Cajun rice and sausage

I made rice and sausage the other day with kielbasa instead of ground sausage. I chopped up a bell pepper with the celery. I added some thyme and cayenne pepper (maybe 1/4 tsp) and a bay leaf to make it more cajun-y. We liked it a lot.

Doug's fancy chicken soup for lazy people

Ingredients:
1 package chicken flavored instant ramen
1 scoop Cape Cod Chicken Salad (from Costco)

Put water, noodles, flavor packet, and the scoop of chicken salad in a pot and boil it until the noodles are soft enough. It has chicken, oil, celery, cranberries, and walnuts. All of which are good in chicken soup!
It's kind of similar to the orange chicken soup recipe, but doesn't require any crazy things like putting an entire chicken in a pot and waiting for the flesh to fall of its bones, or peeling carrots or anything at all, really.

Creamy Shrimp Rolls

Recipe and Image from http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/creamy-shrimp-rolls-00000000000684/index.html

Serves 4| Hands-On Time: 10m| Total Time: 10m

Ingredients

• 1/4  cup  mayonnaise
• 1  tablespoon  fresh lemon juice
• kosher salt and pepper
• 1 1/2  pounds  cooked medium shrimp, cut in half crosswise
• 2  stalks celery, chopped
• 1/4  cup  sliced chives (optional)
• 4  hot dog buns
• 1  small head butter lettuce, torn into pieces
• 1  5-ounce bag potato chips

Directions

1. In a medium bowl, whisk the mayonnaise, lemon juice, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper.
2. Fold in the shrimp, celery, and chives, if desired.
3. Line the buns with the lettuce and fill with the shrimp mixture. Serve with the potato chips.

By Sara Quessenberry and Kate Merker , August, 2008

Aquarium Chicken Salad

Sam and I went to the New England Aquarium for our cousin, Crystal Stay Farrell's, wedding reception. They served salmon. It was really weird eating salmon in an aquarium.

BUT! They also served this delicious chicken salad. It was the best thing we ate all night. So, I tried to recreate it when I got home and came pretty close. I didn't measure anything, but it's easy enough to add stuff until you get the right proportions.

Mix together:

• Chopped cooked chicken (I think I used rotisserie chicken)
• Thinly sliced red onion
• Thinly sliced celery
• Craisins
• Chopped pecans

Add enough real mayonnaise to make it all stick together, then add a little bit more.

Season with

• Dill (this is essential. do not skip it.)
• salt
• freshly ground pepper
• maybe a little bit of sugar? I didn't add this, but now that I'm thinking about it, it would have been appropriate.
  

Serve on oven-warmed croissants with a slice of lettuce.

Nana's Turkey and Stuffing

Lay out 1 1/4 loaves of white bread on cookie sheets and let the slices dry overnight. Turn them over if you think about it.

Also the night before (to make things go faster in the morning) chop up two big onions and at least 6 stalks of celery. Saute both in about ½ cup of butter in a big pan. Add 2 cups of water and 1 heaping TBSP of chicken soup base (you can substitute chicken broth) and simmer 2-3 min. Let cool and then add 3 eggs and mix well. Pour this into a big pitcher and put in the fridge until morning.

Stack the bread 4 slices deep and slice into long ½ inch thick slices. Dump those in a bowl to be hand torn into pieces (to keep the kids busy and involved: you can also just cut them into cubes with a knife). Divide the bread between two big bowls (to give you room to stir and lift the bread). Sprinkle the bread very generously with sage, generously with thyme and dried parsley, less generously with black pepper. If the bread is so dry the spices won’t stick, you can spritz it with a bit of water.

Slowly pour about ¼ of the celery/onion/egg/broth mixture over the seasoned bread in each bowl and mix well; if the bread is still really dry, repeat. If the bread is fairly moist, pour off some of the liquid and add the rest of the onions and celery to the bread. You want the bread to be moist enough to hold together, but not soggy.

Meanwhile, wash out the thawed turkey (be sure to remove the neck and giblets!) and tip it so the inside drips dry. Start at the head end (the smaller cavity) and fill with stuffing. Slide thin slices of sacrificial apple or potato between the skin and the stuffing (so the stuffing won’t burn). Use thread (about 4 strands in a big needle) and sew the skin closed or use big poultry pins to secure the skin.

Turn the bird over and fill the bigger cavity. Place slices of apple/potato over the exposed stuffing.

Hook the legs back together (usually there is a plastic leg holder on the turkey already. If not, use thread to lash the legs together). Set the bird on a rack in the roasting pan. I then like to pull the wings up and stitch thru the tips, leaving about 4 inches of thread between the wings resting on the breast of the turkey. This keeps the wings from touching the sides of the pan and burning.

Baste the turkey if you want to and bake it. I preheat the oven to 375 then turn it down to 325 and cook it longer than recommended since it is at a lower temp. You may want to cover the breast, wings and legs with foil the last hour to keep them from overcooking.

These amounts are for a 12-14 lb turkey. Leftover stuffing gets put in a foil lined pan and is wrapped in the foil like a tin foil dinner. Bake it for only one hour, not the whole time the turkey is baked.

I find I like fresh turkey, rather than frozen. If you brine a thawed out frozen turkey, that is good and moist as well.

Rice and Sausage

1 lb of sausage
1 cup celery and 1 cup onion cooked with sausage
1 box both packs of dry chicken noodle soup (delete or replace with GF noodles)
1-2 cups of rice
chicken bouillon/ soup base to taste (NO MSG!)
enough boiling water to cover
some pepper
bake at 350 until water is absorbed (about 40 min if water is boiling, 60 min if not)