Spring greens with chicken in peanut sauce

A friend and I went to the last Winter Pantry at Schlafly Bottleworks today. It's their continuation of their summer Wednesday night Farmers Market.


As I hoped, I brought home a big bag of spring greens -- chard, baby kale, and beet tops. We've been practicing a dish for a couple of weeks using spinach that we wanted to try with greens.



There were four kinds of leaves, I'm not really sure which is which. Numbering from the left, I think 1 and 2 are the chard because of the deeply colored veins. 3 is the most bitter of the greens. But I don't know whether that's the kale or the beet top. [Edit 7/06/08: now that I've had a whole spring's eating of greens, I'm pretty sure that left to right is chard, beet green, collard green, and kale].

We learned recently that chard and beets are the same species, Beta vulgaris. Varieties cultivated for leaves are called chard, varieties cultivated for roots are called beets.

The recipe originated with the booklet, Stir-Fry Recipes: Light and Easy Recipes, that came with R's new wok. But we've now modified it beyond all recognition and we're still thinking that it could use more greens and fewer peanuts. Here's the version we made tonight.

Spring greens with chicken in peanut sauce
Greens
5 cups baby greens, washed, spun dry, and put in the refrigerator for awhile to dry further, coarsely chopped

Chicken & marinade
1 boneless, skinless chicken breast, sliced into thin pieces about 1 inch long
1 Tbl chicken stock
2 tsp hoisin sauce

Peanut Sauce
2 Tbl reduced-sodium soy sauce
2 Tbl chicken broth
2 Tbl peanut butter
1 Tbl hoisin sauce
2 tsp honey

Stir-fry
2 oz dried Asian noodles (broken angel hair pasta works, too)
1/4 large onion, chopped
scant 1/2 cup of unsalted roasted peanuts
sunflower oil as needed for stir-frying (we don't measure this)

Prepare the greens so that they have time to dry in the refrigerator for awhile before cooking (dry ingredients work much better in stir-fries).

Marinate the chicken for 10 minutes to an hour in the broth and hoisin sauce.

Whisk the sauce ingredients together and set aside.

Cook the noodles in boiling water, uncovered, until just tender. Drain, then toss with oil in the cooking pot. Put the lid on to keep them a little warm and set aside.

Stir-fry the chicken for a minute. Add the onions and continue stir-frying until the chicken is opaque. Add the greens and stir-fry until they wilt, about a minute or two more. Stir in the peanuts, noodles, and sauce. Stir until everything is combined and hot.



We used angel hair pasta the first few times we made this until we found Asian noodles at Global Foods Market. We use one and a half of the bird's nests of noodles. They untangle themselves in the boiling water. We found that the Asian noodles have a fuller flavor than the angel hair pasta. We like the Asian noodles better in this dish.


If we're both hungry, this is two servings (yep, that means we eat 2 1/2 cups of greens each!). This time we have a snack-sized portion leftover for tomorrow.

Spring floods

Flooding is a sign of spring we would rather not see, but we got a big one on the Meramec and some of the other rivers south of us after about 36 hours of rain earlier in the week.





My favorite place to watch the Meramec, any time of the year, is at Emmenegger Park in Kirkwood. The water is often low enough to walk out on a gravel strip into the river. Today, though, the parking lot is under water. I couldn't get closer than 200 yards to the parking area and trail entrance. That gravel strip is probably under 15 feet of rapidly moving water right now.





The bathrooms were once part of the swimming pool complex. Easy to see why they moved the pool to higher ground. Only birds and fish are swimming there today.





Lovely weather for ducks...and geese.





We're thrilled that Highway 44 is going to stay open. Our family Easter celebration in Washington this afternoon was going to be quite an adventure to get to if it had closed.

Rooting stem cuttings

Today is a rare spring-like day, even if there are still patches of snow on the ground. My unhappy herbs did manage to survive the winter, just long enough that I could use this warm day to take stem cuttings so that I won't have to buy new plants this spring. I learned everything I know about rooting stem cuttings in water from Easy Plant Propagation by Nancy J. Ondra.




This is a sprig of apple mint that I cut from my plant.



And here's the same sprig, with the lower leaves removed, ready for rooting.



I root my cuttings in mason jars filled with water. A square of chicken wire forms a structure that keeps the leaves out of the water.





The peppermint leaves are too small to catch on the chicken wire, so R made me a new structure out of hardware cloth.



