commercial orange-peach-mango juice
2 tablespoons chili sauce or ketchup
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
In a large bowl, thoroughly mix all the ingredients except for the chili sauce. Place the mixture in a greased loaf pan and bake for 30 minutes.
Spread the chili sauce or ketchup over the top of the loaf; return it to the oven and bake for an additional 45 minutes.
Chicken Paprika
My kids like this chicken dish because the taste is sweet and inviting. It is colorful to look at, which interests them. I like it because it’s easy to make. This recipe serves two and can easily be doubled, which is what I often do.
2 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, cut crosswise into ½-inch strips
Salt and pepper
4 teaspoons paprika
1½ tablespoons butter
1 small onion, chopped, about ½ cup
1 large plum tomato, chopped
1 cup chicken broth
¼ cup reduced-fat sour cream
Season the chicken with salt and pepper and 1 teaspoon of the paprika.
Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat.
Add the chicken and sauté until just cooked through, about 3 to 5 minutes.
Transfer the chicken to a plate.
Add the remaining butter to the same skillet.
Add the onion and sauté until it starts to soften, about 3 minutes.
Add the remaining paprika and stir for 10 seconds.
Add the tomato and stir until it softens, about 1 minute.
Add the broth, increase the heat to high, and boil until the sauce thickens enough to coat a spoon thinly, about 5 minutes.
Mix in the chicken and any collected juices.
Reduce the heat to low.
Add the sour cream and stir until just heated through (do not boil).
Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve on a bed of thick egg noodles.
Surefire Broccoli
1 head broccoli, trimmed of the stalk and cut into small pieces
½ cup bread crumbs
1 clove garlic, minced
Take a whole head of broccoli, rinse it well in cold water, and cut off the florets, making sure they’re not too big—kids like small things to eat. Dip the broccoli in some bread crumbs and garlic and stir-fry them over high heat. The bread crumbs make the tips get a little crisp and give them some extra flavor. It’s very tasty. I put it down on the table and it goes in a snap. The kids can’t get enough of it.
STEPHEN KING
On Cooking
Stephen King has written more than forty novels and two hundred short stories. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the Canadian Book-sellers Association Libris Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2007 he was inducted as a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America. Among his most recent best sellers are Full Dark, No Stars and Under the Dome. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King.
First, my wife’s a better cook than I am. That’s straight up, OK? And she should be. Raised in a Catholic family during the fifties, she was one of eight children, six of them girls. These girls were “kitchen raised,” as the saying used to be, by their mother and grandmother, both fine country cooks. My wife has an excellent command of meats, poultry, vegetables, quick breads, and desserts. She keeps a deep store of recipes in her head. If she has a specialty, it’s what I call “everything-in-the-pot soup,” which usually starts with a chicken carcass and goes on from there. It’s good the first time, and—like the best country cooking, which specializes in plain food often prepared sans directions—even better the second time.
But in the late 1970s, something strange began to happen to my wife (perhaps because she was raised in a mill town in central Maine back in the days when environmental protection meant little more than pouring used engine oil at least five hundred yards from the nearest well): she began to lose her senses of taste and smell. By the turn of the twenty-first century, both were almost gone. Over those years, her interest in both cooking and eating have
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