I needed a quick meal the other night and I wanted to use up some left over roasted chicken from the night before. I was thinking risotto but I didn’t have any in the pantry but I did find a box of San Giorgio orzo and thought this might work.

What is Orzo?

Orzo is rice shaped pasta slightly smaller than a pine nut and is great in soups and pasta salads. See my seafood orzo salad recipe.

Find Recipes In All the Right Places

I love finding recipes and adapting them with ingredients I have on hand. Keep your eyes open and you can find interesting recipes everywhere; on product packages, the supermarket shelves, ads in magazines, newspaper articles, mail flyers. Most of these recipes are trying to sell you their products but they are still good starting points for creating your own recipe.

The orzo box was no exception. They had a recipe for Mediterranean Orzo Pilaf. Some of the ingredients were processed products like dried Italian seasoning, bouillon cubes, and garlic powder. It’s my opinion you can really change the quality of mediocre recipe just by using higher end products that really don’t cost you that much more money in the end.

For example, using homemade or quality chicken stock instead of bouillon can make all the difference in the world. Try using fresh garlic instead of garlic powder or fresh basil and parsley rather than dried Italian seasonings.

Dried herbs are great in some dishes, but with a pilaf recipe like this, why not go fresh if you can. If you don’t have fresh herbs in your refrigerator, by all means go with the dried ones but make sure they have not been sitting in the cabinet too long. I don’t date my dried spice bottles, but I should because I’m sure some of them have been around longer than my daughters. Chef Ricco forgive me.

I made the chicken stock the night before when we had roasted chicken. I’ll be honest.  I didn’t roast the chicken. It was a rotisserie chicken from our local market and a pretty good one at that. After I stripped the meat off, I stuck the carcass in a pot, covered it in water and made a quick stock in about an hour. Not classic chicken stock but good enough for what I wanted to use it for and a heck of a lot better than anything canned and let’s not even talk about a bouillon cube.

You can make this dish one hundred different ways by substituting various ingredients. Don’t like chicken, add shrimp. Don’t like parsley, try cilantro.  Try different types of cheeses, olives, nuts; whatever works for you or you happen to have in your pantry.

Experiment and have some fun. There are some recipes you must follow a precise technique using specified ingredients. This is not one of them.

Quick Orzo Pilaf

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 8 ounces uncooked Orzo
• 1 clove of garlic, minced
• 1 small onion, chopped fine
• 2 ½ cups chicken stock
• 12 or more grape tomatoes, cut in half
• 1 cooked boneless chicken breast, meat shredded or cut into pieces
• Salt & pepper, to taste
• ½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

How to Make Orzo Pilaf at Home

Heat a large sauce pot or fry pan over medium high heat. Add the butter and melt. Add the onions and cook for a couple of minutes. Add the orzo and cook with the onions & garlic for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring frequently so the orzo doesn’t burn. If the pan seems too hot, turn down the heat to medium.

While this is going on, I like to heat up the chicken stock so I’m not adding cold stock to the hot pan with the orzo. No reason to slow down the cooking process by cooling down a hot pan.

Add the chicken stock to the pan and bring it to a boil. Lower heat and simmer uncovered for about 10 minutes while the orzo absorbs the stock. Be sure to stir every so often.

Add the grape tomatoes, chicken and parsley. Season with salt and pepper and then cover and cook for a few more minutes until all the stock has been absorbed into the orzo. Be sure to stir so the orzo doesn’t stick to the pan.

I like stir in the grated Parmesan cheese at the end just before serving. You can add a sprig of fresh parsley to the plate to make it look nice. I always forget.

Chicken Goulash - Not Really

I received an email from Marisa who said she has “made a lot of dishes that are good but not great” and “know they could be improved by adding some of this or doing a little of that,” so I invited her to send me a recipe to “fix”.

So what recipe did she send me  - her Hungarian mother-in-law’s recipe for Chicken Goulash. And we all know what a great idea it is to muddle with one’s mother-in-law’s recipes! Marisa even said, “It’s always a dangerous proposition to mess with a mother-in-law’s recipe, but I’m willing to take the risk in the name of culinary advancement.”

The problem with her recipe she said is the “sauce is always very watery, even if I barely cover the chicken (as directed). Also, the flavor is nice, but it lacks a certain something.”

As part of my brand new Ask a Chef feature, I sent her recipe to Chef Ricco to get his opinion knowing he’s always ready to talk about a recipe and how to make it better along with adding a few interesting comments. The first thing Ricco said to me was “there is no such thing as Chicken Goulash, goulash is made from beef.”

Marisa’s husband’s Hungarian mother’s recipe is called Paprikas Csirke pronounced (PAH-pree_kash CHEER-kah). Chef Ricco also questioned the recipe only calling for 2 chicken thighs and wanted to know if this recipe was for one person? Actually he said a child but we don’t need to go there.

So first I’ll post Marisa mother-in-law’s recipe and then Chef Ricco’s. You will see a big difference in the list of ingredients in addition to the cooking technique.

And to see Chef Ricco’s classic Beef Goulash recipe….

