Cheese-Stuffed Mushrooms

To the apparent surprise of Americans who believe conservative podcasters, Canada is a sovereign nation.

Cheddar-Stuffed Mushrooms 6 large portobello mushrooms, or 1 to 1½ pounds baby mushrooms ¼ cup (60 mL) butter, divided ¼ cup (60 mL) chopped roasted salted cashews (or nuts of your choice) 5 or 6 green onions 1 clove garlic (or more if desired), minced 2 tbsp (30 mL) flour 1 cup (250 mL) milk 1 cup shredded cheddar, or cheese of your choice 2 tbsp (30 mL) soy sauce 2 tbsp (30 mL) cooking oil Salt and pepper to taste Heat oven to 425°F or 220°C. Line a baking sheet with foil.* Remove the stems from the mushroom caps and chop. Set aside. Melt half the butter, mix with the chopped nuts. Set aside. Thinly slice the green onions, keeping the white and green parts separated. Set aside the green parts. Melt the remaining butter in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the whites of the green onions and cook for 4 minutes, or until wilted. Stir in the garlic and chopped mushroom stems. Add salt and pepper to taste. Continue cooking 8-10 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and most of their juice has dried. Sprinkle the flour over the pan (if you have one of those miniature sifters, it's perfect for this), stirring rapidly to prevent lumps. While still quickly stirring, add the milk one splash at a time. You can add it more freely as the mixture thins out. After all the milk is added, cook until smooth and thickened, about 2 minutes. Then remove from heat, and immediately stir in the cheese and the green parts of the green onions. Mix the oil and soy sauce. Brush them all over the mushroom caps. Then lay the caps concave side up on the baking sheet. Fill them with the cheese sauce, adding enough to almost come to their rims. Put some of the chopped nuts and butter on top of each. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and the cheese is golden at the edges. Serve warm. *You don't need to line the pan with foil. But come cleanup time, you'll be glad you did. Adapted from Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Right after election night, I said that I hoped Trump's dumber policies would inconvenience enough people who have sufficient money to influence him, thus bringing at least a little sanity back into national politics. And already, we are seeing little ripples of dismay in various top-floor offices. I would be bitterly amused if I had a lot of money to throw away on rising prices.

Liquor store employees in Canada have been removing American alcohol from the shelves as shoppers carefully avoid it. It turns out that people get irked when threatened with annexation and whapped with tariffs. Canadians may not be able to vote in US elections, but they can definitely vote with their money.

A friend sent me this picture from a store in Montreal.

 

Sinking sales over the border haven't bred executive desperation yet, but there are already signs of consternation. After all, stores never let freshly-cleared shelf space stay vacant. The president of the Kentucky Distillers' Association took to Twitter and begged Canadians to keep buying bourbon. The distillers' plea came on the same day that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario yanked American alcohol from every single store in the province. Other Canadian provinces have followed suit. 

The Globe and Mail

All of this to say, today we are getting out that magazine I took home from Ottawa's airport, and making a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Or at least, we are trying to make a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. As we have learned, a lot of the recipes from their beautifully-photographed magazine seem like they were only tested in commercial kitchens. I suspect the LCBO's recipe developers didn't always think about the realities of cooking in a house that does not have a full complement of restaurant equipment.

On a minor cross-cultural cooking note, I'm surprised the recipe writers used volume instead of weight* when writing the metric measurements of ingredients like shredded cheese and flour. I thought that people in Canada (and everywhere else that isn't the US) had kitchen scales.

We begin the recipe by making puffed wild rice. It was surprisingly hard to find plain wild rice at the store. There were plenty of rice mixes that contained it, but only one store in town could sell us a bag of standalone wild rice.

My puffed wild rice tasted burnt. I threw it out and tried again, watching the pan a lot more carefully. But I got more burnt (yet puffy) wild rice. After two failures, I figured that I needed a better tutorial than a few recipe sentences. But when I looked online, everyone's Instagram-worthy pictures showed rice that was just as burnt as mine was. Maybe everyone has been burning their wild rice and trying to convince themselves that it has a "deliciously nutty flavor" as the recipe headnote claims.

