Previously, my rate of cooking efficacy--like you could cook, eat it, and possibly feed it to someone else, was like 50%. Chickens cooked by Miss Lady...hmmm....could be delicious (less likely), could be merely edible, or could be just...no: dry, raw, weird. There's no telling. Recently, my rate of total edibility went up, maybe to like 75%, oddly due to poverty. You see, when you spend 1 million dollars on veterinary care for your pet, you can't really afford to waste money effing up dishes, especially if you still mostly insist on using expensive items from Whole Foods. Anyhow, I'd like to share my recent successful recipes, especially for other cooking challenged people. Nothing here will be earthshatteringly gourmet, just accomplishable.
Italian Sausage and Stuff
Ingredients
- Italian Sausage (Or if you can, this artisan sausage from the farmer's market near my house on Sundays. Course, if you do that then you can't embarrass the meat counter guy and possibly yourself by saying "I neeed some hawwt Italian sausage, the big one, please." Not that I did that this weekend. Nope.)
- Basil or something else green
- Something brown, like bulgar, rice, or quinoa
- Tomatoes, fresh or in a can
- Maybe some spices or garlic powder.
Find your big pastel skillet. Put the sausage in it and brown it. Sausage is greasy, so you don't need oil, which most people probably know through common sense, not trial and error. While you are doing that, it turns out to be efficient to cook your brown stuff. I do that by boiling to wrong amount of water, then pouring some out once that becomes apparent. I lost my measuring cup several years ago, and um...it hasn't come up that much till now. Don't worry--if this system stops working, I'll buy one. Once the sausage seems brown, which is confusing because it still kinda looks pink even when its brown, you put in the tomatoes, and spices. After you stir that put in the green stuff. I originally did this with basil, but I've been using Organic Girl Viva la France greens lately. I wouldn't say it adds much flavor, but it does add veggies. Anyhow, once all that seems pretty done, you mix in the brown. Oh yeah, at some point you already remembered to turn down the heat. How much brown stuff depends on how much you haphazardly made, how carby you are feeling, or how many of your storage containers are clean. If most of them are dirty and still at work, you could even skip the brown stuff, though I usually need it to be full.
Curry or Vindaloo Rotation Type Dish
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Ingredients
- Chicken breasts or thighs-- This could depend on how much money you have and/or whether or not you are a protein type a gal. Turns out that dark meat is a little better for my metabolism AND I find it a little easier to cook.
- Veggies like carrots, cauliflower, and broccoli. It's nice if this is fresh, but it is easier to keep a few frozen bags of this mix on hand, so that's what I've been doing lately. It's like if being prepared is an excellent way to be prepared.
- Chickpeas/Garbanzo-- WTF do they have two names?
- Green stuff like in the last recipe
- Some Indian sauce marketed to white people-- I rotate them out, or otherwise I get overloaded on the flavors, but my favorites are the $7 tubs of Vindaloo or Curry at Whole Foods in the cheese section, which is probably not their official name. The Korma is excellent too, but it has too much cream for me to do for daily eating. Target oddly carries a green curry sauce I like too.
- Brown rice
It is really pretty similar to the sausage. Slice up the chicken small enough to cook in a skillet. Get your big skillet, which is aqua instead of pink as you would prefer. Brown the chicken so that it's cooked. Not like beyond a shadow of a doubt, since you'll probably bring your sauce to a boil, but pretty much cooked. Then stir in your sauce. Add the veggies first and wait a minute if frozen. Add the chickpeas and greens sometime around here. After your sauce is kinda boily, turn down the heat. Ideally you would simmer this with a lid, but I don't have a lid for the big blue skillet, so sometimes I put a cookie sheet on top of that and call it good enough. Other times, I just say fuck it and cook it without the lid. Oh yeah, I hope you already cooked the rice. Once the chicken mixture simmers for a bit-- timing depends on hunger!-- stir in the rice, being sure to be like "oh fuck, there's all this extra water here because I refuse to measure" and pour said water out. Simmer while you wash up some plastic containers and curse it up while you try to find matching lids from your collection of 800 lids. Voila, dinner and lunch and dinner is served.
Also, I do a Tex Mex version of this as well. Same shit, but use beans, corn, onions, and vaguely Tex Mex sauce.
