Homemade Dog Treats

Have you ever given your dog those dried chicken strips for a treat? Dogs go crazy for those things. My dog Zim (seen here flapping his lips by hanging out the sunroof of the car) would do just about anything for a bit of dehydrated chicken.

There are two big problems with store-bought dried chicken treats, though: they're mad expensive and - far more importantly - lax production standards in China, where so many of the treats are made, result in products that can potentially kill your dog. I stopped buying imported animal treats several years ago when word first started circulating about the problem, and it hasn't gotten any better since.

Luckily, there is a huge supply of dog treats available to you at an extremely reasonable cost of time and treasure, and you need look no further than local supermarkets.

The answer is right there in the poultry section. The raw materials are inexpensive, dehydrate quickly with little risk of spoilage, have an insanely long shelf life at room temperature once they've been processed, and are not only low in fat but provide your dog with calcium. And they're crunchy as hell, which seems to be really important to dogs - if you've ever seen the way a teething puppy crackles an empty water bottle, you know how much dogs love stuff that crunches between their jaws.

I'm talking about chicken feet, or "chicken paws," as I've seen them hilariously packaged. They start out being low in moisture, consisting mostly of skin, tendons, and bone, so they dry well and keep a long time. While most everyone knows that you're not supposed to give dogs cooked chicken bones because of the danger that they'll splinter, that doesn't apply to raw bones, which help provide dogs with essential nutrients which their canine guts are especially keen at extracting. These treats aren't cooked, they're dried, so they're safe. And of course, they're not made in some anonymous Chinese industrial plant so you know exactly what your dog is eating.

The first step is to acquire a few pounds of chicken feet. Most of your suburban white-bread supermarkets will not carry them, so seek them out at more urban or ethnic locations. Asian markets are ideal, and usually the least expensive. When I make these (which is at least once every couple of months since I always give some away to friends with dogs) I try to get two heavy packages of them, five pounds or so.

Chicken feet are rather cool and prehistoric-looking with big nails and scaly reptilian skin. And there's usually tendons sticking out of the cut ends. If you hold the chicken foot in one hand and pull on the tendons with the other, the toes will curl like some kind of gruesomely beckoning marionette. [My grandmother once told me that when she was a girl, she would take one of the feet of a freshly-killed chicken and do exactly that with it, chasing her squeamish and screaming older sister around the house with the monstrous gripping claw.]

Anyway,  once you get the packages home, open them up and give them a rinse. If you have a child around, show them how those tendons work - the kid will be fascinated and horrified and probably want to try it themselves, and you should let them as long as you have them wash their hands when they're done, because it's fun.

Okay, so that part about kids and tendons is optional, but rinsing shouldn't be. Rinse them off and then pat them dry. Then, using kitchen shears, cut off the toenails. If you cut straight through the toe at the base of the nail, you'll go right through a joint and it's easy. If you cut through bone, it's still easy, it just gives a bit more resistance. I take the nails off, even though I just told you a few paragraphs ago that raw chicken bones are okay, because they're sharp. Most of the nails are like needles, and they don't get any blunter when they're dehydrated. So just to be safe, I remove them.

Next, I arrange them in single layers on the trays of my dehydrator. It's okay if they touch, but you don't want them packed tightly against each other because they need room for air to circulate around. Use as many dehydrator trays as you need, put the cover on, plug it in, and let it do its magic. I rotate the trays bottom to top once or twice a day.

After three days, open up the dehydrator and check them out. They should be totally dry to the touch and rather stiff. If they feel at all pliable and leathery, they're not ready.

It usually takes three or four days for them to all dry out. You'll have a large enough supply for at least two months, feeding your dog one of these treats twice a day or so, and trust me he'll love them.

When you buy dehydrated chicken feet ready-to-eat online or at retail stores, they can cost as much as $45 a pound (they're often put up five or six to a package and that package costs up to 10 dollars!) I buy the feet for $1.29 a pound around here, so for six or seven dollars I make a bag full of them that would retail for about $75.

PS: If you're really lucky, you can find duck feet as well as chicken. They're a little meatier and more substantial than chicken feet, but you process them the same way. Usually they run about 20 - 25 cents a pound more expensive than chicken feet; you'll have to decide for yourself if that's worth it.


Where to find a dehydrator:

You can get one at many Walmarts or hardware stores, in the canning section. You can spend a couple hundred dollars on these things, believe it or not, but you can also order one inexpensively on Amazon. Or you can do what I did and pick one up at a church rummage sale or estate sale. Many people buy one, use it a couple of times, and then get rid of it. I've bought three or four of them secondhand like that, all the same make, and put the trays together to make one bigass dehydrator for making dog treats, jerky, dried herbs, and so on.

Review: KFC Original Recipe Bites

Seems like fast food chicken merchants just can't make enough little bite-sized things to eat.  Maybe it started with McDonald's and their Chicken McNuggets, which seems to have gone through several recipes in their long life. I don't know - but I do know that virtually everyone who sells chicken sells at least one littlebit version.

And thus we have Kentucky Fried Chicken and their Original Recipe Bites. They're pretty simple: smallish chunks of white meat coated in KFC's Original Recipe breading. Nothing fancy, and they're pretty good: moist, tender, tasty especially if you like Original Recipe, and pop-in-the-mouthable.

