One-Skillet Dinner: Chicken With Napa Cabbage and Bacon

This is basically a riff off the Lettuce Chicken recipe with a couple of variations—most salient, the use of—wait for it—Napa cabbage in lieu of lettuce. It is a quick (~30 minutes) one-dish weeknight supper, and while I generally consider “low-carb” to be a pejorative, rather than a positive term, it is that too, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I laid about 7 strips of bacon to cook on medium-low in a large skillet. As it did, I chopped about 1 ½ pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breasts (slicing through the center to halve the thickness, then once length-wise, then 3-4 times width-wise) into pieces approximately the dimensions of my thumbs (mind you, I am a 5'3" woman, so don’t necessarily base this on your own thumbs—I’d say to think of the orange man with his tiny hands on the button, but you might lose your appetite) and dredged them in flour seasoned with kosher salt, garlic powder, and dried herbs.

I set the bacon on a piece of cardboard (or use a brown paper bag or paper towels) to drain the grease, then poured the bacon grease from the pan, leaving some residue. I turned the heat to low to melt 2 TBSP butter, returned it to medium, and nestled the chicken into the pan piece by piece, shaking off the excess flour. I cooked until golden brown on bottom (meanwhile chopping 1/2 a Napa cabbage head, cored, into roughly chewing-gum-stick-sized strips), then flipped and cooked the other side to match, and then removed the chicken to a plate.

I added another 1 TBSP butter to the pan, tossed in the cabbage, sprinkled with kosher salt, and tossed with tongs; after a few minutes I splashed in a bottlecap full of cider vinegar, tossed again, and covered the pan. I chopped the bacon loosely. After the cabbage had cooked a couple minutes (leafy ends of cabbage should be wilty but not mushy; base ends should have a bit of give but still be crisp), add back the chicken and bacon plus a sprinkling of fresh thyme leaves, toss to mix, re-cover, lower heat to medium-low, and cook a couple more minutes.

Serve by itself or with rice (*cough*perhaps of the a-Roni variety*cough*).

Spinach-Cheese Crepes With Bacon

Gentle reader, remember how I told you that I made spinach-cheese sauce … and that I would tell you what I did with it … and that it would involve bacon? Well, let this post go on the record as proof that I do not lie to you.

This crepe main dish is the latest episode in my ongoing quest to negate any and all health benefits involved in eating green vegetables. Yes, I actually took spinach and mushrooms and made them as cholesterolicious as a croque monsieur. Look, I had some bits of Swiss and some other sharp cheese that was getting crusty around the edges, so what else COULD I do? As the French, who invented crepes and cheesy sauces (I think) would say, je ne regrette rien. (That’s French for “sorry, not sorry.”)

I premade the sauce by cooking some bacon on medium until tender, not crispy, in a saucepot, and draining off the grease but leaving the wee brown bits. I then added half a stick of butter and once melted and bubbly, stirred in a chopped half shallot and 4 mushrooms sliced thin, with those slices then halved.

Bacon-Wrapped Chicken Breasts With Roast Brussels-Parsnip Hash

This is a quick and easy weeknight meal that can be cooked all on one foil-lined baking sheet for easy cleanup. Both my man and my 26-year-old adopted son inhaled it in a hush reminiscent of the Silence of the Lamb (well, my adopted son did not have any of the veg, obvi. As I type this, he is balancing out the protein with a bowl of Cookie Crisp).

I took two boneless, skinless chicken breasts and sliced them in half, pounded them thin (you can use the bottom of a frying pan if you don’t have a meat-tenderizing hoocher), and marinated them overnight in a mix of olive oil, salt, thyme, Dijon mustard (I’m really working the packets from the cafeteria, gentle reader), and a bit of dried sage.

The next night, I preheated the oven to 400°, lined aforementioned baking sheet with foil, and wrapped a slice of bacon around each of the four pieces of chicken. Full disclosure: I didn’t have a baking sheet large enough to fit the veg as well, so I popped this into the oven and prepped another foil-lined sheet for the hash.

Adventures in Slow Cooking, Part II: Cream-of-Mushroom Chicken With Broccoli

Gentle reader, for my second-ever foray into slow-cooker cooking, I had the urge to go old-school-Americana with that classic creamy combo of chicken and Campbell’s canned cream of mushroom soup. (I have a perverse taste for this, as evidenced by the Company Chicken recipe.) I checked out a few recipes online, and they were all pretty similar—as Andy Warhol could’ve told you, Campbell’s soup cans do not really lend themselves to variation. I settled on a pretty simple take on it. You just dump all of the following into the cooker:

Lettuce Chicken. Yeah, that’s right. Lettuce Chicken.

With food, as with fashion, some things are timeless...and some are fads that instantly evoke the era that spawned them. Like, while steak frites is the culinary equivalent of a little black dress and pearls, pesto with sun-dried tomatoes is the equivalent of a pink Izod shirt with a turned-up collar.

Recently, I found myself with a strange nostalgic compulsion to make a circa-late-1970s dish that could be considered the equivalent of a Mrs. Roper print muumuu. And let me tell you, gentle reader, it was damn good.

