Testing America's Test Kitchen

Like everyone else who watches home improvement or cooking shows, occasionally I get inspired. You see the hosts build a nice cabinet or redecorate a stale-looking room and you say to yourself, "I should do that to the den!" Suddenly you find yourself wandering the aisles of the nearest Home Depot and trying to pick out the correct lumber. And even if it doesn't come out as pretty as the professionals when it is done, it's still a damn satisfying feeling. Last week this same kind of inspiration struck. I was watching an episode of "America's Test Kitchen" where they were making chicken and dumplings. Now, I've never had that before, but it looked fairly easy to make. Suddenly, I got it in my head to try and make it for dinner one night this week. Last night was my attempt.

So, with inspiration on my side, I signed up so I could have access to the recipe (God only knows what kind of spam emails I'm about to be bombarded with). Looking it over, I began to do that move every person does with recipes, in that I started to substitute things in and out due to a combination of laziness and knowing myself. For example, the recipe called for buttermilk. Now, I don't have buttermilk in my house and don't know why I would be expected to. Secondly, I'm not about to run out and get it because given how infrequently I use buttermilk (yesterday would have been the first time in... ever), there is a good chance I would just end up throwing the majority of it away in a week. Regular milk did just fine, as did salted butter in place of the unsalted the recipe called for. Another example is that they called for two small onions. I don't like onions, so that was reduced to one medium onion and we called it even. Also I suck at getting just the egg white without the yolk so I didn't even try.

One thing I did love about making this was discovering how much stuff is just randomly hanging around in the kitchen. Seriously, some of these kitchen cabinets are like magic. I thought I was going to have to go out in invest in parsley and thyme leaves, but they were already in the house. I can only assume they were bought the last time someone decided to try a random recipe and needed a bunch of ingredients they would never use again, so they've been sitting around ever since. Personally, I don't care why this stuff was ready to go, I just know it made the entire process easier.

Now, the chicken stew was a fairly straightforward process. If you've ever made stew you know it's not very hard. It's just stock, vegetables and pieces of chicken. The dumplings were the hard part. Apparently if you didn't do it just right they would either disintegrate or become extremely soggy and sink. The dumplings were what separated the men from the boys. And while my dumplings may not have turned out as pretty as the ones on TV, they tasted pretty good. You can see the results below.

Trust me, this tasted better than it looked.

Anyway, if you're looking to try this yourself, I highly recommend it. It would be a great cold-weather dinner so, unlike me, you probably want to wait until a night when it's not in the 80s to make it yourself. It's pretty easy and other than the prep work of cutting everything up it is not a high-maintenance process. I only had two issues: 1. I used more stock than they recommended and I feel like if I had stuck with their number it wouldn't have been enough. 2. They claim it serves six, but I don't know what six people they were feeding. That being said, I definitely can and will make this again. If you're interested I can shoot you the recipe.