Category Archives: Columnists

A la Carte: Chicken Adobo with Coconut Rice is ‘Good and Easy’

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Lee White

This was another interesting food and friend weekend. I began the week with a Milton cauliflower pizza, which lasted for two evenings. I also finished up the beef stew topped with some quinoa I’d cooked and refrigerated. I like playing with quinoa.

Then I made a sheet pan dinner that also lasted for two night. This time I placed parchment paper on the sheet before I added salt, pepper and truffle oil to the potatoes, salted and peppered the broccoli and topped the chicken thighs with butter, curry powder and a little honey.

The latter (the curry, butter and honey) is the first combination I made with chicken maybe 50 years ago. The combination was delicious. (I had used frozen broccoli I’d bought at Trader Joe’s and wasn’t sure it would go straight from the freezer to the oven, but it worked out very well.

On Saturday, Sue and Karen came over on Saturday to watch the noon Connecticut women’s basketball game (yes, we won by lots). We ate snacks (Cheez-Its, trail mix from Costco, peanut butter cups from Aldi). After we won, I put tiny potatoes into the oven, created an enormous salad and Karen grilled a rib eye filet they’d bought from their own house (a new cut for me) on the Weber. Dinner was delicious.

Then we watched two movies in a row: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (meh) and Judah and the Black Messiah (Daniel Kaluuya and movie memorable). All together, eight hours of three things I like the most: good people, good food and movies.

Hope we do this more often.

Now I am back to routine: write a column or two, thaw some chicken for dinner, prepare for a 6 p.m. board of meeting, finish book for book club. The recipe below is a very good and very easy. Use any fairly spicy chile you have. I always have cans of unsweetened coconut milk. I also buy big packages of sweetened coconut chips for my salads, but if you don’t have chips, a little toasted coconut works fine.

Chicken Adobo with Coconut Rice
From Fine Cooking, February-March, 2021
Yield: serves 6

For the chicken:
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup reduced-sodium soy sauce
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
1 tablespoon packed brown sugar
1 serrano pepper, stemmed, seeded and minced
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon fresh cracked black pepper
6 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (3 to 3 ½ pounds)

For the rice:
1 cup long grain white rice
1 14-ounce can unsweetened coconut milk
½ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ cup toasted unsweetened coconut chips; more for garnish
3 scallions, sliced

In a Dutch oven, combine vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, brown sugar, serrano, bay leaves and black pepper. Add chicken, skin-side down, Bring to a boil, then reduce heat. Simmer, covered, 15 minutes. Turn chicken and simmer 15 minutes more. Place chicken skin-side up, on a rimmed baking sheet.

Bring cooking liquid to a boil over medium-high heat. Boil gently uncovered, until thickened and reduce to about 1 cup, 10 to 12 minutes. Remove from the heat. Discard bay leave. Skim the fat.

Meanwhile, preheat broiler. Broil chicken, 5 inches from heat, until skin is browned and crisp, 4 to 5 minutes.

Make the rice: Place rice in a fine-nesh sieve and rinse with cold water, Place in a 2-quart saucepan. Stir in coconut milk, ½ cup water and salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat. Simmer, covered, 15 minutes. Remove from the heat. Let stand 10 minutes.

Fluff the rice with fork. Stir in toasted coconut and half the scallions. Serve the chicken with the rice. Drizzle with sauce and sprinkle with remaining scallions. Garnish with additional toasted coconut.

A la Carte: There’s Always Something to Celebrate with Red Velvet Cake

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Lee’s Red Velvet Cake recipe can be adapted to make delicious cupcakes. Photo by Owen Bruce on Unsplash.

I have not seen my son, daughter-in-law and their three grown daughters since Thanksgiving of 2019. I missed another Thanksgiving, Christmases, Greek Easters and many birthdays.

But Sydney, my second oldest granddaughter, will celebrate her March 16 birthday with her nuclear family and me in Newburyport, Mass. I will bring dinner, probably Pasta Bolognese, a big salad, lots of garlic bread and dessert. And that dessert will be Red Velvet Cake. 

