USA Rice, Sun Sweet, Ninja, Chef's Choice.

- [Sara] And thanks to the generous support of-- - [Narrator] The twenty-sixteen Subaru Legacy With symmetrical all-wheel drive, plus 36 mpg.

It pairs well with every kind of road.

Subaru, proud sponsor of Sara's Weeknight Meals.

(bright music) - Y'know five ingredient recipes always seem like a miracle to me.

And I'm a chef, I mean, I just wanna add more to the recipe.

But trust me, these dishes today are so sophisticated and so delicious, you'll think there's much more in there.

Two tablespoons of hot sauce.

I guess it's the hot sauce I love best in my buffalo rice.

It's my take on buffalo chicken wings.

A cup of rice, butter, chicken, blue cheese.

I'll be honest, in this recipe I'm cheating.

The celery is the sixth ingredient.

But don't tell anybody.

If you want something elegant and easy try my duck breat with Szechuan peppercorn sauce.

The duck from start to finish, takes maybe, with resting time, 17 minutes.

Then we're out to the grill.

I'm making a little surf and turf Haiku.

Scallops, prosciutto, basil, seasoned with a little lemon juice and olive oil, and grilled on the grill.

Couldn't be simpler.

But first I'm gonna make a pink sangria.

(electric guitar strum) (bright music) Buffalo chicken wings, who doesn't love them?

It was my chef de cuisine, Jen Day at gourmet who came up with the basic idea for this recipe, taking all the elements of buffalo chicken wings and combining them with pasta.

I took it even a little further left and decided to use rice.

So let's get started with the rice part of this.

Now I'm rice impaired, I cannot cook rice.

People have tried to show me the proper proportions, and when you add it and how you add it and what it looks like, but it just has never worked for me.

So I'm gonna do what I used to do when I worked in this wonderful restaurant, the last restaurant I worked at before I started at Gourmet, I'm gonna cook the rice like pasta.

Plenty of boiling well salted water.

We're doing about a cup of rice.

This is long grained white rice.

Takes 17 minutes.

You could use brown rice, that takes about 45 minutes, and it's much healthier but you need a little bit more time.

This is quick weeknight meal, but by all means go that route if you want to.

One cup of raw rice will yield three cups of cooked rice.

That's true whether it be white or brown.

Very important to stir when you first put it in.

Otherwise, just like pasta, if you've ever thrown pasta to the bottom of the pot and then walked away, and you come back however many minutes later.

It's all become one at the bottom of the pan.

Okay, so we're just gonna let this go.

Let me grab my chicken and my celery.

Actually, I'll be honest, in this recipe I'm cheating.

The celery is the sixth ingredient, but don't tell anybody.

Okay so here's our chicken.

What's fun about a pasta or a rice dish, is you don't need to use as much protein as you would have if the protein was the main star.

Here it's really the ricey, creamy base of the dish.

We all know one of the important ingredients in buffalo chicken wings, is butter.

We're using three tablespoons, because there's supposed to be a fair amount.

So we're just gonna heat that up.

I've got a separate cutting board here for chicken.

It's a good idea to do that.

I'm gonna cut this into quarter inch cubes.

(bright music) Whenever you're cutting up protein, the colder it is, the easier it is to cut up.

So I could have even thrown this in the freezer for a few minutes, and that would've made my life easier.

All right here we go.

Takes about three or four minutes, depending on what size you cut the chicken into.

I'm gonna give it a quick stir.

Now it doesn't matter if the butter gets a little bit brown, as mine did here.

It adds a nice toasty aroma.

Okay, so let me go hose down.

I've got a bowl of soapy water in the sink, so that I don't have to touch the faucets.

This is a good thing to do when you're working with raw poultry.

Now, we need our blue cheese.

(rhythmic music) We need about a cup, which is four ounces.

This is what's gonna give it its creamy texture.

So now, have to measure out two tablespoons of hot sauce.

Now the story about buffalo chicken wings is really interesting.

It happened at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York.

This woman was cooking up chicken wings, and she'd sort of run out of ingredients.

