Grapefruit and Greens: A Refreshing Winter Salad

February 10, 2016February 7, 2020 ~ Judy's Chickens ~ 21 Comments

I love to eat grapefruit with mixed greens and avocado in the winter. The grapefruit is so sweet, acidic, and refreshing, that I crave it all winter. That’s fortunate because winter is when they are in season. They fill the void left by the absence of vine-ripened tomatoes.

It helps that I have incredibly fine memory associations with grapefruit. My grandfather grew grapefruit trees in his backyard in Hollywood, Florida. My grandmother loved it when my siblings came to visit because then they could be the ones to climb the trees to reach the high fruit instead of Granddaddy.

Even my infant son got to join in on the fun.

Ingredients:

Salad greens: I enjoy spring mix and baby spinach
1 Sweet Scarlett grapefruit, peeled, sliced and quartered
2 green onions, sliced
2 tablespoons sliced almonds
1 avocado, peeled, pitted and sliced
Rotisserie chicken or salmon
Feta or goat cheese
Everyday Salad Dressing

Mise en Place:

Instructions:

Prep the grapefruits: Check out this very clever method of peeling and slicing oranges and grapefruit that I learned on a navel orange farm. You will wonder how you got this far in your life without knowing how to do this.

Remove grapefruit seeds. Cut the sliced grapefruit into bite-sized chunks. Save the grapefruit juice from the cutting board to pour into the salad.

Slice the green onions and avocados. Add all the ingredients to a salad bowl.

Add my Everyday Salad Dressing and toss.

Lunch is served.

Other Salads
Meera’s Arugula, Feta, Cherry, and Toasted Almond Salad
Roasted Beet Salad
Marlin’s Black-Eyed Pea Salad
Blanched String Beans with Vinaigrette

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Rachelle’s Italian Sausage, Onions, and Peppers

February 4, 2016November 6, 2022 ~ Judy's Chickens ~ 40 Comments

Dear Doris’s Italian Market and Bakery,

Please open a store in Nashville so I can get delicious homemade Italian sausage, sweet or spicy, with or without fennel, veal sausages, meatloaf mix and braciole-cut beef when ever I want them.

And, please send Lester and his delightful butcher friends from the Boca Raton store, to the opening. They know stuff.

Whenever I go to Florida to visit my family, I always make a trip to Doris’s and to Joseph’s Classic Market. At Joseph’s, I buy the best sfogliatelle I’ve ever tasted

and the best cannolis, with real cannoli cream.

At Doris’s, I buy sausages galore: pork, veal and chicken, freeze them, pack them in my suitcase, and fly them home with us to Nashville. My husband goes with me to Doris’s because the store is so much fun to browse in, but he starts to shake his head when I start filling up the cart with pounds and pounds of sausages. Always the more practical one in the family, he wonders how I plan to get it all home. “Don’t worry honey,” I say, “I always find a way.”

This year, because I was working on a recipe for a Portuguese stew, my sweet husband searched out and found fresh Portuguese linguica at Boca Brazil Supermercado. It’s one of the many reasons he is my Valentine and no other.

I, meanwhile, am my grandfather Carl’s granddaughter — when he went to Sicily to visit relatives, ages ago, he brought home cured salami hidden from Customs inspectors in the toecap of a shoe that was packed in his suitcase. I thought that was strange as a child, but I totally get it, now.

A few weeks ago, when I was in Florida, Mom’s sister Rachelle made sausage and peppers for dinner on our first night in town. It’s her husband Steve’s favorite meal from childhood. Was it ever good! So good, we had to have a repeat performance later in the week so I could blog it.

Part of the fun of making this dish was all of us going grocery shopping together to get the ingredients. As you can see, this recipe isn’t complicated.

Because we didn’t live in a big city, with Italian markets, while growing up, my mother often bought pre-packaged Premio Italian Sweet Sausages. They are great in meat sauce and also excellent grilled. In Nashville, you can buy the Premio brand at Costco, five pounds for $12.00. The inhouse-made sausages at Doris’s are $3.50 a pound.

Yield: Serves 6

Ingredients:

2½ pounds Italian sweet sausage (8 links)
8 cups sliced sweet bell peppers (5 peppers)
5 cups sliced onions (3 medium)
1/3 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon garlic pepper
1 teaspoon sea salt

Mise en Place:

Instructions:

This is truly the easiest recipe on the blog.

Prep veggies. Here’s Rachelle, favorite great-aunt to my children, chopping veggies.

Prep sausages: cut apart links.

You’ll need two frying pans. One for the peppers and onions and one for the sausages.

Sauté the onions, garlic pepper and salt in olive oil over medium-high heat until translucent and soft, about ten minutes.

Add the peppers. Continue to sauté the peppers and onions over medium-high heat until the peppers start to soften, and then let them simmer over low heat while you cook the sausages.

Sauté the sausages in 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a different pan.

Brown on all sides over medium-high heat.

Slit sausages to allow heat to get inside. Cover pan and let simmer for 20 minutes over low heat.

Add sausages to peppers and onions. Be sure to tap off as much fat as possible from the sausages before you add them to the peppers and onions.

