Woznation

This is another one of those recipes that I never made the same way twice and it resulted in dumplings that were ‘hit or miss.’  Well guess what – this recipe?  Naaaaaaaailed it!!!

The soup starts off much like many of my other soup recipes:

I round-up the usual suspects – carrot, celery, onion, garlic, and stock.  I’m also going to throw in some frozen corn and frozen peas, but that’ll come later.  I dice up and saute about a cup each of the carrot, celery and onion. In this case, it was about half an onion, 4 carrots, and 4 ribs of celery.

I let those soften with a little salt and pepper for probably 6- 7 minutes.  Then I mince up a shit-load of garlic and throw that in for another few minutes.  Shit-load, in this case, would classify as 4 large garlic cloves? 3 tablespoons? About this much:

I dunno.  Use however much garlic you like.   After those have married together awhile, I add my stock.  About 8 cups.

Bring that up to a boil, cover, and reduce to a simmer for maybe 15 – 20 minutes until your veggies are just about as soft as you want them.  Also give everything a taste periodically and make sure it has enough salt and pepper to your liking. I also find it kind of funny that the food post immediately following my chicken stock post uses store-bought stock.  But whaddyagonnado?  Sometimes a girl is fresh out of home-made chicken stock.  Sad, too.  Because this is the kind of recipe in which home-made stock really shines through.  Oh well.  Carrying on…

Finally.  We are to the dumplings!  These suckers are quite delicious.  Here is what you will need:

All-purpose flour, milk, butter, salt, and baking powder.

Now these dumplings are the thick, dense, chewy, stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth kind of dumplings; not the light, airy dumplings touted in other recipes.  I believe this is due to the low amount of baking powder and the fact that I boil instead of steam the dumplings.  If you like an airier dumpling then…well… I cant help you.  It took me a very long time to determine how NOT to make an airy dumpling, people. Just go consult any other recipe.  Because those are the ones I have already dismissed.  Anyway.  Back to chewy dumplings.  I use 2 cups of flour, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp of salt, 2 tablespoons of melted butter and 1.25 cups of milk.

Yep. Now stir it all together. It will be a very wet mixture but will still hold together fairly well.

So now you can take the lid off your simmering soup and raise the heat so its at a steady simmer or low boil without the lid on.  This is where you will want to grab 2 spoons.  You only see one below because i had to use my other hand for the camera, but the best way to do this is take a teaspoon of the mixture in one spoon and scrape it off with another.  The dumplings will sink to the bottom and slowly rise to the top as they finish cooking.

I try to work quickly so they have approximately the same cooking time.  I also try to work my way around the pot to give each dumpling a bit of room as they cook in the stock and not all stick together.  Soon the top will be completely covered with the cooked dumplings.  I would say this process take 5 minutes? (Ill time it next time and add it to the comments).

Lastly, I throw in about a half cup each of the frozen corn and frozen peas.  Oh and now is also the time I would add the CHICKEN part of this chicken dumpling soup, but this was also the time I realized I had no ‘snacking chicken’ left in the fridge. But I would have added around 3/4 cups of shredded cooked chicken, so lets pretend that I did.

After you stir it around and defrost the corn and peas, you are done!! Here is the finished product:

Or in our case:

Here is an easy copy/paste version of the recipe:

Ingredients:

1 cup diced carrot

1 cup diced celery

1 cup diced onion

3 tablespoons minced garlic

8 cups chicken stock

2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1/2 teaspoon of baking powder

2 tablespoons melted butter

1.25 cups of milk

1/2 cup frozen corn

1/2 cup frozen peas

3/4 – 1 cup cooked shredded chicken

salt/pepper to taste

Saute diced carrots, celery and onion in some olive oil with a bit of salt and pepper to 6-7 minutes.  Add in minced garlic and saute for 1-2 minutes more.  Add 8 cups of chicken stock and bring mixture to boil, cover, and reduce to simmer.  Simmer for about 15 -20 minutes until soft.  In the mean time, make dumplings.  In bowl combine flour, salt, and baking powder.  Stir in melted butter and milk.  Uncover pot, and bring heat up to a low boil.  Drop in a teaspoon of the dumpling mixture at a time, trying to give each dumpling a little room to cook, working your way around the pot.  Work quickly to give about the same cooking time to each dumpling.  Dumplings will rise to the top of the soup once cooked.  After all have risen, add frozen corn, peas, and cooked chicken to pot.  Stir everything together to defrost the frozen veggies and heat the chicken through.  Then Eat!

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We’ve finally reached part III of woznation chicken – chicken stock! For this post I will go through how to make the stock using the leftover carcass of the woznation chicken from part I and part II. Alternatively, I have also made stock using chicken backs or turkey necks (we have a butcher down the street who practically throws these things away so I can get lots of poultry flavor without all the work of roasting the chicken and carving it up).  Making stock is pretty easy no matter what you use, I’ll talk you through it.

So we have our chicken from woznation chicken part II

I pick as much meat off the bone and then place the bones into a large stock pot.

Oh yeah, I also saved all the juices from the roasting pan and put that in there, too.  Thats what those dark juices are.  Yummmm:

So then I take off all the skin from my cut-up chicken and add it to the pot.  We’re not big skin eaters around here – so we just add that flavor to the stock.

Since we also dont eat the chicken right when its made, I go ahead and peel the chicken meat from the legs/thighs and save all the meat for future meals and/or ‘snacking chicken’  for the week.  And then throw the bones into the stock pot.

Boom.  White meat and dark meat.  All ready for the week.  And now all the bones are in the stock pot.