Since my burnt rice looked just like everyone else's, I gamely put it into the spice grinder. After it was as pulverized as it would get, it had a lot of unnerving translucent crystals that looked like Plexiglas sawdust.

With a skeptical yet open mind, I tried some of our allegedly completed "wild rice crunch." It was like eating gravelly dirt. This stuff threatened to sand off my teeth. At this point, I went off-recipe and tried putting it in hot water to soften it-- you know, what people normally do with rice. I thought I could put a dab of the resulting paste into the bottom of each mushroom for that, um, earthy flavor. But the rice was just as gritty as ever. Since I don't like ending every meal with a visit to the dentist, I threw it out. 

Setting aside the failed wild rice, it was time to go nuts.

We're supposed to use pecans, but this isn't the most economical time of the year to purchase them. Instead, I helped myself to a quarter-cup of cashews from the household snack stash. I could have chopped them with a knife, but we already had the spice grinder out from our recent wild rice misadventures.

I mixed the nuts with the melted butter as directed. If the wild rice hadn't been so terrible after getting burnt and pulverized, it would have been here also. But even though the paste looks terrible, but it tasted really good. I could already tell it would be an amazing topping for what was to come.

The next part of the recipe involved the white parts of our green onions and a lot of butter. I don't usually cook green onions, so this felt a bit odd. But it smelled really good. We should have been using a leek, but those were very expensive and only sold in large bunches. I didn't want to commit to two pounds of leeks for the sake of one mushroom recipe.

We are next directed to add the chopped mushroom stems. I like that the recipe uses the whole mushroom instead of telling us to snap off the stems and then discard them.

I usually don't cook mushrooms until dry, but I followed the directions and kept stirring the frying pan until all of the juices had bubbled away. The mushroom reduction in the pan was fantastically good, but I don't know if it was worth it.

The next part of the recipe is easy if you can make a competent white sauce (which, admittedly, is tricky to get right on the first five attempts). After we have made gravy of the pan, it was time to add the cheese. The ingredients list calls for "old cheddar," but I chose to use up the various scraps of cheese lurking in the refrigerator. Besides, "five-cheese sauce" sounds so much better than "cheddar sauce."

 

One taste of the cheese sauce and I forgave the recipe writers for the burnt wild rice.

And so, it was finally time to assemble everything! The recipe calls for large portobello mushrooms, but full-sized ones were extremely costly compared to the little ones. I know nothing about fungiculture, but the price difference suggests that mushrooms are difficult to grow to a large size. So, I figured we would have dainty little stuffed mushrooms instead of big ones. And they looked so cute before we baked them.

I know that this magazine is meant for autumn recipes, but realistically we can only serve these on Halloween. They look like we should call them "zombie pustules."

Things didn't look any better after coming out of the oven.

Before I get too disappointed about their appearance, I should note that the magazine's army of photoshoot professionals couldn't make their mushrooms look any less oozy. Their picture is a lot prettier than what happened in our kitchen, but I think this is an inherently untidy recipe.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Even though our mushrooms looked like I had dropped them onto the floor before serving, I figured there was no way mushrooms and cheese could possibly taste bad. On a related note, I wonder if there's a visual equivalent of an "acquired taste." You know, how you think something looks ugly until spend several years forcefully convincing yourself that you like it.

These were as delicious as they weren't pretty. I know the recipe calls for pecans on top, but I thought the cashews were a lot better. That salty hit on top of the cheese made the mushrooms taste like really good bar food, without having to pay $20 for a beer in some place where the music is as loud as a high school dance. 

And so, once again, a recipe from this magazine didn't go where the directions told us to, but took us somewhere delicious. These mushrooms don't make up for the horror show that currently passes for national politics. But on the (very small) bright side, our northern neighbors who gave us the recipe aren't pretending any of this is normal.