Saute together for 5-10 minutes. It will look like this when it is done.

Can be served as is, or over pasta, or in a hoagie. It works for Whole30 if you skip the bread and pasta and serve it with a green salad.

Two family photos of Rachelle, just for fun:
Rachelle, my grandmother Marion, and my brother Chris. Rachelle and Grandma are visiting us in Baltimore and by the looks of their hair, they’ve been to Bridget’s Beauty Shoppe.

This is a photo of Rachelle in Sicily with Granddaddy Carl and Grandma’s cousins Marianina and Salvatore. Rachelle was in high school at the time.

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Grandma’s Sick Soup, Sometimes Known as Snow Day Soup

January 31, 2016February 18, 2021 ~ Judy's Chickens ~ 21 Comments

A few years ago, my friend Jennifer told me her family was sick with the flu. What I heard was, “Stop at Kroger and pick up a ten-pack of chicken thighs to make the Johnstons a pot of soup!” I bought the chicken and immediately set about making stock. My husband came home, smelled the soup simmering, and automatically asked, “Who’s sick?”

A few weeks ago, I was sick with a winter cold. My mom’s sister, Rachelle, heated a bowl of chicken soup for me. It was warm and wonderful. She uses my rotisserie bone broth recipe to make the chicken stock and her mother’s recipe to make the soup.

Chicken Stock from Rotisserie Chicken Bones
This stock is made with roasted bones, veggies, aromatics, and water.

Aunt Bridget’s Chicken Soup with Little Meatballs
This stock is made with raw thigh meat, bones, veggies, aromatics, and water.

A few words on ingredients:

Canned Stewed Tomatoes:
I like to purée stewed tomatoes before using them in a recipe. While I love the instant flavor boost you get from a can of stewed tomatoes, I don’t care for the texture or taste of sliced and diced tomatoes. Rachelle turned me on to Del Monte’s brand of “Italian Recipe” Stewed Tomatoes and I like it.

Heel of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese:
Using the heel of a wedge of Parmesan as flavoring was Mom’s secret ingredient in both her spaghetti sauce and soup. I grew up with a baggie of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese heels in the refrigerator and for the longest time, I had no idea why Mom saved them. Truth be told, I may have even thrown a few away when I was cleaning out her refrigerator. Big mistake. Those Parmesan heels are solid gold. They are an instant flavor booster. They are also a little salty so be sure to taste test your soup before adding salt. Chicken carcasses, heels of cheese. You probably think I have the eye of newt in my fridge, too.

Ingredients:

4 quarts chicken stock
2 cans Italian-Style stewed tomatoes, puréed
1 can Fire-Roasted tomatoes, puréed
6 cups sliced celery (1½ pounds)
6 cups sliced carrots (2 pounds)
½ heel from a wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
2 teaspoons garlic pepper
2 cans cannellini beans, drained
2 pounds cooked chicken meat
2 cans quartered artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
salt to taste
1 head of escarole or other mildly bitter green, leaves washed and chopped
Pasta or ravioli, cooked in a separate pot of water

Mise en Place:

Instructions:
1) Add stock to a large soup pot and heat until the gelatinous stock melts.
2) Add tomatoes, carrots, celery, and the Parmesan heel. Bring to a boil over high heat and then simmer over low heat for about one hour.
3) Add chopped chicken, beans, and artichoke hearts. Simmer 30 minutes.
4) About five minutes before you are ready to serve, stir in the greens and turn off the heat. The greens will wilt almost immediately.
5) Adjust the seasoning by adding salt and more garlic pepper, as needed.
6) If serving with pasta, cook per the package’s instructions.

About escarole:
Escarole is sometimes hard to find in Nashville. I would check Whole Foods first and if they don’t have it in stock, try Kroger. It is often the green of choice for many Italian soups. It is mildly bitter.

If you are going to serve pasta with your soup, I recommend using a box of ditalini, a small tubular and chewy pasta. It has always been my family’s favorite soup pasta. Cook it in a separate pot of water so the pasta doesn’t absorb all of your broth. Store unused cooked pasta in a separate container.

Rachelle’s chicken soup heals what ails you.

Sick Soup can easily become a very hearty Snowy Day Stew by adding artichoke hearts, rosemary, and ravioli. Last week, for a quickly organized dinner party for neighbors during a snow storm, I used a 20-ounce package of Buitoni Four Cheese Ravioli instead of the ditalini. I cooked the pasta in a separate pot; just as I recommend doing for the ditalini. Be sure to have a bowl of freshly grated Parmesan cheese on the table to share.

One of my dinner guests, on that snowy evening, was my neighbor, Ann Shayne, of the dynamic knitting duo at MasonDixonKnitting.com. Ann and Kay Gardiner have recently published a best-selling knitter’s coloring book. Check it out here. Rachelle colored the picture on the right from her copy of the coloring book. In the background of the photo on the left, you can see the knitted mitered-square blanket that Kay taught me how to make. There are how-to instructions for knitting this blanket in MDK’s first knitting book.

