- Hello everyone, this is Chef Jack Irwin.

We are presenting a new series from all local chefs from places you have probably been.

We've learned how to make some of their favorite dishes this week.

Features my expertise in the kitchen.

I will be making my world famous chicken salad.

It is a chicken salad over shoer potatoes.

And also I will show you how to make a five minute strawberry ice cream that everyone will love.

You're gonna thank me - Program funding made possible in part by the Paul and Joanne Warley family fund at the Austin Area Foundation.

- I'm going to start out making a, about a three minute omelet in a mug for one person.

Very quick, very easy.

And treat yourself a little bit.

It'll go real good like with a muffin or something like that.

So what we're gonna start with is a mug and we wanna spray it real good with food spray or you can wipe it like with olive oil or something like that because of course the eggs would, would tend to stick.

So I am going to crack two eggs into this and I like to crack my eggs on a flat surface because if you crack it like on the rim of something, it pushes those, those little pieces of shell into your egg and that's what sometimes when you crack it and you get pieces of shell in your egg, that's no fun 'cause it's hard to get out, right?

So that's what we're doing here.

Putting two eggs in.

I am gonna put a little quarter half of a teaspoon of baking soda because that's gonna get your eggs, your omelet, nice and fluffy.

So that's a real good tip for an omelet.

Put either whip the omelet if you're making larger amounts with a mixer, really whip it really, really good.

Or add a little bit of baking soda because that will get your, your omelet nice and fluffy.

We're gonna add some cheese by finally shredded cheese.

And this is just gonna be a cheese omelet because that's what I had on hand today.

If you've got some ham you could do diced ham, diced bacon, diced green pepper, whatever you like to put in there.

Tomatoes I would like.

So we put that in and now we're just gonna beat this with a fork and we have our handy microwave ready.

Just mix this real good.

Make your, make sure your eggs are, are well beaten and you don't have to try and fluff 'em too much, but they are, they do fluff up, you'll see.

And so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this in the microwave.

Start out with one minute.

Okay?

So, so that's gonna go for one minute.

I'll give it a little stir with the fork again and put it back in one moment.

Okay?

So whether you can see, it's already puffed way up, but we wanna stir to make sure the middle is quite soft in the middle yet, but it's really puff it up.

So we just wanna get all that and now we're gonna put it back in.

I'm gonna go maybe a minute and yeah, in the meantime I'm going to, you can top this however you like.

Chop chimes would be really good.

I'm just going to, gonna chop a little bit of flat leaf parsley to put on the top.

Again, you probably don't have to garnish it for yourself, but why not make it look pretty?

It always tastes better even for yourself.

You make a Denver omelet with ad ham and green pepper a little, I thi I like diced tomato in an omelet.

I think that would be good.

I'm gonna pull this right now because I'm sure it must be done.

And I want you to see the fluffiness here.

Okay, nice and fluffy.

And you would normally eat this right outta the cup.

I'm gonna put it out on a plate so you can see this and just see the fluffiness a little bit.

Okay?

So it slides right out because remember we sprayed that and a lot of times they'll get even higher than this, but we sprayed that cup, which is what we wanted.

There we go.

You can garnish it with a little bit of the shredded cheese and our parsley flat leaf parsley that we chopped.

And what do you think it is?

Such a quick and easy breakfast can't lose, you know what I mean?

Hi, today I've got a great tip for you in using your cast iron frying pan, which everyone should have.

They're very important to have.

So first of all, when you first get that cast iron frying pan, you wanna wash it good in soap and water.

That's the only time you're gonna use soap on this, on this frying pan.

Then you wanna dry it, well real well take oil and with paper towels, coat the inside and the outside of it with oil, put it in your preset oven on 350 degrees, put a sheet of foil underneath on the rack underneath it, bake it for one hour at 350 upside down, turn the heat off and then let it cool all the way that is going to season your pan so things don't stick in it.

And then anytime you go to wash it, just use, you can wash it just with hot water, no soap because soap will take that seasoning off.

Or you can use coarse salt and a paper towel and it will scrub it and you only need to do this about every three or four months.

I was in food service for about 50 years.

I know that's hard to imagine.

So I started out at a kind of a chain family restaurant in Austin many, many years ago as a cook fry cook.

I was terrible, terrible.

And then I moved to a place where I got training from an older lady that had been a cook forever and ever.

So she showed me all her secrets that usually you don't get from somebody.

And she showed me them all and that made me into the cook and the chef that I am today.

That was my, that was my start of everything.

And all the cooking shows I do and all the fancy things, sometimes I make, this is what everyone wants me to cater for them.

And this is my chicken salad.

If it's very easy for you and you can, you can do variations, I do variations.

Today I am just gonna show you how quick and easy this is.

I've got, I've started with a rotisserie chicken.

Going to take it apart first and then we're going to take the meat off.

I do have a bowl here where I'm gonna be putting the bones and some of our vegetable cuts and I'll, I'll tell you about that afterwards.

But in the meantime I wanna take this apart and start pulling the meat off and we are going to get the meat off and then we'll dice it of course.

So now we'll take the skin off.

