Tonight, I’m brining chicken. It’s a whole chicken and I’ve not done that before. I’m going to brine it for two hours. Then I’ m going to roast it with potatoes, celery and carrots. Not inventive, but if successful, it’ll help restore my confidence in trying new dishes.
Last week, I tried to put together a few meals for the week. Having experimented with the kefir the week prior – successfully making a chevre-like cheese – I thought it was a good idea to try marinating the chicken thighs I brought home that day with kefir. Another earlier experiment I tried was to marinate brussels sprouts in kefir whey. Unusual, but the result was harmless enough – if not riveting.
My experiment with the chicken was a dismal failure. At first, I thought the chicken had a milky flavor and was very tender, if a little underdone. No worries, I would bring home some ready-made sides to combine with the chicken to round out the meals. The next day, I brought home pasta with spinach and olives – along with a separate chicken & cabbage side I thought would work. Well, I completely missed that I brought home salads. I combined the chicken with the salads – heated up a bowl of the pasta and grimaced. The chicken did not do well with the olives, the salad suffered from being re-heated – the whole thing was nasty. I ate what I could and threw away the rest. This weekend, I threw away leftovers – giving up on trying to make them work.
Then I went grocery shopping Saturday. While in the bulk section, I came across a light green, short grain rice, called bamboo rice. I picked some up, along with prawns, to make for lunch. When I made the rice, in our microwave rice cooker, it came out tough. After mixing up so many recipes, I worked hard to make this meal turn out well. I took the prawns in to J to eat right away – he saved some but enjoyed the few that I had prepared with ginger, garlic and lemon, pepper and butter. I figured that the bamboo rice was close enough to abrorio to make it worth saving by tossing into the pan I had just cooked prawns in, with repeated dousings of chicken broth. I would’ve prefered vegetable broth or ginger broth, but made do with what we have. I brought the bright green rice in and had added a fried egg to the top of the dish, to make up for the missing prawns. I had poured a bit of soy sauce to add salt to the egg. It was sooooo tasty!
My experiments since then have all been tasty. I hope that the chicken is too.
It's all under the surface 