When Will saw me starting to steam broccoli for this dish, he couldn’t help but let out a little cheer. It’s his very favorite vegetable — and has been since he was a toddler. Even though he’s loved it for much of his six years, I am always caught off guard by his excitement. When I was a child broccoli wasn’t high on my list. Unless it was drowned in cheese sauce, of course, but that kind of defeats the purpose. No?

But even though his enthusiasm for broccoli surprises me, I try really hard never to let my preferences color Will’s or Paige’s. I never ever want them to not try something — or worse, to dislike something — because I’m not as excited by it. I’d much rather they make their own decisions about foods — and they do.

These days though, I do like broccoli too. But I especially like it when it’s tossed with a delicious sauce like in this Baked Ginger Sesame Chicken and Broccoli. It’s a sweet-salty-savory dish with Asian inspiration. The marinated chicken soaks in all the flavors of the marinade, and then the steamed broccoli is enhanced by a quick toss with some reserved marinade, which really ties it all together. Read the rest of this entry…

The other night, when I was at Cate‘s house for our Blogger Thanksgiving fest, we were reheating a batch of these Homemade Seasoned Baked Chicken Nuggets that I made for the kids. Cate asked me if they were done right after I’d checked on them, and I said “No, they aren’t humming yet.”

It never occurred to me that would be a weird thing to say. It never occurred to me that the idea of food humming is something that not everyone thinks. Or hears. Or says. Yea. But Patsy, Joanne and Cate set me straight. It’s definitely a Sarah-ism. (In my defense, that’s really what I look for whenever I reheat food — the hum of sizzling warmed food.)

So, about the chicken nuggets … honestly, I had never thought of making my own until a recent Skinny Chicken Nuggets post on Tablespoon set off a wild obsession with baked chicken nuggets for me. My kids love chicken nuggets (I think it’s written somewhere in the kid handbook that they have to), and I like feeding them good, wholesome, homemade food that doesn’t take long to make.

Ding. Ding. Ding! We have a winner. Read the rest of this entry…

Can I tell you something? Lately, I have had to work on meal plans and budgeting for food. I simply have to spend less on what we eat.

For awhile there, my freelance writing business was booming. In fact, it was so big that I ended up letting go of a few lower paying clients. But this summer, one of my clients cut my workload (and my pay) in half. At first, it was kind of an abstract this sucks kind of thing.

But this month is when it really hit me. My income was substantially reduced, and suddenly I need to budget really well again. That means no more trips for after-school lattes for me and cake pops for the kids. That means using coupons again and paying attention to the sales flyers. That means seeking out work and making due in the meantime. (Anyone looking for a recipe developer/journalist/writer/blogger?)

As a result, I’ve been looking to less-expensive meals that are both easy and meet our expectation for really delicious dinners. Chicken drumsticks are a great budget-stretching meat to have in the rotation. Not to be confused with the mini ones that are a popular game day food, chicken drumsticks are larger and meatier. Two pounds of drumsticks with a couple of sides is perfect for my family, though you might want to go to three pounds if you are big eaters. The glaze recipe could be stretched to glaze another pound of drumsticks — or it’s easy to make a little extra.

These Baked Sticky Orange Chicken Drumsticks are delicious. They go perfectly with Kale and Bacon Fried Rice and a salad. And it can all be ready in under 30 minutes — totally easy too.

Also see Crunchy Oven-Fried Chicken Drumsticks.

I came up with this recipe after spying a similar one in an old food magazine. The original recipe from Every Day Food called for basting with marmalade only. However, I find marmalade to be too tart for our tastes. But combining the marmalade with soy sauce and rice vinegar, the sharp tartness is toned down and a richness is added without losing the orange flavor. The reaction was huge — everyone loved the sticky coating.

Do you have to watch your food budget too? How do you do it?

