Asian Lettuce Wraps

We had these at P.F. Chang's and they are so good! I saw this recipe in my January All You, check out the link for a much prettier picture!

Ingredients

• 2  tablespoons  vegetable oil
• 1  onion, chopped
• 2  cloves garlic, minced
• 1 1/2  pounds  ground turkey
• 1/2  cup  low-sodium chicken broth
• 2  tablespoons  hoisin sauce
• 2  tablespoons  teriyaki sauce
• 1  cup  bean sprouts (about 4 oz.)
• 2  carrots, shredded (about 1 cup)
• 24  large Boston or butter lettuce leaves
• Soy sauce, optional

 I wish I could say that I followed the recipe exactly, but since I didn't have hoisin sauce or teriyaki sauce, I really ended up making my own sauce. I used soy sauce, ginger, rice wine vinegar, and a little sugar, along with the suggested chicken broth. Mostly I just kept tasting until it was the way I liked!

We also used iceberg lettuce instead of the cute little lettuce the recipe calls for. It worked fine, we just ended up with a lot of meat in each leaf!

The only thing we would do differently is to add more veggies because (even Martin said) it was just too much meat! When you have tacos, you add a bunch of other toppings, but the "toppings" were already mixed together in this recipe. I would double or even triple the amount of shredded carrots (you can hardly even see them in my picture) and larger sprouts would have been better. I think some cabbage would work nicely in this too.

This was a winner, even with Emma! We'll be having it again sometime soon!

Orange-garlic roast chicken with balsamic glazed carrots

I roasted my first chicken tonight!!!

It wasn't too scary - honestly the worst part was having to stick half my arm up the chicken's butt to pull out its heart and liver since they weren't in a nice neat little bag.

I don't have a roasting pan, so I used my new Le Creuset baking dish ($25 at Marshall's, thankyouverymuch!):


I used a recipe from my Martha Stewart Living magazine. Here are the ingredients:

• 1 garlic clove, minced
• Coarse salt
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
• 2 navel oranges, 1 zested, both cut into 2-inch wedges
• 2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh thyme, plus a few sprigs (I used ~1 tsp. dried thyme)
  
• 1 whole chicken (4 to 4 1/2 pounds)
• 2 red onions, peeled and cut into 1 1/2-inch wedges (I just had yellow onions)

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. The recipe says to mash the garlic and salt together in a paste. I've seen this done with the edge of a knife on your cutting board, but I decided to use my mortar and pestle. I added the zest and thyme to the paste too.

Mix the garlic paste with the butter.

Prepare the chicken - rinse it under cold water, and make sure there aren't any feathers still stuck in the skin. Remove all the goodies from the cavity of the bird, then pat it dry and place it in your dish. Tuck the wings under the body. Gently separate the skin from the flesh, and rub half the butter mixture under the skin. Fill the cavity with a couple onion and orange wedges, and tie the legs together (I didn't have kitchen twine, so I used a rubber band...). Salt the bird, and arrange the rest of the onions and oranges around the bird, dotting with the rest of the butter.


So pretty! Roast for 30 minutes, then flip all the aromatics. I was supposed to save some butter for basting, but didn't realize - there were plenty of juices in the pan to baste with though, so that worked fine.

Roast and check and baste at 15 minute intervals until done - I pulled mine out after about an hour, because I thought the skin was going to burn. I should have left it in another 15-25 minutes, though, because the thighs were still pink. The breasts were done and super juicy though!

Here's the finished product:



It looked so pretty I couldn't believe it came out of my oven!! The rub really flavored the chicken well, it was very orangey and delicious. The onions and oranges in the pan were also really good, they had a nice roasty flavor and who doesn't love super-sweet roasted oranges?

I cooked up some balsamic-glazed carrots to go with. Basically I made glazed carrots like Mom usually does, but instead of butter and sugar, I used balsamic vinegar and butter, and let it reduce to a glaze. They were really yummy and a new flavor combo for us.


Anybody else have any fun chicken roasting stories?