Comfort Cuisine

What you need:

2 lbs. of chicken tenders, lightly salted and peppered
2 TBLs corn oil
1 cup chopped scallions (substitute: onions)
1 cup sliced mushrooms (optional)
3/4 cup white wine or chicken broth
1/2 cup flour + an additional 2 1/2 TBLS flour, set aside
1/2 yellow cornmeal
1 teas. baking powder
1 teas. baking soda
1/4 teas. salt
1 teas. black pepper
2 TBLS chilled butter, cut into pieces
4 TBLS chopped chives
3 TBLS chopped Italian parsley
2/3 cup buttermilk
3 cups canned or boxed chicken broth
1/4 cup cream or half & half

Helpful tools: Pastry cutter

Using a medium-large skillet/pan, heat the corn oil over medium-high heat. Cook chicken tenders in pan for about 8 minutes, until lightly browned. Add scallions and mushrooms; then add wine (or chicken broth). Cover and reduce heat. Cook an additional 15-20 minutes, or until chicken is done. Remove chicken pieces and transfer to your prettiest, homiest oven-safe serving dish. Put in oven (250 degrees) to keep warm. Note: If you like your chicken "shredded" rather than in large pieces, as some people do, now's the time!

Now onto the dumplings! In a medium mixing bowl, combine flour, cornmeal, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and pepper. Add chilled butter and cut through using a pastry cutter or fork (texture of this should resemble damp, coarse sand). Stir in the buttermilk until combined; add 2 TBLS of chopped chives and 1 TBLS chopped parsley.

Now it's time to get back to the skillet. Bring 2 3/4 chicken broth to a boil over medium-high heat. In a small bowl, combine cream (or half & half), flour and the 1/4 cup chicken broth that remains, and whisk until smooth (it's important to have no clumps!). Add this to the boiling broth. Once the liquid begins to thicken into "gravy," reduce heat to medium-low (low simmer).

Using a tablespoon, drop dumpling dough into the simmering gravy -- make sure that none of them touch, if possible. Cover and simmer for about 15 minutes (it might take longer depending on your altitude). The dumplings will appear "dry" and will be springy when you poke them.

Gently transfer the dumplings and gravy over the chicken that you're keeping warm in the oven. Garnish with remaining parsley and chives. Et viole!

(Serves: About 3)

What you need:

2 1/4 cups sifted flour
1 teas. baking soda
1 teas. salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter (room temperature)
1/2 cup shortening
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
1 TBLS sour cream
1 1/2 teas. Madagascar vanilla
2 large eggs (room temperature)
1-pound bag chocolate chips
4 ozs. Heath "Bits o' Brickle" toffee bits (a bag is 8 oz.)

Helpful tools: Large cookie scoop

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Combined flour, baking soda, and salt in a bowl. Beat butter and shortening together -- I use my Kitchen Aid Mixer, but hey, we all used to do it by hand back in the day, right? Add the sugars, sour cream, and Madagascar vanilla and beat well. Add the eggs, one at a time, then the flour mixture. Stir in chocolate chips and toffee bits.

Now, using a large cookie scoop, scoop the dough out and place on cookie sheet. You can also use a very small measuring cup or a conventional tablespoon. These cookies are truly large; I usually get only about nine cookies on one cookie sheet, depending on size. Note: I use the Wilton Right Air sheets -- there is almost no way to burn a cookie with these.

Bake until nice and golden, usually around 15 minutes. Cool slightly before removing cookies from sheet with spatula. These present excellently served on a tea saucer while still slightly warm, with a scoop of vanilla (or chocolate) ice cream on top -- and boy, do they taste good, too!

The year: 1937. The place: The Toll House Inn run by Ruth and Kenneth Wakefield in Whitman, Massachusetts.

There are conflicting stories as to just how Ruth came up with the recipe for what we now now as Nestle's Toll House Cookies. One story purports that Ruth, when making her Butter Drop Do cookies, ran out of powdered baking chocolate -- a necessary ingredient -- and instead chopped up a block of Nestle's semi-sweet chocolate, thinking that the chocolate would melt into the dough evenly during the baking process and achieve the same effect. Another story suggests that Ruth added the chopped chocolate to her recipe just for giggles. Whatever the case, the cookies were a big hit with guests at the Toll House Inn.

Ruth promoted her new recipe, which she named Chocolate Crunch Cookies, in a Boston newspaper. Sales for Nestle semi-sweet chcolate bars went up, which in turn caught the eye of the good folks at Nestle, who gave Ruth a lifetime supply of chocolate in return for allowing them to print her recipe on the back of the bars of baking chocolate they sold. At first, the bars were sold with a "chopper," so that bakers could achieve the same results as Ruth. In 1939, however, Nestle's "chocolate chip" was born, thus making life a lot easier.

As they say, the rest is history. Ruth Wakefield's original recipe is the same one you see printed on the back of the back of Nestle's chocolate chips today. Unarguably the chocolate chip cookie is the first thing to come to mind when defining the most all-American dessert treat. In 1997, the chocolate chip cookie was adopted as the official cookie of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts - a fitting tribute to the cookie's "home state."


Thank you, Ruth Wakefield!

What you need:

4 chicken breasts, cooked and shredded
2 TBLS cooking oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
2 cans Campbell's Cream of Chicken soup (10 3/4 oz.)
1 can Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup (10 3/4 oz.)
1 can Ro-Tel tomatoes
1/2 cup canned chicken broth
1 lb. package shredded "Mexican Mix" cheese (cheddar and jack)
1 package corn tortillas

Boil chicken until done in a large cooking pot. I usually do this a day ahead, so that the chicken will be refrigerated (and therefore, nice and cool) when I shred it.

