Light & Healthy: Chicken consomme with herbs

As I was making this wonderfully fragrant and satisfying consomme, I thought about how many ways I could spin it to take advantage of seasonal vegetables and leftover rotisserie chicken - just for example. In fact, I want to try this again with whole wheat dumplings, perhaps some fresh peas and pearl onions.

This isn’t like any boxed or canned chicken broth you’ve ever had. Instead, it’s a riff on a classic French technique for preparing consomme - a very rich, clear chicken stock. It’s simply perfect served in the French manner - hot with a few fresh parsley or thyme leaves - as a starter for a light meal which is a welcome change from all the rich holiday foods we’ve been stuffing ourselves with.

Ingredients:

1 large leek - cleaned thoroughly of sand and grit. Finely chopped

3 large shallots - peeled and minced

3 baby carrots - diced very small or grated

1 rib of celery - very finely diced

1/4 pound of ground chicken (thigh meat is preferrable)

6 cups of low sodium chicken broth

1/4 cup white wine

1/4 cup of finely minced fresh herbs - thyme, *parsley stems, sage and rosemary

1 large clove of garlic - finely minced

1/8 cup parsley leaves

3 tablespoons of grapeseed or canola oil

salt and pepper

In a heavy pot, over medium high heat, add the oil, then the carrots, celery, leek, shallots and garlic. Sauté for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the rest of the herbs and the chicken meat. Sauté for about 5 minutes more. Add the broth and wine. Turn the heat to high, and bring to a low boil, add a tightly fitting lid and reduce the heat to low and simmer for about 30 minutes.

Now take and strain the entire pot through a fine mesh strainer into a large bowl. Discard the boiled veggies and meat. Return the clear consomme to the pot and continue to simmer over low for another 10 to 15 minutes.

You can serve this hot, with a few fresh herbs sprinkled on top, or add whole grain dumplings, whole grain pasta, peas, shredded rotisserie chicken - or even a couple of eggs, whisked and stirred in with fresh herbs like tarragon and chives.

The beauty of this consomme, is that you can make it up and have it one way tonight, and another way tomorrow - and of course, it freezes really well.

I served this with a salad of iceberg lettuce, arugula and cherry tomatoes dressed in a lightened up real mayonnaise dressing. You simply take the mayo - NOT the low cal icky stuff - and whisk it with the juice of one small lemon, a bit of oil, and either some yogurt or milk. Adjust to get the right creaminess so that it will coat the lettuce when it’s tossed. Add salt and freshly ground pepper … and a sprinkle of blue cheese crumbles would be excellent.

As you can see from the photo, I pan-fried slices of a whole wheat bread pudding with dried cranberries that some friends had brought over for dessert the previous evening. Then drizzled a bit maple syrup on those. I think I might make another bread pudding out of some leftover multi-grain artisan bread, and use some wild boar sausage that I’ve got in the freezer. This would really take the bread pudding out the realm of dessert and put it into the dinner column.

This was a perfectly light and healthy antidote to the endless rich holiday meals!

-maven

Spicy mango spinach salad

Well, I made the salad again tonight for the main course, and remembered to photograph it for you.

Everybody liked it just as well as last night, and the leftover Pesto Shrimp were also really yummy.

Spicy mango persimmon spinach salad

You will need:

About 6 cups loosely packed baby spinach leaves

1 large fuyu - the firm,

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Pesto shrimp with sweet pepppers, okra 'bhindhi', Spicy mango spinach salad

Everybody at the dinner table tonight insisted that I blog this dinner up, despite the fact that I didn’t photograph it all, as it was totally lip smacking good.

Okay. Okay.

I saw the large fresh shrimp at the fishmonger today and couldn’t pass them up. At the same time, I grabbed a container of the fresh pesto from the fresh pasta chiller, and the peppers to do a sort of mediterranean treatment. Here goes. Oh, and remember that I mostly shop at Whole Foods for the more exotic stuff, so if you can’t find an ingredient, that’s probably where it came from - noted with an asterisk*

Pesto shrimp with sweet peppers

You’ll need:

1 lb of fresh, large shelled and deveined raw shrimp

4 - 5 anchovy filets with their oil

1/2 cup of fresh basil pesto*

1/2 each small red, yellow, orange and green sweet peppers

1 tablespoon minced garlic

1/2 small red onion, frenched

3-4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1/4 cup vodka

salt

pepper

italian seasoning

Take 3-4 tablespoons of the pesto and use that to marinate the shrimp, for about one hour prior to cooking in the fridge. Heat your skillet over medium high, add the oil and swirl to coat. Saute the peppers and onions till almost tender.

Add the garlic and stir to combine.

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Cool cucumber and onion salad

This is always one of my favorite salads, which I make with the packages of baby cukes or the english cukes from places like Costco.

Don’t use great big cucumbers, since they have too many seeds. Use them for my braised cucumber recipe.

You can add a little heat to this with some red chili pepper flakes!

Heavenly ginger galangal vinaigrette salad dressing

Not your typical Asian dressing, this features the flowery scent of Galangal, which marries perfectly with ginger in a lot of southeast Asian dishes. In this version, of my classic house made and fresh, vinegrette dressing, I combined the dressing with romaine lettuce, spring lettuce mix andfresh bite sized chunks of pineapple and avocado.

You’ll notice that I used light Agave Nectar instead of honey. The Agave Nectar has a very mild flavor and I chose it to just give these special spices a nice undercurrent of sweetness.

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Mache Mango Salad

You’ve probably seen that curly stuff called Mache in places like Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods and wondered just what to do with it.

Last night we had an outstanding salad that was so very simple, elegant and very tasty with a simple, unassuming homemade vinegrette - all made right in the big wooden salad bowl for ease.

Dressing:

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Macaroni Grill: Not hateful after all.

First we thought about Truckee River Bar & Grill, always a fav but it was Sunday and about 2:30 and I knew they’d be closing soon, along with Josef’s Vienna Bakery. Whole Foods was too far down the street to go there and back to Best Buy, so with a sigh, I said “oh, well it’s just food. Let’s go in Macaroni Grill.”

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