*In the purest, most pedantic sense, it is true that the kilogram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. However, unless someone has decided to whip up some stuffed mushrooms while in a vomit comet or somewhere far away from Earth's surface, mass and weight are functionally interchangeable in the kitchen. Anyone wishing to waggle their irate index finger at me is advised to direct their corrective urges at the manufacturers of kitchen scales that switch between pounds (a unit of weight) and kilograms (a unit of mass) at the press of a button.↪

Turkey Burgers: or, Discount meat leads to strange places

Today, we are having fun with the food processor!

Turkey Brunch Burgers 6 English muffins Brown mustard Leafy greens of choice* 6 slices Cheddar cheese (or whatever cheese you like), or ½ cup shredded cheese Tomato sauce: 1 clove garlic, minced 1 tsp thyme 1 tbsp olive oil salt and pepper to taste 1 tsp balsamic vinegar 8 plum tomatoes Turkey patties: 1 tbsp cooking oil 2 tbsp onion powder 1½ tsp dried sage 1 Granny Smith apple, cut into 1"(ish) cubes (no need to peel) 4 slices smoked bacon, cut into 2"(ish) long pieces ¼ tsp nutmeg 1 pound ground turkey Salt and pepper to taste ¼ tsp liquid smoke For the tomato sauce: Blenderize all the ingredients except the vinegar. Put in a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan or frying pan and bring to a low boil. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for an hour or two, until thick enough to spread. Stir the sauce, scraping the bottom of the pot, every 15-20 minutes. When done, remove from heat and add the vinegar. This can be made a few days ahead and refrigerated. It also freezes well. For the turkey patties: Heat oven to 350°. Line a baking sheet with foil. If the pan does not have raised edges on all sides, fold up the foil on all sides to contain any juice that runs out. Cut the bacon slices into 1" lengths and the apple into ½"-1" cubes (no need to peel them). Run the bacon and apple through the food processor. Mix the apples, bacon, turkey, and all remaining ingredients. Form into 6 patties. (The mixture may not be firm enough to hold a shape very well until after it is baked.) Bake about 20 minutes, or until a food thermometer reads 165°. Place cheese on top of each one about 5 minutes before they're done. When done, cover with foil. Make sure the foil doesn't touch them or else the cheese will stick to it. (You can put little loosely-crumpled wads of foil between the patties to keep the foil on top from making contact.) Let them rest 5 minutes. To serve: Split the muffins. Warm them in the microwave, or spritz the cut sides with cooking spray and toast on a griddle. Spread the tops with mustard. Spread tomato sauce on the bottoms, then place a patty and greens on the bottoms. Close and serve. *Baby arugula if you want to strictly follow the original recipe. Or, use avocado (mashed and seasoned to taste) instead of leafy greens. Adapted from Food and Drink, autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

This recipe begins with clearance turkeys. We purchased two of them when the price dropped to 45¢ per pound. Like the ham, I argued it was false economy to spend $25 on two turkeys when no one would actually eat them. I was overruled on this, and the birds spent several months in the chest freezer. While everyone forgot the $25 of unwanted poultry sitting in the chest freezer, it needled at me. The birds bothered me. Their presence irked me. Eventually, I thawed one with no plans for it.

Then, on a night when I was feeling unusually energetic, I pulverized the whole thing. You should know that your average household-use food processor is not meant to pulverize an entire raw turkey in one long slog. The food processor survived, but it made whining noises as we reached the end of the bird. Despite mechanical protestations, we had an entire ground turkey. Unfortunately, no one here likes ground turkey. But somehow, ground turkey seemed easier to work with than a whole bird.

I think this is what they call "having a normal one."

In looking for recipe ideas, I didn't want to (not-so-)secretly swap in turkey for beef. That always ends up tasting like an apologetic "At least it's good for you." With that in mind, I found this in that Canadian food magazine I pinched from the airport the first time I went up north. 

Most of the magazine's pictures are relatively generic, but this recipe's photograph is very Canadian. It could not unironically come from anywhere else. We've got someone in flannels, serving the food on a slab of dead tree. My friend who lives in Canada had only one correction:

This was in a themed article about creative new spins on Thanksgiving ingredients. I don't know about you, but attempting a "creative new spin" on a Thanksgiving recipe is a risky move for most people I know. The tableside fallout could persist for months. But we're not making this for Thanksgiving, so that doesn't matter.

