A different kind of chicken casserole
… a creamy chicken casserole with a bread topping sprinkled with shredded cheese. “Confetti” describes the just-melted shredded cheese on top. I kinda overmelted the cheese on mine so the “confetti” became a “melt-y.” The difference in looks notwithstanding, the result was wonderful. It has the feel of home-cooking written all over it. And the bread topping? It’s oil-free.
To make this baked chicken dish, I had to make some substitutions in deference to the low-fat diet that we’re trying to maintain at home. Yogurt for cream of chicken soup; low-fat milk for regular milk.
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Salmon salad with mango-lemon dressing
Have I ever mentioned that salmon is my favorite fish in the whole world? It is, actually. Not tuna, not tilapia, not bangus, but salmon — smoked, preferably, but quite alright just fresh. My daughters are very much aware of my preference that they decided to give me Nick Nairn’s Top 100 Salmon Recipes cookbook for Christmas. This salad has been adapted from a recipe in Mr. Nairn’s book.
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Bear with me… the cookbook has passed dream stage
It’s been rather hard to pull myself together to open this blog after what happened last Friday. You’ll have to read it in my other blog. I suggest that you do so that you can better understand the rest of this entry.
Done? Okay…
My first reaction was to put Pinoy Cook on semi-retirement. Meaning, no updating to wrap up the work on the cookbook that I first mentioned more than a year ago. The writing part wasn’t so hard, taking better photos was harder. It didn’t help either that I couldn’t — still can’t — work fulltime on the book. I have a family — a hungry husband and kids, I have a twice weekly op-ed column, I write for a magazine, I teach “Internet and Law” to high school seniors and there’s also an IT Guild which is like a combination of IT and high school journalism. But the most trying part was writing the cookbook and keeping this blog up-to-date. It was like writing two cookbooks at the same time.
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Book review: Nigel Slater’s ‘The Kitchen Diaries’
I’d like to think that Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries is an attempt to redefine cookbook writing. It is more about sharing rather than trying to impress. The message is: Cooking great meals is not the sole domain of professional chefs — we can all do it if we wanted to.
I even appreciate more that there was (mostly) no mention of countries or regions of origin of the dishes. It’s like saying food is universal and a great meal is not about being academically correct about the history of dishes nor ingredients. What can be cooked in one part of the world can be cooked in any other — it’s just a matter of modifying to adopt to the native ingredients of a locale. After all, cooking great meals is about knowing how to make the best use of what you have.
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Spanish tortilla
This is soooo easy to make. And the cooked dish looked just swell. Tasted great too. We had this Spanish Tortilla for lunch last Sunday, storm and all, and my family loved it. The original recipe is for an all-vegetable dish. My modification consisted of the addition of a can of tuna flakes (lemon and butter flavor), the adjustment of the proportion of the ingredients for what I considered a more balanced dish and the substitution of green peas for bell peppers which we didn’t have in the house last Sunday.
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