Because I figured everyone would want to try them, I picked up a large order of them at the local KFC, which was supposed to be a "ten-piece." I think they may fill the orders by weight or handful or something other than an actual count, though, because when I got them home there were way more than ten of them in the package. That was pretty fortunate, since everyone really liked them and they were gone in no time.

Walkerswood Jerk Seasoning

I've tried a lot of Jamaican-style jerk seasonings in search of something really authentic, without too much luck. But recently, my friend Roger discovered Walkerswood Traditional Jamaican Jerk Seaoning, and I think my search is at an end.

Unlike so many other jerk seasonings out there, Walkerswood is a paste made up of hot peppers, scallions, black pepper, onions, salt, allspice, nutmeg, cane sugar, and thyme. It's made in and imported from Jamaica, and it's the most authentic jerk seasoning I've found.

It's easy to use - just rub some into the meat and let it sit a few hours (though overnight is best) before grilling or roasting. I've used it on chicken and pork so far, and it's AWESOME. (I'm considering making some beef jerky with it to see how it turns out.)

Walkerswood also understands that not everyone has a high tolerance for hot and spicy food., so they make a mild version that has the same authentic jerk ingredients with a little less hot pepper added to the blend. Don't get me wrong - Walkerswood idea of "mild" still might ring your bells if you are a complete pepper wuss, but it does have quite a bit less kick than the hot and spicy stuff.

Availability varies depending on where you live. I had never noticed it at all until just a little while ago, when Roger brought some back for me from a recent out-of-state trip. Since I've actually started looking for it, I've found it in a couple of ethnic markets (like Food Zone International on Belmont Avenue in Springfield MA) and supermarkets (I think ShopRite carries it in Enfield CT.) If you're a fan of jerk cooking, it's well worth the search.

Sweet Sue Canned Whole Chicken

I've had Sweet Sue Canned Whole Chicken on my Grail List since I first learned of its existence several years ago. The sheer bizarreness of a canned whole chicken drew me to it like a moth to a flame. Alas, however, Sweet Sue products have severely limited availability in my area - I might occasionally find their Chicken and Dumplings or tins of chicken breast, but that's it.

However, thanks to the generosity of an anonymous reader who lives in Sweet Sue Land, I recently received the elusive Sweet Sue Canned Whole Chicken.  It immediately went into the fridge, can and all, because the instructions on the label advise that it should be chilled before removing (makes sense - cooked meat is always easier to handle chilled.)

This photo, taken by Tracy O'Connor and first published on her awesome blog, I Hate My Message Board, is what I was expecting to find when I opened the can: a whole (albeit small) cooked chicken, goopy with the broth created during processing. Kind of looks like it just came out of one of the egg pods in Alien, doesn't it?

But when I opened the can, what slid out was even more horrifying.

This is what actually came out.

I poked through the shredded, gooey poultry meat and discovered that there was indeed most of the components of a whole chicken in there. There was skin, lots of bones, and plenty of chunks and fibers that I'm pretty sure once comprised a chicken. The only readily identifiable bits were the legs and the breast; all the rest of the bird had been pulverized.

Needless to say, I didn't bother to follow the rest of the cooking instructions (which told me to put the chicken in a pan in a hot oven and bake for 10 to 15 minutes, basting frequently with the delicious broth.)  I spent some time picking out as many of the bones as I could find, then heated up the whole mess in a Dutch oven and made chicken and dumplings with it.

The flavor was okay. It had the kind of tinny flavor and strange mouthfeel of cheap canned chicken soup, and it was somewhat on the salty side, but the taste was recognizable as chicken when all was said and done.

So, I'm ticking this one off the Grail List, with no regrets - and no desire for a repeat.

Review: McDonald's Chicken McBites

McDonald's is officially into the popcorn chicken business now with their new, limited-time Chicken McBites.

Unlike McNuggets, which are made from chopped and formed chicken meat, Chicken McBites are more-or-less randomly sized chunks of white meat chicken, breaded and fried and served up in three sizes - "Snack," "Regular," and "Shareable," which are clever ways of saying "small," "medium," and "large." We picked up a couple of the Shareable size for the three of us.

First of all, let me just say that the Shareable size is fairly generous, easily enough for two people to enjoy when paired with a couple of sides of fries.  We had skipped the fries on this trip, and the two Shareables we got were just right for three adults. All of us - Maryanne, Lynnafred, and I - were satisfied with the serving sizes when we divvied up the McBites.

One of the things that has made McDonald's so popular is their uniformity. Although there are usually some variations in the quality of service depending on the franchise, time of day, and how busy the restaurant is, the actual food is really quite predictable: You know going in what to expect when you order, say, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese - it's going to be the same sandwich whether you order it in Maine or in California.

This uniformity also extends within product lines in McDonald's, too.  The flavor of a McDonald's beef patty is the same whether that patty is going into a regular hamburger, a McDouble, or a Big Mac. It's comforting in its familiarity. And that's the same way it is with the chicken McDonald's serves. A chicken patty from a sandwich has the same chicken flavor as the McBites and even the McNuggets - the big difference is in the texture of the different products and the way they are incorporated into the menu. It's still McDonald's chicken.