The recipe starts by roasting tomatoes. Since I don't live in Canada where the nightly temperature is still dipping in and out of freezing as I write this, I took issue with baking the tomatoes for four hours at 250°F (140°C). Some online investigation told me that I could put the tomatoes in a slow cooker and leave them all day. 

My only problem with this (which is true for everything involving a slow cooker): it smelled really good several hours before it was done. If I used a slow cooker often, I would plug it in outside so the smell of food didn't follow me around the house all day. 

On a related full disclosure: You will need to soak your slow cooker in bleach water overnight. If you don't have a yard or an apartment balcony, consider using another cooking method.  Otherwise, your house will smell like an indoor public pool.

We were next directed to grate apples. This seemed maddeningly tedious, but it turns out you can shred an apple really fast. Of course, I didn't bother peeling them since I figured the cheese shredder would reduce the peel into tiny flecks anyway.

I don't understand why the recipe tells us to core the apples before shredding them. It's a lot easier to just shred the apple until you've exposed the core on all sides, and then throw it out. Maybe whoever wrote this recipe typed "peeled, cored" after the word "apples" on autopilot.

 

It's taking a while for this recipe to look normal, isn't it? 

We are now directed to mix our apple shreds with a respectable amount of onions. By the time the juice in the pan evaporated, it looked like I had made a semi-successful attempt at hash browns.

At this point this gets into recognizable burger territory. Mix your meat with whatever you're adding to it, shape it into patties, and take it to the grill. Everyone who has ever complained about a dry turkey burger will love this recipe's solution: adding lots of raw bacon. Either our burgers would be flavorful, or they would set the grill on fire.

I'm not an expert on grilling, but I could already tell that grilling this would be a miserable ordeal. The meat was gloppy and runny. If anyone tried to grill it, the turkey burgers would stick to the racks, fall apart, and land on the cinders. 

I could have wielded a spatula over the flames and gotten more and more angry and defensive as supper ruined itself while complaints arose around me. But even though that is a traditional rite of the summertime, I decided to skip it. Instead, I would bake our dinner.

Doesn't this look manageable?

I managed to shape the meat into patties, but it was like trying to pat extra-sticky fruit preserves into tidy mounds. I didn't know if these would fall apart as they baked or not. But since I wasn't trying to grill them, we wouldn't watch our grocery money crumble through the racks and go up in flames. If our burgers fell apart, I figured I could put the surviving meat-clumps onto a bowl of lettuce and halfheartedly call it a salad.

To my own surprise, the burgers cooked up really nicely. They may have been as gloopy as undrained cottage cheese before baking, but they came out all right afterward. Granted, the random shreds of cheese I sprinkled on top looked bad after they melted. But that would be covered with a bun anyway. Speaking of, I dropped the English muffin onto a hot griddle to make it extra-toasty in the middle.

After final assembly, the burgers were... not bad. However, like the last time we mixed raw bacon into food, the bacon stayed oddly squishy and faintly... un-right. Like, yes, the pork germs were definitely dead, but the bacon didn't seem cooked. And the chopped onions were out-of-place. It was like someone tried to pretend a slice of meatloaf was the same as a burger patty. The flavor was good, but the execution was unimpressive.

But no one liked the roast tomatoes. They tasted all right, but they were slithery and slimy when we ate them. We ended up mashing the tomatoes with a fork, which eliminated the slimy texture problem. The resulting mashed spiced tomatoes tasted a lot like the homemade tomato ketchup we made from Miss Leslie's cookbook. And yes, we used avocados instead of baby arugula. Avocados were 45¢ each, and baby arugula was priced on the other side of the stratosphere.

But as much as I liked these burgers, they were a lot of effort (even if you exclude shoving an entire turkey through a food processor). And so, I decided to simplify things. First, I replaced the onion with onion powder. The fresh onions made the meat too watery anyway. Second, I added a bit of liquid smoke since I had no intention of trying to grill these. 

