I made chicken empanadas this weekend because it seemed like a good idea and like a good way to say goodbye, even if it’s only a temporary goodbye. A chicken filling full of love, hugged by a flaky crust. Tears optional. Lime juice recommended.

Our friends are moving. To Scotland. Scotland seems awfully far away from Minnesota. So, as I sat here last week contemplating the length of 12 months and what on earth I would do without Jen at happy hour and Halloween and New Year’s Eve and all those days in between and tried to determine how I could possibly justify trekking over a giant body of water – maybe to bring you all a haggis recipe, perhaps – I asked Matt and Jen if I could possibly bring them dinner this past weekend. They agreed.

This is the dough blade on my food processor. It makes doughs like this one easy and fuss-free.

My favorite parts about this particular dough adapted from Laylita are that it comes together easily and is easy to work with once it is together. Start with flour.

And butter slices.

Add in one whole egg and some cold water and pulse until it comes together.

When it’s nice and crumbly, we’re done. Keep in mind that you do want a few chunks of butter in there. We aren’t looking for uniform texture. Those chunks will make the dough flaky later.

Form a ball shape and stash it in the fridge to rest while you make your filling.

Toss a few diced onions and two to three chilies into a pan with a bit of heated oil.

Add in the spices and honey…

… and cook it down until the onions are tender. This is where I want to try it because it suddenly looks all hot and spicy.

To our onion, sauce-like mixture we will add shredded chicken.

Green olives.

Hard-boiled eggs. The Argentinean recipe told me so. I can’t argue.

Mix it all together, and we’re ready to stuff.

Start by rolling out your dough. I like the uniformity of rolling out large sheets of dough and cutting them with a cookie cutter or a round lid or container.

Place a small amount of filling in each circle. These circles are about 4-5 inches across, and I used 2-3 tablespoons. You want to leave a decent edge around the sides to seal and fold to prevent anything from spilling out.

Fold the empanada in half and press to seal.

You can roll over here and press with a fork, or you can just seal with a fork. For mine, I rolled the chicken empanadas over, and then because I was making caramel bourbon peach pies from the dough as well, I simply pressed those with a fork so they would look different and I could tell them apart.

Not pictured because I was melting in the heat of Matt and Jen’s kitchen: Beat an egg yolk and brush it on before baking so your empanadas get a brown glossy look across the top.

While my empanadas baked in the house, Ole stayed outside and grilled steak and chicken fajitas and the rest of us sat around and pretended that no one was leaving, that we’d all be there again or perhaps at Kevin and Leslie’s house or in my own dining room, that summer would last forever.

And when dinner was ready, we ate outside in the cooling summer evening, silent. I’m not sure if they were silent because they liked the food or because we knew it wouldn’t last, despite the fact that we’d bid the Sno’Laughlins farewell earlier this month already and here we were again, trying to extend the time before the inevitable parting.

And after we ate, well, Matt invited us out to one last farewell dinner the night before they depart. That was last night. The final goodbye. And here we are, at the end of summer and the beginning of a year of emails and Skype calls. From there, all that’s left is to say hello again in 12 months. That is, unless I can weasel my way to Scotland before then. We’ll miss you both! In fact, I miss you already. Have a fantastic time!

This is a post about bean salad. A Mediterranean bean salad I made back in June. It has taken me this long to share it, but that’s because I had some other sharing I was obligated to do. It’s a post about Greek seasoning on chicken. It’s a post about stuffing it all together in a pita, serving it with tzatziki to make a chicken gyro and having a wonderful meal with your family and your friends and your neighbors. It’s a post about food.

This is a post about the food I feed to my family.

I made bean salad. I’d had some at Costco, of all places, and I was instantly drawn in. Beans, barley, peppers, sauce. Simple, understated and bursting with flavor. Ole was not convinced as I cooked and drained beans and barley and stashed them away in the fridge to cool. Note: I had originally planned to use three bell peppers in this recipe. That is, of course, until Ole used one of them for something else. Flexibility is key to a happy marriage.