So that leads me to the nitty-gritty: Just how are these McBite thingies?  Not too bad. They are truly chunks of white meat, tender, not too dried out even when the pieces are small. Very similar in flavor to other McD's chicken products, as I mentioned, a little salty but otherwise kinda bland. They'd be better with some black pepper in the breading. Good for a snack and well worth at least a try.

Wings on the Grill

The original Anchor Bar recipe for "Buffalo Wings" calls for the wings to be deep-fried until crispy.  Most home recipes ditch the deep fryer (does anyone besides me do any deep frying at home anymore?) and instead roast the wings at 425 F in the oven.

For me, though, grilling the wings over coals is definitely the way to go. I like the flavor of charcoal-grilled wings a lot more than fried or oven-roasted.

Wings don't have a lot of intramuscular fat, but they do have a lot of skin in proportion to their size, and skin is quite fatty. For this reason, wings have a tendency to "flare" and burn on the grill (especially when you're a fan of charcoal!) and they have to be looked after a little more carefully than the typical burgers or hot dogs.  Here's some tips:

• If you use a gas grill, preheat the grill on high, but turn the burners down to low when your put the wings on. The wings will take a little longer to cook on low, but they'll be easier to tend and they'll cook more evenly.
• With a charcoal grill, give the coals time to burn down a little before you put the wings on. I like to let my coals settle for about 5 - 7 minutes after I dump them from the chimney into the grill itself. 
• You can carefully arrange the wings on the gridiron if you like and then check and turn them frequently.  I'm not that fussy, though.  I just dump the wings all over the damn grill and then turn batches of them over with a big-ass spatula every now and then as they cook.  It's king of like stir-frying on the grill, and it keeps the wings moving around over the coals so that no one spot collects a lot of grease to catch on fire.

When the wings are all crispy and delicious, get 'em off the grill, douse 'em in your favorite sauce, and serve 'em up.

Burger King's New Chicken Tenders

For quite a while now, Burger King's chicken nuggety-things have been vaguely crown shaped, mostly non-descript breaded chicken pulp.  Other than shaping them like crowns,  it never seemed like BK was putting much effort into them. No one really cared, because BK didn't put much marketing into them either as they concentrated on selling burgers and sending the King out to spook people with his creepiness.

And I think people still wouldn't care about Burger King's Chicken Tenders if BK hadn't gone around pointing at them and yelling about how great the New And Improved Chicken Tenders are.  Thing is, they're not all that "new and improved," they're just "different from how they were."

It's clear that BK is trying to mimic McDonald's Chicken McNuggets with their new Tenders. They've given up the sorta-crown in favor of the slightly randomized blobtangle shape Mickey D's has used forever. BK and McDonald's both can call it "white meat" all they want. There are a lot of inferior places on the top end of a bird where you can find "white meat," and because the Tenders are made with chopped and formed chicken, I'd say chances are pretty good that both the King and the Clown are already familiar with some of those places.

Both products share that "kind-of-like-chicken-but-more-like-bouillon" flavor that lots of fast-food chopped/formed chicken has, and there are other similarities to the McNugget as well. The Chicken Tenders are drier and less spongy in texture than their McDonald's counterpart, but the coating is quite similar: The seasoning seems to be (lots of) salt, a little pepper, and that's it.  Burger King really isn't trying all that hard here.

I should probably also mention the sauces that are available, but they're every bit as "meh" as the chicken.  There's generic "Ranch," Burger King's standard "BBQ Sauce" (cheap, smoke-flavored corn syrup), "Sweet and Sour" (not even as good as those little packets the Chinese take-out tosses into your bag by the handful), "Zesty" (a completely WTF flavor that defies definition - also, it's orange), "Buffalo" without the heat, and "Honey Mustard" (like dollar-store honey mustard poured right out of the jar.) It's like Burger King was going out of their way to be unremarkable.

On Ad Hoc Fried Chicken

Several days ago in a post on her blog Fun With Carbs, Leeanne Griffin described recreating the amazing buttermilk fried chicken served at chef Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc restaurant in Yountville, CA. Her joyfully over-the-top account was enthusiastic and bursting with fun, and she made it obvious that the recipe produced an awesome-tasting fried chicken that was second to none.  I found it quite inspiring, in fact, and made up my mind to try the recipe myself.

Because I have long experience with both whole fowl and big batches of brine (smoking, pickling, and homemade bacon all require gallons of the stuff) I didn't find the prep work as daunting as Leeanne perhaps did. But although it's indeed time-consuming and labor intensive for such a relatively simple meal, the results are truly worth it..  The brine is absolutely the key - it imparts a wonderful flavor and juiciness to the meat and makes it more than just another fried chicken recipe.  It was so good that I consider the recipe a keeper, and one that I will certainly make again.

There are, however, a couple of changes I'd make (may Mr. Keller and Leeanne forgive me.)  Wanting to test the seasoning balance in the coating, I fried up a couple of test pieces before going all out  and found the coating a little bland.  An extra tablespoon of salt and a tablespoon of Bell's Poultry Seasoning mixed into the coating mix provided what we were looking for.  Before making any tweaks to the recipe, though, I still recommend that you fry a piece of chicken in the coating as originally formulated just to be sure you really want to tinker with what many people feel is perfection.

