4M

So here’s me getting creative with leftovers again. Anybody who knows me, knows I hate leftovers. Passionately. But “new-overs” I don’t mind a bit! New-overs just means transforming boring old leftovers into something completely new and mostly unrecognizable as its previous incarnation.

Here’s where I started: Last night I baked some chicken thighs and made some quinoa with walnuts to go with it. If you’re not familiar with quinoa, it’s a tiny little grain from South America that has lots of nutritional value and a nice nutty sort of taste. Well, by the time dinner was ready I really wasn’t hungry and neither was my roomie, so I just put the chicken and quinoa away.

Today comes along and I’m just not that interested in the chicken for whatever reason, so I decide to cut up the meat and simmer the bones and skin with some onions to make a homemade stock. It’s freezing outside and something about the smell of simmering chicken stock is so comforting!

I cut the chicken into nice-sized chunks. Then I think, well, what am I going to do with this quinoa? I had cooked it (you cook it like rice, boil some water or stock or whatever, put it in, turn to low and simmer for a while) with chopped walnuts and chicken stock. When I had put it all in a plastic container together - the chicken, the chicken juice and the quinoa - there was a really sizable amount of good chicken-jelly along with the quinoa. So I started idly mashing it into the quinoa while trying to get an idea.

Here’s where I ended up:

Ingredients:
1 box of plain old Stove Top cornbread stuffing plus a handful of dry polenta (optional)
2 cups of prepared quinoa
1 1/2 cups or so of chicken, white or dark as you like - you could even used canned if you wanted
a can of black beans, drained
a jar of corn chipotle salsa (whatever salsa you like will do)
some mozzarrella

Okay, you are not going to believe how simple this is:

Heat oven to 350
Put the cornbread stuffing and polenta in a baking dish
Add a cup or so of boiling water and stir
Put the quinoa in a layer on top of the cornstuff
Throw the beans on top of that
Add the chicken
Slather it with salsa
Top with cheese
Bake for 20 minutes or so, until the cheese is melty and the sides are bubbly

And you’re done. Besides the quinoa, these are pretty ordinary ingredients - but the taste of them all together is pretty extraordinary, and hey, this is the kind of dish you could assemble beforehand, throw in the oven when it’s almost dinnertime and you’re golden! This is really comfort food - laden with tons of protein from the chicken, the quinoa and of course the beans; lots of corn and not so much fat.

If you really wanted to play down the fat content I suppose you could use that lowfat mozzarrella, but … why? Of course, I don’t believe in low-fat versions of perfectly good foods. If you want to limit your fat, go eat a salad. Don’t go messing up dinner for the rest of us! Plus, what chemicals and synthetic crap are they replacing good old-fashioned (and biologically necessary) fat with? But that’s another rant for another day.

Enjoy!

~m

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 10:42 pm and is filed under FOOD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.