Now of course we've got all the nice white breast meat on top.

If that's all you want to use, that's perfectly fine, but might as well use it all.

So I'm going to cut down the breastbone a little bit down the sides of it to peel this off.

You can see that going right down the middle.

And so that will peel this, the breast off easier.

Kind of comes off in one, one pull, one piece.

So we're gonna put this again in this extra bowl, these pieces we're gonna cut into pretty much bite-sized pieces if you can see those, those.

And we cut this breast up.

I'm gonna kind of go with the green, a little bit of the meat here.

Keep it tender and we'll cut that again into more bite sized pieces.

They don't need to be very big because you don't want somebody have a great big old mouthful of a big old chunk of chicken, right?

So we don't wanna do 'em very big and they don't have to all be perfectly even.

So I think that looks pretty good.

So we're gonna put that in our big bowl.

Let's do another one.

The other half of the, the breast.

And I don't know if you can see when I'm cutting, if you can see that I keep my fingers curled underneath.

I've found the hard way that that's the way you wanna do cutting and dicing and that.

So kinda you kind of keep your fingers outta the way.

Hold your item in place and curl your fingers underneath.

And it works much better than getting stitches.

So I think those pieces are nice, smaller size.

Now we've got, if you wanted to do all white chicken, there is probably enough in there right now.

Now we are going to add a few things to it.

So I'm just gonna, you can clean your cutting board.

I'm just gonna turn it over 'cause that size clean.

And first I'm going to add some celery.

So I've got a stock of celery.

Now I'm gonna cut the ends off like we do.

And there again, put that in your bowl with your bones because you can make wonderful stock out of this.

The bones make just great great stock and any of your leftover veggies, you could add anything else you have to that if you have any onion, even onion skins, you can put that right in and make a wonderful stock and you can freeze your stock or whatever you'd like to do.

But that just makes really good.

So I'm just gonna take a few ribs here and Okay, I'm gonna cut them down the middle so that they're not so big.

This wasn't a very big stalk so the pieces weren't very large, which is what we probably want because, and we don't wanna cut big too thick of pieces.

Okay?

So we kind of want to kind of show you the size that I like to make because again, nobody likes to be eating something and get a great big old mouthful of big old C cha of celery.

So I do 'em fairly small, that's why I thin those stalks down and now I'm dicing them whatever size I want.

And I'm doing a fairly small, and I'll show you in just a minute here.

Okay, so if you can see that I've got fairly small pieces here that's gonna be less than bite size.

That's what you want.

Because again, it's the crunch is really DIC in the chicken salad to be.

Okay, so we've got that done.

Now I am going to add some toasted almonds and put in however much you like or if you don't like them, don't.

But the almonds you, you buy in the store in a little package, they're not toasted, they're sliver.

These are sliver almonds, not sliced sliver almonds, you put'em in a pie pan or something like that.

Or in a, on a little sheet tray in the oven for seven minutes.

Toast them just beautifully, just perfectly.

But again, that they just work really well in this dish and put it however much you like.

But they work, they work really, really well with the chicken salad.

Now here's something that I switch up.

I've got dried cranberries, okay, now it's in the fall and winter when I make this, 'cause it's a year round dish, I used dried cranberries in the summer.

I used grapes, red or green.

And it's ver it's really nice presentation with grapes as well in the fall.

And Chris and at Christmas time it looks really nice with the cranberries.

But I use grapes, red or green sometimes if I have the time I'll slice 'em in half and little tedious, but it's worth it, you know what I mean?

Again, you don't have a grape big, you know, some grapes are pretty large.

So that's what I like to use in the summer.

So I am going to mix mayonnaise and I put it in this today and I could just add as much as I like and I'm gonna snip the corner and squeeze that out like that.

That's a good tip for putting ice, piping icing on a cake or something as well.

So how much you need kind of depends on you.

So just a little bit of vinegar to thin that.

Just a little bit of white vinegar, just thin it.

Very little bit.

I'm going to use, I like to put on a little bit of ranch dressing mix, dry mix.

And I put a little bit of of that on there.

The therefore you don't need any kind of salt.

It adds a lot to it.

I don't put very much.

And now, excuse me one minute again.

Okay, so now I'm gonna add sugar.

And the key to this, to me, when I came up with this, you need to add a fair amount of sugar to take that kind of sour edge off of the mayonnaise.

And you wanna use mayonnaise, not anything else.

And so I'm just gonna mix this up.

And again, it isn't because pure, you know, just the mayonnaise alone is quite thick.

That's why I put that little bit of white vinegar in there just to thin it down.

Make more of a dressing than the pure mayonnaise.

Now I'm going to taste this real quick to make sure it has enough sugar.

Just needed a touch more because again, the, you know, Manny's taste alone, it's fine on a sandwich, but with the dressing you wanna, you want to jazz it up a bit.

So here is our chicken mixture and for our salad and you can see everything.

I've got the DIC celery, I've got the toasted almonds, slivers and the dried cranberries.

So now we're gonna make this really good.

And of course we don't want this soupy.

We actually got more chicken than I expected out of that, that rotisserie chicken.