The other change I plan is in the cooking method.  I no longer own a deep fryer - it's one of those "single use" appliances that I shed from my kitchen a few years ago when I decided that I'd collected too many one-trick culinary ponies in the pantry.  I deep fry the way my grandmother did, with a heavy pot of oil, a frying thermometer clipped to one side, and careful regulation of the fire.  The trouble with deep frying chicken is the chicken fat which contaminates the cooking oil and renders it, for me anyway, unacceptable for further use.  Next time I make Ad Hoc chicken, it will be coated the same way as in the cookbook, but fried in shallow oil in a covered "chicken fryer," turning frequently to ensure that all sides are browned and crispy.  It will take no more time than deep-frying in batches, and the end result will be virtually indistinguishable from deep fried, but it will use far less oil (and give me a pan of drippings for whipping up some country gravy.)

Murry's Pick-Up Stix - Dollar Store "Chicken"

I went in to Dollar Tree just before Thanksgiving hoping to find some cheap holiday-themed paper dessert plates - and struck out; the Thanksgiving stuff was gone, already replaced by Christmas cultch.  The trip wasn't a total washout, though, since they had a freezer case full of Murry's Pick-Up Stix.  How could I resist seven ounces of mechanically separated chicken, extruded into long thin strings and breaded with delicious crispiness?  I'm only human you know.

On Thanksgiving Day, wanting a relatively quick finger-food breakfast to nosh while cooking, I heated up a bit of lard left over from making pie crusts and pan fried the Pick-Up Stix.

They're kind of salty with a kind of cheap chicken flavor in the background.  Not incredibly meaty. In cross-section, they show a core of spongily-textured and bubbly mechanically separated chicken which gradually gives way to the breaded coating. Strangely, there doesn't seem to be a clear dividing line between the inside and the coating.  Pan-frying them in the lard gave them a marvelous crunchy texture which helped make up for the rather uninspired taste.

They remind me of something a school cafeteria would serve while trying to convince the kids that they were getting a special treat.  In fact, when I offered some to Lynnafred she looked at me horrified:  "No.  Those look like the same shitty 'chicken fries' they used to give us in Fourth Grade. There's a reason I used to bring my own lunch to school every day, dad, and crap like that is a big part of it."  I guess she's not far enough removed from the trauma of school lunches to feel nostalgic for them.

Despite Lynnafred's disparaging comments, however, the Stix did not disappoint.  They tasted okay in that sort of salty potato-chip way.  They were easy to munch as I worked in the kitchen.  They were filling - my seven-ounce portion killed my hunger and kept me going right up until I got the feast on the table much later that day.  And they were cheap, so there's a bonus point.  I'm not going to make a regular habit of them, but the Stix are okay for an occasional cheap salty snack.  Like popcorn, only with meat.

I've heard tell of folks who buy products like this and eat them as is, still frozen, right out of the bag like some sort of sodium-spiked meatsicle treat.  These would be folks of the non-me persuasion, for  although I eat, and even sometimes enjoy, industrially-produced food, I don't trust any of it until it's been heat-sterilized.  If anyone reading this decides that eating Pick-Up Stix out of the bag is a good idea, keep in mind that it says on the label that they are uncooked.

The Pot Pie Buyer's Guide

Ever since I was a kid, I've loved pot pies.  Back then, my mom used to buy Banquet pies because they were infinitely cheap - something like 20 cents apiece, on sale - and a bunch of hungry kids could be fed for a couple of bucks.  Although Banquet pies aren't anything like the best on the market, I still buy them now and then.  We had them often enough as kids that they're comfort food.

Anyway, over the past couple of months, I've been buying and eating various brands of commercial pot pies in an effort to rank them by taste and quality.  Price and overall quality are pretty closely related with pot pies, so when you go shopping for any of the brands I've reviewed you'd be safe in assuming that the lowest-ranked pies are going to make the smallest dent in your lunch budget.  But even with that in mind, you should know that any of them, even the worst of the bunch, are still enjoyable in their own way. With only one perhaps surprising exception, I liked every pie I tried and would buy them again.

So, let's take a look, starting at the bottom.

LOWEST QUALITY:

Sharing last place are Valu-Time (made for and distributed by Topco,) Banquet (made by ConAgra,) and Bremer (one of ALDI's house brands) 7-ounce frozen pies, which are so similar that they are virtually indistinguishable.  All three have top and bottom crusts, a large amount of salty, artificial-tasting gravy, and little squares of soft spongy "meat" which are actually cut-up bits of processed, pressed, and formed poultry loaf.  The meat also varies in color from light to dark, simulating actual white and dark meat from poultry. Vegetables include potatoes, carrots, and peas, but like the meat, they are in small pieces, thinly distributed.  Although the crusts of  these pies are thin, the top crusts at least cook up fairly flaky.   I've found that the bottom crusts, of the Valu-Time and Banquet pies seem to  have a tendency to remain undercooked and a little gooey even after the rest of the pie is ready when the pies are prepared in a microwave.  For all their faults, however, I still keep coming back to these cheap pies - especially Banquet - for nostalgia's sake. 