Works perfectly!







I also took stem cuttings from basil and sage. I've done the basil and mints before, but not the sage, so I don't know if it will work or not. After I took this picture, I moved the jars to the back of the bay window--the cuttings want "bright but indirect light." I'll change the water every few days. In a couple of weeks, I should start to see roots. In four or five weeks, I'll be able to pot these. I'll have more plants than I want to pot, so if you're in the St. Louis area, let me know if you want a rooted cutting or two.

Camellias

Mid-February in Missouri means that the camellias are blooming in the Linnean House at the Missouri Botanical Garden.





Less dramatically, except when you think about the season, the witch hazels are blooming outdoors.

Locavore

Listening to The Splendid Table on my mp3 player during a workout a couple of weeks ago, I learned about their new project: Locavore Nation. They asked 15 people across the country to try to get 80% of their food from local sources in 2008 and to write about their experiences. I've been following the adventures of the Central Region Locavores. It's a struggle for us to get local fresh produce this time of year! But, lots of other things are available.

I went to Local Harvest Grocery yesterday with a couple of friends. It's in St. Louis just south of Tower Grove Park. I bought locally made balsamic herb mustard (used it last night in a sauce for chicken and it was amazing!), honey, and salsa. I also bought agave nectar, which wasn't local but I'd been hearing about it as an alternate sweetener. We really liked it both in hot tea and in that chicken sauce.

As far as local produce, about all they had was dried mushrooms, hydroponic lettuce, and sprouts, which were very expensive. Does anyone have advice about growing your own sprouts? I'd like to try that.

We use a grilled chicken breast recipe from the July & August 2007 Cook's Illustrated magazine. They hide their recipes behind a firewall, which makes them tempting to steal -- I found it here online. I changed the sauce part of the recipe enough to make it my own, I think, and managed to reduce the fat and increase the flavor.

Sauce for Chicken:
1 Tbl olive oil
1 Tbl Terrapin Ridge Balsamic & Herb Mustard
1 Tbl lemon juice
1/4 tsp agave nectar
1 clove minced garlic
2 Tbl minced flat leaf parsley
Salt and pepper

Whisk the liquid ingredients together until well-blended. Add the garlic, parsley, and salt and pepper to taste. Pour over grilled chicken breasts. We usually split one piece, these days, and don't use all the sauce. I mix the leftover sauce with yogurt cheese and a little mayo to make a sandwich spread for the leftover chicken.

Mexican-inspired stuffing

Stuffing and its culinary cousin, bread pudding, are my favorite adult comfort foods. Stuffing seems underutilized when it only comes out on holidays. I'm calling this "stuffing," although I know it's really "dressing" but that's what I put on salads!

I recently learned that my new bread machine can be used to bake Savory Bread Stuffing. That thrilled me because "fix the oven" has yet to make it to the top of the priority list in our new house, so my choices were going without or making tiny one-serving versions in a miniature loaf pan using the toaster-oven. I may continue to use the bread machine when I do have an oven -- it uses less energy and, if I should want it in the summer, it doesn't heat up the house.

So, when I end up with too much bread, accidentally or on purpose, I make bread stuffing. The recipe is open to endless variations -- I usually let the variety of bread I'm cubing suggest possibilities. Today's purpose was to use up asiago sun-dried tomato bread. I usually make that to go with chili, so I was thinking Mexican as I invented this version.

Using the recipe linked to above as my base, I substituted red pepper for celery and added a chipotle pepper to the vegetables. I always use a couple of tablespoons of oil (in this case, olive) instead of the stick of butter and my stuffing comes out nice and moist and much healthier. I seasoned it with cumin and stirred in a couple of tablespoons of grated asiago cheese.

Stuffing makes a warm, nourishing accompaniment to the main dish salad that my New Year's Resolution has me eating for lunch most days.

Unhappy herbs

My herbs are failing to thrive. These were stem cuttings from my potted herbs that grew on the deck this summer. I rooted them in water and planted them in small pots in October. That went well, but they haven't grown much since. This window seems better equipped to keep plants alive than to force them to grow.




So, I'm going to try something different in 2008. I'll make my stem cuttings in late June, pot the plants when they root, and leave the plants outdoors to grow for the rest of the summer. Then, I should have large herbs to move inside before the frost, keeping me supplied with fresh herbs through the winter months.