Read the rest of this entry…

Leftovers are a challenge in our house. If it’s pasta, you can pretty much guarantee that if there’s anything leftover (and usually there isn’t) then the kids will be all over it. It’s perfect for warming up and packing into Will’s lunchbox. But soup? It’s 50-50. Sometimes that’s great for lunch too but other times we don’t want to look at leftover soup. I’ve frozen it in the past, but we rarely go back to it. And leftover chicken, steak and other meats? It’s 50-50 on those too.

As a result, I try hard to not have leftovers from dinner. I make just enough. But sometimes leftovers can’t be avoided. For instance, earlier this week I was working on a recipe for Tablespoon that called for using leftover roasted chicken. I ended up buying a whole roasted chicken at the grocery store but only used a portion of it to finish off the recipe. A little of the chicken became Paige’s lunch one day, but there was still a good amount left. I hated seeing it there, knowing that it would go to waste if I didn’t do something.

Of course, I didn’t want to just eat it. With chicken especially, I am much happier when it becomes part of a whole new meal. Putting it on a salad was an option. But I had nachos on the brain and I’ve been on a long quest to make chicken work on nachos. Often, I feel like when you pair chicken with traditional nacho toppings it ends up seeming out of place — like your Thanksgiving dinner got into an argument with fiesta night. The flavors is just so different.

But I had an epiphany recently. If the chicken’s flavor was more Tex-Mex then it would blend in better. It’s a matter of narrowing the gap between the flavors. So I tried it (what good is a theory if you don’t?). It worked. All it takes is shredding the chicken and mixing it with a little salsa to make it a perfect nacho topping. Sweet.

Making these nachos, which make a perfect easy dinner, is simple as can be. Tortilla chips are topped with the chicken mixture, a load of black beans and red peppers. Then it’s all baked with a blanket of cheddar. Serve it with salsa, sour cream, guacamole or whatever you love with your nachos.

Did I mention that it’s ready in a mere 15 minutes, start to finish? Go ahead. Try them tonight. You totally have time.

What do you do with your leftovers?

Read the rest of this entry…

Ahoy, me hearties. Today be buccanneer tide at me office. Me work shipmates an’ I dressed up like sea dogs. Thar be sea dog foods, games an’ treasure. It be a great, grand day.

I’m a big, huge, gigantic pirate fan. After hearing legends as a child of Captain Kidd allegedly burying treasure off the New England coast, I just fell in love with the lore and romantic pirate histories. Of course, the reality was far less romantic. My interest is more Captain Jack Sparrow than real-life pirates. (And for the record, I know that real life pirates are nasty … nothing like Jack.)

When my editor suggested we have a pirate party to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day this week, I was all for it. I might have yelped in glee, but who’s counting? Today was our party (though the actual day was Sept. 19).

This was our treasure chest — filled with a few fun prizes for the pirate trivia game (I won!) and the hook game (we had to use a homemade hook hand to pick up five pretzels. That takes skills. Did I mention that my coworkers are awesome?

Oh, and of course we dressed up. Why would anyone skip the opportunity to dress like a pirate? Arggggg!

For my contribution to lunch, I brought a plate of Chicken Daggers, a fun take on skewers that’s fashioned after daggers (as in the knife). My coworkers brought fun pirate foods like anti-scurvy fruit salad and walk the plank cookies.

Making them is simple – you marinate strips of chicken (I cut mine from chicken breasts) until they are filled with flavor. Then you thread the chicken onto skewers with a thick slice of pepper and a pineapple chunk (the dagger handle). Once that’s all done, all you need to do is cook them.

Fun, right?

And hey, these aren’t just for Talk Like a Pirate Day. They’re allow a perfect food for a Halloween party. Think how awesome the daggers would look on a spooky buffet.

Read the rest of this entry…

Does this plate look familiar? It should. It’s the same plate from the Herbed Grilled Red Potatoes, just shown at a different angle. Generally, I don’t end up photographing two new dishes at the same time, but when this super simple chicken dish worked out so well that I wanted to share it.