Banquet pot pies can be found just about everywhere, usually for about a dollar when they're not on sale.  Valu-Time pot pies can be found at any supermarket that sells Topco products, such as Big Y, Harris Teeter, and Price Chopper.  The price varies depending on the store, but Big Y was selling them for under a dollar and I suspect that's close to the going rate.  And Bremer pies, of course, can be found at ALDI in the frozen prepared foods section.  When I bought them, they were a pretty good deal at 85 cents each.

SLIGHTLY BETTER THAN LOWEST:

There isn't a lot of difference between the Swanson 7-ounce pot pie and the low-quality pies I've already mentioned.  The crust is just about the same and the fillings are similar.  But the gravy in the Swanson pie seemed thicker and more natural-tasting to me, so I thought it should be in a slightly better category.

However, all things being equal, I pass up the Swanson for the Banquet most of the time because Swanson is priced higher, and the difference in quality is not at all commensurate with the difference in price.



GOOD QUALITY

Marie Callender's 7 ounce pies are made by ConAgra - just like the Banquet pies - but the difference is so striking that you'd never guess they were produced by the same company!  These pies have white meat only (still cut from formed loaves) in much larger cuts and more generous distribution, and much better gravy.  These pies also have top and bottom crusts, but the pastry is thicker, flakier, and just overall better than the low quality versions.

These 7-ounce pies can be a bit harder to find than their slightly-larger 10-ounce version, but you can usually find them in multi-packs at Costco.

Marie Callender's 10-ounce pies are exactly the same composition as the smaller 7-ounce version.  The same good gravy, the same big chunks of white meat and larger vegetable cuts, the same flaky pastry - just 3 ounces more of it.  Ten-ounce pies are easier to find in the stores than the 7-ounce sizes.

Bremer Select 10-ounce pies (by ALDI) are sold in 4-pack boxes only. They are 2-crust pies with excellent pastry (thick and flaky) good chicken gravy, large chunks of real white-meat chicken, and generous vegetables.  I was pretty impressed by the quality of these pies, but while I consider them to be superior to the Marie Callender pies, they are similar enough to share a rating.

VERY GOOD QUALITY:

Boston Market 16 oz pie, top and bottom crust.  The pie has lots of meat (white and dark) but also seems to have odd chunks of cartilage.  The gravy is quite good, and the vegetables - carrot, corn, and green bean. - are generous and fresh-tasting. The crust is flaky and decent, even on the bottom. This pie should be a winner, but there is something about the Boston Market pies I've tried that almost nauseates me. The  gravy has a "slippery" mouthfeel, a vague and unpleasant gumminess that triggers my gag reflex. Because the other aspects of the pie are so good, though, I'm willing to give Boston Market the benefit of the doubt - it's possible that there's something about the recipe that I don't care for, but you won't mind.  So here it is, in the "Very Good" category.

Meanwhile, the Stouffer's 16-ounce pot pie is really great.  It's loaded with lots of big pieces of white-meat chicken, great veggies, and the gravy tastes, no kidding, like homemade.  The crust is just the right thickness, delicious tender and flaky.  I guess the only fault with it would be that it's a bit saltier than the Boston Market (still less salty than the bottom-rated pies, though.)

EXCELLENT QUALITY:

It is a testament to the outstanding attention to quality at Budd Foods of Manchester New Hampshire that all three of the pies rated "Excellent" are their products.

Bistro Cuisine chicken pot pies are made by Budd and advertised as "The World's Finest Chicken Pie."  That's not too much of an exaggeration. The single crust on top is a generous circle of awesome puff pastry which sits atop delicious gravy, true white meat chicken, and vegetables including corn, peas, and carrots.  My only complaint about Bistro Cuisine was that the gravy was very thick - thicker than I like it - but the other qualities of the pie are so outstanding that I can't take points off.

Mrs. Budd's Fully Baked White Meat Chicken Pie is usually sold in the refrigerated prepared meats section.  All they require is a thorough heating in the oven and they're good to go, but they do include microwave instructions.  After our local Shaw's supermarket closed, I hadn't realized Mrs. Budd's were still available around here until I got a Tweet from Sproffee one afternoon:  "This microwave pot pie is surprisingly and delightfully delicious."  She pretty much summed up Mrs. Budd's pies right there.  Big chunks of chicken breast meat, fresh-tasting veggies, and homestyle gravy bubbling under a delicious shortcrust pastry.  Well worth the $3.50 or so at the store.

I have similar high praise for Mrs. Budd's Fully Cooked White Meat Chicken Pie with broccoli, carrots, and pearl onions.  Once again, this is a single-crust pie which is topped with an excellent, flaky, tender disk of shortcrust pastry.  The homestyle gravy is just as delicious in this pie as in the other Mrs. Budd's offering, though it has a bit of a greenish tinge to it from the broccoli.  There are big chunks of white meat, and the broccoli isn't in tiny little mushy bits but rather in two or three generous florets which still maintain their shape and their almost-crispy texture.  I was quite favorably surprised at that (I expected soft and squishy overcooked broccoli.)  The only problem I had was that I just couldn't find any pearl onions in either of the pies I bought.  Maybe they melted away into the gravy during the cooking time?  No matter what happened to those elusive onions, though, it won't stop me from recommending the pies.

