celery | DCEP

Chicken Noodle Hold the Soup – Nance & Robyn make the same recipe

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Robyn

Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Chicken Noodle Hold the Soup. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post. The original recipe can be found over at The Rachael Ray Show

Robyn’s Take: This is our first reader-submitted recipe, sent to use by Nicole D!

I don’t know a whole lot about Rachael Ray except that she shills a $20 “garbage bowl”, and so help me if any of you buy a damn bowl ESPECIALLY to put your kitchen garbage in, I will come knock on your door and slap you into next Tuesday, because that is some ridiculous-ass shit. It always confuses me when a specialist – ie, a cook – gets a five-day-a-week show.

I mean, you’re a cook or a cardiothoracic surgeon (Dr. Oz, lookin’ at you), what on earth makes anyone think you need an ENTIRE show where you, I assume, do things other than cook or perform surgery? But I guess she’s had her show for several years now and it’s still going, so there you go. Speaking of Dr. Oz, is it just me or does that man recommend a HUGE number of supplements? If you took every supplement he recommended, you’d be eating nothing but supplements all day long. ANYway.

Your ingredients:

A chicken, removed from the bone and kind of shredded (the recipe called for a rotisserie chicken; we have a freezer full of chicken, so I cooked one in the crock pot and used that), peas, carrots, onion, celery, zucchini, egg noodles, olive oil, salt and pepper, and a bit of butter. The original recipe called for parsley, but I don’t do parsley so I left it out (the world would be a better place if parsley was left out of everything.)

Cook your egg noodles!

Put a large skillet over medium-high heat, and add your olive oil. Add the carrots, celery, and onion to the pan and cook until the veggies start to get tender, 3 – 4 minutes.

Add the zucchini and some salt and pepper to the pan, and cook for another couple of minutes, until all the veggies are tender.

This is the point when my noodles were done cooking, so I feel obligated to show you what noodles sitting in a colander look like.

Fascinating, no? I love the hell out of that colander; it’s made of silicone and it’s collapsible, so in theory it takes up less space. I mean, when I’m the one who puts it away, it takes up less space. The issue comes when Fred does the dishes. First he tries to take up half the damn dishwasher with that thing, and then when I yell at him for the fact that I’ll have to run the dishwasher with just that colander and two spoons and ask why he’s trying so hard to kill Mother Earth, he washes the colander and puts it away uncollapsed so it takes up the entire cabinet. When it’s collapsed it sits unobtrusively to the side, but when it’s not, it’s VERY FUCKING OBTRUSIVE. But I love it, so it’s staying.

Anyway. Add the chicken and peas to your pan of veggies, and let everything heat through.

Not shown: Adding butter to the noodles and tossing to coat. To serve, spoon chicken and veggie mixture over the noodles.

The verdict?

Really, just not impressive. It was okay, it wasn’t bad – we ate it for two meals and then Fred took the rest for leftovers – but it was pretty boring and bland. It could have used more spices (don’t try to tell me that it would have been better if I’d used the parsley. Parsley would have taken it from “meh” to inedible.) or maybe Rachael Ray in attendance to say “EVOO”, but all I know for sure is that I won’t be making this again.

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Nance’s Take:

Okay, I’m going to admit it. I cannot stand Rachael Ray. I remember watching her on the Food Network and she drove me nuts with her 30 minute meals. 30 minutes if you buy a bunch of pre-sliced and expensive ingredients! And the real truth on why I can’t stand her…I think she’s a fake-laugher. I cannot stand people who fake chuckle, giggle or laugh. Nobody should ever fake something in order to appear like they have charm. She does it all the time and if you don’t believe me, watch her closely. Fake laugher. Fake grin. Fake Smile. Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake!

Although I do believe her boobs are real. See below.

You can’t possibly know how annoyed I was that I had to watch her cooking segment to get the gist of this recipe. Or it might have been to see how to “matchstick” vegetables correctly. Shut-up.

Rick picked up the rotisserie chicken for me since it was on his way home from work. This came from Sam’s Club and we call it a Pickin’ Chicken because sometimes we’ll grab one of these and pick at it all day like a bunch of gross carnivores. Then I throw it in a big pot of water to get all of the meat off of it and make chicken and dumplings (the real kind).

