Thursday, January 26, 2012

I have the attention span of gnat,

especially while cooking.  First of all, there is recipe selection.  Today for dinner I picked a simple one from Martha Stewart.
http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/sweet-spicy-chicken-00000000014577/index.html
Then I proceeded to make it not so simple.  My thought process goes something like this.

 "That looks good, but I'm using chicken quarters, and dark meat is kind of sweet to start with.  I bet it would be better with a marinade.  Oh look, we have draft cider.  Let's throw that in a gallon bag w/ some cider vinegar...and a bay leaf...and a cinnamon stick....Oregano is the only herbage.  We'll throw a bay leaf in there.  Well, what's a recipe w/ garlic and onion.  I have dried minced garlic and toasted onion.  Let's just throw that in the marinade too, and salt and pepper of course." 
And the weird factor was the dry mustard & tandoori seasoning.  Not sure about that.
    It's done marinading.  The rest is pretty straightforward, right?  Uh sure.  Off the bat I double it.  Our olive oil is garlic flavored, fine.  I find our brown sugar has um, dried out a bit...so I use honey.  I have two kinds of oregano.  Mexican is the obvious choice.  A splash of cider vinegar.  Can't be too sweet.  Red pepper flakes.  Mr. Man likes heat.  Finally, it's in the oven.

Then there's all the used-to-be-small people buzzing around, going "can I help?"
"Of course you can help.  Do you want to help me start the rice?"

In about half an hour, we'll have chicken, brown rice and broccoli, really.

Documenting this process, with pictures, is why I'm thinking about starting a food blog.  Because amongst all the weirdness, sometimes something great works out.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

It worked really well! Moist, moerately spicy, touch of sweent 'n sour...the kids wanted seconds.