This is a quick and easy snack to make. My kids love to munch on these after school or while watching their favorite television show. You can use any size crackers, but I like using either miniature saltines or oyster crackers since they’re small enough to pop a handful into your mouth.
Give my recipe a try. I think you’ll like it.
Chicken Chalakiles is one of my favorite Chamorro comfort foods. It’s a soup made with chicken, onions and garlic, thickened with toasted ground rice, and made even more rich with the addition of coconut milk.
Chalakiles can be served as your main dish or as a soup served before your entrée.
I make my Chalakiles the way my mom taught me — with freshly toasted and ground rice. A quick and easy substitute is to use Cream of Rice instead. Toasting rice is easy. Place the rice in a skillet over medium heat. Cook until the rice turns golden brown, stirring constantly to prevent any rice from over-browning (and burning).
Let the rice cool for a few minutes then place in a food processor (I have a mini food chopper/grinder that works well).
Grind the rice into a mixture that looks like cornmeal. A few large pieces of rice is okay; it will add texture to your Chalakiles once cooked. Set the ground rice aside.
Place your chicken into a large soup pot. You can cut the chicken to your desired size. I diced them small here so that we could have more of a soup. My mom would use chicken drummettes or leave the chicken pieces whole if we served this as a meal. She’d make it more on the soupy side as well so that we could also serve this with some steamed rice. Cook the chicken with onions, garlic, coconut oil and black pepper.
Once the chicken is cooked through and no longer pink, add chicken broth (or water and chicken seasoning), achote powder, and the ground toasted rice.
Bring the mixture to a boil; cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes (keep the pot uncovered). Stirring occasionally to prevent the rice from settling and sticking to the bottom of the pot.
This is what the Chalakiles looks like after the rice is done. The mixture is quite thick at this point, but will thin down once you stir in the coconut milk.
Stir in the coconut milk. Cook for another couple of minutes, just long enough to heat up the mixture after adding the milk. Remove from the heat.
If you want a thinner soup, either add more water or another can of coconut milk. Taste and adjust the seasonings to your liking.
My recipe makes enough for a family of four plus enough leftover for lunch the next day. Serve and ENJOY!
Donne’ Dinanche, or a hot pepper paste, has many variations. It can be made with just peppers and no other seasoning, or you can add other ingredients such as onions, garlic, coconut milk, vegetables, crab paste and lemon juice.
One variation that is quite popular — tasty too — adds miso paste to the mixture.
The resulting sauce — it’s more like a thick paste — is a spicy, salty, savory mixture that goes perfectly with grilled meat (or any meat dish, really) and hot steamed white rice.
Give my easy recipe a try. If you like spicy condiments, you’ll like this one. 🙂
These are some of the ingredients I used — a Japanese long purple eggplant (although any eggplant will do), yellow onions, fresh green beans, garlic (not pictured), lemon powder (not pictured) and ready-made Tinian donne’ dinanche.
You can make your own donne’ dinanche if you don’t have any of the pre-packaged kind. Use a blender you’re willing to dedicate solely for grinding peppers; using the blender for after you use it to grind peppers will most likely add a spice to the other food. I don’t know about you but spicy smoothies don’t taste all that good to me. Blend about 3 cups of hot chili peppers, adding a few spoonfuls of some sort of liquid–coconut oil, lemon juice or water–if the blender is not grinding the peppers into a smooth consistency.
If you’d rather not use your blender to grind peppers, mince the fresh peppers as finely as you can. You could also substitute the fresh pepper mixture with dried pepper flakes that you can buy in an Asian store. Ask the store clerk for the dried pepper flakes commonly used to make kimchi.
Add the eggplant, onions, garlic, and coconut oil to a large frying pan. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally to prevent the vegetables from sticking to the bottom of the pan and to prevent burning.
Cook for 5-7 minutes or until the onions and eggplant soften. Press the mixture with the back of your cooking spoon to start to mash the mixture — you don’t want to mash it completely, but the final consistency should be a spreadable, paste-like mixture.
Add the beans to the pan. Cook for a few minutes until the beans soften.
Add the miso to the pan.
Stir the mixture to combine all the ingredients together. Cook for a few more minutes, pressing down with your cooking spoon to mash any large pieces.
Turn the heat off then mix in the donne’ dinanche (mashed hot peppers). Be careful — ensure your cooking area is well-ventilated. The fumes from cooking pepper are quite potent!
Taste the mixture. Add lemon powder or freshly squeezed lemon juice if you want to cut back on the saltiness.
Serve with BBQ meat (or your favorite meat dish), hot steamed rice and ENJOY!
If you’ve visited my “kitchen” before, you’ll know there is probably no dessert I won’t like. 😉 Baklava is no exception. A bite of the sweet nutty filling sandwiched between crispy, buttery phyllo dough with a gooey honey syrup is like heaven in your mouth.