[Now, if I hadnt roasted a chicken and instead had raw chicken backs or turkey necks instead, I would put a little olive oil in the bottom of the stock pot and brown the backs or necks a bit (Dont worry about them being all the way cooked – they will boil for the next 4 hours).  After they had a bit of color (i.e. flavor)  I would continue with the stock in the following manner.]

So now I get some veggies and seasonings ready to throw in to add extra flavor.

I use about 4 ribs of celery, 4 carrots, an onion, 3 cloves of garlic, salt, whole peppercorns, and bay leaf.  I run a wet towel over the carrots and celery to get off any extra dirt and then rough chop them.

Then I quarter the onion, skin-on and all!  And smash about 3-4 garlic cloves.

Then I throw the veggies in the pot and add about a tablespoon each of salt and peppercorns and then 2-3 bay leaves.

Fill the pot up with water (approximately 3 ‘where else?’ glasses full…96 ounces total?).

Bring everything up to a boil and then reduce down to a low simmer.  Simmer for 4-5 hours.  If you are losing water too quickly, you can always add more water but you dont want to dilute your stock too much. Just make sure your simmer is very low.  You can stir the pot occasionally if you’re around, but I’ve also let this go while Ive been out running errands.  It doesnt need a babysitter.  After 4-5 hours you will have pretty much sucked out all the flavor from the chicken and vegetables.

And now you have some liquid gold!  All you need to do it strain out the bones and veggies!  I usually use a bit of cheese cloth in my strainer as well to catch as much of the grit as possible, but I was out this time.

Voila.  Chicken Stock!

All the fat in the chicken stock rises to the top and will solidify in the fridge overnight.  You can just take a spoon and scoop off the layer of fat and throw it away the next day.  Now you are all ready to make some homemade soup, risotto, shepards pie,  or anything else you want!

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This is a delicious delicious marinade I got from Jared’s mom Lynn. Before we started making jambalaya I think this was my favorite meal. It can be used on any cut of beef but we like to use it with flank steak because it is a cheap, tough cut of meat which magically becomes delicious after we marinade it.

There are really only 4 ingredients to the marinade as you can see above. Scroll down to the end of the post for amounts. Making the  marinade is very complicated, follow these directions explicitly. Combine the soy sauce, ketchup, brown sugar and garlic. Done with the marinade portion. We like to use a plastic bag to do the marinating because it makes it easy to redistribute over the  meat. Feel free to use the vessel of your choice to combine the ingredients. See  our bag O marinade below.

One optional ingredient to this marinade is red wine vinegar. You can include this if you only have time to let the meat marinade for an hour or two. For a short marinade time, the vinegar starts to break down the meat and allows the other flavors to infuse. For tastiest results we recommend NOT using the red wine vinegar and marinating for at least 6hrs (the longer the marinating the better). One additional tip, use low sodium soy sauce, it just makes everything more delicioiuser.

Once the marinade is made the next step is to prepare your meat. We like to cube our flank steak so we can make shish Ka bobs but feel free to cut your meat in whatever way makes sense for your cut. As an example; Jared’s mom marinades the full flank steak and then cuts small slices at an angle against the grain of the meat after grilling. For our shish Ka bobs we cut then cube flank steak as shown below.

The next step is to poke holes in each cube. This allows for more marinade to soak into the meat over time. For our cubes I like to put two fork punctures in an X pattern on each face of the cube. This takes some time but it is worth it. Additionally, if you have experience with lawn care you can think of this as aerating the meat.

Speaking of cubes, one of the most famous cubes is the Necker Cube shown below with it’s more interesting cousin the un/impossible cube. The most interesting thing about this cube is that it can be interpreted in at least two ways, I like this from a philosophical standpoint.

Back to the steak. Once you have prepared and aerated the meat put it in the marinade, make sure all the meat has been fully submerged (see below). This is very easy to do with our zip lock bag method, you can pretty much man-handle the meat to make sure everything is sufficiently covered.

As I mentioned earlier Amy and I like to let the steak marinade for at least 4-6 hours before we start grilling. Approximately once every hour I like to mix up the bag to redistribute the marinade and make sure all pieces get a healthy dose.

Once the meat has sufficiently marinaded it is time to build our shish Ka bobs or go directly to grilling if you did not go the shish Ka bob route. Anything you typically put on a Ka bob is fine, for this dinner Amy and I just used meat, green peppers, and onion petals. Amy believes these could have used some nice to cherry tomatoes to really make the colors pop.

We typically grill the meat but these can also be cooked on the stove top. However, if you use the stove top consider taking the batteries out of your smoke detector because the sugar in the marinade will burn (and smoke) when placed directly on the burner. When I say ‘burn’ it is more of the smoking that causes the problem, the meat still tastes amazing. To mitigate this try to get as much marinade off the meat as possible, the flavor is already infused in the meat. That said, we still recommend cooking the meat on the grill for optimum flank steak performance. Feel free to grill the meat to your preferred tenderness.

Now we feast

See Below for Quick Recipe:

The following makes enough marinade for ~3lbs of meat (flank steak is our meat of choice)

1 cup soy (preferably the low sodium soy)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup ketchup
2 teaspoons minced garlic (to taste)
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar (only include this if you are marinating for less than 2 hours)

Thoroughly mix all ingredients in the vessel of your choice (1 gallon plastic bag works well)

Prepare meat if necessary (Example: cut into cubes for shish Ka bobs)

Poke lots of holes in meat with fork (aerate)

Immerse in marinade for at least 4 hours (If you include the red wine vinegar marinade for no more than 2 hours)

Grill/Cook

Eat

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