This is what it looked like after having been in the refrigerator overnight. Um, gross.

I had no idea what flat-parsley is and it didn’t matter because when I went to the grocery store they only had Italian Parsley. Who knew there were so many different types of parsley out there? Not me, man. Maybe there aren’t that many types. Maybe there is just flat and Italian and I’m just stupid. Hmm.

This is a carrot and vegetable peeler. I am not really good at peeling shit. When I have to peel potatoes (I avoid it like the plague) I use a knife and hack away at it. I may lose some of the potato, but I’m okay with that. There is nothing more annoying than peeling the skin off of anything (Silence of the Lambs – WOOT). Okay, I just grossed myself out. We’re not going to talk about it anymore.

As you can see, I muddled through. The recipe is really simple to make (although not quite as simple as Rachael Ray made it seem). The biggest pain in the ass and time-suck for me was getting all of the vegetables peeled, cut, and thrown into the pan.

I salt and peppered the shit out of those vegetables. The recipe calls for cooking them 3-4 minutes, but I cooked the shit out of those bad boys because I don’t care for vegetables. Zucchini? Get real. I don’t need a crunch to tell me that I’m eating a vegetable. I prefer mine to be cooked beyond recognition and then I’m all about them. What? At least they’re not deep-fried!

Decapitation brought to you by DCEP! Shirley (aka: mom) cracked my shit up when I opened the refrigerator this morning and found the bottom half of that bunch in a plastic baggie. She was cooking with me and either she has even less of a clue about parsley than I do or she was just on a roll cleaning up and not paying attention. Either way, I got a chuckle out of it. A real chuckle. Not to be confused with a Rachael Ray chuckle.

I was in a hurry so I used one of Rick’s tricks to cook the noodles. You know how the instructions say to bring water to a boil and then add the noodles? Rick just adds them right away. I flip out every time I catch him doing it. But I was in a hurry so the noodles went into the pot and I was all, “Boil, goddammit, BOIL!”

Don’t tell Rick.

Action shot! Please Note: Those vegetables are seriously COOKED (and some of them even look like worms).

Noodles with chopped parsley. You don’t know how badly I just wanted to add a shit-ton of parmesan cheese and call that dinner. But I soldiered on because I’m trying to be good about this bullshit recipe site with a weird name. Sigh.

It was really very good. And that’s saying something coming from a vegetable hater like myself. It’s going into the rotation for sure. Whoever picked this (I don’t pay attention, I figure Robyn will know) did a good job because it’s the first Rachael Ray recipe that has ever made it in to my recipe book!

Chicken Noodle Hold the Soup - Nance & Robyn make the same recipe

Prep time

10 mins

Cook time

20 mins

Total time

30 mins

: Entree

Cuisine: Indonesian

Serves: 6

Ingredients

1 whole cooked chicken (rotisserie from the grocery store, if you must), removed from bone and torn into small pieces or shredded
2 tablespoons Olive Oil (extra-virgin, if you want. Who can tell the difference? Not ME)
1 thinly sliced medium onion
3 carrots, cut into matchsticks
4 ribs celery, cut into matchsticks
2 small zucchini, cut into matchsticks
Salt and pepper
1 pound egg noodles (medium or extra wide)
1 T butter
½ cup (about a handful) flat-leaf parsley, chopped (If you must)
5 oz frozen peas, thawed

Instructions

Cook your noodles according to the instructions on the box and drain. Put the noodles back into the pot they were cooked in and add butter and parsley, and toss to coat (you can do all this while you're making the chicken and veggies if you think you won't screw it up.)
Put a large skillet over med-high heat, add olive oil. If you're feeling feisty, call it "EVOO" and roll your eyes.
When the pan is hot, add carrots, onion, and celery to the pan. Cook 4 - 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables start to get tender.
Add the zucchini to the pan and add salt and pepper (to taste) and cook another 2 - 3 minutes, until all the vegetables are tender.
Add chicken and peas to the pan and cook until heated through.
To serve, put noodles in a bowl and spoon the chicken and vegetable mixture on top.

