Lemon Chicken

Lemon Chicken

My mom sent me an email from SavingDinner.com for lemon chicken. It looked pretty good.

I basically see cooking as a circus (those of you who have seen the mess I can make in a kitchen will see the sense in this), so I see components of a dish in rings. This dish was a three ring circus. First, I had to get the chicken together, then the dipping sauce, and then the email (which came to my mom via FlyLady.com) mentioned at the bottom that I could throw some cauliflower in a food processor and then toast it up to serve with the chicken.

So, I start with the first ring. It was a dipping sauce that involved chili garlic paste. I was way too lazy to go find a store that sold that, so I found a recipe for it. I didn't write down what kind of chillies I needed for the recipe, I just wrote on the back of a piece of paper that some asshole had left on the floor (by the trash can) of the computer room at the hotel, "2-3 oz. chillies" and left it at that.

Well I got to the store, and there were all kinds of chillies. I usually shop at a tiny little grocery store across the street, but I needed some stuff that they don't carry so I was at a great big grocery store, and I had basically forgotten how big that place was. There were all kinds of dried chillies to choose from. After getting opposing information from around the country from the people I trust to know about chillies, I was about to give up.

Then a guy and his wife walked up to the chili display and started talking in rapid-fire Spanish. I decided to ask him which chillies are the mildest. I retained enough of my two semesters of Spanish to get out, "Pardone me, necissito chillies pero no me gusta caliente. Err....help? Por favor?" This was the wrong thing to say. He started in with me in Spanish like we were old amigos from Ecuador with shared fond memories of being weened on pablanos and fried rice. Oh hell no. I stopped him with, "That's all the Spanish I know."

He said, "okay. Okay!" and smiled and handed me a bag of little chillies. "Caliente!" he declared proudly. I said, "Um...gracias. Pero, no me gusta caliente." And I held my stomach and tried to convey to him with pantomime what would happen with caliente. His wife giggled. He took the bag back and handed me a bag of great big chillies. He said something that I told myself was along the lines of, "Ok, nice lady, here are some nice, mild chillies. Have a great day!" but was probably more like "Alright, you bland, unimaginative, gringo, here are your bland-ass chillies. I hope you choke on 'em." Given his wife's ensuing guffaws, I'm sure it was the latter. I digress. Here are the chillies:



I finally did find a jar of the chili garlic paste, over by the soy sauce. Here is what I found:



It was only $1.50 and I figured I could definitely use a back-up.

So I got home and started in making the dip, an ingredient of which was the chili garlic paste. First, I soaked the chillies in boiling water for half an hour:



While that was going on, I went to pummel the chicken. I don't have one of those...you know, the mallet things, so I improvised:







Just trust me, that's a half an inch. Boy, that was fun!

The chillies still had some time left for soaking, so I went on with the second ring of the circus: the caul-rice. This sounded kind of gross to me, because a caul is actually a...well, it's not pleasant, and there's no need to bring it up. Here, it's short for cauliflower-rice, which is basically chopping up some cauliflower in the food processor and then toasting in a wok. And so:





Easy.

The chillies were done soaking, so I drained the water into a separate bowl and cleaned the chillies. This basically meant taking off the stems, cleaning out the seeds, and rinsing off the chillies. This was boring and seemed to take forever. I'll cut to the chase:

I went from this:



to this:



to this chili/oil/garlic concoction:



So the paste was done. Now I needed to make the rest of the dipping sauce. That was easy, just throw some stuff in a bowl. Don't even have to cook it, just stir it up with a fork.



So, one ring down, one ring nearly finished, and one ring to go.

Instead of dipping the chicken into the bowl of marinade, I poured the marinade into the Ziploc baggie and shook it up. Then I heard a commotion outside and went to go see some drama! It was a false alarm. That extra time with the marinade probably did the chicken good, though. Right?

So I threw the first chicken breast in the pan, set the timer for five minutes, and went to start cleaning up the horrendous mess this meal had created. After a minute or two I went over and started messing with the chicken. I didn't want it to burn, so instead of letting it cook for five minutes on one side and then flipping it like the recipe said, I started flipping it and kept doing that for the next ten minutes, in between washing dishes.

That one seemed done, so I put in the next piece of chicken. As that was cooking, I started to toast the caul-rice. That was pretty boring. So I made a second dipping sauce with the pre-made chili garlic paste. That was a shitload easier, since it was just opening a jar instead of all that soaking and cleaning.

