Mmmmm.. chicken and dumplings

Somewhere Michael got the idea he wanted chicken and dumplings. I have no idea where he even heard of it. He asked Rachael if she knew how to make them and she humphed. Rachael doesn’t believe in anything that takes more than twenty minutes to prepare. She especially doesn’t like two or three stage recipes. She does menu items that require quick easy steps. One, two, three, done - with each step requiring a corresponding number of minutes. I don’t blame her. She works all day and then comes home and fixes dinner. Nobody feels like working another hour and a half to get dinner. The good thing is that she doesn’t have hungry kids fussing to eat. Michael and I don’t care too much when we get around to eating. Often we don’t have supper until seven or after.

Hence. When Michael asked for chicken and dumplings it didn’t meet with a lot of enthusiasm on her part. The immediate response was, “Mom knows how to make them." So a little while ago I cleaned and cut up a chicken to put on for stewing. It is sending good smells all over the house right now and it still has to cook a while. I’m gonna be the World’s Number One Mother-in-law when Michael comes in the door and smells that!

I learned to make dumplings when I was really young. Dumplings are a good source of energy for poor hard working people. My grandma raised 13 kids on a poor farm in southern Ohio on the river. There were ten boys and grandpa believed in making them work. Grandma had to supply the energy for that. Dumplings are loaded with carbohydrates - a great source of energy. She could take stewed fruit or vegetables or meat and drop dumplings in to stretch them and add needed calories. She could stew one old hen that had quit laying and use the broth and shredded meat to feed the whole crew. It might not be good dietary consideration today, but in the early 1900’s it was a god-send for mothers of hungry, growing kids.

When I was little we were definitely better off financially that Grandma and Grandpa, but the thrifty measures learned in childhood stood my mother in good stead. Her favorite recipes were chicken and dumplings or peas and dumplings. And before you turn your nose up at peas and dumplings let me say you are missing a good meal. Take a couple cans of peas, juice and all. Heat them up in a good sized kettle, add a little chicken broth or milk or even water in a pinch with some additional salt and a good dollop of butter. Then when it boils carefully drop dumplings, either by teaspoonfuls or cut into squares, into the boiling liquid. Good stuff.

Okay, gotta go check my chicken.

Chicken and dumplings is at best a two phase dish and if you want to get fussy it’s a three step. First you clean and stew your chicken. If it is an old hen it has to stew on low heat for at least an hour and a half, maybe more. You also need to chop celery and onions in the stew water to add flavor and vitamins, but if you leave the skin and fat attached to the chicken you don’t need to add anything else for flavor. Many recipes today call for added butter. That is only because the recipe also calls for canned broth and the butter is needed for flavor. ( I get really disgusted with ‘chicken broth’ in a can. It has NO flavor because people are so stupidly worried about fat. Okay, don’t eat tons. But fat is very necessary for good flavor) Make your own with a fat old chicken!

When you have stewed the chicken for about 90 minutes or more the meat should be removed and placed in a separate covered dish. While it is cooling, take the big chunks of celery and onions out of the broth. You can strain it if you want. I just use a slotted spoon and scoop out most of it. Or you can leave them in. I happen to think they are unattractive after they have stewed for an hour and a half - kind of like greenish and gray rags.

When the chicken is cooled it is time to pull it off the bones. (This is the step I skipped. I figure it is easy enough to do that while you’re eating it!) To be fancy though you really need to remove the bones and cartilage and fat from the chicken. Pull it all apart and keep the bones separate from the rest. Dump the fat and skin in the same dish with the limp vegetables you removed from the broth. Stir it all together and moosh it up. When you feed the dogs, there is just enough to put a couple big spoonfuls in each dish. (Well, you gotta have four dogs… but you get the idea) They love it and the vegetables provide fresh vitamins. Set the chicken aside till just before you serve the dumplings. The cats like it, too.

The third stage is the dumpling stage. The nice thing, I think, is that the first step and the last step can be widely separated. Once you have the broth and meat prepared you can stick it in the fridge for hours or even until the next day.

My Mom taught me to make dumplings. I’ve read some other recipes that were chiefly flour and water, but I learned to use eggs and milk, flour and baking powder. Oh yes, a little salt, too. You make a heavy dough, slightly softer than cookie dough. It makes the best dumplings ever and takes about three minutes to stir up.

Bring the broth to a rolling boil-and I do mean rolling. The broth has to be boiling hard enough that you can drop the dumplings in without decreasing the heat. I’ve seen some people who roll out their dumpling dough and cut it into squares. That seems too much like noodles to me. Mom used a teaspoon and scooped a skimpy spoonful, cutting it against the side of the bowl. Wetting the spoon in the hot broth before you start makes the dumplings roll off smoothly when you dunk them in the broth. The dumplings will sink when you put them in, but soon pop to the top. When the dough is all gone, use a big spoon to gently fold them all under the hot broth once or twice, then carefully put the chicken back in the kettle. DON’T STIR. Fold carefully. You don’t want to break up the tender dumplings. It literally takes no more than ten minutes from start to finish when you make dumplings this way.

Mmmmm. I saved my carbs all day for this!! And it was worth it. We had chicken and dumplings, beets, peas and green olives. (Michael and I had the green olives. Rach doesn’t like them.) If you want you can put some vegetables in the broth and cook them just before you put the dumplings in. Peas, carrots, corn and green beans look especially pretty. Or you can serve vegetables on the side like we did.

And I was right. Michael did love them; so did Rach for that matter. She just didn’t want to make them.

getting ready for thanksgiving

I've discovered the joy of a convection oven! When R & M bought their new house, it came equipped with a Jenn-aire stove. It is an old one but it's fantastic. Jenn-aire, in case you don't know, is a high end type of cook stove. This one does everything except whistle "Dixie" when your roast is done. For one thing, it has removable burners on the right side that expose a built in griddle. The grease trap under the griddle almost cleans itself.