My aunt—ironically, I'm her namesake—was not much of a cook. She was one of those people that had one “company-friendly” recipe down pat and would make it at every occasion she hosted through the years. In this case, her signature dish was Lettuce Chicken, composed of sautéed chicken, bacon, and—how weird is this?!—iceberg lettuce, with some lemon juice bringing it all together. And it was actually AWESOME—a perfect balance of rich and clean/tart flavors. For some reason, a craving for this popped into my head recently…but when I googled “lettuce chicken” I got a bunch of crap about “wraps” and “cups” calling for lettuce leaves in lieu of the tortillas God intended.

So I texted my mom to ask if she recalled the gist of the original recipe for Lettuce Chicken, and, happily, she did. (Apparently it originated in Gourmet back in the day. If anyone can track down this O.G. recipe I’d be most grateful, and would sleep better at night linking to it as the source of this post. I did do due Google diligence in an effort to cite my source properly…but it’s not my fault that ’Merickan women are obese but aspire not to be, and hence searching for lettuce chicken yields 87 pages of variations on the same freaking “wraps” and “cups”!)

Anyhoo. I originally thought of substituting escarole for the iceberg lettuce as a modern update of the dish, since I just didn’t trust my memory that iceberg could go in a cooked dish. But the Met Foods, much to my lack of shock, did not have escarole in stock, and when I texted my mom to confirm that it was indeed iceberg in the original recipe, she responded, “Yep. That’s all we had back then. AND WE LIKED IT!” Clearly, I had to keep it real and go with the iceberg. (I mean, I didn’t have an option. You caught the part about how the market had no escarole, right?) So, to make a long story short (too late), here’s how I made the awesome lost-in-history dish that is Lettuce Chicken.

7 Layers of Kevin Bacon Dip

I’ve already expressed how much I enjoy the Super Bowl from a food perspective despite my utter apathy about football. But this year, with the big rematch between the Pats and the Giants, I have a real reason to actually get excited about the game itself…yes, MADONNA is performing!!! (Hehehe, I can’t wait to hear what Alyce has to say about that one… No, but seriously, I'm pretty excited about Madonna.)

For this year’s Super Bowl party at Fredna’s place (that would be Rob’s Aunt Edna and Uncle Fred, who are kind of like the Brangelina of Super Bowl parties), I’m planning to bring a mash-up between seven-layer dip and the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, and make a contest out of it—since it's a day for betting, after all.

The game plan (see what I did there?): I printed up sheets with a multiple-choice quiz, and everyone who ponies up $1 fills out a sheet matching the layers of the dip to the movies they represent. Either one person will get the most answers correct, or we do a random drawing from the entries tied for most correct (even if that number is zero). Surely this will be a fun gaming alternative for people who don’t care/know enough to bet on the actual football game. Download the quiz to play at your own Super Bowl party!

Here are the dip layers (in top-down order, 1-7), which, in a nod to the original “degrees” game, symbolize six of his movies, plus a bonus layer honoring Kevin himself. Can you match up which layer symbolizes which movie?

Quiz answers and explanations, as well as dip assembly instructions, after the jump.

7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon Dip (layers in top-down order)
1. Bacon
2. Spicy cheese
3. Corn
4. Sour cream
5. Ground beef
6. Salsa
7. Navy beans

And, emphatically not in order, since that is the whole point, the movies those layers represent:

a. Footloose
b. Diner
c. Friday the 13th
d. Kevin himself (seriously, if you don’t get this one…)
e. A Few Good Men
f. Wild Things
g. Apollo 13

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Answers, in top-down order:

Bacon-Wrapped Stuffed Pork Chops: So, That Happened.

I’m baa-aack, did you miss me? Gentle reader, I am just setting foot in the kitchen again after weeks of what I dubbed the Taco Diet, and leave it to me to eat even less nutritiously when cooking at home.

The Rob, as I have mentioned, enjoys very much the Stove Top, and I cannot deny that I see where he is coming from. The other night when I asked if he had any requests, he said he wanted Stove Top, but not chicken. Clearly, that was just silly. But I took this as a challenge and ended up inventing a sort of unholy inside-out pork sandwich, or maybe an inverted version of a KFC Double Down but with pork. If both of those concepts intrigue and excite you, you’ve come to the right post. This meal couldn’t have been simpler to put together and was shamefully satisfying.

Red Chard with Bacon and Cannellini Beans

I once attended this awesome lecture class at the Natural Gourmet cooking school, taught by Annemarie Colbin, whom I admire very much for proving that it’s possible to believe in holistic health and nutrition without being pretentious or preachy. To wit: At one point she said something like, “I just know there’s something medicinal about bacon. I haven’t figured it out yet, but it’s just so delicious, there has to be!”

That quip came to my mind while making Red Chard with Bacon and Cannellini Beans (above left), since if you operate with the assumption that bacon is indeed somehow medicinal, this would be, like, the healthiest dish ever. You could, of course, omit the bacon and just use olive oil to sauté your veggies, but bacon is a great complement to bitter greens and really just brings all these flavors together.

(Also, you could use kale instead of chard, though I might discard the stems and use solely the leaves, and also cook it about 10 minutes longer. But I love red chard [above right], because it cooks into such a pretty pink color.)