I then made a pretty simple sun-dried tomato pesto using sun-dried tomatoes, basil and parsley from our garden, garlic cloves and oil.

Mix the pesto, the beans and barley, the peppers, a bit of vinegar to pull it all together and a Mediterranean bean salad you shall have to be eaten on pitas or with pita chips or scooped up with a spoon and a fork. And I was happy with it. I packed it up, placed it in the fridge and told Ole to make it a meal with some cucumbers and tomatoes from the garden while I was gone, but he was skeptical. He did not trust me. Turns out, I was right, but he made the chicken anyway.

A Greek-seasoned, dry-rubbed chicken, grilled and thinly sliced. This is what happens when you stock your pantry, meals become feasts in a matter of minutes. In fact, I shared that same sentiment just today how making impromptu meals from your pantry is so much easier when you stock that pantry.

He also paired it with homemade tzatziki, which is easy to make and is so much better when you make it fresh. It’s bright and lively, and it pairs nicely with said Greek-seasoned chicken.

And he put the salad on the side (except the kids and I still put it inside) and made a gyro. I do have to say it looks like a meal I’d love to eat. Ole even called to let me know the bean salad was a new favorite with the kids, and they’d begged to eat it for lunch the next day too.

The moral of the story is that my husband knows not how barley and beans can be mind-blowing. In fact, our dinner guests last month asked specifically for the recipe. My kids cheered when it showed up on the table for a third time this summer. I cried inside when everyone ate it all because it meant I couldn’t eat it for lunch the next day.

And the chicken gyro? Well, it’s pretty fantastic, and so is the man who made it.

Ole is gone, gone gone this week(end) motorcycling in the UP, and I am attempting to remain sane by taking the kids on short jaunts around the neighborhood. We already hit Conny’s Creamy Cone, and I think we’re going to attempt the beach sometime this weekend too. I hope you all have a fantastic weekend!

It’s not a secret that I love avocados. I buy 4 or so a week on a regular basis, and then I add chunks of them to salads, I spread them on burgers and sandwiches, and I love them as guacamole and chips. It’s no surprise then that when looking for a twist on chicken salad, I naturally just used all the ingredients I’d put in guacamole into the chicken and topped it with the avocado slices.

Start with a roasted chicken. You could make your own, or if you have a good deli near you, feel free to grab a rotisserie chicken from them. Better yet, you could just collect some leftover chicken from a different meal or add a few breasts or pieces next time you’re grilling. However you procure your chicken, you’re going to need to shred it.

I prefer shredded chicken in my chicken salad to chunks. It sticks together more, provides more surface area for the dressing to stick to, and if you’re using all chicken breasts, it ends up drying out less because the chicken is fully coated. Note: Those are Ole’s bear claws. He wants to tell you about them, but that’s for a different post.


We used sweet peppers that we had in the fridge for this. They needed to be eaten in short order, but you could also substitute with the bell pepper of your choice.

Meet my spring onions. Aren’t they cute? I knew you’d love them.


I did add cilantro to this because, well, I add it to my guacamole whenever it’s available. This came directly from my garden, but it can easily be left out if you’re a hater of cilantro.

Tomatoes, diced finely, also make an appearance.

You can add additional or fewer jalapeños to match your heat tolerance. I probably could have added two more for me, but I’m not sure the kids would have appreciated it as much.

Mix all the shredded and diced ingredients into a bowl.

In a separate bowl, mix together your mayonnaise, lime juice and spices. We went with garlic, cumin, salt and pepper and a bit of cayenne.

Stir this into your chopped ingredients and set aside to let it rest. Salads like this are always better if they rest and marinate for a bit. This one is no different, and feel free to make it ahead.

Salad just wouldn’t be salad without a bit of crunch on the side, so croutons are a must. Use whatever day-old bread you have lying around that needs to be used up, but an artisan loaf or heartier bread will work best. Start by heating olive oil in a pan.

