Category: Main Dishes

Chicken Stroganoff

Although there were twenty or thirty bottles and cans of dried herbs and spices in my mother’s kitchen cabinet, I can remember only four that she grew herself One was mint, which she tended in a flower bed near the house. As I recall, she used it only to make mint jelly, though I may be wrong about that.

On one side of the garden were several chive plants, which grew in the same row with the winter onions. Because of her I still love cottage cheese flavored with chopped chives. Mom also used chives in soups and roasts, and she added them to lettuce, tomato and cucumber salads.

She planted two or three parsley plants, which provided important flavors to soups, meats and other vegetables like boiled and buttered new red potatoes. The fourth herb was dill. On the same day we planted the hills of cucumbers, we planted a long row of dill seeds. Dill was of course the primary flavoring ingredient in her dill pickle recipes, and she used it occasionally in other dishes.

Although dill is grown and used in countries as far apart as India and Iceland, I have always associated it with northern European cooking. I even think of dill pickles primarily as a way German and Slavic housewives preserved the cucumbers they grew in the short summers of the northern hemisphere. However, dill may have actually been brought to northern Europe by Roman soldiers and settlers. Archeologists and food historians have found evidence of dill being cultivated in Celtic Britain after the Roman invasion.

Since dill was thought to have medicinal properties it was added to wines and other foods to cure diseases or give people more energy and strength. Roman gladiators are said to have rubbed their bodies with fresh dill to give them more strength and it was added to wine as an aphrodisiac.

However, I like dill for the subtle flavor it adds to many of my favorite foods including pickles, potato salad, cabbage rolls, poached salmon, fish soup and this recipe for chicken stroganoff derived from the Use It All Cookbook by Jane Marsh Dieckmann.

INGREDIENTS:

1 medium onion (about 3 inches in diameter)
3 T butter/margarine
1/2 lb. mushrooms
1 T flour
1/2 salt
2 tsp. paprika
1/4 tsp. basil, crumbled
1/4 tsp. thyme, crumbled
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup dairy sour cream
1/4 cup Swiss cheese
2 cups diced cooked chicken
2 tsp. lemon juice
2 T chopped fresh dill
8 oz. noodles

PROCEDURE:

Clean and chop the onion into a quarter-inch dice. Clean and thinly slice the mushrooms. Chop the chicken into a half-inch dice. Grate the cheese and wash and chop the dill. Start heating water to cook the noodles.

Melt the butter over medium heat in a large saucepan or Dutch oven and sauté the onion until it just begins to turn gold. Add the mushrooms and cook for three or four minutes, stirring constantly. Blend in the flour, salt, paprika, basil and thyme and cook for two minutes. Lower the heat and gradually stir in the chicken broth and wine. Cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture bubbles and thickens.

Reduce the heat to very low, cover, simmer for five minutes and remove the pan from the heat. Blend in the sour cream and cheese. Add the chicken, lemon juice, and dill. Heat thoroughly over low heat, but do not boil.

Serve over hot cooked noodles with a cucumber and tomato salad and good bread.

NOTES: You can substitute leftover turkey for the chicken. I use rounded tablespoons of dill. Sauvignon blanc or chardonnay wines are both good choices for the recipe and to serve at the table. This recipe makes four generous servings.

Mary Harvey’s Pasties

It’s pasty season once again in the Rang household. For people who grew up in northern Wisconsin, Michigan or Minnesota, pasties are comfort foods that warm you both inside and out. They are filled with a tasty combination of meat and vegetables baked into a crust. They warm the house as they are baking and give your body the energy it needs to keep you warm on that walk after dinner.

Mary Harvey was the secretary at a Methodist Church in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula when our friend Alan served there as pastor. She also baked wonderful pasties. He says that her pasties were in great demand at the church, in the community and of course by her family. “They were big, the crusts were tender and flaky and they were stuffed with meat and vegetables seasoned just right.” Alan’s family had a standing order for Mary’s pasties and ate them almost every week in the winter.

As always seems to be the case, when a recipe is developed by housewives in their homes there are hundreds of different versions. Pasties are a good example. While most traditional pasty recipes call for beef or pork, some specify chicken or turkey. Others are made with fish or crabmeat, and today there are even vegetarian pasties that omit the meat entirely.

Mary’s recipe is different from the the one I usually follow because it uses a combination of beef and pork and turnips instead of rutabaga. The crust is also very different. It uses vegetable shortening instead of lard and the flour is stirred into the melted shortening and hot water rather than being cut into the flour as is usually done to make pastry crusts. I thought that the dough would make tough crusts, but they turned out just fine and were very easy to make.

INGREDIENTS:

For the crust:
1 cup water
1 cup vegetable shortening
1 tsp. salt
4 cups all-purpose flour

For the filling:
3/4 lb. round steak
3/4 lb. pork steak
3 cups chopped potatoes
1 1/2 cups chopped carrots
1 1/2 cups chopped turnips
3/4 cup chopped onion
1 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
8 T butter

PROCEDURE:

First make the crust. Pour a cup of boiling water over a cup of shortening in a large mixing bowl and stir until it is completely melted. Blend the salt into the flour in another bowl, then add the flour to the liquid and stir rapidly until it forms a ball. Cool the dough in the refrigerator for at least an hour before rolling out the crusts.

Make the filling while the dough is cooling. Remove extra fat from the meat and cut it into thin slices about an inch long. Peel the potatoes, turnips and onion and scrape or peel the carrots and chop all the vegetables into a quarter to three eighth-inch dice.

Mix the meat and vegetables together with the salt and pepper in a large bowl. Refrigerate the bowl if you are not ready to assemble the pasties.

Preheat the oven to 400º.

Make the pasties when the dough is well chilled. Divide the dough into eight pieces. Use your hands to make a small ball, then roll the dough on a floured surface into a circle the size of a dinner plate. Place a cupful of filling near the center of the circle and dot the filling with a tablespoon of butter cut into quarters. Fold the dough over the filling and seal by turning the edges to make a rim.

Prick the dough with a fork in several places to let steam escape while the pasty is cooking. Place the pasties on lightly greased baking sheets and bake them at 400º for fifteen minutes, then reduce the temperature to 350º and bake for another fifty-five minutes until the pasties are lightly browned.

NOTE: If necessary, heat the bowl of water and shortening in a microwave a few extra seconds until the shortening is melted.

Pasties are still not Jerri’s favorite food, but she liked these better than the ones I have been making for years, so I guess that I’ll be making these again.