Courtesy of Everyday Food Magazine. The chicken salad I modeled my recipe after!

This one is dedicated to my cousin Rudy. She ordered the roasted chicken salad at Founding Farmers recently, and I was absolutely inspired by its sweet, tangy and peppery flavors.

I decided to recreate it on a whim after stumbling across a similar recipe in Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food magazine. Instead of using dried blueberries and golden beets, I replaced the sweetness with dried apricots. But there’s also a nice, nutty crunch from the toasted almonds and a verdant aroma from the fresh basil.

Like the Founding Farmers’ dish, I assembled the plate just the same: I laid out a bunch of leaves (spinach in my case, but you can use spicy arugula or buttery lettuce), topped it with a giant heaping portion of chicken salad and gently rested a crispy wedge of French bread against it. It was a beautiful sight to behold, and I didn’t want to break into it — but it was too good to resist.

Recipe:

1 heaping spoon of mayonnaise
1/2 c greek yogurt
1 tbs vinegar
1 clove garlic, minced
salt
pepper
3 chicken thighs, seared, roasted and then shredded
1 stalk of celery, minced
1/2 small red onion, minced
1/3 c slivered almonds, toasted (you don’t have to do this if you don’t want)
about 10 dried apricots, minced
8 basil leaves, minced
2 green onions, minced

Mix the first four ingredients together and season with salt and pepper. Add the rest of the stuff in and season again to taste. It should be tangy, sweet and tart!

A handy guide to misua...

Misua, a very thin noodle used in a lot of Filipino soups, is a tricky thing. Cook it for too long, and you end up with a glutinous, pasty chunk at the bottom of your pot. Cook it too short, and you’re eating straw.

Unlike other Asian noodles, misua — which hails from China and is a good luck symbol for many Filipinos — is made of flour, not rice. Traditionally, this soup includes sliced chayote or patola (a vegetable that also doubles as a bath sponge, I discovered) and straw mushrooms, but I have neither of those, so I’m going to do it my way — with a basic broth of chicken stock and fish sauce, thickened with raw egg at the very end.

But of course, you can have fun with what you add to misua soup. My uncle once put turkey meatballs and asparagus in his, and I’ve seen celery and enoki mushrooms in it, too.

Recipe:

-5 cloves garlic, minced
-1/2 large onion, sliced
-1 qt chicken stock
-Chicken fat (optional)
-handful of celery leaves
-1 package misua noodles
-3 c baby bok choy, washed and leaves sliced into thin strips lengthwise
-8 dried shittake mushrooms
-1 c shredded chicken
-1/4 c green onions, sliced
-fish sauce to taste
-1 egg (optional)

In a large pot, gently fry the garlic in vegetable oil or chicken fat until it gets slightly golden brown. Add in onions and cook until translucent. Pour in chicken stock (add water if it’s not enough broth). Add mushrooms, celery and bok choy and bring to a boil. Cook until the bok choy is tender. Pull out mushrooms and cut into bite-size pieces if using whole shittake mushrooms.

Add in misua noodles and chicken and boil for two minutes until misua is cooked through. Do not overcook! If desired, crack in the egg and stir into the soup to thicken the broth. Flavor with fish sauce and pepper. Garnish with green onions.

It’s funny, because when it came time to make the soup, I knew exactly what to do — I didn’t have to check a recipe or look up how much patis I had to put in. I made it from memory, and I knew exactly what the lasa should taste like. It’s not like a Thai coconut curry — the vinegar and the whole green chili in ginataang gives it a kick.

Recipe:

1/2 lb chicken tenderloins
1 1/2 cans coconut milk
1 can chicken broth
1/4 c white vinegar
1/4 c patis (fish sauce)
1 head of mustard leaves, roughly chopped
1 onion, quartered
2 tbs ginger, sliced into thick pieces
salt
black pepper
15 grape tomatoes
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 bay leaf
1 whole green chili

Boil coconut milk, chili, broth, onions, ginger, black peppercorns, bay leaf and chicken together. Once it reaches a boil, bring to a simmer, add tomatoes, patis and vinegar, and simmer for 20 minutes. Add in mustard leaves and simmer for another 5 minutes until the leaves cook through. Season to taste and serve with freshly steamed rice.

Photo courtesy of cookalicious.wordpress.com.

I asked my aunt Mona to make it for me the last time I was in Egypt, and she cooked an entire pot and served it to me like a soup (which is kind of gross, considering it’s supposed to be a sauce, but I really like it!). I didn’t even use a spoon — I just used little tears of pita bread to mop up every last bit. My Tant Mona served it alongside a very complicated baked rice, chicken, nuts and raisin casserole, so the kishk balanced the meal with its slightly bland, acidic coolness.

This recipe has chicken and onions in the kishk, which sounds delicious beyond words can possibly express. Chicken kishk and a big pile of basmati rice? OH MAN!

Recipe:

Here’s the link to the recipe below:
Chicken Kishk, Baby!!!!

I baked mine with potatoes, used lots of garlic and cilantro, stuffed the cavity of the bird with a whole lime, and made a lovely gravy with the crispy bits at the bottom using chicken broth. I wish I used white wine and a spoon of flour though — that always makes a better gravy. We’re thinking about doing a mini version of Iron Chef at our house complete with a secret ingredient…what do you think about that?

Her recipe is a Filipino-American invention, something she developed after coming to the States. It’s stuffed with bacon and frozen peas and carrots and marinated in calamansi (a native Filipino citrus fruit) and fish sauce.

Filipinos tend to pair fish sauce with chicken — I don’t know why, but it just works. It doesn’t taste fishy at all, so don’t worry!

Recipe:

2 1/2 c frozen peas and carrots mix, thawed
5 rashers bacon, snipped into bite-sized bits
salt
pepper
lemon pepper
2 tbs fish sauce (patis)
juice of 10 calamansi (they’re really small!) OR juice of 2 lemons
6 pats of butter
2 cornish game hens
1 tbs soy sauce

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Rinse your hens and pat dry. In a large pan, marinate the hens in fish sauce and calamansi juice. Season well with salt, pepper and lemon pepper. Cover in plastic wrap, marinate for 1 hour. Transfer the hens into a greased baking dish and pour the marinade over it. In a separate bowl, combine the peas, carrots and bacon and season to taste. Stuff the cavities of the hen with the mixture. Dot the pan with the pats of butter and a few pieces of chopped bacon for extra flavor. Bake for 1 hour, basting every 20 minutes. After an hour, add the soy sauce to the gravy collecting at the bottom of the roasting pan and stir. Baste the hens again — the soy sauce will make the hens look more golden brown. Bake for another 20-30 minutes until done.

Serve with freshly steamed white rice — the gravy is to die for!