(Not Your Mama’s) Chicken and Dumplings

Calm down, all you central Pennsylvania friends. We are not providing a recipe for the “Pennsylvania Dutch” floating pie crust square version of chicken and dumplings that is very popular in this region. 

We went a different direction and made Asian chicken fingers, fried rice, pear cucumber salad, and Chinese dumplings we pulled from the freezer (from a much earlier cooking adventure). This week, my main goal was to use up many different tired ingredients that were sitting around, not getting any fresher. Mmmmm…enticing.

For the Asian chicken fingers, we cut boneless, skinless chicken breasts into strips, and then marinated them in a soy sauce-based marinade while we got the other things ready. We set up dipping dishes and dredged each piece of marinated chicken first, in coconut milk, and then in crushed Rice Krispies. When all the pieces were on a parchment-lined baking sheet, we baked them at 375º for 15 minutes. 12 would have done it.

For the marinade and the pear salad, we used the recipes from a Christopher Kimball recipe: 

https://bensdaywednesday.com/lighten-up/

For the dumplings, we depended on the fruits of our previous labor that had been secured in the freezer for just such a rainy day:

https://bensdaywednesday.com/year-of-the-oxygen/

They were great!

The fried rice had a decidedly dicier past. There was some plain cooked white rice in the fridge from a meal last week. Lacking both the bacon and the jarred kimchi that a recipe called for, we decided to double down on rice, except that we had only a paltry amount. We had soy sauce, ginger, garlic, sugar snap peas, and onions. I summoned up memories of the first dinner party I hosted when I was Ben’s age. We crossed our fingers, threw it all together, and… it was pretty good!

The same summer that I threw my first dinner party, I remember calling my mom to ask her for the recipe for chicken and dumplings. I still have notes I took from that phone call scrawled in my Betty Crocker cook book, and it is the guide I still use when making chicken and dumplings. 

The menu for my first dinner party included roasted chicken, fried rice, and peach pie. Lacking sufficient seating in the apartment, most of us sat on the floor. I can’t even remember who was there, but I do remember the satisfaction in serving a meal that exceeded my expectations, and in doing something so “grown up”! An extensive search through old photo albums did not turn up any photographic evidence of this evening, but in my mind, I see a bunch of friends sitting on the floor with plates on their laps, eating, laughing, talking, and listening to music (possibly Steely Dan), in a hot second floor apartment in Kansas in August. Oh, to be young again. To know that the best thing you are ever likely to serve or eat is right there on your plate. To know that you can roast a chicken, stir-fry some rice, and bake a peach pie. To know that sharing food with friends requires work, vulnerability and risk, but also great satisfaction.

I look forward to the day that I, once again, have the energy, time, and inclination to entertain the notion of entertaining.