Anyway, the second piece of chicken was starting to look pretty well burnt, so I put it on a plate with some caul-rice.



I took both dipping sauces and tried each of 'em. The one with the home made chili paste was pretty damn bland. I didn't put any of the seeds in there, though, so that explains it. The dipping sauce with the pre-made paste had a lot more kick but the vinegar was way too strong.

The chicken was okay. I guess I don't understand chicken. I can't get it to cook right. My friend Ed said I should poke holes in it with a fork since I'm too cheap to buy one of those things that injects the flavor into the chicken. Maybe I'll try that next time. Or maybe I'll start making the kind of friends who go out and buy that shit for me.

In all, it took an hour and a half to prepare, half an hour to clean up, and it wasn't worth it. It had real potential, but only part of the chicken - the outer part, naturally - tasted like anything. It was good, but it wasn't worth the trouble.

The caul-rice was fucking awful. Maybe I didn't let it toast long enough, because every bite became a mouthful of caul-water. Nasty.
Next time I'll poke holes in the chicken, let it marinate overnight, and use cous-cous instead of caul-rice. Also, the email I got said to serve the dipping sauce on the side, but I think it would have been better on the chicken. I honestly think that in this instant glory world that we've created, there is probably a pre-made marinade for this. I'll keep an eye out for that for the next time. I mean, this didn't even taste like it involved lemons, and the whole point was that it was lemon chicken.

Whatevs. The kitchen is clean now and I'm heading to bed with a heart full of disappointment and a belly full of cous-juice. Whatever horrid dreams may come, I know I've brought them on myself.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Drops

So there's this site called Supercook.com where you can put in the ingredients that you have on hand and it tells you what you can make. Holy crap, what a great idea!

I was craving chocolate, but the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips said it would make 5 dozen cookies. What in the sam hell am I gonna do with 60 cookies? I suppose I could eat them (lord knows I would enjoy every morsel) but really I have no place to keep 'em, so fuck that noise, you know?

So I go to SuperCook and tell it I have some semi-sweet chocolate chips. It comes up with this recipe (from another site, actually) for "Quickest Ever No-bake Chocolate Drops."

Half a cup of chocolate, half a cup of peanut butter. Well dang, even I can do that. So I got on it.

Naturally, I left my purse at work, and with it my camera. So tonight we're going to do something a little different. Since this whole recipe is a hell of a shortcut, I'm going to shortcut the pics and use my cell phone's camera.

This should be fun...?

I took a picture of the chocolate chips in the bottom of this bowl. I forgot that you have to hit "save" if you don't want the picture deleted, so if you were looking for some lovely pic of chocolate chips you're outta luck.

You peanut butter fiends are in luck, though:



My microwave tends to blow a fuse more often if I let it run down to zero and beep. So for melting the chocolate I set it for 4 minutes and stood around watching it for about a minute and a half. I stirred it and it looked like this:



Looked pretty gross to me. I was having evil brownie flash backs.




My shoulders hunched forward and I took a quick breath, ready to throw down some noble cusses at the chocolate.

With rigid limbs and a heavy heart I scraped the peanut butter out of the half cup measure and stirred the two together. I saw the peanut butter loosen up the chocolate and I took a deep breath and relaxed, loosening up a bit myself.

Holy shit does this look awful:



I rolled my eyes. Always one more fucking thing. This stupid recipe had two damn ingredients in it - TWO! - and I'd fuckd it up somehow. This didn't look at all edible. Well, I figured I might as well finish making 'em since I started 'em and all, so I plopped them out on to a plate and took an embarrassingly poor quality picture:



This is where I realized I didn't have any wax paper. Oh well. Into the fridge they went.

And then I completely forgot about them until this morning when I opened my email and saw the pics I'd sent to myself from my phone last night.

See, after I dropped the mix onto the plate, I licked the spoon. It tasted okay and basically sated my craving for chocolate. So I was satisfied and forgot to go back to get more.

It tastes like an intense and proud Reese's cup. Maybe like a Reese's cup that was trying to overcompensate for a small...sense of self worth.

I'd probably melt the chocolate chips a bit longer, but I worry about burning them. Also, this mix would probably be fantastic on some pretzels, or with some toasted oats rolled up in 'em. Ooo! Or some Grape-Nuts! Just something to give them a bit of shape, you know?

