Chicken
So I have to be honest, I don't like chicken. I think it's weird. It's a funny color compared to the other meats. Plus, I'm afraid of salmonella. No one needs to give themselves food poisoning more than once in a lifetime. But it has a couple of annoying qualities that keeps it around: it's healthy; it's inexpensive; and, other people seem like it. So there's always some in the freezer, because I think adults are supposed to keep a package of chicken in the freezer. It's in the handbook.
Problems always arise when I take it out of the freezer to defrost. I take it out the night before I want to use it and put it in the refrigerator, just like my mom taught me (see, I really did pay attention). Again, because I fear salmonella, I'm afraid to defrost it in the microwave. And no, I don't know why. I just am. Moving on.
Once it's defrosted, I usually face a major problem: there's too much of it. I know that you are supposed to come home from the supermarket, put all of your meat into single servings, and stick them in the freezer. That's in the handbook too. But I often forget to do that (because I'm afraid to touch the raw chicken and get salmonella - are you seeing a theme here?) OR know that I want to be able to make multiple meals and have no sense of appropriate portions, so I just defrost all of it. Which is where I found myself last night. I had defrosted about 100 (okay, like 12) chicken tenderloins. I like tenderloins for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they are small. Those big chicken breasts scare me. I mean really, who are these DDD sized chicken running around everywhere? There's just something weird about that.
So back to my chicken tenderloins. I wanted to make chicken parmasan again, but was persuaded by two things. First, I had just made them last week and even though it's inevitable that I'll eventually because a "Tuesday is chicken parm day" household, I'm trying to hold off. And secondly, I didn't have any parmasan or mozzarella cheeses, so I didn't think it would be tasty. (For those of you keeping track at home, and who know I eat almost no dairy, parmasan cheese is safe and my mozzarella cheese is really a fake cheese made out of rice. It's actually pretty good - I've fed it to a variety of people without dairy issues and they haven't complained. To my face.) So now I'm back to square one. Normal people can look at the contents of their cupboards and know how to make them edible. I am pretty sure there's no way to combine chicken, popcorn, relish, and canned green beans into something my mother would be happy to hear that I ate. So I improvised.
I took a bunch of the chicken and browned it in the skillet - this is a relatively new skill and one I am proud of, especially when things don't burn. I also feel it cuts down on the salmonella potential. At the very least, MERP tells me that if you brown something before you put it in a sauce, it cooks faster. And I wanted to take that chicken and mix it in with some tomato sauce. So that's what I did - chicken and tomato sauce sounds healthy and it just seemed like a dairy free version of chicken parm. Despite the fact that I overcooked the sauce once I put the chicken in (I think you've figured out why by now), the chicken didn't taste exactly like shoe leather and gluten free pasta tastes so bad in comparison that it didn't matter.
Except then I panicked, because there was still another 8 pieces of uncooked chicken. I teach until 8:00 on Wednesday nights, so there was no way the chicken would get cooked if I put it back in the fridge raw. Plus, you know, salmonella. So I decided to poach the rest of the chicken in vegetable stock (I was out of chicken stock - I'm pretty sure it's weird if you use beef stock), a technique I perfected when I learned how to make chicken salad a few months ago (that's right, I'm 30 and I can use a skillet and poach things - my intellectual talents clearly have limits). I figured that by poaching them, it would save on the time I would need to re-cook them.
But now I'm at a loss, because in my refrigerator I have a HUGE container of tomato sauce with chicken (in which I also poured an extra can of diced tomoatos, because it seemed like a good idea at the time) and a bunch of little poached chicken tenderloins. I was able to make a couple of small sandwiches for lunch today, but my ability to eat all of the chicken currently in my fridge is seriously limited by the fact that I'm only one person, big appetite or not. So now I'm stuck. I know I can have leftover sauce tonight for dinner, and more sandwiches tomorrow. But that will still leave me with WAY more chicken than one girl could handle. I've gotten some interesting ideas, but many of them would require me to have more ingredients on hand than I do - and with no car and class starting in less than an hour, it's not likely I'll get them soon. Which leaves me with another question - what staples do you always have around, to make sure you can feed yourself?
