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!

Soups Galore

Now that apparently it has decided to be winter, it's a good season to break out the soups.
I've also been on the borderline of sick since after Christmas and there's one thing that is always a cure: chicken soup! If you're sick, you have to make chicken soup. My mom always did, but I've never made my own until now.

The process is actually a lot simpler than I imagined. Really all you need is chicken broth, some veggies and some chicken. Of course you could go old school and make your own broth, but let's not get carried away. According to my mom you can either use chicken that's skinned already or use chicken that has skin which will need more cooking time but will also make the broth richer. The second version also requires you to scoop the fat off the top of the soup after it cools.

I tried the skinless version. There weren't a huge amount of choices in chicken pieces, and as I've mentioned before, I'm pretty picky about the meat I buy, when I do buy meat. I bought some fairly thin breast pieces and tossed them in a pot with chicken broth, chopped carrots, chopped celery, chopped garlic, dill, and dried parsley. Everything boils for about half an hour and voila! you have chicken soup. I think for my first try it came out very well.Soup number 2 was based loosely on a recipe for split pea turnip soup, which I think also came from mom. I had looked at the recipe vaguely a few times but it involves a crock pot and dried split peas so I just created my own version using frozen turnips and frozen peas.

I boiled vegetable stock with frozen turnips, frozen peas, celery, garlic and a potato cut in chunks. I also added onion powder, a pinch of turmeric, a pinch of paprika. I boiled it all for about half an hour or so then let it cool off a bit and blended it with the handheld blender or 'motorboat'. I left chunks in it, but I blended the majority of it.

Above is the photo before the blend and below is after the blend.


It came out nice and hearty like I was hoping. It's a great winter soup! Nice amount of flavor and a good texture. Soup for the win!