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Saks Fifth Avenue Tomato-Basil Bisque

Posted on March 5, 2012 by admin

Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Tomato Bisque, found over at cdkitchen. The printable version of the recipe is at the bottom of the page.

Robyn’s take:

Nance chose this week’s recipe. Well, first she sent me a recipe for stuffed green pepper soup, and I was all “PASS!” and then she suggested tomato bisque and I was like “Well, I’ve never had it before. I’ll give it a try!” I even said something about expanding my horizons, which makes me a big ol’ dork.

I looked at the recipe and thought “Well, it just sounds a lot like a thick tomato soup!” and somewhere in my brain, I had the knowledge that Fred likes tomato soup, and so I thought “Well, this will be a good one.”

AU CONTRAIRE. Apparently His Majesty does not care for tomato soup, and so I could sense his resistance from the very beginning of this venture. But I forged ahead, gathered my ingredients, and made the damn stuff.

It’s fairly simple, the only difficult part was the chopping of veggies, and god knows I like me a simple recipe.

Ingredients:

Butter, onion, celery, flour, garlic, diced tomatoes, fresh basil, tomato puree, beef stock, heavy whipping cream, and a bay leaf.

Heat the butter in a large stockpot, toss in your diced celery and onion.

Saute it ’til the onion is transparent. Five minutes or so, I think? One tablespoon at a time, sprinkle flour over the onion and celery, then stir in until it’s all paste-like. Add the rest of your ingredients. The recipe has annoying instructions like “stir in beef stock and tomato puree slowly”, but I just put everything in there at once, then stirred it all together. Because I am a renegade. The soup should be a rose color, says the recipe, and it was!

Then you toss in your bay leaf and put the temp on low and simmer for about an hour. You might be tempted to cook on a temperature other than low. I advise against this. With the wisdom I have gained in a lifetime of “GOD, why won’t this stuff COOK, I’m going to just crank it up on high!”, let me inform you that there’s nothing tomato-based stuff loves more than to burn to the bottom of the pot. If you cook this stuff on a too-high temp, you’ll end up with a bunch of it burned to the bottom of the pot, I guarantee it. Keep it on low!

After an hour of simmering and occasional stirring, the bisque was done. I made grilled cheese sandwiches to eat with it, and I dished up bowls of the bisque for each of us.

And the verdict? I liked that it was creamy and tasty, and I actually think it might be good served over a bed of rice. But I am sad to inform you that neither of us much cared for it. I wouldn’t say we hated it – if we were served it at someone else’s home, we’d eat it and we’d like it. But we wouldn’t go out of our way to make it at home, and it won’t be going into the recipe box.

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Nance’s take:

Fucking Robyn refused my suggestion of Stuffed Pepper Soup for this week so I had to look up Tomato Bisque recipes. I had never heard of tomato bisque until I went to a restaurant in Ohio and tried it (shout out to Rockne’s in Ohio). The whole situation is weird because I don’t normally order soups and stuff like that when I’m in a restaurant (too messy – I’m extremely uncoordinated). I thought it was so good that I wanted to try to make some at home, but I promptly forgot about it until Robyn put the kabosh on my Stuffed Pepper Soup idea. For the record: I hate stuffed peppers so I have no idea why I wanted to try the soup – I will be trying it one of these days, just not with the killjoy named Robyn, and I promise to record the experience.

So yeah. I have to admit to a couple of things first. On the day I decided to make this soup I was very unprepared. All I know is that it was cold outside and I thought a good bowl of hot soup was the way to go. Unfortunately, I had not been to the store and did not have the exact ingredients at hand. A normal person would have waited. But this is when I decided to give you the make-do experience. What? Everybody has to learn how to make-do with what they have in this world. If you don’t know how to do that, you’re pathetic. Yes, I said it. Yes, I judged. As my tube-top, sweatpant wearing mother would say, “You gotta make-do with what you got.” And you sit there and wonder why my writing is so atrocious. Table for one, Captain Obvious?

