I Eat a Lot of Chicken

Which isn't exactly a surprise. It's just that a lot of the meals I've featured here have included chicken. And there's probably gonna be a lot more of that as I have done my traditional forsaking of the red flesh for Lent. (Not that I'm Catholic. But I feel like it's a good thing to lay off the meat for a while, and Lent seems as good a time as any to do it.)

So, yes, tonight I had chicken again, specifically this chicken and artichokes with angel hair recipe from Everyday Food. The pasta isn't a total necessity for this recipe, as it's really used as more of a side than part of the main dish, so potatoes or rice would also be good. If I ever make it again, I might add a little lemon juice, just to give it a little extra tartness, but in all it was very good.

Relish It

Don't let the Valentines fool you, this was not my sad Valentine's Day dinner. I had this tonight. It was inspired by a recipe for chicken with tomato relish from Everyday Foods magazine. Very lightly inspired, I should say. First, I used fresh tomatoes instead of the canned the recipe called for because I hate the way canned tomatoes taste when they aren't being used in a cooked sauce. I used everything else in the relish recipe--lemon juice, parsley, capers, olive oil--but it probably would have been better if I let it sit overnight, to turn into more of an actual relish. As it was, it was really just a tomato salad. Which is fine.

As for the chicken portion, I wanted the chicken to be crispy since it was being paired with something kind of mushy, so instead of just pan searing, I decided to coat the chicken in flour, egg white, and Panko, and lightly fry it. ("Lightly frying" sounds like an oxymoron, but I really didn't use that much oil). Pounding out the breasts yielded two pretty big pieces, resulting in the virtual feast you see pictured. I also skipped the spinach portion of the recipe because I thought I didn't have any spinach. (Turns out I did. Derrrrr.)

I forgot to put a lot of salt and pepper in the flour coating, so the chicken was badly in need of some seasoning once on the plate, but other than that, it was really good! I mean, come on. It's basically fried chicken. You can't go wrong!

Is It Stir-Fry If You Don't Use a Wok?

First real food post! Woo!

Tonight I went with something relatively simple, although it's not as simple as one would think.

The basic recipe was this chicken and broccoli stir-fry on Cooks.com. I halved most of it since I was just using half a chicken breast, and omitted the ginger because I'm not a fan. Now, I say stir fries aren't as simple as they would seem because it's not just a matter of dumping everything into a wok and cooking. It's all about the timing. You have to brown the meat first, but not too much or it will turn tough when you put it back in the pan; and you have to make sure the toughest vegetables are sauteed the longest, so they have to go in the pan first; and you want most of the cooking done before you put the sauce in, lest the sauce all evaporate. So, yeah. Not that simple.

This one turned out pretty dern good as the chicken was cooked perfectly; really tender. I probably would have preferred the broccoli was a little crisper than it ended up being, but it wasn't too bad. I had it over brown rice, which was actually left over from some Chinese take-out I had this weekend. I reheated it by placing the rice in tinfoil inside a steamer, a trick I learned from my grandmother.

In all, a successful meal. Now I have to start thinking about what to make tomorrow. Horrors!