Archive for the ‘Life’ Category
January 27th, 2009 Posted 9:27 am
Last night we made a really simple, delicious and healthy dinner of spicy roast chicken breasts (cooked on the bone), steamed green beans, and mediterranean curry couscous. The chicken was rubbed with a spice mix that included cayenne pepper, white pepper, salt, dried cilantro, garlic powder, onion powder, chinese five spice…and probably some other things. After it was a little under-done (about 150 degrees), Matt basted it with a mix of peanut sauce (which we bought on sale, but you could easily make with peanut butter, soy sauce, sesame oil, etc.), cayenne pepper, and a little hoisin sauce (YUM!). It then went back into the oven until it was nearly done (~158 degrees). The finishing temperature for white meat chicken is 165 degrees, so we pulled it at 158, covered it in foil and let it rest for about 10 minutes while we cooked the green beans and the couscous (each took a little over 5 minutes). Â
I didn’t get any pictures because the kitchen was a mess (I had just finished making a coffee cake in my silicone bundt pan for work!)
…plus I was just generally frazzled trying to cook dinner and tomorrow’s breakfast on a Monday night after work, but I had to blog this because part of what made the meal spectacular was the moistness of the chicken. If you’re trying to eat healthy, chicken breasts will come up in a lot of recipes and are a really nice choice because they will work with a lot of different cuisines and flavors and they are low in fat and pretty easy to work with. The problem is that white meat chicken goes from undercooked to horribly dry really really quickly. People have a lot of tricks for guessing the done-ness of various types of meat. A lot of people will just slice into the chicken breast and see if it’s pink–the problem with this method is that meat really needs to rest before being cut in order to keep it moist. The digital probe thermometer Matt got me for Christmas is the answer! This was the second time I’ve used it–the first time, I used the preset temperature for white meat chicken but it turned out slightly dry–their preset is actually at 165, so by the time it rests, it’s gone up 5 or 10 degrees and has past the point of moistness that makes it palatable. So this second-time around, I used the manual temperature setting and got to the exact stopping point I wanted, letting the chicken finish cooking during the covered, resting stage. It was SO good! Spicy, moist, and accompanied by yummy cous cous and green beans! And I baked an extra breast of chicken that we’ll chop and use for fried rice on Thursday when our CSA veggies come in!
Dinner Success
January 19th, 2009 Posted 12:13 pm
While I was in Portland, I found this recipe for Winter Vegetable Stew with Maple Glazed Tofu in the Oregonian and thought it sounded perfect since I knew our Full Circle Farm box was going to have turnips, which I have never cooked before. I made a couple changes: I left out the fennel, used mostly chicken broth instead of water, chopped regular bok choy instead of baby (because baby bok choy was not available at the store), and cut my tofu into 16 squares instead of 8 rectangles. The other major change is that we don’t have a pressure cooker so we just made it in a normal pot, and it worked just fine. Matt helped chop all the veggies and made the glaze for the tofu, so it went pretty quickly and was super easy and pretty fast. Plus, I just heated up some of what was left (it made a giant pot of soup) and it works pretty well as leftovers–hooray!
More Yummy-ness!
January 18th, 2009 Posted 5:44 pm
Breakfast with scrambled cheddar eggs, toast (with jam and cinammon sugar), turkey bacon (not really bacon, but still delicious), and fresh squeezed orange juice from our CSA oranges!
The last time we got oranges in our Full Circle Farm box, we planned to peel and eat them as snacks, but by the time we were in the mood, most of them had gone bad. So this time I used our three giant navel oranges to squeeze some fresh organic orange juice with nothing added! It only made one small glass (a little over 1 cup of juice), but it was pretty wonderful. We shared the OJ and each had some french press coffee (Matt’s breakfast job).
A great start to the day!
Living the CSA life
January 18th, 2009 Posted 9:52 am
We are trying to maximize our use of the digital camera AND to eat lots of new healthy foods, and so this blog will probably take a food-related spin more often.
We recently joined Full Circle Farm‘s CSA, so we’re trying lots of new fruits and veggies. The first couple weeks were a little rough and a couple things went to waste, but now we’re working on making a two-week meal plan everytime we get a box (we get one small box bi-weekly), so that we can ideally eat more fruits as snacks (something we always say we’ll do, and then have a hard time following through) and use up the veggies that we’re not so used to cooking with.
After a week in Portland for work (where I stayed at the super-fun Kennedy School hotel), I was completely tired of eating out. So we planned a homemade dinner for Saturday night! We spent the afternoon in Kirkland getting the car’s oil and filter changed, buying puppy toys, building a futon, and grocery shopping! We really over-estimated how long the futon would take to put together, so dinner was SUPER late. We made a yummy basic roasted chicken, with super crispy yellow fingerling potatoes and simple steamed broccoli. So delicious! Plus, I used the drippings from the chicken to make a tasty sauce which the potatoes soaked up nicely. While we waited for the chicken to roast we had an apple and a pear for a snack and a green salad with cucumbers, tomatoes and organic croutons! Our apple, pear, potatoes, broccoli, lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes all came from the CSA! A few were from Full Circle Farm, a few were from other local NW farms, and the rest were from other organic farms farther away. So yummy, fresh and healthy!
BONUS: I got to use my new digital oven probe thermometer that Matt got me for Christmas from Williams-Sonoma! Spectacular, and so fancy!! AB would be proud.
To celebrate Obama, puppies (old and young), hope, progress, love, the luck of still having jobs, and life in general…
January 14th, 2009 Posted 1:27 pm
Let’s try to get back to blogging regularly!