The first thing that I didn’t have was a 16 oz can of beef broth. I had to make-do with these little beef stock cups from Knorr. I remember thinking that they were ridiculously expensive and the only reason I bought them was because I had a coupon. I also remember thinking that I will not be buying them again because even with a coupon they were still too expensive. In my world, beef broth should not be expensive. But in all fairness, I suppose these little cups would be perfect if you lived in an RV (camper) and space was at a premium. So yeah, I’m technically not bashing these little cups of stock. If you have money for an RV and traveling all over the country, you would probably not cringe at the price of this stock. OHMYGAWD, can I go on any more about the goddamn stock? Shut the hell up, Nance.

I had to do some math to figure out that 2 Knorr containers equals 2 cups and 2 cups equals 16 ounces of beef broth. MATH, bitches! It makes the world go ’round. And God, please let me be right because how embarrassing would that be?

Moving on…

I had no half rib of celery (and no fresh onions), but I did have that stuff in my freezer. Interesting fact (maybe): I never knew you could freeze onions until I read a blog entry that Robyn’s husband (Fred) wrote in which he bought frozen onions one time at Publix. I had a lightbulb over my head moment and that was the end of my money wasting on onions ways. Go, Fred!

Blah, blah, blah. All you’re doing is making a roux. Don’t know what a roux is? Google it. This is how you learn. You’ll thank me later. Fine, I’ll do it for you. Learn how to make a good roux and you can do just about anything.

Go to your grocery produce section and look for this. Because this has seriously saved my ass plenty of times. I’m in a rural area that takes for goddamn ever to get to a decent grocery store. With this in my refrigerator, I’m gold.

When one does not have the correct ingredients you make-do.

See what I mean?

And then I strained them into my pot. But I’ll do full-disclosure here by telling you that the minute I dumped some of those goddamn tomatoes out, it started to take forever to strain and I said, “FUCKTHIS!” and just put the blended tomatoes into the pot, seeds and all. It’s NOT that big of a deal. And I figure that most people reading this are just not that precious. We’re a practical bunch (I hope). Except Robyn. She’s too precious for stuffed peppers. Hee!

More full-disclosure: I used half and half instead of heavy whipping cream and I skipped the bay leaf business because I didn’t have any.

When it was all said and done I had a beautiful, delicious bowl of ~~soup~~ bisque that I loaded with homemade croutons because I am a total fatty. I’m going to go ahead and say that I liked this recipe even with making the changes because I don’t think I mixed it up too much. And from reading Robyn’s entry above we should probably say that your mileage may vary. Different strokes, man. Different strokes. Heh.

Saks Fifth Avenue Tomato-Basil Bisque

Original Source/Author: cdkitchen.com (see link above)

: Soup

Ingredients

3 tablespoons butter
1 large yellow onion
½ rib celery
3 tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon minced garlic
2 cans (16 ounce size) diced tomatoes
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
2 cans (16 ounce size) tomato puree
1 can (16 ounce size) beef stock
½ cup heavy whipping cream
1 bay leaf
salt and pepper, to taste

Instructions

Heat butter in a large stockpot. Dice onion and celery and add to pot. Saute until the onion is transparent. Sprinkle flour over onions one tablespoon at a time, stirring in each one thoroughly with a large spoon until paste forms. Add garlic, diced tomatoes and basil, and stir. Stir in tomato puree and beef stock slowly, then whipping cream. The soup should be a rose color. Add bay leaf and simmer on low for about an hour. Remove bay leaf before serving.
Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Notes

A commenter on the cdkitchen site said that the recipe can sizes varied from what she was able to buy in the store. She just used what she had (which is only a few ounces difference) and it worked out fine.

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Pork and Corn Stuffing Bake

Posted on February 27, 2012 by admin

Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Pork and Corn Stuffing Bake, found over at AllRecipes.

Robyn’s take:

This week, after Fred looked through my pile o’ recipes and turned up his nose at every one of them, I threw up my hands and said “Okay, goddamnit, YOU pick one, you picky motherfucker!” So he communed with his best friend Google and sent me a link to this recipe, and I sent it on to Nance, who had no problems with it, and thus that is how this week’s recipe was chosen.