BEST IN SHOW:

As I said in the beginning of this post, I really like pot pies and I'd gladly enjoy even the worst ones on this list.  But there is one brand I tried that is head and shoulders above the rest.  It is also by far the most expensive of the pies - but remember, I did warn you that quality and price are quite intimately related when it comes to pot pie selection.


Willow Tree Chicken Pot Pie, made in Attleboro MA and distributed primarily in New England, is a top-crust-only pie which comes frozen in an aluminum pie pan and must be baked in either a conventional or a toaster oven, no microwaves allowed.  The crust is gorgeous and tastes homemade, and so does the splendid chicken gravy.  But what is most noticeable about Willow Tree pies is what's missing.  There are no vegetables or filler of any kind in them, they're just meat, gravy, and crust.

There are no tricks here, no compressing white chicken meat into an easily-portioned rectangular mass, not even any slipping in smaller irregular bits to round out the weight for the packing scale.  The picture speaks for itself and shows you exactly what you get under that pastry: big chunks of chicken breast meat, cooked absolutely perfectly, with a generous portion of gravy (enough to dress a scoop of mashed potatoes) and a delicious circle of pastry as well.  This pie truly deserves its "Best In Show" honors.
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ALDI's Kirkwood Brand Frozen Fried Chicken

There are some products which I buy with the full knowledge that they aren't as good as most of the alternatives.  But I buy them anyway because of expedience, or price, or simply nostalgia because my mom used to get the stuff when I was a kid and they bring back fond memories.

Frozen fried chicken is like that, and when I buy it - which is very occasionally - it usually qualifies on all three points.  It's drop-dead easy to prepare (just chuck it in the oven for 45 minutes); it's cheap (under five bucks a box - sometimes well under if you're shopping a no-frills place like Save-A-Lot); and it's nostalgic for me because when I was a lad growing up in a somewhat poor household, frozen fried chicken was one of the cheapest easy-to-make things an 11-year-old could prepare with few cooking skills, so it was a regular item. (Mom worked nights and I babysat my younger sibs; I learned to cook as time went on because I was tired of living on frozen box food.)

Anyway, it was a raw and rainy night last night when I stopped at ALDI on my way home from work, and I was having a peculiar jones for cheap fried chicken.   A box of the frozen stuff would be just the thing, because I could take the chill off the kitchen by running the oven for awhile.  So I picked up one each of ALDI's Kirkwood Brand Original and Southern Style "Crispy Chicken."

The chicken performed exactly to specifications, which is to say that it wasn't excellent but it was acceptable and satisfying in a way that reminded me of sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework while the smell of oven-fried chicken filled the room.  

Objectively, though, I have to admit that it's pretty mediocre stuff.  The chicken is a little on the dry side, especially in the spots where the coating has come off at the factory and the meat has kind of dehydrated into a sort of fried chicken jerky.  There isn't much of a flavor difference between the two varieties, either.  The "Southern Style" has a lot of black pepper in the coating, while the "Original" doesn't.  On the other hand, each box contains six honest pieces of chicken - two drumsticks, two thighs, and two portions of split breast - and by "honest" I mean that they don't try to pass off a chunk of backbone with some spindly ribs hanging off it as "white meat."  Unfortunately, they also leave out the wings these days.  Back in the days before wings became a popular bar food, wings were plentiful in boxed chicken packs like these.  Now, however, wings are hugely profitable for processors so they're saved out for specialty products.

When all is said and done, I would probably buy ALDI's house brand of chicken again.  It was OK, and there really wasn't all that much difference between Kirkwood and ConAgra's Banquet frozen fried chicken.  No surprise there, either:  when I checked the USDA seal on the Kirkwood box, I found that the chicken had been prepared and packaged by Est. P-7131.  ConAgra Foods.

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Local Chicken

When was the last time you tasted chicken?  I'm not talking about the bloated, watery battery-raised birds from Perdue or Tyson here, I mean real, locally-raised and freshly-processed chicken, the kind your grandparents might have had back when most poultry was raised on small farms a stone's throw from their house.

Late last week, I stopped at Impoco Poultry Market to pick up a couple - of all things - beef tongues (more on that later) and while I was there I bought one of his locally-raised broilers for supper.  His chickens come from his own poultry farm right here in the Connecticut River Valley, and they are killed and dressed on the day of sale - minimal processing, no shrinkwrapping, and no sitting around a supermarket display case for days or more.  I took the bird home, cut it up, and grilled it over an applewood fire.

The difference between Tony's chicken and standard supermarket chicken is striking.  The juicy white meat is firm and solid, and the dark meat is dark the way it's supposed to be, not pale and limp.  And not to be a wiseass, but it tastes like chicken.  Factory agriculture might have done wonders for food production, but that often comes at the expense of flavor, and the washed-out flavor of commercially processed chicken is a great example of that.  And here's the kicker:  the price for one of Tony's awesome chooks is comparable to the supermarket variety.

Small markets like Impoco highlight the best reasons you can find for buying food grown in your own area.  I know that's not always practical - hell, if I had to rely on New England-only food, we wouldn't see a green vegetable on our plates from November to June - but every time you make a decision to buy veggies at the farm stand on your way home from work, or go a few minutes out of your way to a place like Impoco to buy a chicken, or stop at a neighborhood butcher for a couple pounds of fresh ground beef ground right there and not eight hundred miles away at E. Coli & Son's Industrial Meat Processing Plant, you are not only helping yourself eat better, you're helping your community by helping local agriculture remain viable.