So she cooked 'em up and she threw some of her hot sauce on top of the chicken wings, and then served it with blue cheese and celery.

Now this is in 1964, her name was Teressa Bellissimo.

But at any rate, it continued and evolved, to the point where, when you usually have it, it's the hot chicken wings with the blue cheese sauce and the celery on the side.

My chicken is now cooked, so let me just add by blue cheese and hot sauce to start melting.

We're gonna save a cup of the cooking liquid.

And you might think that's a little weird, but I will explain myself in just a minute.

Isn't this easy, you just cook it like pasta.

Doesn't have to be completely dry, because you're gonna come and dump it right in here.

Right on top of our chicken and everything else that's in there.

What Italians do when they make pasta, is they'll often save some of the pasta cooking liquid, which is nothing more than starchy water.

They will often save some of that liquid, and add it back to the sauce, because what this liquid does, you can see that it's quite starchy.

It's got the starch from the rice in there.

What it does, is it helps to bind the sauce, in the case of a pasta dish, to the pasta.

Here's it's gonna bind the sauce to the rice, but also give us a sauce.

As soon as it looks really creamy and I know it's heated through, we're good to go.

Oh boy, see how creamy it gets.

All righty.

And then our beautiful celery garnish.

If your family loves buffalo chicken wings as much as mine does, then they'll love this recipe, my buffalo chicken rice.

(bright guitar music) Hi, I'd like to get some duck breasts, two doubles.

My first job out of cooking school was working in a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts called the Harvest Restaurant.

It's the only restaurant I worked at, that's still standing today.

But I had a great time there, and I learned the sauce for this recipe, I'm just about to do, from the chef who was Laura Beamer.

She was very exotic, in her tastes in food.

So we're gonna be doing, sauteed Pekin duck breasts with an apricot Szechuan sauce.

So we're gonna start with the Szechuan peppercorns and toast them in a dry pan.

About a quarter of a teaspoon.

Now these have nothing to do with black peppercorns, or even pink peppercorns.

These are in a class by themselves.

They come from a pod from southeast Asia, and I can already smell them.

They're very aromatic, they're sort of citrusy.

Okay, this is Pekin duck breasts.

I'm gonna score it, so the fat comes out and the skin gets crispy.

There's one other major duck breast, that you can find in many supermarkets, which is a Moulard duck breast.

A Moulard duck, is a cross between a muscovy and a Pekin, and it's larger than a Pekin, much larger, and one whole Moulard duck breast, meaning two sides, will feed four people.

One whole Pekin duck breast, which is what I have here, will only feed two, 'cuz it's that much smaller.

Okay, I think my peppercorns, 'cuz I'm smelling them, are ready.

Wonderful, wonderful, aroma.

I'm gonna set up a little corral, 'cuz I need to crush them and I don't want them going all over the counter.

So we're just gonna put them in the center of the corral, so we don't lose them.

I'll crush those in just a minute, I want to get my duck in the pan.

We cook it skin side down, now even if you're gonna take the skin off later on, and that's completely acceptable, cook it with the skin on.

Because it's gonna give it more flavor, and it's also gonna insulate it from drying out.

Believe it or not, duck breast, without its skin, is leaner then white meat turkey.

Then you put it in a dry pan over about medium heat.

(sizzle) Yeah, you want it to make that noise when you put it in.

And it's gonna proceed to render out a lot of fat.

So I'm gonna crush these in here.

By the way, the duck is gonna take about 10 to 12 minutes in the pan, skin side down.

Let the duck fat come out, and it will continue to render the skin and render more duck fat.

Alright you see, I just crushed those.

And these are gonna go into my little pot here.

Just a little dab will do ya, a little goes a long way in terms of flavoring.

And add my vinegar.

We need two tablespoons of just white vinegar.

You only have three ingredients in the sauce.

You have vinegar.

You have the toasted Szechuan peppercorns.

By the way, toasting is really key.

I didn't mention that before.

Very important, they don't really come alive until you toast them in a dry pan.

The third ingredient, which we have down here, is apricot jam.