I thought that Fred had carefully considered the recipe before suggesting it, but as it turned out, he glanced at it and was all “I like cornbread stuffing! I like Cream of soups! Done and done!” So the entire time I was making the pork chops, he kept wandering in and questioning each step until I wanted to stab him in the eye.

That said, it was a pretty simple recipe. The ingredients are as such:

Pepperidge Farm Cornbread or Herb Seasoned Stuffing (or, to be honest, I’m sure ANY kind of stuffing would do), Cream of Celery soup, whole kernel corn (the recipe calls for 1/2 c., but when I froze corn last summer, I did it in 1-cup servings, so that’s how much I used), onion, celery, pork chops, brown sugar (not pictured) and spicy brown mustard (I used Dijon).

About the pork chops: we have tons of pork chops here, since we grow our own pigs and thus always have plenty of pork in the freezer. The recipe called for boneless pork chops, but I’m not one for deboning pork chops when you can just cook them with the bone in and eat around them. That’s just the kind of wild party girl I am!

Like I said, this was a simple recipe. The hardest part was finely chopping the celery and onion. But I have a super awesome tool to help me do the fine chopping. A few years ago, my mother sent me a Vidalia Chop Wizard, and I’ve been using it ever since. I use it to chop lots of stuff – onions, tomatoes, potatoes, and in this case, celery. All I had to do for the onion was skin the onion and then slice it, put it on the Vidalia Chop Wizard, lower the top, and voila! Finely chopped onions.

I did the same with the celery.

After the celery and onion is chopped, it’s just a matter of tossing the dry stuffing into a bowl and adding the condensed cream of celery soup, onion and celery, and corn. Then you stir ’til it’s reasonably combined, like such:

Take a pie dish, spray it with cooking spray, dump the stuffing mix into the pie dish, and spread it evenly. Top with the pork chops. Mix your brown sugar and mustard, and brush the pork chops with that.

Then stick it into the oven and cook for half an hour. Now, here’s a note: pork chops with bones need to cook a bit longer, apparently. After ours had cooked for 30 minutes,Fred and I got our pork chops and sat down, and his pork chop wasn’t completely done.

Nothing makes me want to run around screaming like underdone pork. Because, BLEH. So we cooked everything for an additional ten minutes, and that was perfect.

(We eat green beans as a side pretty often, because we grow a metric ton of them every year.)

The verdict? Two thumbs up from both of us! The pork chops were really good with their sugar/ mustard glaze, and the stuffing was nice and moist. The onion and celery was a bit crunchy, which I like – but if you prefer yours uncrunchy, probably 2 – 3 minutes in the microwave before you add them to the stuffing mix would take the crunch out.

Fred said that the meal was good enough that he’d like to have it again (which is a good thing, since we have leftovers and will be eating it again for dinner Monday night), though he thinks (and I agree) that Cream of Mushroom soup would be perfectly good. I believe that pretty much any kind of Cream of soup could be substituted for any other; we keep the Cream of Mushroom on hand, so that’s what I tend to use.

Also, of note: Kim was kind enough to share her celiac-friendly make-your-own cream of anything soup mix, here (thanks, Kim!).

Like I said, we’ve got plenty of pork chops in the freezer, so I’ll definitely be making this again – though I think that next time, instead of using a pie dish, I’ll use a 9×13 Pyrex dish. Some of the pork chops were overlapping, and that’s probably part of the reason they didn’t cook all the way through in 30 minutes.

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Nance’s take:

Fucking Fred (shush, it’s an endearment, sometimes). When I heard he was picking out the recipe this time I knew in my heart it was going to involve some kind of pork (Mr. Fred and I sometimes share a brain and it is not always a good thing). I was appalled when I saw cornbread stuffing, but I figured I had signed up to try new things (even if they did make me barf) so I went with it.

A little FYI about Nance. I freaking hate pork chops. With a bloody passion. I have no idea why, but they are just a cut of meat that does absolutely nothing for me – so, of course, I must hate them! God forbid, I dislike something and not be all dramatic about it!

