Sunday Potluck

Happy Sunday y'all!  Hope you had a great weekend filled with lots of yummy stories to share with me!  Sunday is my favorite day of the week.  Why?  Because I get to spend the day in the kitchen at church with family and friends.  See, at our church, we have potluck EVERY SUNDAY.  Sometimes we have folks to bring a dish, but most of the time we have them bring the ingredients and me and a handful of teens to 50 somethings get busy in the kitchen creating a feast for the rest of the congregation.  It can get quite interesting back there, especially if we have folks who may have forgotten to bring their ingredient or happen to miss church for some reason.  We have had many a triumph, mishap, and complete tragedy back there.  But it's always fun and it always comes together!  A time or two we have even pulled off a fish and loaves miracle.  However that was not the case today.  Today we had well more than enough to go around.  This week, a big ol' down home country breakfast was on the menu.  We must have had 20 dozen eggs, 20 pounds of sausage, and about 35 cans of biscuits.  Oh and let's not forget the gravy made from scratch!  At first we weren't sure if we were gonna have enough to go around.  I had to throw out quite a few farm fresh eggs that had turned green, P.U.!  And for a moment I thought I was going to have to make biscuits from scratch and let me tell ya, that's NOT my greatest kitchen accomplishment for sure, LOL!  But as the time passed people kept bringing their promised ingredients.  I even had a spare 3 lb roll of sausage that i browned and threw into the eggs we beat.  When the scrambled egg and sausage mixture hit that flat top grill, woo wee, did that smell good!  Everything was ready at just the right time to take out to the buffet table and breakfast was a hit!  One nice lady even brought in some packages of flour tortillas.  It's Mexican next sunday! 

See ya in the Kitchen!

I Just Had a Foodgasm!

 Hey y'all!  Hope everyone is having a great week!  I've been keeping myself busy in my kitchen as well as trying to upgrade to a bigger kitchen--in a bakery!  I applied for a job at a local bakery earlier this week, that has a GINORMOUS kitchen that I'd love to get my hands dirty in!  Especially after the success of my cinnamon rolls. 

Today's project, however, is not of the baking sort.  A couple of weeks ago I was watching Rachael Ray's Week in a Day show.  I love that woman.  I could hang out with her even outside the kitchen.  She's so perky!  She showcased two recipes that I wanted to try:  chicken thighs w/spicy Italian sausage and spicy ziti.  I love cooking with fresh veggies especially when I'm cooking Italian.  But I have NEVER cooked chicken thighs in any way, shape, or form.  I'm a drumstick girl at heart or quick and easy frozen breasts.  And very seldom do I fry chicken.  Not like when I was growing up at home and my Granny fried chicken once a week.  Oooooh that smell!  I could always tell what we were having for supper!  I'd be walking home from school and you could smell my Granny's cookin from two doors down!  Her chicken make you wanna slap ya mamma!  But, I digress...

I've never tried to cook one of Rachael Ray's dishes, I usually just drool on myself watching her throw it together on TV.  So I was really excited to try this tonite.  The aroma of the sausage and the veggies were to die for!  So I'm frying the chicken (skin on) in the sausage grease while I'm chopping up the peppers and onions.  I'm really careful too, cooking in over low heat so as not to scorch the outside and leave it raw inside, and I'm checking the temp with my meat thermometer.  After so long, I just got tired of them not coming up to temp as fast as I thought they should.  The veggies were chopped and ready to go in the pan, the dishes I had dirtied were washed, and my chicken thighs were still 20 degrees away from being done.  So I did what any wife with a patient, but hungry man would do...I popped them in the microwave and got to sauteing my veggies!  Once I did that, dinner came together nicely.  I got my peppers and onions tender, threw the sausage back in the pot, and finally my chicken got thoroughly done.  I put the chicken on top of the sausage and let it simmer for about ten more minutes and just like that, supper was done!

OH.  MY.  GOD!  I cannot explain to you the DEPTH of the flavors that were going on in this dish!  It was spicy, sweet, and smokey all at the same time!  The layers of flavor were phenomenal!  This has got to be the best chicken I've ever made!  I encourage you to try this recipe and see for yourself!  Thank you Rachael Ray!