French toast

Possibly the most boring cooking post ever, even for this blog.

First an update. Remember that sun dried artichoke chicken that I hated so much? I sliced it into strips and sauteed it with the tomato/artichoke mix that was on it, and put it on some rice. That was delicious! Man oh man, if it had been that good the first time around I wouldn't have thrown away the recipe! Anyhow...

French toast, in the beginning:



I put the nutmeg in the picture there because when I was a kid, we put nutmeg in the French toast egg mix. Then I reread the recipe and it didn't call for any. I know we did, though, because we had a cat named Nutmeg and we'd joke about putting the cat in the French toast. We had a very discerning sense of humor, back in Kansas in 1982.

Side note: Nutmeg only ever had one kitten. His name was Patches and he was born in my hair. Remind me later to tell you that story.

Anyhow, I put a pinch in, mixed it up, and used some store bought bread because I didn't trust the bread I made not to crumble.



The recipe said to put some butter on the griddle/skillet and cook it up. My dad said never to do that because the butter burns, so I used Pam.



It was going pretty well. Nothing was burning, getting fucked up or anything.





So...um...it turned out fine. It was kind of bland. I don't have any syrup so I put some apple butter on it. Nothing interesting to report at all. But I want to take a minute to talk to you about something I hear about all the time: apple butter.

I know some of you haven't heard of apple butter, and others have heard of it but haven't tried it. I know it looks weird. I had a roommate once who threw out a brand new jar of apple butter because "it looked funny, like whatever it was it had gone bad." I know it looks like apple sauce that's gone bad, but trust me: it's delicious. Try to get it from one of those farms where you can go pick your own apples or something, or if you live near an Amish community go get it from there. It's usually better than the store-bought stuff. And you all have the good fortune to have never tried my grandma's apple butter.

That sounds bad, I know, but listen to the whole thing here. My gramma was an excellent cook. Everything she made, from her own jams and jellies to her own bread, as well as just regular dinner stuff, it was all wonderful. Every time I have any apple butter at all, I always compare it to my grandma's apple butter. None of it measures up, all apple butter everywhere is only just OK compared to my grandma's, which was fantastic. I'm going to live the rest of my life knowing that I will never have apple butter that good ever again.

But you, dear reader, can go run out to your local farm (hell, probably even your local grocery store) and find apple butter that you consider to be the best, and you can enjoy that brand for decades. And there you're lucky. You don't know what you're missing, so you're not even minutely disappointed in what you find. Sometimes, it turns out, ignorance is bliss.

Meatloaf

Damn. I went right ahead and made a meatloaf tonight and completely fucking forgot to blog about it.

Erm...

Here is a picture of it after I already had some and the leftovers were sitting the fridge for about half an hour:



Honestly it's not really that pink. Sweet jesus that looks awful.

It was extra greasy. I was going to use this ground turkey I had, but it turns out it had gone bad. I already had an egg, some onion, green pepper and a piece of bread in a bowl, and fuck all if I'm gonna waste some food, so I got the cheapest pile of ground meat I could find. Man oh man was that greasy.

I chopped the green pepper & onion too coarsely. But it was decent. After I drained it...twice.

Sun Dried Tomato Artichoke Chicken

I was wandering through the grocery store trying to find something better for dinner than mac & cheese or frozen pizza when I found this package of Knorr French Onion Recipe Mix. There were two recipes on the back. One seemed kind of long and involved, the other one was Sun Dried Tomato Artichoke Chicken. And so:

I forgot to put the olive oil in this picture. Such is life:

I put all the stuff in, but because it's hard to walk with these glasses on I had them perched on my head when I was reading the instructions. I am going to use that as the excuse for draining the artichokes when the recipe said to not do that. After I realized my mistake, I added some water and extra olive oil. That was basically just to make the mixture more liquid, since the directions said to pour the mixture on the chicken.



It still wasn't very liquidy:



I smeared it all over the chicken, even tucking it between the pieces. It was a sun dried tomato extravaganza all over that chicken. I'm never going to eat four pieces of chicken, but that's what the recipe called for. I'm horrid with numbers so it's easier to just do the whole recipe than to try to figure out the math of just one serving.



