, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon chopped sage, salt, and pepper. Fry the bacon until done. Add onion and celery, fry 5 more minutes. Combine with the rest of the ingredients in a large bowl.

We stuffed ours into four Cornish hens. We did not use the orange or lemon; it was VERY good.

Game hens with bacon-chestnut stuffing is brought to you by j.ronald.lee - photography / journal

Drain everything and carefully dump into stand mixer or mixing bowl. Add 3 T butter and 3T skim milk. Mix on low until everything gets broken up. Add whole cream – however much one likes to achieve the level of smoothness one likes in their mashed potatoes. Add 1/2 cup shredded cheese.

After everything is nicely blended, pour into glass baking dish which has been sprayed with olive oil. Top with freshly ground mixed pepper. Bake at about 375 – 400 until everything is nice and hot throughout. Add a layer of cheese to the top and return to oven until it looks yummy

Remove and eat (don’t burn your mouth – hot hot hot when it comes out)

So that’s twice cooked. Here comes the thrice.

The next day, take the leftovers, and scoop out quarter cup sized portions, and roll them into balls with your hands. Next, press the balls into panko crumbs, then pan cook the resulting potatoes in olive oil.

YUM!

Thrice cooked potatoes is brought to you by j.ronald.lee - photography / journal

That’s not really this dish’s name.

It’s more, “Spicy bacon-chicken Alfredo with green-chili-cilantro marinara sauce and avocado.” And if you’re fundamentally opposed to deglazing a pan of bacon drippings with heavy cream, you should just go ahead and leave now. This dish is not for those on their second triple-bypass.

The Alfredo sauce

I’m writing for someone who knows how to prepare a standard Alfredo sauce. If you don’t, Chuck will tell you how. I don’t use as much cream or cheese, and I skipped the butter, because I figured I had enough going on without it.

Start with cooking three slices of bacon cut into half inch strips and 3/4 lbs of chicken in a skillet. Set the meats aside and deglaze the pan with heavy whipping cream on low heat to start the Alfredo sauce. Add approximately 1/3 cup freshly grated Romano and 1/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan. That stuff in the green shaker can? That doesn’t count. Use real cheese! After the sauce is starting to set, add garlic, paprika, and cyan pepper to taste. Sauce should have a gentle pink color.

The Marinara sauce

In another pot, prepare a sauce of Roma tomatoes, diced red onion, garlic, diced green chili, and cilantro. I used 5 tomatoes, two chilis, half a small red onion, and about a quarter cup of fresh chopped cilantro. Simmer about 15-20 minutes.

When it was time to serve, I warmed the bacon and chicken in the microwave, then tossed it with the Alfredo sauce and fettuccine noodles. After plating the noodles, I added the tomato sauce and garnished with one half avocado.

The dish was delicious, but with all the good things going on, I found the fettuccine was actually a little bit distracting. I think I would have preferred this dish served over pene or campanella noodles instead. I’ll try that next time. I’ll also probably toss some habenero in there to bump up the spice.

Very. Very. Good.

Spicy Bacon and Chicken Alfredo is brought to you by j.ronald.lee - photography / journal

Now in my oven, it takes a lot longer than that… but if your oven works properly, this should do the trick.

Stuffed peppers is brought to you by j.ronald.lee - photography / journal

If viewing from my home page, click to continue below to view the recipe.

We used the bread maker to make the dough, then went a little nuts (pun intended) on the filling and sauce.

Probably too much brown sugar when all was said and done… may want to cut it in half on the filling if you make this.

Dough:
3/4 cup milk
3 tablespoons water
1 egg
1/4 cup softened butter
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 1/3 cups flour
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons fast rising yeast

Filling:
3/4 cup softened unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
liberal amount of cinnamon (see instructions below)
dash of nutmeg
1/4 cup pecans, rough chopped

Topping:
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1/2 cup dark corn syrup
1 cup rough chopped pecans

I used a bread machine set to the dough setting. Alternately, you can mix the dough by hand, knead ten minutes, and let rise 90 minutes.

At this point, regardless of mixing method, punch the dough down and let rise an additional ten minutes in a warm place.

Roll the dough to a rectangle form, then coat the dough with the butter for the filling. We spread it with a spatula. Next, cover with brown sugar, then liberally sprinkle cinnamon on top. Add a little bit of nutmeg, throw in some pecans, and roll the dough up into a pinwheel.

Slice the roll of dough into one inch thick sections, and place them so around the perimeter of a buttered bundt cake pan.Bake for about 30 minutes at 350 F. About half way through, cover the rolls with the topping mixture.

To serve, simply flip the rolls over onto a plate. Your topping mixture should be a gooey mess by now. When you serve the rolls, spoon a little of the topping onto each roll.

Best eaten warm. Enjoy!

Bundt cake sticky buns is brought to you by j.ronald.lee - photography / journal