I have been completely slacking lately, at least, as far as blogging goes. I’ve been traveling all over the most fantastic destinations of the southwest searching for 5 minutes of rest. Can you blame me though? If you were in the suburbs of Dallas or Albuquerque, you would be completely mesmerized too. I have 2 new meals ready to blog about and 2 new meals that will happen this weekend, so I need to get cracking. Not to mention that in my old age, I can barely remember what I was thinking about 2 hours ago, let alone 2 weeks ago. This meal is for everyone who reads and says “great, this looks delicious, but I have WAY better things to do than spend 30 minutes scouring the grocery store and an hour cutting up vegetables.” As much as I would like to have all the time in the world to do that, I’m still 32 years, 218 days, and 17 hours away from retirement. If the market continues in its current trajectory, that number jumps to 84 years and some change.
Because this is a quick meal, we decided to utilize the community grill. Ironically, it’s difficult to grill out in AZ, or at least in our apartment complex. We usually get a thunderstorm right around dinnertime and I don’t have any recipes that are improved by rain water. I also tried to use some of the leftovers from previous meals to make things tasty and easy.
Main Dish: Peppercorn and bourbon-marinated chicken breast
Sides: Grilled Vegetables with chili-cream sauce and wild rice with goat cheese
Dessert: Grilled chili spiced mangoes and ice cream
The chicken sounds delicious and I would like to tell you that I scientifically crafted and selected the ingredients, but it’s actually a store-bought marinade that cost $1.50. I cut the chicken breasts up and put it in the marinade for about an hour and a half before we grilled out. The secret to this chicken is actually the charcoal. As tasty as grilling over charcoal is, it’s really a pain. I feel like I need use an entire day’s worth of coal just to get the fire hot enough to cook. Cooking chicken over charcoal is difficult for me, because you want the coals hot, but not so hot that it will char the outside of the chicken before the middle cooks. Medium rare chicken is not nearly as good as medium rare beef. I got my pyramid shaped charcoal, added a little lighter fluid, then added a little bit more, lit the charcoal, then like all men need to do to prove their manhood, drenched the fire with more lighter fluid pretending that my life could actually be in danger.
The vegetables were a little bit of a risk. We had some mushrooms and zucchini in the refrigerator, so I wanted to season and skewer the vegetables to grill. I put about a tablespoon of olive oil over the mixed veggies with some cumin, salt and pepper, but there was definitely not enough moisture to handle all the spices. I didn’t want to add any more oil (still trying to keep it real and healthy here), so I thought, let’s turn to the ole’ standby and threw in a few spoonfuls of Greek yogurt. I’ve never done this or even heard about it before, but how bad could it turn out? I got all that mixed together and then skewered the vegetables to get ready to grill.
I had a decent amount of the red chili enchilada sauce leftover from my previous meal. I had Emily mix the rest of that with more Greek yogurt to make the chili-cream sauce. So in 2 minutes, we had a spicy, flavorful, fat-free cream sauce to spoon over the vegetables.
The wild rice is pretty straightforward. Measure out water, put in chicken bouillon cubes, boil, add rice, simmer, fluff, eat. My mother reads my blog, so I won’t make any jokes about that series of verbs. I don’t understand why wild rice is so much more expensive than normal rice. Was the rice wild, did something stupid and got arrested so that you have to pay for its time in prison and parole? I buy it though, because it has more flavor and it’s more “fibrous” than white rice, meaning that it takes longer to break down the carbs. Think Wonder Bread vs. raw oat bran with a slight chicken flavor. Once it was done, we sprinkled a little goat cheese on it, mixed it in, and it was ready.
The meal turned out really good (and fast).
We don’t normally eat dessert, but we decided to really live it up on that Friday night and go on a date to the grocery store to get some light vanilla ice cream. Don’t be jealous of my life. Emily bought some mangoes earlier in the week, so they were ripe and ready to eat. She cut them up and we used the ancient Boy Scout art of wrapping them in aluminum foil to grill. That’s actually true, well, not the ancient part. I was in cub scouts at one point in my life. My parents thought it was a cheap babysitting option. Besides catching the largest fish in a polluted lake in upstate New York, I also learned the aluminum foil trick. Basically, when you have something small or cut up you want to grill, you put it in aluminum foil, add some spices and a little liquid, and throw it on the grill or in the campfire for a few minutes to cook. So we added brown sugar and chili pepper to the mangoes and threw them on the grill. They turned out really tender in this sweet, thick slightly spiced sugar sauce.
We poured that over the ice cream and I ground up some peanuts to put on top. I talked Emily into turning back the clock to her sexy barista days and making us some espresso to go with dessert. It was a perfect combo (and less than 225 calories).
No comments:
Post a Comment