Third, I tried to let the food processor do all that apple-grating and bacon cutting. On my first attempt, I just dropped everything into the machine in its natural state and turned on the motor. This may have worked if I had a commercial-grade food processor. Instead, I got a lot of tangled, sinewy bacon strings and wads of half-chopped apple. I had to take the whole mess out of the food processor, hack at it with a knife, and put it back into the machine. 

But on a later batch of turkey burgers, I got out the cutting board and gave the food processor a bit of starting help.

We ended up with perfectly pulverized apples and bacon. Even the apple skins turned into tiny speckles that I could pass them off as herb flecks. Unfortunately, our food processor success looked terrible.

I think that pulverizing all the non-turkey components of these burgers makes it easier to see why this meat was never going to hold itself together on a grill. There's too much ground-up produce and too little meat.

I don't know why our Canadian recipe writers were so hesitant to just chuck the ingredients into a food processor. Although food processors are both expensive and frivolous (unless you get lucky at a thrift store), this magazine seems like it's aimed at the sort of people who probably have one.  

And for those who can't imagine eating burgers made with beige paste, they looked perfectly fine after mixing them together. They just would have been hopeless on the grill.

Since electrical pulverization seemed to help a lot with the burgers, we took a similar approach with the tomatoes. Instead of slow-roasting them in the oven (or slow cooker), we blenderized them and put the resulting froth in a small frying pan over a low burner. 

After several hours of simmering, we had a really good tomato spread. Its flavor was concentrated and intense. As mentioned above, this reminded me of making making ketchup like it's 1837.

Having corrected the recipe's faulty handling of its ingredients, these are easily the best turkey burgers I've ever had. They tasted a lot like breakfast sausage, except without the excess salt and greasiness. 

I think they're so much better than other turkey burgers because they're not trying to be hamburgers. Yes, you have a cooked meat patty stacked on a bread bun, but there the similarity ends. So instead of tasting like the absence of beef, they are actually good. I hesitate to recommend them for summer grilling unless you have one of those cage-on-a-stick things people use for grilling fish. But since these aren't even trying to be burgers anyway, it's no loss to bake them instead of grilling. 

One-Pan Roast Chicken and Crispy Bread, Mushroom, and Apricot Stuffing: or, Cooking our birds the modern Canadian way!

You know how at Thanksgiving, some people bake extra stuffing separate from the bird- but with slices of raw turkey laid on top before baking? Someone in Canada decided to turn that into designer recipe.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

One-Pan Roast Porcini Chicken With Bread, Mushroom, and Apricot Stuffing       Chicken: ⅕ oz (6 g) dried porcini mushrooms* ¼ tsp (1mL) fennel seeds 3 chicken leg quarters 1 tbsp (15 mL) olive oil 1 tbsp (15 mL) butter Salt and pepper to taste       Stuffing: 8 oz sliced mushrooms 1 tbsp (15 mL) chopped garlic ½ cup green onions, cut into ½-1 inch pieces† ¾ cup (2 hectograms) dried apricots 1 cup sodium-free chicken stock 5 cups (12.6 deciliters) Italian or French bread, cut into 1½ inch (4cm) cubes 1½ tsp dried parsley‡ 1½ tsp dried thyme‡ 1 tbsp olive oil Heat oven to 425°F or 220°C.       To prepare the chicken: Grind the dried mushrooms and fennel seeds in a spice grinder to a fine powder. Mix with salt and pepper, then rub it into the chicken pieces. Heat the oil and butter in a large, oven-safe skillet over high heat. Place the chicken skin-side down in the pan and cook until golden brown, 4-6 minutes, spooning the fat onto the exposed side of the chicken pieces as they cook. Set the chicken pieces on a plate, and cover them with an upside-down bowl. Set aside. Leave the juices in the pan for the stuffing.       To prepare the stuffing: Add the mushrooms to the skillet and cook for 3 minutes, or until they begin to brown. Add green onions and garlic, reduce heat to medium, and cook 2 minutes or until softened. Add the chicken stock and apricots, bring to a boil, and simmer for 6 minutes or until apricots are plumped. Remove from heat. Add bread, parsley, and thyme. Mix well.       To assemble and bake: Spread the stuffing out so that it is in an even layer in the skillet. Lay the chicken on top. Bake for 35 minutes, or until a meat thermometer reads 165°F or 78°C. After removing from oven, cover tightly with foil and allow to rest 5 minutes before serving. *Didn't have this, so I omitted it. † The original recipe used sliced leeks. ‡ Or 2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley/thyme if you want to strictly follow the original. Adapted from Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Today, we are returning to that fascinating Canadian food magazine I found in the airport! When the pickier members of the household are away overnight, I tend to foist the more... shall we say, unconventional recipes on those who remain. With that in mind, we're going to put dried fruits into chicken.