The day Sydney was born, we drove from Old Lyme to the hospital in Beverly, Mass. I had been eating clementines in the car. When I held her in my arms  and she was then fewer than 24-hours-old, she sucked my orange-scented finger. From that day, I was hers forever.

Maybe I will take her a bottle of Grand Marnier!

Red Velvet Cake*

Adapted from The Confetti Cakes Cookbook by Elisa Strauss (Harper Row, New York, 2007)
Yield: serves at least 12 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter each pan, line bottoms with parchment, then butter parchment. Set aside. 

3 ½ cups cake flour
½ cup unsweetened cocoa (not Dutch process)
1 and ½ teaspoons salt
2 cups canola oil
2 and ¼ cups sugar
3 large eggs (I have extra-large, which is fine)
6 tablespoons red food color (3 ounces!)
1 and ½ teaspoons vanilla
1 and ¼ cups buttermilk
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 and ½ teaspoons white vinegar

Whisk cake flour, cocoa and salt in a bowl. Place oil and sugar in bowl of an electric mixer and beat a medium-speed until well blended. Beat in eggs one at a time. With machine in low, very slowly add red food color (be careful, it can splatter). Add vanilla. Add flour mix alternately with buttermilk in two batches. Scrape down bowl and beat just long enough to combine.

Place baking soda in a small dish, stir in vinegar and add to batter with machine running. Beat for 10 seconds. Divide batter among pans, place in oven and cake until cake tester comes out clean, 40 to 45 minutes. Let cool in pans 20 minutes, then remove from pans, flip layers over and peel parchment. Cool completely.

*To make cupcakes: use cooking spray to muffin cups (or use cupcake liners), add batter and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, checking for doneness with a toothpick. 

Red Velvet Cake Icing

Adapted from The Waldorf-Astoria Cookbook by John Doherty with John Harrison (Bulfinch, 2006)

2 cups heavy cream, cold
16 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature (reduced-fat is fine)
8 ounces mascarpone (available in most supermarkets in the fancy cheese section)
½ teaspoon vanilla
1 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

Softly whip cream by hand in electric mixer. Cover in bowl and refrigerate.

Blend cream cheese and mascarpone in bowl of stand mixer or in large bowl with electric hand mixer until smooth. Add vanilla, pulse briefly and add confectioners’ sugar. Blend well. Fold in whipped cream. Refrigerate until needed. Yield: enough icing for top and slice of three-layer cake.

Place first layer cake on wide plate. Place pieces of waxed paper under each quadrant, about 2 or 3 inches in. Place lots of icing on top of layer and spread about half an inch to the end. Add second layer and to that again. Place the top layer on top and frost the entire cake around the sides. Add lots more to the top and spread. (I had enough left over for one one-layer cake). Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Lee White

About the author: Lee White has been writing about restaurants and cooking since 1976 and has been extensively published in the Worcester (Mass.) Magazine, The Day, Norwich Bulletin, and Hartford Courant. She currently writes Nibbles and a cooking column called A La Carte for LymeLine.com and the Shore Publishing and the Times newspapers, both of which are owned by The Day. She was a resident of Old Lyme for many years, but now lives in Groton, Conn.

Reading Uncertainly? ‘The Survival of the Bark Canoe’ by John McPhee

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John McPhee, the ever-curious observer, listener, and recorder, has written and published some 30 books, exploring almost every facet of human existence. I’ve just re-read one of his earliest, and best, from 1975, an ode to, of all things, the canoe.

Attracted to the water at an early age, he confesses “the canoe … is the most beautifully simple of all vehicles.” So it is natural that he is attracted to Henri Vaillancourt, a New Hampshireman with Nova Scotian blood, a builder of birchbark canoes, for a mid-life story (McPhee was 44 when he wrote this book.)