About those beef tongues:

I've had a jones lately for corned tongue, but not a strong enough jones to pay $10.95 a pound for one at ShopRite (that's not a typo, that's the real price!)  Tony sometimes brings in specialty meats at the market and announces the availability on the store's Facebook page, and when he mentioned that he'd have fresh beef tongues for $2.00 a pound, I was there right after work, buying two.  

Right now, they're brining in the fridge.  In another couple days, I'll simmer one to perfection in a pot of broth, and smoke the other one to tender delightfulness.  And I'll have full instructions with plenty of photos for you in a brand new post.

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Strange Gizzards

So I get my chicken home and pull out the gizzard bag from the cavity and open it up.  Every time I buy a chicken, that little bag is like a lottery ticket.  Most of the time, I get pretty much what I expect - a couple gizzards, a heart, a liver, and a neck.  But sometimes there's a bonus...extra livers maybe, or two necks.  This time there wasn't any liver or necks.  Just hearts.  Eleven of them.

Eleven hearts!  I got the One-Eyed Jack of chickens!

Feets Don't Fail Me Now

I was in Save-A-Lot a few days ago and found a section of the frozen meat case completely devoted to large frozen packages of chicken feet.  Only they weren't labeled "chicken feet," they were labeled Chicken Paws.  Paws.  What a great name for the filthiest part of the bird - it almost makes them sound cute and huggable.

Not cute and huggable enough for me to buy them that day, however, even though I've bought them in the past.

This is a Barred Rock pullet.
They're good layers, don't mind
the winter, and are relatively
friendly as chickens go. 

I never saw a chicken foot in a supermarket until I was in my late 20's and even then, it was in an Asian market.  It was several more years before I found them in mainstream supermarkets.  These days, chicken feet seem to be in a lot of the places I shop.  When I buy them, I prefer to buy them fresh and I always take a close look at the package to make sure they're not too dirty.  That's a direct result of having kept a backyard flock of chickens for several years.  Chickens don't really care where they walk, and it doesn't matter how clean you keep the henhouse, they're always finding a way to tread on their own poop.  Remember this if you decide to buy a package of chicken paws: inspect them and buy the cleanest ones you can find, and then scrub the hell out of them anyway (under cool running water, with a vegetable brush.)

And what sort of things do you make with chicken feet?  For starters, they make really exceptional chicken broth.  Feet are nothing but skin and tendons and some fat (and a few toenails hahaha) and they're loaded with delicious chickeny flavor.  I like to stir them around in the bottom of a hot kettle until they start to brown a bit and then add chopped onion, celery, carrot, some parsely, a few peppercorns, a bay leaf or two, and water to cover, and then simmer them all day while I go do something else.  When I come back from the something else, the pot is filled with superb chicken broth ready to be strained and seasoned.

But the best way to enjoy chicken feet are as appetizers. 

Chicken Feet with Black Bean Sauce

1 pound chicken feet

3 cups water

Oil for deep frying

3 scallions, chopped

1 tbsp ginger, slivered

2 or 3 star anise

3 or 4 cloves of garlic, crushed

2 tablespoons black bean paste

1 tablespoon dry white wine (I like to use sake)

2 teaspoons sugar

Black pepper to taste

3 tablespoons soy sauce

½ teaspoon sesame oil

1 tablespoon cornstarch, moistened with a bit of cold water

Rinse and scrub the feet well, then trim off the tips (cutting off the nails.)  While you're prepping the feet, bring the 3 cups of water to a boil in an uncovered pressure cooker.

Plunge the cleaned feet into the boiling water and blanch them for about a minute, then remove them from the water with a slotted spoon and drain them well.  (Keep the water in the pressure cooker.)  Deep fry the feet in the oil until they're golden brown and then drain them.  Reserve a tablespoon or two of the oil.

Put the scallions, ginger, and star anise into the pressure cooker with the water and the chicken feet.  Close the pressure cooker and cook them for 10 minutes with the top jiggling., then remove the  feet from the pot, reserving the broth. 

In the reserved bit of oil, saute the garlic and black bean paste, then add the feet and stir-fry them until cooked and browned.  Add the wine, sugar, pepper, soy sauce and sesame oil.  Pour in the stock, cover the feet and simmer another 5 minutes.  Stir in the cornstarch mixture to thicken the sauce, and serve the feet hot.

Yes, it's a time-consuming recipe, but worth every delicious minute.

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Pacific Natural Foods Organic Free Range Chicken Broth

Full disclosure:  One of the very first things my mother ever taught me in the kitchen was how to make stews, soups, stocks, and broths.  I've been making them as long as I can remember.  I hardly ever buy prepared broth because it's so easy to make (especially with a pressure cooker) and my homemade is far superior to anything I've ever bought.

