Tuesday, August 30, 2011

I finally cooked!

I finally got ambitious and cooked something other than eggs...and rice. Other than eggs and rice, I haven't done much in that arena for way too long.

The motivation? It's gross outside. Time for comfort food! Plus, this was super-passive comfort food. If I had a crockpot, it would've made an awesome crockpot meal! The veggies and fruit pictured above (onion, small red potatoes, carrots, apple) received a rough chop.

I then placed two chicken breasts (they were monster ta-tas!) on a greased pyrex 13x9 pan and topped with the veggie mix, minced garlic, salt, pepper, rosemary, and thyme.

See the chicken hiding in there?
I then poured in chicken broth. How much?
That much. Maybe half a carton?
I popper her in the oven at 400C for 50 minutes. In the interim, I graded a quiz and I ate my dessert first (3 hershey's kisses, 1 tbsp peanut butter, 1/4 c oats - microwave 30 seconds, eat. Try it!) Then I raised the temp to 450 for the last 10 minutes and got the golden brown look going on.
Veg and chicken. It's a huge plate, so I'm sorry it looks like a tiny portion. I also have tons of leftovers to last me all week!


This was perfect for me because I'm a chicken-phobe. First, I don't really like to eat meat, so I'm more than happy to eat beans, eggs, veggies, protein powder for most of my protein sources. However, I get super low energy when I don't eat any meat, so I like to pepper it in occasionally. Since I started living alone, my meat consumption has been limited to deli lunchmeat. I have a whole bag of chicken in the freezer, so I thought one huge dish of chicken that can be eaten all week would do me well. And I only had to touch it once and it only touched one dish, and that dish got up to temp and can't be filled with salmonella. Chicken-phobe, see?

Plus, if I don't like the way the chicken tastes later, I can always respice it and repurpose it in tacos, bbq, salsa chicken, etc. Don't believe me? Tune back in!

Also a teaching tidbit: I teach biochemistry and biochemistry lab at a small state school in Minnesota. At this school, they are a little behind-the-times in equipment, so they actually have a lab for the students to do that involves pureeing raw chicken in blenders and extracting an enzyme (a special type of protein) from the raw chicken. OMG. The fiance laughed so hard when I told him this was the first thing I was going to change in my curriculum for next year. Imagine, 110 students over 5 days (we run labs Monday-Friday), 4 blenders, and 7 chicken breasts. I will be rocking the lysol spray that week in class!

Ok, take care. Do you have any food phobias?

1 comment:

  1. Mushrooms. When I was 3 my dad was making pizza, and I was sneaking mushrooms out of the can while he was putting it together (I don't remember any of this). He jokingly told me if I ate another mushroom he'd cut my fingers off. I never ate another mushroom. Ever. Well, I tried one at Ohana Steakhouse at our anniversary dinner 6 years ago, but I didn't like it, and I was all apprehensive about trying it in the first place. I guess you could say I took things extremely literally as a kid.

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