Okay, I just got a bag of those frozen chicken breasts from Costco, and I’m trying to find some new things to do with them on Allrecipies. I’ve run into a few problems:
It’s just too damn big. I can’t figure out how to narrow down my search to anything resembling a managable number.
The ingredients search doesn’t work. I ask it to exclude peppers, but it still gives me recipies with peppers in them. Even if it doesn’t, it asks for something like wine. It makes me want to actually take up drinking.
Measuring chicken breasts. Many give amounts in terms of “halves” and such, not pounds. How do I tell how many that is in a bag of breasts?
Ingredient demands. I’ve complained about this before, but many of these recipies ask for stuff like 2 bay leaves or a clove of garlic or whatever, stuff I almost never use and would just rot before I had a chance to use the rest. Is there anything I can do to cut down on this?
Someone once mentioned I could search for “one pot” or “one saucepan” recipies, but I can’t figure out how.
Okay, I don’t know if this will help or not, but when I tried it…it worked.
I went to the site, and used the “search by ingredients” function. I typed in chicken under what I wanted to use and then typed “pepper*” under ingredients I did not want to use. The recipes that resulted (at least in the first 8 or so) did not have peppers. I also did the same thing with “bay” as a keyword under ingredients I didn’t want to use, and got no bay recipes.
If you exclude pepper from your search, you will still get recipes that call for peppers. Using “pepper*” eliminates both pepper and peppers. If you exclude bay leaves, you will still get recipes that call for bay leaf, so just using “bay” as the exclusionary term works better.
This is how the search works on eBay, at any rate, and when I tested the allrecipes site using the same method, it seemed to work in the same manner. This does not mean I am right, though.
If you don’t have (and won’t buy) things as basic as garlic, you’re not really interested in recipes so much as prepared dinners, “chicken helper” type things, or pouches of rice and/or pasta, which usually just require water or at worse butter and milk. Find them in the Bachelor Section of your local grocery store.
On the other hand, I recommend getting garlic, bay leaves, and a few other basic herbs and spices (garlic cloves are cheap and last a long time, or you can just get dried garlic flakes in a jar. bay leaves will last years).
You can make soups without much more than salt, pepper, and parsely – if you have a good pot to cook them in. A basic one would be 2 chicken breasts cooked and cubed and one can of chicken broth, and the following chopped vegetables: 2 white baking potatoes, three carrots, three celery hearts, one onion, and three cloves of garlic. You chop up the onion and garlic first and let it cook in oil for a while in the pot, then add everything else, cover with water, and cook until the potatoes and carrots are soft. Easy as pie and it’ll feed you for a week.
BTW, if you’re afraid of buying veggies that will go bad… you can buy loose potatoes and onions, so that’s not a problem, but for the carrots get little bags of baby carrots and you’ll use them all. Celery doesn’t last long, so you can just scratch the celery from the recipe and add something else like frozen peas.
Garlic is absolutely a cooking basic. Desserts aside, it can go into pretty much everything.
My impression is that you’re just looking for recipes that use chicken. I’ve found allrecipes works best if you search for specific recipes, like chicken marsala or fried chicken or roast chicken. From there, you can pick out simpler recipes that won’t call for ingredients you’ll never use again.
Absolutely. What would you say is basic besides salt and pepper? Garlic powder is probably the next one most people buy. Some people put it on the dinner table with salt and pepper.
If you really don’t want to keep garlic around, you can buy crushed garlic in a jar. It has a slight vinegar taste to it since that’s what it’s preserved in, but it’s more convenient if you honestly can’t be bothered with the fresh stuff. Yes, garlic is a kitchen essential these days (though where I grew up it was rare and exotic until about 15 years ago, and only ‘ethnic’ people and weirdos like my family cooked with it.) A few dried herbs on hand are good to have too. Bay leaves are definitely good to have on hand and will not go bad. I’d suggest that for your needs a jar of “Italian seasoning” would be handy too. It’s a no-brainer herb combination.
I have also found allrecipes to be mostly useful if I already know what recipe I’m looking for. But keywords like “simple” or “basic” seem to help for getting low-key, easy recipes, in my experience.
There are a couple of cookbooks around that are specifically for making dishes with no more than a set (small) number of ingredients. You might want to poke around your local bookstore.
That’s good advice. Don’t let the name fool you, “Italian Seasoning,” is good for all kinds of dishes… If you want a savory soup, for instance, it’s a good way to get rich flavor without buying all that stuff separately (oregano, marjoram, thyme, etc.) Since you have all this chicken, you can try this: thaw a couple, rub them with butter or oils, sprinkle with IS, and bake for 30-40 m. on 350 degrees. Throw some little red potatoes, washed and quartered, around the chicken in the pan for a good side dish. The juices from the meat will baste the potatoes.
Spices can be expensive, but most of them will last for years. I have jars I’ve dragged around for 10 years now. If you get basic blends like curry powder, chili powder, adobe seasoning, etc., you can get a lot more variety from basic meats and veggies.
I didn’t see anyone else mention this question yet. The term is deceptive because a “whole” chicken breast refers to both breasts from the animal, still attached to each other. For example, if you were buying a fresh chicken a cutting into pieces yourself, you’d want to know if the recipe called for you to keep the chicken breast(s) “whole” or “halved”.
A “half” chicken breast is just one breast. Bags of chicken breasts are usually sold as “halves”. (If you’re talking about the same product from Costco as I buy all the time, they’re frozen boneless, skinless chicken breast halves).
Some recipes will ask for chicken quantities in pounds, but they usually also give an equivalent in breast (ie. “X pounds, or approximately Y halves”).
If you really can’t even fathom using garlic, of all things, you will find this whole ‘cooking’ thing a little tough. Surf over to the site of your local grocery store instead of allrecipes and order yourself a few jars of premade sauce-green thai curry, korma, basic spaghetti, wine and mushroom cream, ect, and some frozen vegetables. a lot of them are really delicious, especially Pathak’s. Problem solved.