I really don’t like typing these entries up on the night before they go up, but I’ll be honest by saying that I avoided this recipe like the plague (note: hate pork chops). I was making this meal up on Sunday afternoon and already had plans to order a pizza for the evening – just in case things didn’t work out (see: hate pork chops). Thank God I have my husband as a witness because I know that Fred would never believe me, but we could not find Pepperidge Farm stuffing at the store. With the additional bonus of not being able to find any cornbread stuffing! (see: Win for the Pittsburgh Yankees, hee). I ended up substituting Stove Top stuffing, pork flavored, which I considered to be sorta kinda “herbed”, maybe? Oh, things were not looking so great for me and this recipe. It was looking even worse when I realized at the last hour that I had no Cream of Celery soup. I actually had Rick run to the store for it because I already felt bad about the stuffing situation.

Check out this stuffing. Gross, huh? I mean, yuk. When I was in my early 20s I used to love this shit, but as I grew older my taste buds got a little more refined (although corn dogs are still one of my favorite foods so apparently I am not only overly dramatic, but a liar as well). Refined my ass.

DO NOT DO WHAT I DID HERE! I screwed up BIG TIME and pre-made the stuffing. What do I know of recipes that involve packaged stuffing? NOTHING. So I made it up like the package said because Robyn was a little too slow in my her email reply and THIS WAS NOT THE WAY TO DO IT. And I wish I would have added more corn like Robyn did, but I was TRYING TO FOLLOW THE RECIPE, AHEM.

SO yeah, kinda looks shitty, but I’m hoping for the best. You can tell by the way I was getting fancy with the laying of the pork chops. Around here, we don’t have pigs in our backyard so I just went to the local grocery store and bought them since I’m rich. I’m not going to lie. The rule about following the recipe went out the window and I totally didn’t measure the mustard/brown sugar. It just didn’t seem like enough (says she who hates pork chops and will do anything to try and make it more likable). It’s about this time that we were leaning towards taco pizza. Our local Fox’s makes a fabulous one.

This was at 30 minutes. And I thought maybe I should just rename it pork chop soup and call it a day. I am all paranoid about pork being under cooked (my mother loves to pass on her Crazy and it’s one of the reasons I usually eat pork and chicken in a petrified state) so I put it in for another 10 minutes. Honestly? I was hoping that the “soup” would dry out a bit.

Here’s my plate. Please note the spoon. Just sayin’!

I was busy doing other things so I just yelled for my kid to come down and get some food. He slopped it on his plate like this (he had never seen anything like it before) and I cracked up when I saw it. Tell me that doesn’t look like a pile of BARF right there. I was rolling. And debating what time we should call to order the pizza.

THE BEST PART OF ALL?

It was motherfucking delicious! 3 out of 4 loved it and the other one (who hates mustard) only liked the pork chop (which had the mustard on it, go figure). Rick was the lone dissenter, but I bet he would change his mind if I made it with my own stuffing.

So kudos to the FredMonster for picking out a good recipe and giving me absolutely nothing else to bitch about today.

Robyn & Nance try the same recipe - Pork and Corn Stuffing Bake

Prep time

5 mins

Cook time

30 mins

Total time

35 mins

: Main, Entree, Pork

Serves: 4

Ingredients

1½ c. Pepperidge Farm Cornbread Stuffing or Herb Seasoned Stuffing
1 (10.75 oz) can condensed Cream of Celery soup
½ c. whole kernel corn
1 small onion, finely chopped
¼ c. finely chopped celery
4 boneless pork chops, ¾-inch thick
1 T packed brown sugar
1 tsp spicy brown mustard

Instructions

Stir the stuffing, soup, corn, onion and celery in a medium bowl. Spoon the stuffing mixture into a greased 9-inch pie plate. Top with the pork.
Stir the brown sugar and mustard in a small bowl until the mixture is smooth. Spread the mixture on the pork.
Bake at 400 degrees F for 30 minutes or until the pork is cooked through.

Notes

If you're using bone-in pork chops, give it an extra 10 minutes of cooking time.

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Tag Archives: celery

Chicken Noodle Hold the Soup – Nance & Robyn make the same recipe

Saks Fifth Avenue Tomato-Basil Bisque

Pork and Corn Stuffing Bake