Colored hens for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Thanksgiving?
I’m sure your girlfriend would love a pink bird for Valentine’s Day, right? Who wouldn’t!?
Now before the vegetarians get their feathers all ruffled (oh yeah, I went there….the pun couldn’t be avoided), check out what the farm has to say about the dyes:
From Gozzi’s Turkey Farm in Guilford, Connecticut, these turkeys are Gozzi Whites. Their feathers are known for being white and their meat is renowned throughout the region, to whom the Gozzis supply over 18,000 turkeys per year. Non-toxic, vegetable-based food dye is applied to their "blank canvases" to create these bright colors: it’s all topical and harmless.
Sitting down like in the picture above, they look pretty innocent, but you should really check them out, walking around, all fluffed up:
I suddenly really, really want a turkey.
And before it eventually ends up served with potatoes and gravy on my plate, I’ll take the one in turquoise!
Asian Chicken Noodle Soup – For when you want something a little different than “homestyle”
Last month I signed up for the Crazy Cooking Challenge and immediately kept an eye out for chicken noodle soup recipes. I knew I wanted something “different,” just for the sheer sake of this being your not-so-average cooking site, but really, there’s only so much you can twist and tweak a classic dish like chicken noodle soup. The requirements said it had to be soup…had to have noodles…and had to have chicken. No exceptions, so there would be no converting it into a hot pocket or casserole or anything “different.”
Or so I thought anyway.
That’s when I ran across Lynn’s Kitchen Adventures Asian version. It fits all the requirements, but isn’t exactly the standard soup you think of either. I probably wouldn’t have given it a try had it not seemed so perfect for this challenge either, so I’m glad it worked out this way. Turns out, it was delicious!
I must say, I really had my doubts about it, mostly because the ingredients are so simple and it doesn’t sit on the stove, simmering for a long period of time, which is a key step for soups in my mind. But anyway, let’s get to the food, huh?
Normally I would have homemade chicken stock in the freezer, but I’ve been looking for an excuse to use up the last of these little Knorr stock packs I received at BlogHer this year. They’re actually a lot better than I thought they would be and don’t carry the overly salted taste that most premade broths do.
And would you look at that?? I thought it’d be liquidy or maybe a dry block like bouillon cubes, but instead, they’re gel packs of sorts. Almost like strange jello shots….of chicken stock. Weird, but easily dissolved and mixed.
I think I may’ve mentioned that my can opener broke? Well I haven’t replaced it yet. Shhh. :P
If you’ve never cooked with rice noodles before, they’re quite amazing. They’re really rough and crumbly out of the package…pieces will fly everywhere, even if you’re careful. Add them to water for a few minutes, though, and they become really soft and bouncy. Yes, bouncy, as in, if you drain off the water and toss them on the table, you’ll see them bounce. Go ahead, do it!
Alright, so really, it doesn’t *look* like the most appetizing dish. It’s this sickly gray color that even with some photo editing, doesn’t really look much better.
Ew! But it smelled delicious and I was starving so at that point, I obviously carried on. Tossing on more color really helped, so I’m happy I had green onions.
Overall impression? It was better than I expected. It was really easy and fast to make, which made it even better. A little lemon or lime juice could really go a long way in kicking it up a notch in the flavor department, too.
Oh, and I had never used coconut milk before because well, I really dislike coconut, remember? When the can was opened and the smell hit me, I started having even more doubts, but it added a creaminess that straight broth couldn’t…and it didn’t actually *taste* like coconut, so once the smell died down, I was happy with the results, hehe. I added more liquid to my bowl than what’s showing in the pictures and oh my god, I was so stuffed by the end. I had no idea it would be so filling.
For the original recipe, check out Lynn’s Kitchen Adventures. She has a version that doesn’t use the coconut milk, too, which looks more like this:
My version of the recipe ended up being for a smaller batch. Take note I didn’t just cut the original in half, and actually used almost the full amount of some of the ingredients anyway.
Asian Chicken Noodle Soup
1 sheet of rice vermicelli noodles
3 cups chicken broth
2/3 can coconut milk
A large splash of soy sauce
One inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled
1 cup cooked chicken
1 cup finely sliced cabbage/carrot slaw mix
1/2 teaspoon chili garlic sauce, tweaked to taste
Handful of diced green onions
Turducken Week – How to put a bird in a bird in a bird…
My first encounter with turducken was in 2006. I know this, because I blogged about it. I had seen it on an American-German-Dutch woman’s site and was in absolute awe. I was new to the blogging scene, both in terms of writing and reading others’ really, and while I thought I’d forget about this quirky poultry concoction, I didn’t.
Fast forward to 2009 and I made my own for the first time. I didn’t have a cooking blog at the time and the pictures I took were just to share with friends….and maybe to feel like I had proof that “holy cow, I just deboned three birds after having never deboned a single one before, stuffed them inside each other, and then cooked the whole thing without really knowing what the heck I was doing.”
(If you don’t want to see raw birds, this is the part where you skip to the bottom or to another post. I left most of the pictures small for you squeamish ones….just click them to see the large versions.)
It wasn’t until this came out of the oven that I was in awe. Check out all that crispy, delicious skin with blackened spices. Mmm, mmm, mmm.
In the last couple years, especially this year, I’ve seen soooo many turduckens and spins on the turducken. It’s everywhere! Everybody and their dog knows what a turducken is and wants to layer this dish or that to call it a ‘ducken of sorts.
So this week, I’m going to share several of those with you. The big cooking holidays are over for the year, but maybe you’ll find another reason to put some food in another food in another food in another food….
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