But I have to warn you. This recipe is so simple, it almost doesn’t need to be presented in recipe format. But I think that sometimes even simple things are easiest to glance and cook with so the recipe is below. Look, it’s worth it.

Grilled Caesar Chicken Strips are a new take on the classic Italian dressing-marinated grilled chicken. Basically, you make a really flavorful, easy and fast chicken tender dish (strips of chicken breasts can be used instead, if you can’t find chicken tenders) and marinate it in Caesar dressing. Then it’s grilled to perfection.

They are just perfect served with a salad. Though, it doesn’t have to be a Caesar salad (but that could be amazing).

Read the rest of this entry…

My grandmother was an amazing, vivacious, full-of-life woman who loved days at the beach, fresh corn bought from farms in the summer (long before it was en vogue again to do so) and green grapes. She did not, however, love to cook. Though she could make a mean spaghetti sauce and great lasagna and she cooked almost every day, it just didn’t fall into the category of things she loved to do. She did it because she had to — to feed her family.

A while back, I was gifted my grandmother’s 1950 edition of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook. It was one of only a few cookbooks that she owned, and is well-worn, with a peeling binding to prove it (any tips on fixing that?). Inside the book is a glimpse into cooking more than 60 years ago, something I love reading about. I have a whole collection of mid-century cookbooks and find them fascinating. But this cookbook is more than that … it’s a glimpse into how my grandmother cooked when she was about my age. Along with the occasional notes in the margin are recipe clippings from magazines and handwritten recipes that she stuck in there over the years.

It was in the pages of that cookbook that I found a slip of paper with a recipe for Chicken Cordon Blue written on it in my grandmother’s handwriting. Immediately I recognized the small paper, torn from the camel-colored notebook that she carried with her everywhere. It was in that notebook that she wrote grocery lists, things to remember and recipes given from neighbor to neighbor in the course of conversation.

I can practically feel the pebbled vinyl (I think) exterior as I write about that notebook, which was omnipresent in her purse. But while I knew the handwriting instantly, I couldn’t remember her ever making this dish — at least not from scratch. Nonetheless, I decided to try making this recipe first.

As these things go — attempting something I haven’t made before with sparse directions — I started making this a little later than I should have, misjudging how long prepping it would take. And when I got stumped on a step (how much oil should I be using anyway?!?), a few rushed phone calls yielded me the answer … and confirmation that this wasn’t my grandmother’s Chicken Cordon Blue, but rather likely a recipe she got from Mrs. S, the neighbor across the street.

I had to laugh when I realized that it wasn’t my grandmother’s own recipe, especially since that thought had been in my head the whole time. I mean, there is no way she would have used this many dishes and taken this many steps to make dinner (unless it was lasagna … but that’s different). No matter. It’s a great recipe for a delicious dish — and one that I plan to make again and again. Read the rest of this entry…

Let’s talk meatballs today. Frankly, I think meatballs can be challenging to make since there is so much that can go wrong. Too dry, too crisp, too flavorless … these are all common problems, and you have to do your best to avoid them.

Then there is the cooking method controversy. Should they be baked? Fried? Both? I’ve always been in the just-bake-em club. And that works. They get crisp on the outside,  tender on the inside. And then you toss them into sauce for a few minutes before serving them and it’s just perfect.

Except, it’s not perfect. The baking method works great for beef-based meatballs and reasonably well for turkey meatballs. But chicken meatballs are really hit and miss from the oven.

When I visited Minneapolis in November, I discovered how amazing a well-cooked chicken meatball can be. While I was there, I had the most amazing meatballs I’ve ever had. They were made from chicken and foie gras, and were buttery, soft and almost airy. Seriously, the only word to adequately describe them is ethereal.

At the time, I thought that restaurant had some secret – something that made their amazing meatballs out of reach for the common cook. Honestly, I know I will never duplicate the meatballs entirely since foie gras isn’t something I have extensive access to.