McPhee introduces himself, establishes a connection and persuades Vaillancourt to join three of his friends for a lengthy excursion in the far north of Maine’s lakes and rivers. This is the story of that trip.

It begins with no-see-ums, those pestilent creatures that sneak through almost any screening. And as they paddle north, we learn almost everything there is to learn about bark canoes.

What is a wulegessis? It’s a “flap of bark that forms a deck over the bow (or the stern) and extends a short way down the sides of the canoe.” But this is an essential piece of knowledge if you are building your own birchbark canoe, assuming you have the time, energy, and patience!

McPhee recounts the conversations, frictions, stories and favorite words of this group (“bummer” is Henri’s normal), even while diverting to history: how the native Americans developed the “vehicle”, and the story of Thoreau’s similar trip to Maine a century earlier.

He lets the reader know that it is indeed possible to travel in a canoe from New York City to Alaska, and down the Yukon, to the Bering Sea (with, perhaps, a few portages …)

And we learn a few new word meanings: “to frog it” is to manhandle a canoe through shallow, rushing water, standing on its side. And how five men manage their “acute propinquity” during several weeks in the wilderness? Their “continued sense of motions, the clear possession of a course to follow, the sense of journey” bring them all closer together.” Plus the loons forever laughing at them …

The end? They finally reach the conclusion of their travel, disappointed that they have seen not one moose, predicted at their start. Then, as they are driving south, they are forced to the side of the dirt road to let a moose rush by, going north, pursued by a huge truck.

John McPhee is now 90. I eagerly await his next set of musings.

Editor’s Note: ‘The Survival of the Bark Canoe’ by John McPhee is published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1975.

Felix Kloman

About the Author: Felix Kloman is a sailor, rower, husband, father, grandfather, retired management consultant and, above all, a curious reader and writer. He’s explored how we as human beings and organizations respond to ever-present uncertainty in two books, ‘Mumpsimus Revisited’ (2005) and ‘The Fantods of Risk’ (2008). A 20-year resident of Lyme, Conn., he now writes book reviews, mostly of non-fiction, a subject which explores our minds, our behavior, our politics and our history. But he does throw in a novel here and there. For more than 50 years, he’s put together the 17 syllables that comprise haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry, and now serves as the self-appointed “poet laureate” of Ashlawn Farm Coffee, where he may be seen on Friday mornings.
His late wife, Ann, was also a writer, but of mystery novels, all of which begin in a village in midcoast Maine, strangely reminiscent of the town she and her husband visited every summer.

A la Carte: Apples for the Asking

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Photo by Pierpaolo Riondato on Unsplash.

This was another fun food week.

I am, as I mentioned before, tired of my own food. With few exceptions, I am eating my own food almost every day since the end of last March. Oh, sure, some takeout, but it is expensive and not a whole lot better than what I can make at home.

Okay, it can be a whole lot better than I can make at home.

But BTP (before the pandemic), I rarely ate three meals a day, so these days my own food can be caloric, way more caloric, like including chocolate chip cookies I’d frozen warmed up in the microwave.

So this week was nice.

My friend Richard Swanson dropped me off some homemade hot dogs (I never knew anyone who tried to make his own hot dogs). I put the hot dogs into a lightly toasted piece of challah and added some Gulden’s mustard. It was really good. He also made his own mile-high chocolate cake and left a slice of that, too.

Earlier that day, my neighbor and friend, Sue O’Farrell, asked if I liked apple sauce. Who doesn’t like apple sauce?

After dinner she also sent warmed apple crumb dessert. That was good, too. She gave me the recipe for her applesauce. And I found another recipe for baked apples I’d not made.

Here they are.

Apple Sauce

From Sue O’Farrell

5 pounds of apples, peeled, cored and cut up
1 cup water
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ cups fresh lemon juice
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg

Place all the ingredients into a slow cooker set on high for 4 hours. When it was cooled for about 30 minutes, she used an immersion blender to puree the applesauce. (I do not have a stick blender, so I pureed it in my Ninja when the sauce was cooler.) 

