Breakfast for Dinner Goes Epic

Hey there, I'm back again!

I think we all get the urge to make breakfast for dinner once in a while, whether it's a simple plate of bacon and eggs or pancakes or going whole hog for a batch of Eggs Benedict. Well, as I recently posted, I'm a big fan of the latest (to Canada) breakfast classic-in-the-making: Chicken and Waffles!

But, me being me, and Kari being Kari, we weren't going to go the traditional route of fried chicken on a sweet waffle with syrup (and maybe gravy) on top, we were going to try something completely new (maybe).

So for our version of Chicken and Waffles, we used a savoury waffle batter using goat cheese and fresh basil and instead of fried chicken, we kept the Italian influence going with Chicken Parmesan (with Kari's fresh-made tomato sauce, of course!). As a topping, we figured everything can use a touch of bacon-like flavour, but to be thematically consistent, I decided to fry up some Sopressata Salami instead. Also, building on the idea of Garlic Maple Syrup from our last trip to Murray Street, I whipped together a garlic-balsamic-maple sauce. Because HELL YES!

Now, this one is going to take some time, because there was a lot going on with this dish (because it was a rare Saturday off together and we're lunatics).

Here are the four main components of the dish:

Savoury Goat Cheese and Basil Waffles
Chicken Parmesan
Crispy Sopressata Bits
Garlic-Balsamic-Maple Sauce

Kari got the ball rolling by putting together the tomato sauce for the Chicken Parmesan (some day I'll actually reprint the recipe for this):

Saucy!

Meanwhile, I went to the Internet for inspiration, having never made waffle batter before. I pretty much followed the recipe below from Allrecipes.com, while omitting some ingredients, and adding others:

Getting pointers online

So here is the revised recipe:

Savoury Goat and Cheese and Basil Waffle Batter

- Makes 6-8 waffles

Ingredients

- 2 eggs

- 2 cups all-purpose flour

- 1 3/4 cups milk

- 1/2 cup olive oil

- 4 tsp baking powder

- 1/2 tsp salt

- 1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper

- 3-4 tbsp fresh basil, finely chopped or 2 tsp dry basil

- 70 g (half a small package) goat cheese

Directions

- Beat the eggs with a fork or hand mixer until fluffy. 

- Mix in flour, milk, oil, baking powder, salt, pepper and basil until batter is smooth. 

- Slowly beat in goat cheese, a few small pieces at a time until well blended into batter. 

- Set batter aside in the fridge while making other components. 

Batter up! 

Next up is the chicken for the Chicken Parmesan. As most of you already know, Chicken Parmesan is basically a breaded and baked breast or cutlet of chicken topped with marinara sauce and melted cheese. Now, I've probably said it before, but I tend to prefer chicken thighs (boneless and skinless) to chicken breast. They have more flavour and are almost always way cheaper. Also in the case of this particular recipe, thigh pieces  were the right size for the proportion of one piece of chicken to one waffle (with two of each per serving).

Chicken Parmesan

- Makes 6 servings

Ingredients

- 6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, pounded flat (directions to come)
- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1/2 cup panko
- Tomato sauce (pre-made)
- 6 slices cheese, cut to cover chicken (usually parmesan, but here I used mostly mozzarella and a pinch of parmesan)

Directions

Before doing anything, make sure the oven is preheated at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. The first step to getting the chicken ready is bashing it into cutlet shape. There are several ways to achieve this, but the best for this recipe was to pound the chicken flat.

This is done by resting a piece of chicken between two sheets of wax paper and pounding it flat using a meat hammer. In our case, since Kari has lots of neato kitchen gadgets, we used this weighted doohickey that looks like some sort of futuristic gavel.

Below is the "before and after" of that process:

Chicken - pre-pounded

Chicken - post-pounded

So, once that's taken care of five more times (or however many piece of chicken you have), it's time to bread those suckers!

You'll need a container with flour, another with milk and another with whatever you're coating the chicken with. In this case, I recommend panko breadcrumbs, mixed with a pinch each of salt, pepper and oregano. If you're lucky enough to have a home breading station, as my gadget-addicted girlfriend does, well your set up is easy! If not, simply fill three bowls with each component.