Ingredients

1/2 lb spicy Italian sausage
5 chicken thighs
1 red pepper chopped
1 green pepper chopped
1 red onion chopped
4 cloves of garlic minced
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup chicken stock
paprika to taste
salt & pepper to taste

Directions

Brown sausage, set aside
Sprinkle salt, pepper, and paprika on skin side of chicken.  Fry chicken in sausage grease skin side down first.  Salt and pepper opposite side of chicken before turning over.  When done, cover with aluminum foil and set aside to rest.
Saute peppers, onion, and garlic until tender.  Once tender, deglaze the pan with wine and continue cooking for 2 minutes.
Add chicken stock and continue cooking for 2 minutes.
Place sausage back in pan on top of veggies.
Place chicken thighs skin side up on top of sausage.  Allow to cook for 10 more minutes.
Serve the chicken topped with the sausage, pepper, and onion mixture.

Take a picture, post on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Google....oh wait, that's just me, LMAO!

The only change I made to this was I omitted the wine and used an additional 1/2 cup of chicken stock instead.  Next time I will most definitely use the wine because I'm sure it will add even more depth of flavor to this delicious dish!  I hope you try this recipe and love it as much as we did! 

See ya in the Kitchen!

My First Disaster

Let's start with my very first kitchen disaster, because after all, we've all had them!  It didn't happen in my kitchen though.  Unfortunately it happened at my very first job.  Back in about 1993 I was around 17 years old and had just started working at The Hungry Pelican, a fast food spot in our local Galleria.  I had only been working as a cashier on the front line for a few days.  We kept a cauldron, similar to the one in the picture above, out in the front so that we cashiers could ladle a hot bowlful as needed.  There was a window between us and the kitchen where the orders came through, and one of the cooks passed a stainless steel pot filled with steaming clam chowder through the window and told me to put it in the pot.  So, I poured the chowder into the pot and passed the now empty stainless steel pot back through the window to the cooks.  They looked extremely puzzled and asked me did we already need more chowder.  I told them no, I just put that chowder that they gave me into the pot like they told me to.  They looked at me like I had just ruined their entire day.  I didn't understand, I just did what they told me to do.  Then my manager came to the window.  She asked me what happened.  I told her that I put the clam chowder in the pot just like the cook asked me to.  It was then that she informed me that the stainless steel pot should have been SET DOWN INTO the pot.  LMAO!!  I didn't realize that the pot was itself just a prop that acted as a warmer that had to be plugged in.  i thought it was a real iron cauldron that you could actually cook in!  Needless to say, I created quite a mess that day and my family still teases me about it to this day over 20 years later.  Thankfully, that's one mistake that I will never make again.  There are many more mistakes and stories to be told however and I will definitely be sharing more disaster stories as well as triumphs very soon!  In the meantime, it's back to the kitchen for me.  I hope you'll share with me some of your kitchen disasters!

See ya in the Kitchen!

Welcome!

Welcome to Jodi's Kitchen!  I'm Jodi!  I'm a born and bred Kentucky girl living in Indiana, hoping to one day move back to God's Country in the Bluegrass State.  I've been married to a wonderful man for nearly seven years, which is why i crossed the mighty Ohio River into southern Indiana.  I'm 39 years young but have only been cooking and baking for about the last twenty years, as my mom wouldn't allow me to cook much more than a boil-in bag of a single salisbury steak or box macaroni and cheese at home.  Or maybe nuke a can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli.  However, I come from a long line of awesome country cookin' Grannies and aunts!  I have great memories of my Granny's kitchen being filled with mouth watering aromas and busy bees cooking old fashioned, made from scratch recipes that were, of course, never written down or even measured.  To this day I find myself always calling on one aunt in particular to learn the secrets of Granny's recipes.  She can always help me out because even though she couldn't tell you what she had for breakfast, her long term memory knows no bounds.  What my momma always said about me being in the kitchen is true.  She said, "You're not afraid to try anything, are you?".  The answer is a resounding "No!"  Whether it's a new recipe, technique, or ingredient, I'm not afraid to try new things in the kitchen.  Most of the time I succeed, but sometimes I fail.  What's the worst that could happen?  I'd have to order a pizza?

See ya in the Kitchen!