Marisa’s Recipe

Ingredients

• 2 chicken thighs (remove skin and the fat), cut into two pieces each
• 2-3 onions, chopped
• 1 red pepper, chopped
• 1-2 cloves of garlic
• 1 tablespoon sweet paprika
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 2 chicken bouillon cubes

Preparation:

Warm the oil in a cooking pot and add to it the onions, garlic and red pepper. From time to time mix them up till they turn to golden. Add the thighs, paprika and tomato paste, mix every thing. Cook the thighs till the flesh becomes white (three to five minutes)

Only then add water (not much - just enough to cover the thighs) plus the chicken cubes. Cover the pot, reduce the flame (after the water boiled) and cook for 1 hour.

Chef Ricco’s Recipe for Paprika Csirke

Ingredients

• 3 tablespoons oil
• 2 large sweet Spanish onions (course chopped)
• 2 green peppers (course chopped)
• 3-4 cloves garlic (fine chopped)
• 3 fresh plum tomatoes (course chopped)
• 3 Tab sweet Hungarian paprika (very important)
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• 6 chicken thighs (skinless)
• 3 cups chicken stock

Heat oil in a heavy bottom pot, over low heat. Add onion, cook over low heat until golden brown.
Add green peppers and garlic, cook for 5 minutes. Add paprika and cook for 3-4 minutes.

Add the chicken and cook for 5-7 minutes. Add fresh tomatoes, salt and pepper cook for 5 minutes.

Add chicken stock and bring to boil. When it comes to a boil, turn down heat to simmer. Simmer until done, about 45 minutes.

Ricco revealed if Marisa feels the sauce is to watery, she should remove the chicken and “crank up the heat and reduce the sauce.”

He also explained this dish normally starts by cooking cured fatty bacon in the oil and finishes by folding sour cream into the braising liquid right before serving. Two great options to give this recipe even more flavor.

Chef Ricco likes to serve this with Spaetzle and would be more than happy to provide a recipe if anyone is interested.

The other day I talked about roasting a couple of chickens, one for that night’s meal and the other for something else later in the week. The first night we ate part of one chicken as our main meal with a few side dishes, the next night I used the leftovers from that chicken to make my Penne with Chicken & Peas in Cream Sauce.

The day after that I needed to do something with the other roasted chicken so while looking through my February 2007 edition of Bon Appetit, I found a Chicken and Hominy Soup recipe in their “Fast Easy Fresh” section and it was fast, easy and delicious.

A couple of changes I made to the recipe were substituting crushed tomatoes for the canned petite tomatoes and using regular paprika instead of smoked paprika. If I had those other ingredients on hand, I would have used them and they may have given the soup a different flavor but my version came out just fine.

This is one of those meals that can be made into a shortcut meal by purchasing a store-bought roasted chicken. I use them all the time if I’m not in the mood to cook and they really aren’t too costly especially if you can get two meals out of one chicken and use the bones to make chicken soup.

One of the keys to this recipe is once the meat is removed from the chicken, take your time and shred the chicken meat by hand. It will be tempting to quickly cut the chicken up with a knife and I’m sure the taste will be the same but you’ll loose something in texture and mouth feel. This is a much better recipe if you take the time to shred the chicken by hand.

The recipe also suggests serving with tortilla chips, avocado and/or sour cream as toppings. All great suggestions, but trying to lose a few holiday pounds, I opted not to. If I were serving this to guests as a starter or even a main course with a salad, I would definitely serve the side toppings.

Chicken and Hominy Soup

Ingredients:

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 bunches green onions, sliced
• 4 teaspoons ground cumin
• 2 ½ teaspoons paprika
• 10 cups chicken stock
• 1 – 14 ½ ounce can crushed tomatoes
• 1 roasted chicken, meat removed and shredded
• Hot pepper sauce, to taste
• 3 – 15 ounce cans hominy in juice, white or golden
• 1 cup FRESH cilantro chopped
• Salt, to taste

How to Make Chicken and Hominy Soup at Home

10 cups of chicken stock is a lot so be sure to use a big soup pot to make this recipe. I actually started out with too small a pot and had to transfer everything over to my soup pot.

Heat your soup pot over medium-high heat, add oil and when hot, add the green onions, cumin and paprika. Sauté for about 5 minutes and then add the chicken stock, tomatoes WITH juice, chicken meat and a teaspoon or two of hot pepper sauce. You can add more of the hot pepper sauce toward the end if you want it spicier but it’s easier to add less now than suffer from adding too much.

Using a food processor or blender, puree the hominy with juice until smooth. Add the hominy to the soup and bring it all to a boil. As soon as it comes to a boil, lower heat and simmer for 15 minutes.

Add the cilantro, taste and adjust with salt and hot pepper sauce. One thing you might not realize is it is very difficult to adjust seasonings when the soup is as hot as it is at this point. Over a certain temperature, you taste buds are not that effective.

I recommend you either wait until the soup cools down a little before adjusting the seasonings or have salt and pepper or hot pepper sauce on the table and let the individual eating the soup make the adjustment. Just be sure to tell them it may need salt.

This recipe is very similar to my Tortilla Soup with Shredded Chicken that you can find on my web site. In fact, I think that one has a little more interesting flavor that this one although it does take just a little longer to prepare.