Toss in bread cubes and stir to coat.

Sprinkle salt and pepper, cayenne and garlic over the bread cubes and continue cooking until edges brown. You could also make these in the oven, but I don’t see why you’d turn your oven on. It’s plenty warm without it, thank you.

Serve over a bed of lettuce. Whatever you have available will be just fine. We happened to have butter lettuce on hand.

Chicken salad over lettuce, croutons and avocado slices. Delightful on its own. Not pictured? The limeade-infused iced tea that we had with this, finishing off a perfect hot weather meal.

Along with the wontons, this was my first attempt at getting in touch with the takeout box I so longed for. Fried chicken pieces, sticky sauce. General Tso’s Chicken. Why General Tso’s and not orange chicken, sesame or even sweet and sour? To be honest, I never really liked sweet and sour. There was always something a bit too sweet for me. Orange chicken is good, but there’s something missing, that bit of spicy kick, and sesame? Well, I really love a good sesame chicken, but most of the sauces I found were tomato based, and I just didn’t find that appealing, so I started looking for the General.

I remember searching online for a recipe and, finding nothing that seemed just quite right, I mashed two or three together to set what I thought would mesh well with each other. Over the years we’ve played with the amounts and the ingredients and one time Ole added way too many peppers and tried to mace all of us. The pepper aroma was so thick that my sister and I were coughing up a storm and the heat was very close to being unbearable. We learned then that it’s better to add the peppers later so they don’t simmer in the sauce quite so long and to really pay attention to how many you’re tossing in there. All is well, though, and lessons have been learned. The journey to somehow capture the essence of the white paper takeout carton was successful once again.

Let’s start with the sauce. Mix together a bit of cornstarch and water and minced garlic and fresh ginger.

Add in sugar…

…soy sauce…

…rice wine…

…and some hot water. Stir until all the sugar dissolves.

And place the bowl in the fridge for later.

Start to heat oil in your fryng vessel. Ours is an electric skillet that plugs in. You can also do this in a fryer or just over the stove in a deep pot.

In a completely separate bowl add cornstarch and white pepper…

…soy sauce…

…and an egg. Mix thoroughly.

Dredge chunks of chicken through the mixture to coat. I find about a 1-1/2″ piece of chicken is the perfect bite-sized portion, and it’s a relatively easy size to cook.

Then fry them in 350° oil until chicken pieces are cooked through. (I was folding cream cheese wontons at this point and missed the photo op. I apologize.)

When the pieces look a lovely shade of brown and are cooked through, drain on paper towels or metal drying racks and set aside, but not too far aside. We’ll need them in just a minute.

In a large wok, heat 2 tablespoons of your oil of choice. I was using peanut oil, but there are lots of oils available. Add in the chopped scallions.

After about a minute, add in sauce. Be sure to mix the sauce before pouring it in. This will free any buried cornstarch that may have settled to the bottom.

Add the hot peppers. I like to add them just as the sauce begins to thicken so they still start cooking down but aren’t overpowering.

The sauce will start to thicken suddenly. Sometimes I find it thickens almost instantly, other times it takes longer. It has to do with temperature of the air around us and the temperature of the sauce going into the wok.

Add the chicken as soon as you see the thickening.

Stir to coat and continue cooking until sauce becomes almost glaze-like but still sauce-like. The bed of rice needs to soak up something, and all the more sauce, the better.


I serve mine over plain steamed rice. Really, that’s all this dish needs, but a cream cheese wonton or two never hurt.

If you’re making this with kids like we do, we just split the first half of the sauce and don’t add peppers before the chicken. Then do the second half with the peppers. It’s as easy as that.

Things have been a little crazy around here. I’ve been juggling one thing after another, starting up this and working on that. It’s exciting, encouraging and hectic. And because of this added component as I try to fit a slice of life into my already jampackedfullwithnoroomtospare schedule, I’ve been cutting some corners on dinner lately and – gasp – planning ahead.