The dredging station

The process for breading your chicken is fairly simple: coat with flour, then milk, then breading. Boom, done. Try to have only one hand handle the meat since this can be a a rather messy process and better to only have one hand covered in shmutz than both.

So follow along with my how-to in pictures!

Step 1 - dredge in flour

Step 2 - soak in milk

Step 3 - coat with breadcrumb mixture

Ready for the oven!

Once breaded, set a wire rack over a foil-lined cookie sheet and place chicken on the rack. Bake for about 15-20 minutes until golden brown and crunchy.

Next, turn the oven to broil. Without removing the chicken from the rack, top each piece with a dollop of tomato sauce and a slice of cheese. Broil in the oven until cheese turns golden brown and bubbly.

Chicken is baked, now to broil the cheese

Turn off oven and keep chicken warm in the oven.

Crispy Sopressata Bits

Next up is the Crispy Sopressata Bits. This part's pretty darn simple. Fry Sopressata in a hot cast iron pan (with just a bit of bacon fat) until it's crispy. Set out on paper towel to absorb grease. Break up pieces of meat with fingers or knife and set aside.

Crispy fried Sopressata... 

...becomes a substitute for bacon bits!

And now we get to the Garlic-Balsamic-Maple Sauce, which is really just those three ingredients mixed together and reduced.

A cross-cultural culinary love affair in the making

Garlic-Balsamic-Maple Sauce

Ingredients

- 1/2 cup maple syrup

- 3-4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped or minced

- 3-4 tbsp balsamic vinegar 

- salt and pepper to taste

Directions

- Bring maple syrup to a boil in a small saucepan. 

- Reduce heat to medium, add garlic and reduce for about 5 minutes.

- Stir in balsamic and reduce for another 10 minutes until syrupy. 

- Season with salt and pepper before serving. 

Halfway through cooking the sauce, preheat the waffle iron.

Preparing the Garlic-Balsamic-Maple Sauce 

Next up, we cook the waffles. Essentially just pour a half-cup of batter per waffle onto the pre-heated iron and cook until crispy and golden (about 10 minutes). 

Waffley goodness!

Finally, it's time to put it all together. There are two ways to plate this one. 

The first is to put the waffles and chicken side by side, which is the more traditional presentation. Top the waffles with the sauce and sopressata bits, as shown below:

Let's eat!

The second way is to put the chicken on top of the waffles and pouring the sopressata bits and sauce all over the whole thing, which is how Mill Street does it: 

Let's also eat!

So, the verdict on this over-the-top experiment in tasty decadence? It was really, really freakin' good! The Waffles were rich and flavourful without being too much so. I wasn't sure if the goat cheese would work, but it totally did! The Chicken Parmesan was, well, Chicken Parmesan, which is pretty fail-proof as a flavour profile. The Garlic-Maple-Balsamic Sauce was a great mix of sweet and tangy that offset the richness of the waffles and chicken and the Crispy Sopressata Bits added a salty component that tied the whole thing together beautifully, and the whole affair was a nod to Italian cuisine, although I doubt any chef in Italy has tried this before!

All in all, this was a fantastic epicurean endeavour that I would totally make again, time permitting. This was quite a time-consuming effort, but nothing was terribly difficult to put together and the flavour was unique and delicious and totally worth it. 

If you give it a shot, tell me how it went! I'd love to hear if I'm the only one crazy enough to try this out!

Eureka! - Surprising discoveries in the kitchen

Hello!

As I've said before, one of the things I love about cooking is the chance to experiment. You can experiment with new flavour combos, new ingredients, new methods, and just generally try out anything your mad scientist brain comes up with, and the mad scientist approach is fine if you're going for over-the-top combinations. But often other discoveries are far more subtle and are sometimes a matter of taking little risks with ingredients and getting startlingly good results. One case is finding a new ingredient that brings out unique flavour combinations. Another is pairing ingredients that you wouldn't think work well together, but somehow do. There's also trying a few new and unexpected, but reliable, twists on an old classic and yielding results that go far beyond your expectations.