I also love most apple desserts — apple pie, turnover, donuts, cobbler, cake — there are so many delicious things you can make with apples.
This recipe is a combination of apple pie and baklava. It’s the sweet, nutty, syrupy stickiness of baklava with the flavors of apples and apple pie spices.
Give it a try. I think you’ll like it. 🙂
Use a total of 3 cups of your favorite nuts. Because I’m adding apples, I omitted the pistachio nuts traditional in baklava and used only pecans and walnuts.
Toasting the nuts in the oven for a few minutes brings out the natural oils in the nuts and intensifies the nuttiness.
Pulse the nuts for a couple of minutes in a food processor until finely chopped.
Add brown sugar and cinnamon to the chopped nuts.
The nut mixture smells so good already!
Peel and core two small apples, three if you want more apples in the baklava. I used granny smith apples in this recipe but your favorite apples will do.
Slice the apples into very thin slices. Squeeze a little bit of lemon or lime juice over the sliced apples to keep them from browning.
Now this is the tricky part — working with phyllo dough.
A frozen package of phyllo dough usually has two rolls of dough in it. You will need one roll of phyllo dough for this recipe. One roll of dough has about 25 sheets.
Phyllo dough dries out very quickly when left uncovered, making them quite brittle.
Defrost the dough at room temperature then carefully unroll it until the sheets are flat. The dough comes pre-wrapped in parchment or wax paper, but there isn’t enough parchment paper to completely encase the dough. Wrap the dough with plastic wrap so that it’s completely covered, then place a very damp kitchen towel over the plastic-wrapped dough.
DO NOT prepare the phyllo dough until you’re ready to start layering your baklava.
Spray the bottom and sides of an 8×8 baking pan with butter flavored cooking spray.
The baklava is made by alternating layers of phyllo dough, nuts, apples, then more nuts.
Begin by placing several sheets of phyllo dough in the bottom of the pan. You’ll need 6 sheets of dough for each layer.
Place one sheet of dough on the bottom of the pan. Spray the surface of the dough with butter-flavored cooking spray. You can use melted butter instead of the spray, but I’m trying to cut back on the calories from butter. Butter spray works just fine in this recipe, but if you use melted butter, use a pastry brush to brush the melted butter over each sheet of phyllo dough.
Each sheet of dough is larger than the 8×8 pan, so after spraying the top, fold over any excess dough and spray once more over the un-sprayed part. Repeat the layering process until you’ve used six sheets of phyllo dough (dough-spray-fold excess-spray-repeat).
Spread a half cup of the nut mixture over the layer of dough.
Add a layer of apple slices over the nuts.
Add another half cup of nuts over the apple slices.
Repeat the layering two more times. Each full layer consists of six sheets of phyllo dough, followed by nuts, then apples, then more nuts.
Don’t forget to spray each layer of dough with butter spray, or brush melted butter on each one.
After adding your last layer combination of dough-nuts-apples-nuts, you should have about 6 or 7 sheets of phyllo dough left. These last few sheets go on the top of the baklava. Layer them as before, ensuring you spray each one or brush with melted butter.
Using a sharp knife, cut the baklava into 16 pieces. It’s essential you cut the baklava before baking it. The baked phyllo dough is very crispy so cutting BEFORE baking will make things easier. 🙂
Bake for 45 minutes or until the top is golden brown.
While the baklava bakes, prepare the syrup. Although I love the nuts and apples and the crisp phyllo dough, I think the syrup is what makes baklava so special.
Traditional baklava syrup is usually made with a mixture of honey and fragrant rosewater, and sometimes with the added zest of lemons and oranges.
Because I want the flavors of apple pie, I’m making a syrup of honey, sugar, water, lemon extract, cinnamon (I use a cinnamon stick in the syrup since I added lots of ground cinnamon to the nut mixture), whole cloves, and a tiny bit of ground ginger.
Place all the ingredients into a pot, bring it to a boil over low heat, and cook until the syrup reduces by half.
Once the syrup reduces by half, set it aside to cool. I poured the syrup into a measuring cup so that I could easily pour it over the baked baklava.
Be sure to remove the cinnamon stick and cloves!
As soon as the baklava comes out of the oven, pour the syrup all over it.
Let the baklava cool for a few minutes before serving.
I prefer to let the syrup soak into the baklava for at least an hour before digging in.
SERVE & ENJOY!
Look at the apples peeking out below! 🙂
Apples and cranberries go so well together. Pair them together in these muffins topped with sweet streusel topping and you’ve got a real treat on your hands.
I made these for a PTA-sponsored Teacher Appreciation Day one year and it was wiped out in no time. These muffins are great for potluck breakfasts, and they make great snacks for a packed lunch.
Top the muffins with my apple cream cheese frosting (recipe below) and now you’ve got a decadent dessert.
Give my recipes a try. I think you’ll like them. 🙂