Baked Apples

[From some magazine(!), October, 2017]

Yield: 4 servings

4 small Honeycrisp apples, cored and seeded, bottom intact
4 tablespoons softened butter
½ cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon cardamom
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ cup chopped walnuts

Mix butter and spices together and fill each apple with butter mixture. Place on a baking pan. Bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes, until apples are tender. Great with ice cream.

Lee White

About the author: Lee White has been writing about restaurants and cooking since 1976 and has been extensively published in the Worcester (Mass.) Magazine, The Day, Norwich Bulletin, and Hartford Courant. She currently writes Nibbles and a cooking column called A La Carte for LymeLine.com and the Shore Publishing and the Times newspapers, both of which are owned by The Day. She was a resident of Old Lyme for many years, but now lives in Groton, Conn.

A la Carte: Crispy Peanut-Chile Chicken with Sweet Potatoes … to Love!

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Lee White

I was so thrilled with the roasted sweet potato pie I made last week, that I decided to use sweet potatoes again for a recipe I found in an almost-two-year-old magazine I was about to toss.

This time the recipe called for chicken and sweet potatoes, with the addition of peanut butter and hot chiles.

I had an appointment with my primary doctor in the afternoon (after I had missed the appointment a week ago, having found the appointment card stuck in another food magazine!), so on my way to the new appointment, I picked up some Thai chiles and more cherry tomatoes. I had already thawed the chicken thighs.

This recipe is a true winner. The sweet potatoes, the tangy tomatoes, the hot peppers (feel free to seed them and discard the seeds) and the bland of the chicken made a terrific dinner plus one lunch and another dinner for one.

I think you will love this.

Crispy Peanut-Chile Chicken with Sweet Potatoes
From Fine Cooking, April-May 2019
Yield: serves 4

½ cup peanut butter (smooth or chunky)
2 Thai bird chiles (it says to seed one, but maybe use one and seed that, too)
5 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup fresh lemon juice
4 cloves of garlic, minced
Kosher salt
8 skinless, boneless chicken thighs
1 large onion, chopped
¼ cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro leaves
2 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into ½ inch dice (about 2 pounds)
7 ounces cherry tomatoes (about 1 cup)
2 ounces (½ cup) shelled roasted salted peanuts, coarsely chopped

Thoroughly combine peanut butter, chiles, 3 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 teaspoons of garlic and ¾ teaspoon salt in a gallon-sized zip-top bag. Lightly sprinkle the chicken thighs and add to the marinade. Refrigerate for 1 hour, massaging every 15 minutes.

Position rack in the center of the oven and heat to 375 degrees. Heat remaining 2 tablespoons oil in a large ovenproof skillet, preferably cast iron, on medium heat until shimmering.

Add onions, remaining garlic, 2 tablespoons cilantro and ½ teaspoon salt and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until onion softens and garlic is fragrant, 4 to 5 minutes.

Stir in sweet potatoes. Cover pan and cook until sweet potatoes just start to soften, stirring once, about 5 minutes. Turn off the heat.

Remove lid from skillet and add tomatoes. Remove chicken from marinade and place smooth side up over the tomatoes, spooning marina ride on top of each. Scatter with peanuts over the chicken and transfer skillet to the oven.

Cook until chicken reaches an internal temperature of 165 degrees, about 30 minutes.

Heat broiler on high, then cook until top of chicken and peanuts turn light golden, 1 to 2 minutes, watching closely so it doesn’t burn.

Let the chicken rest for 10 minutes before serving, sprinkle with remaining cilantro.

About the author: Lee White has been writing about restaurants and cooking since 1976 and has been extensively published in the Worcester (Mass.) Magazine, The Day, Norwich Bulletin, and Hartford Courant. She currently writes Nibbles and a cooking column called A La Carte for LymeLine.com and the Shore Publishing and the Times newspapers, both of which are owned by The Day. She was a resident of Old Lyme for many years, but now lives in Groton, Conn.