This cooking thing sure gets tricky. I think I'm going to go get a Starbucks now!
Problems always arise when I take it out of the freezer to defrost. I take it out the night before I want to use it and put it in the refrigerator, just like my mom taught me (see, I really did pay attention). Again, because I fear salmonella, I'm afraid to defrost it in the microwave. And no, I don't know why. I just am. Moving on.
Once it's defrosted, I usually face a major problem: there's too much of it. I know that you are supposed to come home from the supermarket, put all of your meat into single servings, and stick them in the freezer. That's in the handbook too. But I often forget to do that (because I'm afraid to touch the raw chicken and get salmonella - are you seeing a theme here?) OR know that I want to be able to make multiple meals and have no sense of appropriate portions, so I just defrost all of it. Which is where I found myself last night. I had defrosted about 100 (okay, like 12) chicken tenderloins. I like tenderloins for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they are small. Those big chicken breasts scare me. I mean really, who are these DDD sized chicken running around everywhere? There's just something weird about that.
So back to my chicken tenderloins. I wanted to make chicken parmasan again, but was persuaded by two things. First, I had just made them last week and even though it's inevitable that I'll eventually because a "Tuesday is chicken parm day" household, I'm trying to hold off. And secondly, I didn't have any parmasan or mozzarella cheeses, so I didn't think it would be tasty. (For those of you keeping track at home, and who know I eat almost no dairy, parmasan cheese is safe and my mozzarella cheese is really a fake cheese made out of rice. It's actually pretty good - I've fed it to a variety of people without dairy issues and they haven't complained. To my face.) So now I'm back to square one. Normal people can look at the contents of their cupboards and know how to make them edible. I am pretty sure there's no way to combine chicken, popcorn, relish, and canned green beans into something my mother would be happy to hear that I ate. So I improvised.
I took a bunch of the chicken and browned it in the skillet - this is a relatively new skill and one I am proud of, especially when things don't burn. I also feel it cuts down on the salmonella potential. At the very least, MERP tells me that if you brown something before you put it in a sauce, it cooks faster. And I wanted to take that chicken and mix it in with some tomato sauce. So that's what I did - chicken and tomato sauce sounds healthy and it just seemed like a dairy free version of chicken parm. Despite the fact that I overcooked the sauce once I put the chicken in (I think you've figured out why by now), the chicken didn't taste exactly like shoe leather and gluten free pasta tastes so bad in comparison that it didn't matter.
Except then I panicked, because there was still another 8 pieces of uncooked chicken. I teach until 8:00 on Wednesday nights, so there was no way the chicken would get cooked if I put it back in the fridge raw. Plus, you know, salmonella. So I decided to poach the rest of the chicken in vegetable stock (I was out of chicken stock - I'm pretty sure it's weird if you use beef stock), a technique I perfected when I learned how to make chicken salad a few months ago (that's right, I'm 30 and I can use a skillet and poach things - my intellectual talents clearly have limits). I figured that by poaching them, it would save on the time I would need to re-cook them.
But now I'm at a loss, because in my refrigerator I have a HUGE container of tomato sauce with chicken (in which I also poured an extra can of diced tomoatos, because it seemed like a good idea at the time) and a bunch of little poached chicken tenderloins. I was able to make a couple of small sandwiches for lunch today, but my ability to eat all of the chicken currently in my fridge is seriously limited by the fact that I'm only one person, big appetite or not. So now I'm stuck. I know I can have leftover sauce tonight for dinner, and more sandwiches tomorrow. But that will still leave me with WAY more chicken than one girl could handle. I've gotten some interesting ideas, but many of them would require me to have more ingredients on hand than I do - and with no car and class starting in less than an hour, it's not likely I'll get them soon. Which leaves me with another question - what staples do you always have around, to make sure you can feed yourself?
This cooking thing sure gets tricky. I think I'm going to go get a Starbucks now!
How much poundage is the chicken you buy? I can usually find half pound packages of boneless skinless chicken, which is about one meal for Nick and I. It might help ease future chicken crisis if you find smaller packages.
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