chicken for dinner

Last week's grocery order came, not with the prepackaged boneless chicken thighs I'd ordered, but with some wrapped up from the meat counter. This made me worried that they wouldn't last as long, so I hastened to use the pound-and-a-half of them in the next two evening's dinners. I fetched two favorite recipes from my little homebrewed cookbook.

First was lemon chicken, which is made by pan-frying whole boneless thighs that have been coated in flour, and then taking the chicken out of the pan and making the sauce in the leftover juices. The recipe says to prepare the chicken by pounding it thin, so it will cook all the way through, as there's a limit for how long you can cook it in the pan before the surface begins to burn. But I can't be bothered with the pounding (experience having shown I can't do it very well), so I found a shortcut: take the cooked chicken, before putting it back in the pan with the sauce, and zap it in the microwave for 30 seconds.

Then one of my two recipes for Chinese cashew chicken, both of which B. likes better than most of the cashew chicken dishes we've had as takeout from local Chinese restaurants. (Actually there's one she likes, but it's from Menlo Park, which is 20 miles away so opportunity to come home from there with dinner is limited.) This requires cutting the meat up in smaller chunks, which is something of a bear of a task but worth it for the results. This one has a sauce including lots of garlic and hoisin sauce as well as soy sauce and chicken broth, which starts out liquid and then sets in place. For cashews, I grab a handful from a can of halves and pieces, which work better in recipes than whole cashews.

For this one, the veggies can be included in the main dish. I'd brought a couple packages of jollof rice home from the newage grocery in Ashland, and made congee* out of it, which owing to the size of the package made for a huge result, especially as I'd mixed a pound of cooked ground turkey into it, a trick I'd borrowed from the recipe for Cajun rice dressing (aka "dirty rice"). Anyway, the point of mentioning this is that the leftovers are making a great side dish for dinners that need rice. Scoop some into a cereal bowl and zap it for a minute and a half.

*Congee is made by taking a rice recipe and doubling both the amount of water and the cooking time. The result is not that different from a regular rice dish, but it has half the carbs.