Like bone broth, knitting is good for you, too; just ask New York Times health columnist, Jane Brody. She recently posted an article about the health benefits of knitting in the NYT. I’ll find out real quick if my sons read my blog by whether they notice I’ve exposed a Mom’s Trade Secret about raising them in a comment I posted in response to Brody’s article.

So, here’s to a little winter cold therapy with sick soup, or cups of bone broth, knitting, and coloring.

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How to Make Chicken Stock

January 25, 2016November 26, 2025 ~ Judy's Chickens ~ 23 Comments

Last year, about the time I started stockpiling turkey carcasses in the freezer to make Bruce’s Turkey and Sausage Gumbo, I had the idea to start freezing rotisserie chicken bones, too. To prepare my first batch of chicken stock, I thawed and then cooked the stored carcasses for about five hours in a pot of plain water, no vegetables, just as we did for the turkey stock in the gumbo. The stock was good, and by good, I mean adequate.

To make it more flavorful, I started simmering aromatic vegetables and herbs with my stash of frozen bones following the ingredients list from my recipe for Aunt Bridget’s Chicken Soup. Much better.

It’s a little more work, but the results are a flavorful stock. While it doesn’t gel up as much as the stock made from using the ten collagen-laden thigh bones in Aunt Bridget’s recipe, the flavor is rich and delicious. You should know the seasoning used to flavor the rotisserie chicken does carry over into the stock so it isn’t as pure as the more neutral tasting stock you might want for a delicate sauce, but it is perfect for making a hearty soup.

Last week, I was at Costco and bought two freshly made rotisserie chickens to have in the fridge for “weekend food.” When I got home and heard there might be a lot of snow on the way, I decided to go ahead and use the rotisserie chickens to make soup since nothing says Snow Day like the smell and warmth of soup simmering on the stove.

At $4.99 each, Costco’s rotisserie chickens are considered “loss leaders” in the grocery industry; Costco knows they are going to lose money on them, but they also know they are going to draw shoppers into the store. Costco happily assumes that risk. I know I, for one, have never been able to leave Costco with just one food item in my cart.

I once spoke to a Costco butcher who told me each of their rotisserie chickens weighs a minimum of three pounds. Anything smaller is used to make food items such as chicken salad or chicken pot pie. The good news for consumers is that most of their roasted chickens weigh a lot more than three pounds, sometimes up to six pounds! Look for a chicken whose breast meat is touching the top of the packaging, and you’ll know you’ve picked a big one.

To give you an idea of how much meat you can get from a rotisserie chicken, I pulled off 2 pounds, 6 ounces from a chicken that weighed 4 pounds, 5 ounces. These results are consistent with those I described here.

Between the two chickens, I bought that day I had five pounds of meat. That’s a deal for $10, even better when you consider the added benefit of getting stock from the carcasses.

As I carved off the meat, I collected the bones, skin and even the gelled chicken juice from the bottom of the packaging.

How to Make Chicken Stock from Bones

Ingredients:

2-3 large cooked rotisserie chickens, or 2-3 frozen carcasses
5 quarts water
1 large unpeeled onion (1 pound), quartered
1/3 head celery, with leaves (½ pound)
4 unpeeled carrots (½ pound)
6 cloves unpeeled garlic (½ ounce), smashed
10 whole stems Italian flat-leafed parsley
3 bay leaves
1 teaspoon pepper, no salt
2 tablespoons cider vinegar or lemon juice

Mise en Place:

Instructions:
Remove meat from bones as described in this post. Or, use 2-4 thawed carcasses from the freezer. These carcasses are from rotisserie chickens from Whole Foods. I used the saved stems from parsley instead of the leaves. Also had lots of singlet garlic cloves that I threw in there.

Place carcasses and water in a large soup pot and bring to a boil. The water should cover the bones. Add a little more water if you need to. Remove the scum that boils to the top, if any.

Add the vegetables and other ingredients all at once. There is no need to peel the vegetables, not even the garlic. Just smash it with a food mallet and throw it in the pot. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat to a slow simmer. The acid in the vinegar helps to break down the cartilage in the bones and pull out the minerals, such as calcium. Allow to simmer, barely bubbling, for about seven hours. I found that if you simmer stock slowly, instead of boiling, the finished stock will be less cloudy. Cool for 30 minutes before handling.

Pour soup through a colander. Discard contents of the colander. Pour it a second time through a sieve or cheesecloth to remove tiny bones and food particles that remain.

Store stock overnight in the refrigerator or outside, if it is cold enough. The next morning, scrape off the layer of hardened, yellowish fat that has risen to the surface and congealed. You should end up with about 4 quarts, or 16 cups, of chicken stock. If you are not going to use the stock within the next couple of days, it is best to freeze it.

But, you might just want to start having a cup of bone broth a day to keep the doctor away.

Or, make a big container of Sick Soup for an ailing friend. Recipe here.

An FYI: A way to carve a chicken or turkey breast:

Carve out the full breast from each side of the sternum, cutting as close to the bone as possible. I often just pull the meat away with my fingers. Slice the breast meat as shown in the photo below. Each breast ways about 11 ounces.