(jazzy piano) Okay, so in this goes, and we're just gonna melt this.

You could nuke it, if you wanted to.

We're just gonna melt it til it's done.

Actually there is one more ingredient that goes into the sauce.

I lied.

It's toasted sesame oil.

Make sure you get the toasted variety, you can see the dark color, because clear sesame oil really has no flavor.

(sizzle) Okay, I can see that it's done, because there's no white down at the bottom.

You take a look at the skin, it's quite crispy.

So I'm gonna take out the duck, now I'm gonna pour off the fat.

But you see, by sitting in all that fat, it helped to render out more fat from the skin.

Sounds counter-intuitive but it works.

So now I'm gonna dump this excess fat in a bowl.

I'm gonna leave just a tiny bit in here, 'cuz we're gonna cook the other side of the meat, the meat side, for two more minutes.

Now you can save that fat, you can actually chill it and then freeze it.

And save it to cook potatoes in, vegetables.

It's just so delicious.

Now just a few minutes with that, with meat side down.

I wanted to discuss very briefly the difference in taste.

The Moulard is sort of more robust, more steak like.

It really has been compared to steak.

Whereas the Pekin is sort of more delicate, more chicken like.

Let me just finish off my sauce, which is ready to go, with a tiny bit of the sesame oil, quarter teaspoon.

Toasted sesame oil is used a lot in Asian cooking.

The duck, from start to finish, 'cuz you can make the sauce and do everything else while it's cooking, takes maybe, with resting time, hmm, 17 minutes.

How do you know when it's done?

And by the way, we're cooking it to medium rare, which is how you normally cook duck breast, and it's perfectly fine in terms of all those issues we have with other poultry.

Not the same issue with duck.

You press it.

A little bit of give means it's medium, medium rare.

So we're gonna let these rest now.

I'm gonna cover them very loosely with foil.

Don't skip this step.

Let them rest for five minutes.

The juices will totally redistribute themselves in the duck.

If I slice this right now, all the juices will come out, and it wouldn't be as tender and juicy.

So we just have to be patient for five minutes.

(guitar music) Now when I slice the duck, I like to slice it with the skin side down.

It's easier to slice if the skin's on the bottom.

And then we just slice it.

I like to slice it at an angle.

It's nicer presentation.

You could plop the whole duck on the plate, but it's just not as pretty.

So here we go.

I'm gonna flip it so we we now have skin side up.

And you can just fan it out.

See, it's a little bit pink inside, which is just how we like it.

A little well done piece.

And then I've got some parsnip puree.

I bet you thought that was mashed potatoes, but it's parsnip puree, which is so delicious.

A little bit of, we've got some pea shoots here.

I'm gonna top it off with our apricot Szechuan peppercorn sauce.

So there you have it, a very elegant dish.

You know, you can have duck on a weeknight.

(bright music) Today I'm making a little surf and turf haiku.

There's just scallops, prosciutto, basil seasoned with a little lemon juice and olive oil, and grilled on the grill.

Couldn't be simpler.

But first, I'm gonna make a pink sangria.

'Cuz sangria is just the perfect drink to go with scallops.

I'm gonna start with seasonal fruit.

I've got some peaches, two peaches, and we're gonna season them first with sugar.

If you've ever made a shortcake with strawberries, and you toss them first with sugar, you know what I'm talking about.

That the sugar pulls out all this liquid, so you're already concentrating the flavor of the fruit, and created a wonderful fruit syrup.

So that's what I'm gonna do.

Now, peaches stick to their pit, so that is why I am cutting around the pit.

Sangria is a wonderful, fruity, fruit-infused wine drink from Spain, that's served chilled.

That we love.

And there are so many variations.

You can do a white sangria with white wine and white fruits.

It's usually done with red wine, and that's terrific too.

But I'm gonna do mine with rosé.

So onto my orange.

You cut this in half.

Cut it whatever size you want.

This is fun, you can do whatever you want.

Just get rid of the end.

And large slices, or smaller slices.