You can tell the editors really thought this was one of the recipes that would sell magazine. They used it as the lead photograph for their article of one-pan dinners. (For whatever reason, they then stuffed the recipe in the back of the magazine instead of putting it on the next page.)

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

I would like to note at the beginning that we modified the recipe due to grocery prices. So instead of following the recipe as professionally developed in Canadian test kitchens, we're really testing the theory behind it. Well, the magazine article was called "Simplifying Supper" (emphasis mine), and you don't simplify supper by driving to every grocery store in town purchasing one ingredient at a time from whoever was selling it the cheapest. Also, since I'm not feeding a whole family, I halved the recipe and decided how much chicken to cook by laying the raw pieces in the pan to see how many would fit.

As we seasoned the chicken, we arrived at our first budget cut. We did not have any dried mushrooms. I know that dried mushrooms are very common in other parts of the world, and it would have been quite easy to drop a few into the spice grinder. But apparently none of the people who routinely cook with dried mushrooms get their groceries from the store near me.

To reduce mess and, dare I say, simplify supper, I rubbed the seasonings onto the skin side of chicken, then put it in the hot pan, and seasoned the exposed nonskin side last. That way none of the spices got left behind on the cutting board, and I had less mess to contend with later. The chicken turned a nice shade of golden brown, though it took a lot longer than the 4-6 minutes specified in the directions. That's probably not a recipe error so much as the result of using a heavy cast-iron pan which needed to heat up before the food in it could start cooking.

We've talked previously about how a lot of the recipes in this magazine seem like no one tested them in non-professional kitchens with non-professional equipment. Today I would like to add another delicate criticism to the writing and editorial staff: they omit a lot of crucial recipe steps. For example, after we've browned the chicken in the frying pan, we are told to set it aside. But they don't mention that we should cover it. Perhaps this magazine is aimed at experienced cooks who don't need every step in recipes spelled out in detail. Or maybe Canadian cooking magazines assume you know more about cooking than Americans do.

But now that the chicken is ready to set aside, it's time to move on to the stuffing. You can tell this is the big feature of the recipe. Without the stuffing, we're just making a pan of baked chicken pieces- which is fine but doesn't sell magazines. When we added the mushrooms, they absorbed all the dang oil like little fungus sponges! Look at how dry the pan was. Our mushrooms kept trying to stick to the pan and burn.

We are now directed to add the leeks, which brings us to our next budget cut: we used green onions instead. The leeks were unexpectedly expensive, and only sold in very large bunches. If we wanted to buy leeks, we had to make a commitment and swear to love them in dinner every night for the rest of the month.

Before we added the stock to the vegetables, the contents of the pan looked like something you'd see on someone's social media postings. It's so colorful, with so many different textures, and just so dang pretty.

I have noticed that this magazine uses a lot of dried fruits in savory recipes. Is this a trend now, or a Canadian idiosyncrasy? Maybe dried fruit in supper is today's equivalent to the chicken-and-grapes fad from the 1970s.

After we added the apricots and the stock, it looked like we made soup out of bong water.

In our next budget cut, we were not using "rustic Italian bread." We had hamburgers last week, and the surplus buns were still sitting on the countertop and looking lonely. I tried to convince myself that the sesame seeds would add extra flavor. The original recipe uses ten cups of cubed bread. That's over half a gallon of bread cubes. (For those in metric countries, we're talking 25ish deciliters.) While that seems overwhelming at first, it turns out that bread expands a lot when you cut it up. One hamburger bun yielded 2½ cups (that's 6ish deciliters) of bread pieces.