But the texture? That sublime light texture? I can do it. And although it’s not the same amazing flavor, these meatballs have a lot of flavor of their own. It’s not the same, but it’s still fabulous — the best chicken meatballs I’ve ever made. And the secret to getting there? 1) Cooking them on the stovetop — part frying, part braising (or is this boiling? I think it’s braising, but that term always trips me up). And 2) ketchup in the meatball. No, really. It doesn’t make the meatballs taste like ketchup, but does add this hint of flavor that you aren’t expecting. Yum.

Thank you, Cate, for introducing me to these fabulous chicken meatballs. Read the rest of this entry…

We’ve had three big snowstorms in as many weeks here — and yesterday there was over two feet to dig out. I haven’t seen snow like this in years. It reminds me of a massive storm when I was in elementary school that knocked out power for days and closed schools for a week or so. There’s just so much snow — we’re out of places to shovel it to.

Yesterday morning, before I had my morning coffee or ate a stitch of breakfast, I went outside in the heavy snow to shovel for my dogs. My back door — the one the dogs use — wouldn’t open with the heavy snow outside and even if it did, they couldn’t walk in snow over their head. So I had to trek in waist-high snow (we still have lots of snow from the last two storms) to the back to shovel the stairs, porch and a little area for the dogs to walk in.

The tail-end of the storm -- the photo is fuzzy because it was still snowing really hard.

Walking through (in?) snow that deep was amazing. As adults, we don’t often get that feeling of snow creeping up so high that walking becomes a herculean effort. And in some ways, it was overwhelming too — especially when I paused to consider that I couldn’t even see our road for much of the day.

There’s some ironic contrast here that I intended to write about Pineapple Chicken yesterday – a bright, sunny, vibrant dish – on a day that was darkened by lingering clouds and mounds of snow so high that I can barely see over them. Of course, after shoveling the roughly 29-inches of freshly fallen snow, I was too tired to do anything. Thank goodness for good neighbors and a Good Samaritan who all pitched in to get my driveway — and my neighbor’s — cleared. I really don’t know what would have happened if I had to actually shovel our entire long, wide driveway by myself.

Switching gears, let’s talk chicken. Pineapple Chicken. I had some chicken in the fridge begging to be used the other day. I’d taken it out by mistake and needed to use it or face wasting it. And I really didn’t want to waste it. So, while picking up a few things at the grocery store, the idea for this recipe started to form — chicken, pineapple, a little teriyaki… all served over fluffy rice. I love sweet flavors mingling with savory, and especially fruits like pineapple paired with chicken. Read the rest of this entry…

Easy Low-Fat Salt and Pepper Chicken, Take Two

If you are a longtime reader of Sarah’s Cucina Bella, you might remember my recipes for Easy Low-Fat Salt and Pepper Chicken Breasts. It was a long post with adorable pictures of the kids, and a bad picture of the chicken. On Tuesday, I had the chance to reshoot this recipe with the help of professionals to figure out how to take something basic like this and make it look fabulous. The photo above is the result.

When I created my (ridiculously easy) recipe for Salt and Pepper Chicken, I was clueless how to make it look tasty in a photograph. I ended up tossing one piece on a white plate and snapping a picture.

The original photo ... Would you crave that?

And did it look irresistible? Like that special, easy recipe that everyone should have in their back pocket to make when you have no time to cook dinner or when you need a lightly seasoned chicken breast for topping a salad or drizzling with an extra special sauce? Um. No. That’s the original photo at the right … See how it looked more like a bland piece of chicken? The darkness and poor lighting didn’t help anything at all. I doubt anyone gave it a second look.

As a food writer who has had to learn to shoot photographs of the dishes and recipes I create, it’s been an uphill battle. This photograph frustrated me, but I just wasn’t sure what to do about it.

Yea.

So, when my buddies (and coworkers!) at Tablespoon asked me to choose a couple potential recipes for my photography lesson with General Mills pros on my recent trip, this one topped the list. Fortunately, they agreed. Read the rest of this entry…