The idea being that the fruit adds all of its flavor to the sangria, so that it's gonna taste like the orange, and the peach, and the cherries.

So that's one small orange.

And then we're gonna add a cup of cherries.

I just wanna show you, I have this fun pitting tool.

Which looks like an instrument of torture, frankly.

So, here's how this one works.

Here you see this.

Oops!

Okay, so it goes right in.

So you take your cherry, and you put the top part, where the stem was, right there.

Let's hope I get it, it doesn't always work.

Then you just put this through, okay.

Or if you want, you can just do it the old fashioned way.

It's the same way that you remove a pit from an olive.

What I do all the time.

You just take the side of your knife, the dull side.

So put this underneath like that at 20, well, more than a 20 degree angle.

And just go whack, and then the pit will come out, oops, easily.

So now all of this is gonna go right in here with a third of a cup of super fine sugar.

Let me show you what this looks like.

Super fine sugar, also known as bar sugar, is what bartenders use.

And the reason it works well is because, unlike granulated sugar, it dissolves in liquid, without you having to heat it or stir it like crazy.

Then I'm gonna add half a cup of triple sec or any orange liqueur that you like.

So this goes in.

We're gonna stir it up.

Let it sit for an hour, and all of the juices from the fruit will be pulled out by the sugar and mix with the triple sec and just get more intense.

So that by the time we top it off with our rosé, it will be wonderfully, deeply flavored.

Okay, so that is our sangria.

I'm gonna park this back here.

So here we have some large scallops, these are jumbos.

When you're cooking scallops, if they're too small, they're gonna dry out by the time they get a little sear on them.

So we're using the large guys, so they can stay on a little longer, get that nice sear, but still be nice and tender and juicy inside.

I wanted to show you one thing.

When you buy scallops, sometimes they have this little muscle right here that attaches them to the shell.

You wanna remove this, 'cuz this is sort of tough.

I mean it wouldn't kill ya if you didn't remove it.

But if you have the time, do remove it.

I'm gonna make a marinade, to put my scallops in.

We're gonna start with some hefty pinch of salt.

This is an actual scallop shell.

When you get scallops in Europe, they come with the shell and the roe, which is so delicious.

But we don't sell it that way here.

We need a little bit of lemon juice.

I just need about a tablespoon.

I'm gonna whisk it with my salt, so that I can dissolve the salt.

And you always wanna dissolve your salt in acid or some other liquid, other than oil.

It just doesn't dissolve as well in oil.

Okay and then two tablespoons of oil.

All right, and that is our very complicated marinade, but very refreshing and appropriate for scallops.

Because they are so wonderful, they have such great flavor, you just don't wanna overwhelm them with strong spices and herbs.

Then you just really want to coat them and make sure they're well seasoned.

I'm gonna add a little bit of pepper to them too.

(grind) Okay, now it's time to assemble.

I've got some prosciutto.

Let me show you how you do it.

So you take a slice about this big.

You want it to be about as wide as the scallop.

The scallops are gonna go on like this, so you want the prosciutto, so you have to cut it to fit a little bit.

And then we're gonna put a basil piece on there.

We put the scallop.

You want your basil to fit too.

You don't want anything hanging out, 'cuz we're gonna lay it flat.

If all you have are wooden skewers, fine.

Soak them for about 20 minutes.

But the advantage of these skewers, first of all they're double skewers, is that when you turn the scallops over, I'm just gonna thread these.

They don't turn around.

I don't know if you've ever had that situation, where you turn over the shrimp, the shrimp turns over too.

But with a double skewer like this, it doesn't happen.

So let me keep going with some more of these.

It's nice to have a little fat on there too.

You can just fold it over if you want, to get the fat on.

Now you could set these up ahead of time and park them in the fridge.

Not a problem.

Okay, this one needs to be trimmed.

(jazzy music) You wanna hold open the skewers, so they all go on evenly.

And don't put them too close together, 'cuz if they're touching they won't cook all around.

They'll sort of steam in the middle, and not cook as well.

All right now I'm going to keep rolling and get three more skewers done, so it's four per person.

This serves four people.