I threw it in the oven, crossed my fingers and wandered off to practice my ukulele. With five minutes left to go on the baking, my neighbor dropped by for some chit-chat so when I took the chicken out of the oven I didn't get to inspect like I usually do with chicken. I'm always worried about under-cooking it. After my neighbor left, I cut open a piece to check it and it seemed fine. That was a relief because I didn't want to put it back in after it was sitting out. I don't know why, but it seemed like a bad idea. I don't understand chicken, so maybe it's an unreasonable worry.



I had some rice on the side. Thank goodness because holy shit was this stuff gross. It just tasted like the sun dried tomatoes. And they didn't taste that great. Until I had this dish, I loved sun-dried tomatoes. Now I'm not a fan.

Here's the thing about chicken: when I make it, it never takes on the flavor of whatever I'm cooking it in. I tried twice to make this orange chicken dish, and it was bland and tasted like plain chicken. Plain, sad, tragic chicken. What's the haps with this? The last time I made that dish I marinated the chicken overnight, and still it tasted awful. Should I, I don't know, poke holes in the chicken to get the flavored dressing or whatever in there? Am I not baking it long enough? Is the chicken angry that I'm a chicken snob and won't eat chicken off the bone? I don't understand.

And for this recipe it didn't really matter since I didn't like it anyhow. Maybe I'll scrape off the sun-dried tomato topping, cut up the chicken and put it on a sandwich or something. Damn.

Wheat Bread

Man oh man, my grandma made the best bread. I mean, her bread was so good that getting a loaf of her bread was like getting a little loaf of gramma love. That sounds cheesy. Fuck you if you don't like it.

Anyway, I emailed my brother up in Alaska for Grandma's bread recipe, but he's trying to raise four young kids and can't be arsed to get back to me. So I had to make do with the recipe from the Better Homes cookbook.

And so, wheat bread. I thought there would be more ingredients:



That's not double vision there, that's two different kinds of flour:



So anyway, mix some flour and yeast in a bowl. Real exciting. Then I had to mix all the wet stuff and cook it just til it was warm, 110 or so, in a sauce pan. I'm no good at knowing how hot stuff is without a thermometer, so I just kind of guessed. Then I poured it in with the flour/yeast mix. Mmmmmm doesn't that look tasty?



This is right about where I started to mentally kick myself for not reading the whole recipe through before starting it. Turns out I was supposed to have my hand mixer all ready. Oops. Anyhow, got it mixed, added the wheat flour, and got ready to wrestle that ball of dough down. This was not going to be walnut-filled bread part 2. I got ready this time: old towel near by to scrape dough off my fingers, some warm water for the same reason, and a small bowl of "fuck you" flour. As in, "fuck you, dough. You're gonna do what I tell you to do, and you're not gonna turn into glue and make it impossible to scratch my head when it itches. Have some damn flour, dough! You're my bitch now."

As you can see, the dough came around to my way of thinking:



So anyhow, let it rise to twice the size. I have one of those things on my stove that carries heat from the oven up to the stove top, so I had the oven on warm and set the bowl right by the, um, oven heat vent thing. It rose pretty nicely, and punching it down was much easier than when I had to deal with the walnut bread.





I kicked myself again here for not reading the directions all the way through. Turns out I needed two loaf pans, not just the one that I have. So when it came time to divide the dough, I put one loaf in the pan and the other loaf got balled up and put in a cake pan:



Let it rise a bit more and threw it in the oven. The book said to let it cook for 40-45 minutes, but since the walnut bread was such a bitch and cooked so fast, I set the timer for half an hour. I tapped the loaves after half an hour, they sounded kind of hollow. I took 'em out.



Mmmmm that looks pretty good!

So I had a little bread smorgasboard. A very little one. I was kind of sleepy.



Mmmmmm marmalade. Mmmmmm apple butter. Oh hell yes.

Well, the crust was done. It was crunchy and if had been in there much longer it would have burned. The middle of the bread wasn't as light and fluffy as it should have been. I don't know if this is from under cooking or if I fucked up the part where I was heating up the liquids in the sauce pan. It's edible, though, so whatever.

Oh, a few weeks ago somebody posted a comment asking why the little black flashlight is in a lot of the cooking shots. I hit the wrong button and deleted it. Oh dear.