Now if you put this in your refrigerator, maybe for an hour it'll kind of meld and blend a little bit.

But I'm gonna plate a little bit up right now.

And so before I do that, I want to, I'll just do it this way, dice a little bit of parsley, flat leaf parsley again.

Okay, just dice that up however you like.

It doesn't really, even with parsley, you, you don't even have to dice it for garnish.

You know, you could just lay sprigs of parsley on top of it and or chives would be really good on this.

But you just want a little, a little something.

I'd like it on something when I'm making it for someone else.

I like a little something on top.

So I'm gonna plate this very quickly for you.

And here's how I like to do it.

I like to use potato sticks and underneath.

You could use a lettuce leaf, you could, you know, do whatever you like.

But these are really good.

And again, give it, you know, we've got a little crunch in there with the celery and the almonds, but this will give it a little crunch underneath.

And this is kind of a classic way to serve chicken salad.

So I'm gonna plate some of these up in case I get, in case I get any tasters coming in.

And I hope I do and let's do it.

So if you can see about the consistency of this salad, you can hear it a little bit.

Yum.

So let's put this out portion this on as much as you like.

And I've got plenty here as you can see.

So this would be a great, just plenty for like a potluck or something like that as well.

'cause this did make quite a good sized batch.

And one more, the leftover is for the chef of course.

So now I'm just gonna sprinkle a little bit of this on there for to set it off just a little bit.

And the voila, what do you think it is really, really good chicken salad I have to say.

Even though it's my own.

And you know, you can put any spin you like on it of your own because lots and lots of people make chicken salad and probably do it all their own way.

To me, the key for this kind of is the dressing and the way I, you know, made the dressing with a fair amount of sugar.

It's not sweet, it's not sweet salad, but you just wanna take the edge off that mayonnaise.

I use the same dressing for coleslaw and other salads that have like a creamy dressing like that I use, I use that same dressing and we will be right back.

I'm going to be making a wonderful ice cream, five minute ice cream or less actually ice cream.

You're gonna read it of and you're gonna thank me for later.

So as we were making our chicken salads, some of you saw and noticed I had mentioned that I'm putting the scraps in a separate bowl.

So I've got our chicken carcass and bones and skin and everything in here.

I've got our I celery leaves that I cut, chopped the top off the celery.

I've got leftover parsley that I don't have any plan for.

So I'm gonna throw that in here.

You could put onion, whatever you like and, and all any vegetable scraps you can put in here.

And what I like to do with this is make stock out of this.

It makes a wonderful stock.

All the meat comes off the bones, the bones add a little gelatin, you know, to the, to the stock.

And so after you make your stock, and this works with many things, it also works with, with wine and with the sauces and, and spaghetti sauce and things like that.

Put it in an ice cube tray in the freezer and it will freeze into cubes again.

It even works with wine to keep your wine cold.

Then once it's completely frozen, you take it out, put it into Ziploc bags and store it in your freezer.

So you can just grab a couple if you wanna grab a couple of stock cubes for soup or or stews or anything like that.

Same with the wine, like I said, keep your wine cold or spaghetti sauce for any dishes right now.

And you're gonna thank me a lot for this one.

We're gonna make a five minute strawberry ice cream.

We need a food processor.

A a blender does not work.

It has to be a processor with your steel blade, okay?

And you can use any fruit.

I like the strawberry the best and I buy sliced frozen.

They have to be good frozen hard strawberries you can use.

I have a friend who who I showed this recipe too a week ago and she's made it twice with peaches because she loves peaches and can't have strawberries.

So you can basically use any fruit.

Strawberry to me is the best one bag is about 16 ounces.

I have a little more than that here.

Put those in and we're gonna put sugar in white sugar.

So, because these strawberries are unsweetened, so I'm putting, I don't usually do the recipes but this, I'm gonna put bout a cup of sugar in there.

Okay, so now might get a little noisy for you here, but we're going to blend that, just the sugar and the strawberries.

There we go.

Okay, so here we go.

It doesn't take long, right?

Little bit more.

There's some chunks in there, which you kind along, I feel.

Okay, so now that's nice and blended and frozen.

So now what we're gonna do is take our, our insert out.

We're going to pour heavy cream into this top slot while it's blending.

Okay?

And that the frozen strawberries are going to freeze this like ice cream.

Three ingredients come on.

So here we go.

Voila, we have ice cream.

Now does it get any simpler than this?

Now this is something your kids could help you with if you want it.

They could pour the, you can, let's stir this around the edges a little bit and blend it a little bit more.

But it is the consistency of ice cream now it's soft ice cream.

Softer ice cream right now you can put it in something and put it in your freezer if you like the really hard ice cream that you have to dip.

So we're going to, I'm gonna dish some of this up and you can see how it comes out, right?

Beautiful.

And could anything be easier?

Honestly?

So yeah, and this makes quite a bit, this is a real handy one for you.

If you get last minute company, let's say and need something like that to serve with coffee, you know, takes less than five minutes.

All you need to have is a a bag of frozen, whatever fruit you happen to like, this is one you're really, really gonna gonna want to use over and over and you are welcome.