So here's the scenario: it was an average winter's night and my girlfriend and I had decided to go with a comforting "chicken, potatoes and vegetable" trio for dinner. Now, I was out shopping for dinner supplies, when I happened upon a new ingredient that really got a ball rolling in my head. It was at La Bottega Nicastro and they were selling something called 'Nduja. 'Nduja is a spicy spreadable salami. It has the flavours of a hot Soppressata salami, but is soft, almost like using sausage meat. I looked it up online and it turns out its origin is that it was a kind of an Italian take on Andouille sausage, a classic smoked French sausage, most often seen in Cajun cooking. However, 'Nduja and Andouille taste completely different; Andouille is smoky and full of herbs, 'Nduja is fiery and tangy.



'Nduja on, um, bread...

 Anyway, now that I had my weird salami to play with (wait, that sounds wrong...), I decided I was going to make a stuffed chicken breast, mixing the 'Nduja with some bocconcini and black pepper as the stuffing, coating the chicken in in bread crumbs and baking it all. The end result surprised me in that it looked very much like a sort of reverse version of an old classic with a lovely little twist on its flavours, but still tasting somewhat familiar. What am I talking about? Well, with its vibrant red colour, the 'Nduja stuffing looked a lot like (and surprisingly tasted like) the tomato-parmesan sauce/coasting we find on Chicken Parmesan. So that brings us to our first recipe.

1 - Food in Disguise - 'Reverse Chicken Parmesan' - Chicken Breast Stuffed with 'Nduja and Bocconcini

Serves 2

Ingredients

- 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1/2 cup breadcrumbs or panko
- 2-3 tbsp 'Nduja
- 2-3 bocconcini balls (if balls are about 1 inch thick, more if using the smaller kind)
- 1 tsp black pepper

Directions

- Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
- Carefully cut a slit along the side of the chicken breast, creating a pocket for the stuffing.
- In a bowl, mix together 'Nduja, bocconcini and black pepper with a fork. You'll have to mash the mixture somewhat forcefully to really soften up the cheese, so use a sturdy fork. As with anything, feel free to add some other spices or herbs to the stuffing; I would bet that some fresh basil would be nice. I don't recommend adding salt as the 'Nduja is pretty darn salty as is.
- Stuff each chicken breast with half the 'Nduja mixture.
- Coat each breast with egg and dredge in breadcrumbs until fully covered. (I forgot the egg part when I first made this, hence why in the picture, the chicken looks kinda naked).
- In a baking dish or on a baking sheet, place chicken in oven and bake for about 20 minutes, until coating is golden, stuffing is bubbly and chicken is cooked through.
- Serve hot with broccoli and potatoes (recipes to follow).

Next on our adventure in flavour discovery we have what I'd like to call 'unlikely pairings' in the flavour department. Think about food combos that you would never think to put together but when tried, they're awesome! Chocolate and bacon is a good example; you wouldn't think they go together, but we all know now that they work wonderfully together! Just ask Homer Simpson! There's also blueberries and blue cheese (Kari gave me that one), not to mention peanut butter and Sriracha (easy Satay!). I had a friend who refused to eat fruit and meat together because she just couldn't get her head around the concept. Too bad she had to miss out on Bacon-Wrapped Peaches! But I'm sure she isn't alone in her aversion to 'odd' food combos.

OK, so clearly bacon goes with everything. But broccoli, on the other hand, doesn't really go with a whole lot of other flavours; cheese sauce, beer, slivered almonds, there really isn't a whole lot, is there? And yet, with a the simple decision to add toasted pecans to a side dish of steamed broccoli and sauté the lot, culinary history was made. Well at least, it was made in my kitchen! As I was tossing in the pecans, I kept thinking this NEEDS something... What goes with broccoli that also goes with pecans? Now, I drew a blank when thinking of pairing something with broccoli, but I then thought about pecans and praline and what flavours praline and then, SKA-BOW!!!! It hit me! VANILLA!!!!! Now, I know what you're thinking, Dude, vanilla? As if! I'm outta here... But I kid you not, it works! It works BEAUTIFULLY! What's the worst part about broccoli? The bitterness, right? Well, really good vanilla extract (or vanilla bean I suppose) does a wonderful job of getting through the bitterness and adds an unexpected sweetness that broccoli has been missing for a long, long time. Of course, an added touch of butter helped it all come together as well.