As far as I'm concerned the Best Feature is the center exhaust fan. I was excited when I got a hood over the range that sucked the hot steam up off the pots and out of the kitchen. THIS BABY has a built in exhaust between the burners in the center of the stove. You flip the switch and it sucks the steam down into the fan and shoots it out the vent. Amazing. I was skeptical at first but WOW! does it work! No steam in your face for one thing. No steam billowing out into the kitchen. And, especially(!), no greasy residue on the hood or the underside of the counters above the stove. There is a fan cover with a filter that pull out and pop into the dishwasher, so cleaning isn't a problem. (Not having that hood to scrub every whipstitch gets my vote every time) If you ever have a chance to get this feature in a new range, by all means, grab it! It takes a little room off your oven space, but it more than makes up for it in comfort and convenience.

The only thing that confused me was (and still is, truth be told) the oven. It does about three or four different things. I always had ovens that you stuck your meatloaf in and set the thermostat to 350, then let it cook. THIS oven you have to tell it what to do. At first every time Rachael left me with directions to put the roast in, I had to check what kind of cooking to use. (FYI: Most ovens are radient heat ovens. Okay, smirk if you will. I'm a dumb country kid--we only had one kind of oven. I told you that!)

This oven also cooks by convection. That is it cooks the food by circulating super hot air around it! I'm not sure how that is better than radient or if it is better even. But this morning at 5:45 AM I discovered a Use For It.

Making dry bread for dressing has always been a pain in my kitchen. Mostly that was because I always forgot about it until twenty minutes before I was ready to make the dressing--just about the time I pulled out the celery, onions, sage, and carrots to begin chopping! So we over stressed the breakfast toaster trying to put two loaves of bread through it in twenty mintues or we spread the bread all over the oven racks and turned the heat up. This sometimes resulted in charred edges on the bread, but don't be picky.

This morning-note this is Wednesday, a full day before we have to make dressing! This morning I said I would dry the bread today so it would be ready to turn into dressing tomorrow. It only took me sixty years to come up with such an outstanding idea. I was preparing to spread the bread out to dry when The Idea hit me. Why not put the bread through the convection oven! Hot dry air. Bread you want to be dry. Perfect combination. AND it saves Vondi having to stand up and turn bread and keep the cats away and remember to put the bread away again when its dry.

I spread the bread on a cookie sheet-kind of leaning them up against one another so the air could circulate. I set the oven to 250 and clicked the dial over to convection! Fifteen minutes later I have dry bread. No rotating slices or flipping slices or trips to the kitchen. No worrying about bread charring while it toasts in the oven. No keeping an eye on the cats so they don't decide to investigate the bread spread on the counter. No gathering it up later. it's all done, sitting there in the oven ready to use tomorrow!

Go buy yourself a $3000 or $4000 Jenn-aire cookstove. It's really handy for drying the bread for your Thanksgiving turkey dressing. Among other things.

sleeping

I was talking this afternoon to a friend who was saying she was having trouble getting up in the morning recently because she was getting up two hours earlier to take her husband to work. While we were on the subject I remembered a study I'd read several years ago about the natural rhythms of sleep. I went and looked it up so I could tell her the straight account.

Studies show that the length of sleep is not what causes us to feel refreshed upon waking. the key factor is the number of complete sleep cycles we enjoy.

Each sleep cycle contains five distinct phases, which exhibit different brain-wave patterns. For our purposes, it suffices to say that one sleep cycle lasts an average of 90 minutes: 65 minutes of normal, or non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep; 20 minutes of REM sleep (in which we dream); and a final 5 minutes of non-REM sleep. The REM sleep phases are shorter during earlier cycles (less than 20 minutes) and longer during the later ones (more than 20 minutes)

If we were to sleep completely naturally, with no alarm clocks or other sleep disturbances, we would wake up, on the average, after a multiple of 90 minutes--for example, after 4 1/2 hours, 6 hours, 7 1/2 hours, or 9 hours, but not after 7 or 8 hours which are not multiples of 90 minutes.

In the short period between cycles we are not actually sleeping; it is sort of twilight zone from which, if we are not disturbed (by light, cold, a full bladder) we move back into another 90 minute cycle.

A person who sleeps only four cycles (6 hours) will feel more rested than someone who has slept for 8 or 10 hours, but had not been allowed to complete the last cycle because of being awakened before it was completed....."

When I first read this I did a conscious trial of the theory and surprisingly, it worked. I would plan to be in bed at 10:30 if I needed to wake up at 6:00. This gave me a full five sleep cycles and I woke up naturally. For a while I did it consciously but then I guess it got to be a habit and I forgot about it.

Now that it all came back to mind I started reviewing my present sleep habit. And guess what! Even though I don't have to wake up at any special time and I can sleep when I want to, I'm naturally following that cycle pattern.

I've noted on here a lot of times that I'm frequently awake very early in the morning and I'm bright eyed and bushy tailed. Even though I go to bed a midnight I wake up at close to 4:30. That is only 4 1/5 hours but exactly 3 sleep cycles. And I'm awake.

Now I can put myself back to sleep at 4:30 if I try--get up and use the toilet wash my face with warm water, turn on the fan so it is chilly and I have to snuggle under a blanket to be warm--and I'll fall asleep for another 90 minutes. And when I wake up then I'm up for the day.

If you are getting up exhausted in the morning, try counting backward from your necessary wake-up time so that you will have a specific number of full sleep cycles. Plan your bed time 3, 4 1/2, 6, 71/2 or 9 hours earlier than your rising time. If you do that, I'll bet you wake up more rested...

Try it. it is kind of neat how it works.