A funny thing this planning ahead on how it gets you prepared for the unexpected. I wish I could say I plan ahead all the time, but I tend to wait until the last minute when it comes to dinner, which has left us dinnerless because I realize oh too late that I was supposed to take the meat out of the freezer a day earlier or get a pizza dough proofing at 3:30, at which time I was scrambling to get as much work crammed in before the kids woke up from their naps and my precious silence gone. Turns out that with a bit of planning you can juggle basketball practice drop-offs, impromptu shopping trips followed by preschool conferences and basketball practice pick-ups and your husband leaving you right at the end of the meal for his curling match, all the while managing to stay sane. Well, at least sane enough for everyone around you to not be painfully aware of the insanity.

Start with quality rice. I have jasmine rice from the Asian market in a sack. It makes me happy. There are lots of rice varietals that make me happy, but long grain white is not one of them. Get something fragrant. You can make it ahead of time. In fact, it’s better if you do because for this, your rice should be cold. Not warm, not sweaty from steam; cold and dry. I made extra when we were having rice with a different meal and stashed it in the fridge for this.

Same with the chicken. While you’re welcome to cook them just before or even in the wok as you make the rest of the dish, do yourself a favor and make this easier by tossing an extra breast or thigh or two or three on the grill as you are making something else. We made our chicken during a chicken fajita grilling session by just adding a few extra with salt and pepper only to the grill.

In a large wok add a bit of oil over a medium heat. Then toss in a bunch of minced garlic and fresh ginger. Only cook it for 30 seconds.

Next come the vegetables. Turn the heat to high and add the longest-cooking vegetables first. Mine happen to be mushrooms. Then I added scallions, bottoms and then green tops, and finally, I tossed in the bean sprouts just long enough to get them warm.

While your vegetables are sautéing, mix up a bit of sauce. A good sauce to me is crucial. It is what will make or break a fried rice. To mine I added soy sauce (of course), sesame oil and rice wine.

Both the rice and the sauce get added.

Mix and stir and let fry until all the rice is heated through. Check for taste and adjust as necessary, adding more soy sauce as needed to control salt and black pepper if you’re a fan.

A few sides and you have a full meal, a bowl of rice perfect for nights when you don’t have a lot of time but aren’t willing to sacrifice it in flavor. Besides, it’s heavenly to eat, and it will keep you sane on those nights when you aren’t sure you can make it through.

I have been craving pasta lately. While doing one of our menus I suddenly realized I’d added three pasta dishes to a five-day span. Carb overload. I adjusted the menu to just one pasta meal, albeit begrudgingly, and left this gem on the menu, and I was not disappointed. It may have had something to do with the giant tub of blue cheese I had purchased to make a tomato salad for a potluck, to top my maple-glazed steak salad and for this pasta.

Orecchiette means “little ear,” which effectively means it’s shaped like a shallow bowl. A shallow bowl that acts as a suction cup to trap the blue cheese and the onions right inside there so that every bite is full of flavor and deliciousness. Start a pot of water boiling for these.


So, you’ll need an onion, make it a big one. Quartered and cut into thin slices.


I’ve had these shallots sitting in my fridge from the garden. If you aren’t looking to spring the extra $ for the shallots, an additional onion will serve you just as well. In this case, because we’re cooking them together, the shallots will sort of melt and disappear into the onions and create almost a creamy sauce that we’ll toss with the pasta.


Melt the butter IN the oil over medium-high heat, and once it’s nice and sizzling, toss in the thinly sliced onions and shallots. Keep it going, and come back to it every once in a while while we’re doing the rest of this. They’ll need a while to brown.


Pour yourself a glass of wine to sip while you cook and your kids do their homework at the table. Ole chose Sebastiani’s Secolo that we bought on a trip to California. He gets liberal when uncorking wines in the fall because he knows that we’re set to return soon. (Side note: When did Kumquat get such long hair? And where was I?)