Okay, that's over with and I can give you my review of Pacific Natural Foods Organic Free Range Chicken Broth.  It doesn't taste like chicken.  It doesn't taste like anything, really, except maybe dishwater.  I've never had such flavorless, bodyless, flaccid so-called "broth" in all my life.  Unfortunately, I'm almost certain to have it again because at the same time I bought the chicken broth I also bought Pacific Natural Foods Beef and Vegetable Broths and given how bad this one is, I have no hope that the others will be any better.

I have no excuse for buying so many cartons of broth except that  occasionally I need broth on the spur of the moment, so I try to keep at least one or two commercially-prepared containers on hand.  I bought Pacific Natural because they were a really good price and "organic" products are usually so much better than "standard" versions.  Hah.  Not in this case.  It's pretty bad when the only way you can "save" a commercial carton of chicken broth is to add Knorr chicken powder and a dash of MSG to it.

I'm going to stick with the Wolfgang Puck broths from now on.

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KFC's Double Down WITH GRAVY

I got out of work late the other night, and I really wasn't in the mood to cook...I was just too beat to think about spending an hour or so in the kitchen.  So I called home and had Maryanne make up a green salad, while I swung by KFC for a batch of Double Downs.

And gravy.

Now, when I was a kid, Colonel Sanders was still in charge of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the gravy was absolutely awesome.  The Colonel himself was so proud of his gravy that he once said, "This gravy's so good you can throw the chicken away and just eat the gravy."  Over the years, with the Colonel now having rung down the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible, the gravy recipe has changed and cheapened and it's not the same as it used to be.  And yet, in it's own not-really-chicken-gravy-any-more way, it's still delicious.  

As I drove to KFC, I was thinking about how good their gravy was, and how good a Double Down would be with some of that gravy.  So when I left KFC, Double Downs in hand, I had a tub of gravy with me as well.  Usually, the gravy is just sold as a part of the "Mashed Potatoes & Gravy" side, but if you ask nicely the folks behind the counter will sell you just the gravy separately.

I cut an experimental bite of Double Down and dipped it with a fork into the gravy.  It was awesome.  So I just kept the sandwich on the plate, ladled it with gravy, and nommed with knife and fork.

If there was any way to make the Double Down even more badass than it already is, gravy is it.

By the way, Double Downs are only here for a limited time - come the end of May and they'll be gone - so if you haven't yet gotten your share of EPIC, now might be a good time.  Ken Hoffman of the Houston Chronicle couldn't have put it better when he said, "This one will be a legend, as in, 'remember the time KFC came out with a sandwich with two chicken breasts on the outside and no bread?'  No joke."

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Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers: Sesame Chicken

Costco had a great deal on Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers last time I was there. They were a four pack for something like seven bucks, and there was a coupon for three dollars off one of these four packs. Awesome deal. So the four packs had one flavor I've reviewed before (twice, even) - Orange Zest Chicken. The other three flavors are Margarita Chicken, Chicken Marinara, and today's entry, Sesame Chicken.

So the prep for these is, like all Cafe Steamers, chuck it into the microwave for four or five minutes, come back, stir, and eat. So after my four minutes are up, I pour everything into the sauce on the bottom of the bowl and stir it up and...

And...oh, are those mushrooms? Gross. Well, first observation is that there are mushrooms in the sauce. (I've always hated mushrooms; they have one of the most disgusting textures to me. But I love the flavor they add to food.) So I'll be picking around the mushrooms.

But everything tastes pretty good: the peas are what I've come to expect from Healthy Choice - cooked so that they're still crunchy but not soft and falling apart, the carrots are slightly crunchy and enjoyable, and the rice is perfectly done and - get this - actually sticky. Yes, Healthy Choice has done a miracle in the frozen food world: they have bestowed upon me sticky white rice to go with my Asian-inspired meal. Aces! The chicken is done perfectly as well, but it tastes kind of like it's been in a lemon juice base. It's got a tang if you taste it carefully, but if you're cutting it up and eating it with everything else you probably won't notice it.

Oh, remember what I said earlier about picking around the mushrooms? No such luck. The mushrooms are pretty well chopped, so it's hard to navigate around them. So other than the kind of rubbery, plasticy texture of the mushrooms, this meal rocks. So what about the sauce? It's thick - like, really thick, almost to a syurp stage - and it's got little sesame seeds in it, but they don't really lend that sesame flavor to everything. You can smell it when it cooks, sure, but other than that, there's so much more going on in this meal that you can't really taste the sesame note alone. And the sauce is very heavy on the sweet, and kind of lax on the spicy. And it tastes like mushrooms, but that shouldn't be a shocker - there's mushrooms throughout the entire thing.

So this meal is pretty good, overall. The veggies done well, and the rice was nothing short of amazing. (sticky rice that's been frozen?! Woah, cool!) The sauce was the letdown here, and it wasn't sue to flavor - it was definitely due to thickness. So, I'm going to minimize my cooking time next time I make it to see if that helps loosen the sauce up a bit.

KFC Double Downs

Foreground above:  My delicious and awesome KFC Double Down, which I had for lunch.

Background above:  Colonel Harland David Sanders, looking a little pissed off, which is probably for two reasons:  First, KFC turned him into a crappy-looking cartoon icon/logo with a dumbass combover and a red aprom, neither of which he had in real life.  Second, he's dead and can't enjoy a Double Down.  All he can do is glare at me from his brown paper bag.

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