Harper's Kitchen: Dumplings!
Mar. 6th, 2006 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kniteracyHarper's Kitchen: Dumplings!
Last night, I roasted a chicken, a nice, reasonably sized one, stuffed with peppers and onions and basted with homemade teriyaki sauce (soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic powder, onion juice). I wanted a taste similar to the chicken rice I grew to love in Singapore, so I made rice not in salty water but in salty chicken stock with a pinch of coriander.
There are only three of us, and although the chicken was yummy, it was slightly undercooked, which meant quite a lot of meat left on the bone. And so of course, what do you do when you have a big honking chicken carcass, plus an extra leg quarter, left ovre after dinner? You put it in the chicken broth you cooked that rice in, yes you do, and you put it on the hob, in a covered pot with a teeny tiny steamhole, at a very low simmerboil -- all night. Oh yes.
It came off the boil this morning, and I've been wondering how to serve it up for dinner. There just isn't enough chicken for a stew, and G hates stews anyway. I don't really care for thin soups, but putting the leftover rice from last night into today's soup would feel like we were having the exact same dinner all over again. Usually, I put stewed tomatoes in chicken soup, but I don't have any, and ih. I'm not in the mood for stewed tomatoes.
But then it came to me. As I stirred the cooling pot and looked up onto the kitchen bookshelf for inspiration, a single word entered my head and Would Not Leave. Oh, it's a word that made me happy in childhood, and it still makes me happy today. Yes, yes, yes, in Harper's head was the word, and the word was
Dumplings!
We will all have chicken and dumplings when she comes!
Right, so you UK people know, these are not those big cut dumplings you serve with beef stews over here. These will be drop dumplings, very simply made.
Before I get started on the dumplings, I'll cool down the broth and get rid of the chicken bones. My grandmother never used to do this in her chicken and dumplings; people just knew to work around the bones, but I think it's only fair to remove the bones and it doesn't take all that much time. There will still probably remain some bone bits in there, so if you're eating this, be careful!
Once I've got all the bones out, I'll add more chicken to the broth, because even though there was a decent amount of meat left over from last night, it's not enough to feed us all for dinner. I've got a package of chicken breasts in the tiny freezer bit of our fridge freezer, and I'll thaw that and add it to the broth. That broth will need to be renewed with a little bit of water and possibly a cube of chicken stock, and the new chicken will have to simmer in for a couple of hours. Some people take out the chicken before they put the dumplings in, but I don't usually do that.
Then it's time to make the dumplings. Now, these are good old fashioned Southern US dumplings, and I'm going to tell you how my grandmother made them and then how I'll have to change that recipe to work over here.
You need two cups of flour, a half-teaspoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon at least of salt, a few tablespoons of shortening, and at least half a cup of buttermilk.
Now, it's hard to get buttermilk and proper shortening over here, so I'm going to use butter and sweet milk*. Basically, you add the dry ingredients together, then cut in the butter or shortening until you have a coarse, grainy texture. Then, you stir in the milk until you have a not-too-runny doughy texture.
At this point, the soup itself should be boiling again. Pat the dough out 'til its about a quarter inch thick or so. Pinch off pieces of dough maybe as long as the length from fingertip to the first joint of your thumb, and drop them into the boiling water. Turn the heat down to a mediumish level and let the dumplings cook for 8-10 minutes. And then you have delicious chicken and dumplings!
Traditionally, chicken and dumplings is seasoned with an awful lot of black pepper. I'm not so much into black pepper, though I do put a little in. I like to season it with savoury herbs like sage or even oregano, adding the pepper only for taste. Then if people want seriously black pepper chicken and dumplings, they can pepper it up all they want at the table.
*Sweet milk is just what you call regular milk in a culture that uses a lot of buttermilk in cooking. My grandmother used more buttermilk than sweet milk when she cooked, so when she made a cake, she always had to make sure she had sweet milk on hand. I am pretty sure this construction is regional to the Southern US.
