Cooking Marathon

You may have noticed that I like to cook in what I now call cooking marathons, ie. cook a lot at once so I can eat for the week. Today I had a bit of a marathon, which I prepped for yesterday. I've decided it's time to start getting some meat back in my diet; meat that I choose and prepare, not the fast food kind mentioned previously. I also wanted to use my George Foreman grill again since it has been sitting useless in my kitchen since I used it for tuna. For some reason my pictures didn't come out great, probably cause I have bad lighting in the kitchen, but you should get the idea.

The Marinades:
Yesterday I prepared three plastic bags with marinades and put the chicken in to soak up the flavor.
1. Hot Sauce ( First it was chili paste, now I'm obsessed with hot sauce, you know, the kind you slather all over bbq wings. Wow, it's so tasty. Aside from a horrific amount of sodium, there's nothing nutritionally bad about it.)
2. Chili paste and oil
3. Oil, balsamic, garlic salt, onion powder, fresh rosemary, lemon, chopped garlic

The Cooking
As part of the marathon I cooked with three different devices, four if you count a microwave.
1. The Grill- On the George Foreman I cooked up my 3 different kinds of chicken starting with the balsamic. They came out beautifully tender and full of flavor. I think each one was unique and great in it's own way. The rosemary really came through in the balsamic chicken. I also cut up some orange peppers and put them in the bag that had the hot sauce in it, then cooked them up on the grill.

2. The Oven- I've had sweet potatoes sitting on top of the fridge for weeks and somehow never wanted to deal with them. Tonight I finally decided to slice and bake em. Probably it's not the healthiest route, but it is delicious. I sliced them thin and rolled them in oil, salt and rosemary. If you have rosemary on hand, it really is a great flavoring agent. I must say they came out just perfect after 30 mins in the oven. They were beautifully soft and flavored just right. Win!




3. The Stove/ Microwave- I wanted to make some sort of vegetable and discovered fresh green beans that I'd frozen a while back. I thawed them in the microwave then cooked them up in a pan with some mushrooms. The texture was a little softer than I'd have liked, but it was still tasty.



So my meal tonight consisted of chili chicken, sweet potatoes, green beans and peppers. And I have leftovers!

Here's my chicken in order from left to right: balsamic, hot sauce, chili.
'And that's my somewhat healthy cooking. Probably up next is some matzoh ball soup and then who knows!