Truly the beginnings of the highest cuisine.

I dumped the bread in, and suddenly the contents of the frying pan looked just like the magazine photo-- aside from the presence of sesame seeds and other signs of ingredient fudgery. I don't always get my recipes to look like the professional photos, and it's very reassuring when they do. It suggests that someone tested the recipe at least once (even if they didn't imagine people making it at home without restaurant-grade pots and pans). 

At this point, it was time to add the half-cooked chicken. And so, after a surprisingly long prep time for a recipe that is supposed to "simplify supper," we were ready to insert the pan in the oven and come back when it was ready to eat. 

As it baked, we could see the fat dripping out of the chicken skin and onto the meat. I don't mean a few small trickles of fat and juices. This chicken bastes itself. For all the fat and juices that melted and dripped down the meat, I may as will have completely covered it with raw bacon. 

While the chicken baked, the stuffing beneath it began to soften and lose its crispness. I won't fault the recipe writers for that. They said to spread everything onto a big pan, and I didn't. After the pile of dirty dishes got unexpectedly high, I really wanted this to be a one-pan recipe. But whether it's my faulty pan selection or a recipe error, our meant-to-be-crispy bread was soon bubbling like a merry stew.

To my surprise, the bread shrank a lot in the oven. I expected to end up with chicken perched on a mountain of bread and dried fruit, but the bread compacted into a surprisingly thin layer beneath the bird.

As they say in some parts of Canada, c'est pret! Going back to what we said about omitting a lot of steps in the recipe, the directions do not mention letting the meat rest after cooking it. Did the writers have any non-professionals test the recipes before printing them? Were they meant to be "inspirational" (read: unrealistic) rather than cooking instructions you can actually follow at home?

After ten minutes of resting time, the chicken was absolutely amazing. Even the "I don't like bones in my chicken" people got over their complaints. The stuffing had a lot of complex interlocking flavors. You'd think I spent a lot of time fussing over correctly-balanced seasonings. For whatever reason, it also tasted like I dumped in a lot of wine even though I did not use any. 

I liked the stuffing, but others did not. However, I could have done without the dried apricots-- or at least reduced the amount. They made the stuffing almost syrupy. If you want dried fruit, I think figs or dates would be a better choice- or better yet, dried cranberries. One person said "That is some good chicken!" and hoped I didn't notice that the stuffing remained on the plate.

However, the chicken was so good that I didn't want to make this recipe one and then close the magazine pages forever. Furthermore, we had some stale French bread laying around the countertop because there just aren't enough people in the house to eat a whole loaf of it. And so, hoping that was close enough to the "rustic Italian bread" I could apparently just grab at any supermarket in Canada, we made the recipe again. 

But this time, we left out the dried apricots. I know the apricots are one of the title ingredients, but people aren't always thrilled about "unusual" recipes- even if they're developed by actual professionals and not by me. But to make up for the apricots' absence, we added chopped celery. I honestly don't like celery on its own, but I think it adds a wonderful flavor to so many things.

Well, aside from the lack of bright orange discs of dried fruit, this one looked almost like the cover photo!

While this was advertised as a simple one-pan dinner, I think that "simple" a bit of a reach. You will end up serving this out of a single pan, but this recipe leaves behind a tall pile of dirty dishes. Granted, if one has a dishwasher it's a simple matter of filing the dishes on the machine's racks and pushing the magic button, but the cleanup is always worth keeping in mind.

But I'm actually kind of impressed that they came up with a recipe for chicken and stuffing that doesn't involve waiting all day for it to cook. When we actually used the type of bread specified in the directions, it came out wonderfully crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. I've never had white bread stuffing before, and it was really good.

With that said, perhaps I just can't be bothered to stay up-do-date with the latest in semi-upscale foods, but I liked the stuffing better without the titular apricots in it. Without the apricots, the stuffing tasted like it came right off the Thanksgiving table (appropriate since this was the magazine's autumn issue). I liked the recipe as written, because a lot of times it's nice to make something a little different. But if you want something a bit more "normal," you can't go wrong with celery.