Okay, now I'm gonna do what my good friend, Elizabeth Carmel, told me, which is I'm gonna oil the scallops.

She says, oil the item, don't oil the grill.

You want the grill to be really well pre-heated, which is what I've been doing on high there.

I'm gonna do this side.

And get them oiled side down, and then I'll oil the other side, before I turn them.

Okay.

(grill clangs) Oiled side down, here we go.

I'm gonna have to put these two at a little bit of an angle.

So they all fit.

Now, these will only take about four minutes a side.

It's gonna be very, very quick.

So I'm gonna clean up.

Then I'm gonna finish my sangria.

(music) Okay... okay, I think I've got one, You have to sort of, oops, I lost one.

But, oh those look beautiful.

We'll just slide that guy.

Y'know what, remember you're alone in the kitchen.

That one's for me.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

Okay, so just a few minutes.

It won't take as long on the second side.

We want them to be a little undercooked in the middle.

This is almost perfect, what I just turned over.

Wow, delicious.

Okay, they're done.

I can tell, 'cuz they're firm.

Those are beautiful.

So now I'm gonna finish my sangria.

We're gonna make a big pitcher for everybody.

Here we go.

So the fruit all goes in.

And the juice at the bottom.

'Cuz that's accumulated all this flavor, particularly if you can give it a whole hour of maceration.

That would be yummy stuff to drink straight up.

The triple sec with the fruit.

And then I love rosé.

I fell in love with it a year ago, when I was in France teaching cooking classes at this manor house in the foie gras country, which was fun.

But anyway, before we'd teach a class, we'd have a little aperitif with a little rosé wine which came from that particular area.

But, here's how you put together a drink.

You throw in some ice cubes, and then you just pour it in.

Let's put a few pieces of fruit in there.

'Cuz the fruit is as good as everything else.

If you must, now for me, this is perfect just like, right like this.

But if you want to you can top it off with some seltzer or club soda, and that would be delicious too.

Isn't that lovely?

Okay, so I just wanna garnish my scallops here, with a little bit of lemon.

Lemon wedges go on there.

And you know, these have sat here for a minute, but that is not a problem.

Scallops will be delicious at room temperature.

And they'd even be delicious cold, but why do we bother grilling them, if we're gonna serve them cold?

So serve them with a few lemon wedges, and there we go.

All right.

I'm gonna go sit down.

(bright music) Ladies, this is my continuing series of ladies who lunch.

Here we are.

I'm so thrilled to have you both here.

This is part of our family.

We have here, Nicki, who's the daughter of my makeup lady, Pam.

And we have over here, Shayna, who is our intern.

And is going to film school, right?

So you both like scallops and eat scallops?

Let's give it a taste.

Tell me what you think.

- [Shayna] That's really good.

- Yeah.

- Yup.

- It's really simple, nicely cooked.

Now I have a special drink for both of you.

I'm sorry you can't have what I'm having.

But we've just got the fresh fruit with the seltzer.

So I think we need to have a toast.

To ladies who lunch.

Thank you both for joining me.

- Thank you - Thank you all for joining me too.

I just wanna say this is all about five ingredient recipes that deliver so much flavor.

I'm Sara Moulton, I'll see you next time, for some more of Sara's Weeknight Meals.

Okay.

(laugh) Isn't it fun how the prosciutto gets all crispy on the outside?

Sicilian grandmother.

- [Nicki] Yeah.

- [Sara] Does she cook?

Do you cook with her?

- [Nicki] No - You've gotta cook with her.

- I will.

- Shayna, do you cook?

- [Shanya] I do sometimes, with my mom, yeah.

- [Narrator] For recipes and videos, go to our website saramoulton.com.

Sara's weeknight meals is made possible by USA rice, Sunsweet, Ninja, Chef's Choice.

- [Sara] And thanks to the generous support of-- - [Narrator] The twenty sixteen Subaru Legacy with symmetrical all-wheel drive, plus 36 mpg.

It pairs well with every kind of road.

Subaru, proud sponsor of Sara's Weeknight meals.

(ending music)