In a separate pan, heat a tablespoon of oil and add a bunch of salted and peppered chicken. Then toss in a bit of rosemary. Keep cooking it until it browns on both sides. Right at the end, add a bit of garlic for good measure. What would pasta be without garlic?


Chop your chicken into bite-sized pieces, perfect for stabbing with a forkful of pasta. We used tenderloin strips, which meant slicing resulted in the appropriate size, but breasts would have worked just as well.


Don’t forget to stir your onions through this whole process. Just let them continue cooking and cooking until they get to a lovely brown color.


When your pasta is done, drain and add to the onions. After stirring them together, we added a scoop back to the chicken pan and gave it a swirl to collect the leftover juices and then tossed it back in with the rest. Add a heaping of blue cheese and your chicken and stir.


Finally, because I’m a sucker for cream sauces, add a bit of cream to stir in and hold it all together.


I may have tasted it before I served anyone. May have.


We ended up with about 3 lunch-sized servings left after everyone had had their fill, and it reheated wonderfully. In fact, I dare say I enjoyed it more for lunch on Day 2 during nap time. I love the quiet that nap time brings.

Around our house, chicken rules. Beef is king, but due to the higher fat content, we try to limit our red meat intake. We eat plenty of fish, but with the cumulative toxins that can come with it, we hold off on going overboard. Sure, there’s pork, but the only way Shaina is not a fan and will only occasionally allow it in some smoked varieties – you know: bacon, ribs, pulled pork. So, by default, we are left with either more exotic meats like lamb and ostrich or we fall back on the most common of edible birds – the chicken. When it’s chicken, there are tons of different ways to go, and even though we’ve been cooking chicken for years and years, there’s one method I’d never done (until now).

How to spatchcock your chicken: First, butterfly the chicken by removing the backbone, pulling out the breastbone and laying flat. Weight is applied to the chicken during cooking to speed the process. You’ll be amazed at the speed, simplicity, and versatility that this combo offers. Pick your favorite flavors and go. Want a sweet barbecue sauce or a spicy rub? Steps 1 and 2 are still the same. How about lemon pepper or garlic and herbs? Again, see Steps 1 and 2. Today we went with a salt, pepper, oregano and cumin mixed with butter prior to grilling and then finished with a lime and scallion butter that we adjusted from the Food & Wine’s Quick from Scratch Chicken Cookbook.

Find yourself a clean brick and wrap it in heavy-duty foil. I had a few pavers left from our compost project in the spring, but anything around 8×12 inches will do, large enough to cover the chicken.



A good pair of kitchen shears will go a long way here. Cut along each side of the backbone until it has been completely removed. Then open up the bird and make a small cut through the tissue holding in the breastbone. Slide your finger underneath it and gently pull it out. Lastly, trim any excess skin and fat.


I apologize if you are squeamish around raw chicken. Just keep scrolling. It will be worth it down there.


Place your brick on the grill and light it before you mix the butter, salt, pepper, oregano and cumin together.


Spread the mixture onto the chicken. Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty if you don’t have gloves.


At this point, your grill and brick should be hot. Using oven mitts, flip up the brick, lay down the chicken (skin side down), and ease the brick back down on the chicken. Turn the grill down to medium low, close the lid and walk away for ten minutes.


Back inside, prepare your finishing baste. Mix together butter, lime juice, kosher salt and scallions. Ten minutes should be up, so go outside and flip your chicken, reapply the brick and let it go for another ten minutes.


After the second ten minutes has elapsed remove the brick and check the internal temperature of the chicken with a meat thermometer (180° F means done).


Back inside, apply the desired amount of scallion and lime butter to the top of the hot chicken and let it melt down the sides.


The added butter at the end melted over the crisp skin gives it just enough added flavor to really make the chicken stand out.


With the abbreviated cooking time and full juicy flavor, this will definitely make the menu again.