A culinary odd couple!


























So, here's how to put together this surprisingly good side dish:

2 - Odd Flavour Combos - Broccoli with Pecans and Vanilla

Serves 2

Ingredients

- 1 head broccoli, cut into florets
- 1/2 cup pecan halves or pieces
- 1 tsp pure vanilla extract (you really don't want to use the fake stuff. Trust me.)
- 1 tsp butter
- salt and pepper to taste

Directions

-Toast pecans in a frying pan on medium-high heat or in the oven (which is hopefully already on and cooking chicken!). Be careful to ensure they don't burn! Set aside once toasted.
- Fill a pot with about half an inch/one centimetre of water and set to boil.
- Once water is boiling, steam broccoli for two or three minutes, until it's a vivid green.
- Strain broccoli in a colander and rinse with cold water. Set broccoli aside until chicken is nearly done.
- Once ready to serve, set a frying pan on medium-high heat and melt butter.
- Sauté broccoli and pecans in butter for a minute or two.
- Drizzle vanilla over top and continue cooking for another minute. Serve hot.

If broccoli and vanilla qualifies as our "never would have expected it to be good but it is" entry, our next exploration is along the lines of "why have I never tried this before?!?!?" It's amazing how we get caught up in the idea that the 'old favourites' have to follow a simple flavour profile. But they don't have to! Who says Shepherd's Pie have to be the same old boring beef, potatoes and corn? I don't!

And then there's our old friend Mashed Potatoes. Potatoes, milk and butter... whee... And yet we all have grown to be so comforted by our traditional flavour combos that we rarely think to get creative with these foodstuffs. Well, luckily most of us have a fridge and pantry full of flavours to raid. Now, think of potatoes and what might accentuate the flavour of your old school mash. Maybe some chili powder? Maybe some dried and powdered mushrooms? Bacon (duh)? That's what's great about potatoes: they're like a blank canvass for cooking. In this case, my own thoughts were of light and fresh and bold. So, I was hit with the inspiration of using lemon juice and rosemary in the mash. And then my inner hedonist added blue cheese... that jerk!

3 - Tweaking Comfort - Smashed Potatoes with Lemon, Rosemary and Blue Cheese

Serves 2

Ingredients

- 2-3 large potatoes, cleaned and cut into large chunks (peel if you want, I never do)
- 1/2 tsp fresh or dried rosemary leaves
- 1/4 cup milk
- 2 tsp butter
- 2 tsp blue cheese, crumbled (I prefer a milder cheese, like Danish blue)
- juice of 1/4 lemon
- salt and pepper to taste

Directions

- Set a pot of water to boil. Once boiling, add potatoes and boil for about 10-15 minutes, until potatoes are tender (if they can be easily pierced with a fork, they're ready).
- Drain potatoes in a strainer and return to empty pot.
- Stir in milk, butter, rosemary, lemon, salt and pepper.
- Mash roughly with a potato masher of sturdy fork. I like a rough texture (hence 'smashed' instead of mashed). If you really want a smoother texture, keep mashing until smooth. This might make the tougher texture of the rosemary stand out too much though.
- Serve with chicken and broccoli

A plate full of discoveries! - "Reverse Chicken Parmesan" (Chicken stuffed with 'Nduja and Bocconcini), Broccoli with Vanilla and Toasted Pecans, and Smashed Potatoes with Lemon, Rosemary and Blue Cheese.


And there you have it! An entire meal full of surprises and none of which are terribly difficult to put together. I hope you enjoy one or all of these dishes in the near future.

Cheers!