Anyway, the wiring in my apartment is shit. I'm always blowing a fuse by doing crazy insane shit like making some toast while brewing some coffee while watching the news. Since I have to go out the back door to get to the circuit breaker, I leave the flash light by the toaster oven so I can always find it. It's a mini Mag light, and it fits in that area well, so that's where I keep it.

What, that answer isn't sexy enough for you? Fine. It's in all of my shots because I am a giant and I want to show you how big my possessions are in comparison to a damn serious police-baton-size Mag light. You puny people could not handle the splendor and vast flatware in my kitchen, so I put a Mag light in my pictures to remind you of my awesome powers of being 100x bigger than you.

Beef stew & Cornbread

I found an old CD I put together years ago. It was like a little time capsule, and I was listening to it while I made the beef stew & cornbread, so there was a lot of dancing and singing. Not so much with the picture taking, though. I digress.

Beef stew, in the beginning:



The instructions said "put the flower in a plastic bag and use it to coat the meat," and honestly my first thought was the grocery bag I brought the ingredients home in. It had been a long day, I wasn't thinking clearly. Anyhow, flour in a bag, in case you needed a visual:



Coated meat:



And this is right about the time I realized I forgot to cut up the bigger pieces into smaller pieces:



I let that cook with all the spices for an hour, during which time I did dishes and danced. Don't be jealous, it's no way to live your life.

Then it was time to make the corn bread. I think we all know how this goes. Dry ingredients, wet ingredients, pan:







Meanwhile, I cut up some veggies for the stew. I know that sounds like a bit too much excitement for some of you, so I'm going to skip posting those pics.*

So anyway, finished cornbread:



And finished stew:



Looks pretty good, right? Wrong. The potatoes and carrots in the stew weren't done, and the cornbread was kind of grainy, like the corn meal hadn't, I don't know, mixed right. Instead of melt-in-your-mouth good, the whole thing was kind of crunchy. I put the cornbread in the bottom of the bowl of stew (like normal people do) so it wasn't as noticeable, but the crunchy potatoes and carrots were still kind of shitty.

So, next time I'll add those much earlier, and then the frozen stuff for the last half hour.

Meanwhile, I need a better cornbread recipe.

Lemon Bars

Or Look! Something Worked! Maybe This Cooking Stuff isn't Bullshit After All!

I love lemon desserts. Cookies, cake, lemon bars, lemon, I don't know, pudding, whatever. Damn, that is tasty stuff! So, lemon bars.

Make some dough - butter, flour, sugar. Done. Mash it into the bottom of an 8x8 pan. I only have one shitty disposable one, but it's better than none, so....done. Lemon sauce mix: gotta get some finely grated lemon peel and some lemon juice. Got a lemon. This is where it got fun.

I don't have a zester or a fine grater. I have one grater and it's basically standard size. But it grated that peel up pretty well. I was making this while the oven was heating and while the squash was burning, so I was a little distracted and didn't get a shot of the grated peel. Cry me a river.

I needed three table spoons of lemon juice. Oops! I don't own a juicer thingy. Like the rolling pin thing, I improvised. I took the top from my pepper shaker:



Cleaned it really, really well, and used it as a juicer thingy:





And it was full of pulp and seeds, so I grabbed a coffee filter and filtered that stuff out.





The trick is when you're draining it, you press it (don't squeeze it) very gingerly with your fingertips so the filter doesn't break. Then you have some fine lemon juice:



It doesn't look like much, and I don't know what you're supposed to get from a lemon, but I got the three table spoons I needed with about half a table spoon left over. I drank it in victory, and regretted it immediately.

I couldn't cook this with the squash because it needed a 325 oven and currently my possessed, crazy ass oven was at about 425...ish. So I put the lemon mix in the fridge (it had eggs in it and I didn't know how long that squash was going to screw around in the oven before I could get the lemon bars in, and I didn't want it to go bad.)



I put the dough in to cook, it came out fine. I'm setting the timer for half what's recommended, then checking on it to see if my oven has vetoed my food.

I poured the lemon mix on the decent dough bottom, and it came out okay:







I wasn't expecting the dull crust on top, but when I cut it open, it was nice and custardy. Also, when I cut into it I realized I'd forgotten to grease the pan. Oh well.

It's also pretty sweet, but that might just be me. They were pretty good, though. If I can tone down the sweetness of it and buy a real 8x8 pan, I'd make these more often. They're pretty easy and quick.

And I'm basically really proud of myself for thinking of that juicing trick.