Last night, I roasted a chicken, a nice, reasonably sized one, stuffed with peppers and onions and basted with homemade teriyaki sauce (soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic powder, onion juice). I wanted a taste similar to the chicken rice I grew to love in Singapore, so I made rice not in salty water but in salty chicken stock with a pinch of coriander.
There are only three of us, and although the chicken was yummy, it was slightly undercooked, which meant quite a lot of meat left on the bone. And so of course, what do you do when you have a big honking chicken carcass, plus an extra leg quarter, left ovre after dinner? You put it in the chicken broth you cooked that rice in, yes you do, and you put it on the hob, in a covered pot with a teeny tiny steamhole, at a very low simmerboil -- all night. Oh yes.
It came off the boil this morning, and I've been wondering how to serve it up for dinner. There just isn't enough chicken for a stew, and G hates stews anyway. I don't really care for thin soups, but putting the leftover rice from last night into today's soup would feel like we were having the exact same dinner all over again. Usually, I put stewed tomatoes in chicken soup, but I don't have any, and ih. I'm not in the mood for stewed tomatoes.
But then it came to me. As I stirred the cooling pot and looked up onto the kitchen bookshelf for inspiration, a single word entered my head and Would Not Leave. Oh, it's a word that made me happy in childhood, and it still makes me happy today. Yes, yes, yes, in Harper's head was the word, and the word was
Dumplings!
We will all have chicken and dumplings when she comes!
Right, so you UK people know, these are not those big cut dumplings you serve with beef stews over here. These will be drop dumplings, very simply made.
Before I get started on the dumplings, I'll cool down the broth and get rid of the chicken bones. My grandmother never used to do this in her chicken and dumplings; people just knew to work around the bones, but I think it's only fair to remove the bones and it doesn't take all that much time. There will still probably remain some bone bits in there, so if you're eating this, be careful!
Once I've got all the bones out, I'll add more chicken to the broth, because even though there was a decent amount of meat left over from last night, it's not enough to feed us all for dinner. I've got a package of chicken breasts in the tiny freezer bit of our fridge freezer, and I'll thaw that and add it to the broth. That broth will need to be renewed with a little bit of water and possibly a cube of chicken stock, and the new chicken will have to simmer in for a couple of hours. Some people take out the chicken before they put the dumplings in, but I don't usually do that.
Then it's time to make the dumplings. Now, these are good old fashioned Southern US dumplings, and I'm going to tell you how my grandmother made them and then how I'll have to change that recipe to work over here.
You need two cups of flour, a half-teaspoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon at least of salt, a few tablespoons of shortening, and at least half a cup of buttermilk.
Now, it's hard to get buttermilk and proper shortening over here, so I'm going to use butter and sweet milk*. Basically, you add the dry ingredients together, then cut in the butter or shortening until you have a coarse, grainy texture. Then, you stir in the milk until you have a not-too-runny doughy texture.
At this point, the soup itself should be boiling again. Pat the dough out 'til its about a quarter inch thick or so. Pinch off pieces of dough maybe as long as the length from fingertip to the first joint of your thumb, and drop them into the boiling water. Turn the heat down to a mediumish level and let the dumplings cook for 8-10 minutes. And then you have delicious chicken and dumplings!
Traditionally, chicken and dumplings is seasoned with an awful lot of black pepper. I'm not so much into black pepper, though I do put a little in. I like to season it with savoury herbs like sage or even oregano, adding the pepper only for taste. Then if people want seriously black pepper chicken and dumplings, they can pepper it up all they want at the table.
*Sweet milk is just what you call regular milk in a culture that uses a lot of buttermilk in cooking. My grandmother used more buttermilk than sweet milk when she cooked, so when she made a cake, she always had to make sure she had sweet milk on hand. I am pretty sure this construction is regional to the Southern US.
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Date: 2006-03-06 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 06:50 pm (UTC)