Heat oil in a large, deep skillet over medium heat. Add onions and green peppers and saute until the onions are limp and translucent, but not brown. Add the soups, Ro-Tel tomatos, chicken broth and shredded chicken. This will look truly vile and inedible. Patience, grasshopper.

Note: When making King Ranch Casserole, how much of the tortilla pieces you use is strictly arbitrary; some people like a dense layer of tortillas -- sort of like lasagna noodles. Others prefer a thin layer of tortillas. Your call.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease a 9 X 12" oven-safe baking dish. (Alternately, you can do what I like to do when feeding a small group of friends -- use Emile Henry individual casserole dishes. This dresses the dish up a bit and doesn't make guests feel like they're at a church social.)

Using kitchen shears, cut the tortillas into bite-sized pieces (you can also just tear them with your fingers, but using the shears is more efficient). Layer the bottom of the dish with tortilla pieces. Pour half the soup-chicken mixture on top. Sprinkle with half of the shredded cheese. Repeat the layers; you'll end up with cheese on the top.

Bake in oven for 30-40 minutes until the casserole is heated through -- warm and bubbly. You'll know when it's done when the entire house smells like an El Patio dinner. Take this little beaut to your next pot luck and see how fast it disappears!

No one seems to know, but most seem to agree that it's a "Texas thing," possibly a culinary result of post-WWII housewives who were trying to figure out how to put all of those Campbell's "Cream Ofs" to good use. Another thing that most people seem to agree on is that this dish tastes just as delectable as it is ugly.

The recipe has shown up in various incarnations in Junior League and church cookbooks; even today, I can go to any deli or take-out cafe and find it residing in the refrigerated section. In big, ugly slices. The stuff's even uglier cold.

"King Ranch casserole is not a pretty dish," concedes Mimi Schwartz of the dish in Texas Monthly. "A steaming mass of melted mush, the classic ingredients-- boiled chicken, grated cheese, tortilla chips, and one can each cream of chicken soup -- make it steady in beige and yellow." Cutting to the chase: King Ranch Casserole is a gentrified, casseroled version of chicken enchiladas, with almost zero muss and fuss. As despicably ugly as King Ranch might be, it makes up for it in taste -- in spades. And with Ro-Tel tomatoes, melted cheese, and all that Campbell's Cream Of involved, this dish's comfort food quotient is dangerously high.

What you need:

1 box reduced-calorie Nilla wafers
6 ripe bananas
2 cups two-percent milk
1 5-oz box sugar-free vanilla pudding
1 8-oz box reduced calorie cream cheese, room temperature
1 14-oz can reduced calorie ("light") sweetened condensed milk
1 12-oz container of Cool Whip Light

Note: If you want to go all out with the calories, please feel free to use the full-fat, full-calorie versions of all ingredients. It does make the pudding much better. However, when I feel a bit abashed at the thought of directly consuming sweetened condensed milk, I'll make my low-fat version instead.

Have your Kitchen Aid mixer or electric beaters ready to roll on this one! In mixing bowl, beat cream cheese and condensed milk until nice and smooth. Add vanilla pudding mix and beat well. Now add the milk, little by little; the pudding will start to thicken, but you do have to use a spatula to make sure that the cream cheese/condensed milk mixture isn't sticking to the bottom of the bowl. After mixture is thickened, mix in 1/2 of the Cool Whip until very well-blended.

Line a 13" x 9" dish (again, I use my Emile Henry lasagna pan for this) with Nilla wafers. Begin slicing the bananas (they do go brown if you slice them ahead of time), and place a layer on top of the wafers. Spoon half of the pudding mixture over this. Repeat with another layer of wafers; spoon the remaining pudding mixture on top. Cover with remaining Cool Whip. Just to make this dish more homey, I do what my mom did -- I crush up some of the wafers and sprinkle them on top, also making a wafer "border" around the dish as well. Some like their pudding with a lot of cookie (I do), and some do not. Banana pudding isn't something you can really mess up too badly.

Refrigerate for a couple of hours until the pudding is thoroughly chilled. I like to eat it the next day, after the wafers have had a chance to absorb some of the pudding and get "soft."

Serves: You. Only you. You know it. You're not going to share this. You won't want to! :)

I stumbled across Paula Deen's Not Yo Mama's Banana Pudding Recipe a couple of years back and was impressed by her interpretation of this old-timey classic. First, she uses Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies, rather than Nilla wafers; and French vanilla pudding, rather than plain ol' vanilla.

Paula gets a little precious with the prep -- she mixes the cream cheese and condensed milk and pudding mix and milk separately (I'm way too lazy for that!) and then blends them together. But this is still a recipe worth making when you want something sinfully delicious:

Ingredients:

2 bags Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies
6 to 8 bananas, sliced
2 cups milk
1 (5-ounce) box instant French vanilla pudding
1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened
1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
1 (12-ounce) container frozen whipped topping thawed (or equal amount sweetened whipped cream)

Line the bottom of a 13 X 9 X 2-inch dish with 1 bag of cookies and layer bananas on top. In a bowl, combine the milk and pudding mix and blend well using a handheld electric mixer. Using another bowl, combine the cream cheese and condensed milk together and mix until smooth. Fold the whipped topping into the cream cheese mixture. Add the cream cheese mixture to the pudding mixture and stir until well blended. Pour the mixture over the cookies and bananas and cover with the remaining cookies. Refrigerate until ready to serve.