The Green Tea Chicken Expiriment

This was my second attempt - to be honest, it came out only about as well as my first. 

My neighbor told me that if you throw some chicken in on a bed of uncooked rice + water, you'll have a yummy dinner.   Well, I don't much care for white rice, so I never bothered.  But then one day I saw a lemongrass chicken dinner that I couldn't eat somewhere, and thought that maybe using green tea + brown rice, I could make a yummy "one dish" meal.  Well, I'd need vegetables (a nice steamed asparagas would go well). 

So, my theory was good - I brewed about a cup and a half of a lemon-grassy green tea, added it to 3/4 cup of my favorite short grain brown rice, threw some frozen chicken on it + threw it in the oven at 350F for about an hour.   The chicken was overdone and the rice was underdone.  And I had WAY too much liquid.  And too much rice. 

Tonight I tried it again.  This time it was 1 cup of tea to 1/2 cup rice, and I tried to thaw the chicken while pre-cooking the rice for about 20minutes.  Unfortunately, I think my still-mostly-frozen chicken kept some of the rice from cooking all the way through, even though I mixed it up a bit half way through.  The rice was still a little underdone, when the chicken was done, and there was still too much liquid even though I cooked it with the lid off for the last 20 minutes. 

The flavor seems pretty good though - even with the thighs I used this time.  

I think the brown rice is really the difficult bit here - it takes much longer to cook than white rice.  But I also think it's soo much yummier that I'm keeping it! 

Next time - 2/3 cup tea, 1/2 cup rice,  cook for ~20 minutes while thawing the chicken ENTIRELY, cook another 30, stir (leave lid off if needed), cook at least 20 more minutes. 

American chop suey and other beef thoughts

I tend to eat moderately seasonally, but often the day-to-day menu items are so un-noteworthy that I come around to the same season again and think "What DID I eat last Novemeber?".  

Tonight, I'm eating my take on:

American Chop Suey

~ 1 T garlic

~1/2 cup of chopped onion

~ 1lb ground beef

~1/2 box of whole wheat elbow macaroni (ziti works, too)

~ 2/3 c of tomato sauce*

Optional:

~ 1/4 c chopped celery

cheese

Start water boiling for macaroni.  Saute the garlic, onion + celery in a large cast iron frying pan until the onion is translucent.  Add ground beef.  When the water is boiling, add the pasta + cook according to manufacturer's directions - err on the side of underdone.  When the ground beef is done, add the sauce, pasta and cheese + mix.  

*I use so little sauce in large part because sauce without vinegar and/or black pepper is REALLY hard to find and canned/jarred tomato products are a mold hazzard. So, I'm working off a relatively small stock of frozen sauce that I made when the tomatoes at the cheap farm stand near work were at their peak.  Next year, I want to hold a tomato sauce canning party... 

In other news, running into an old friend on Ravelry got me thinking about higher quality meat.  Supposedly, grass-fed beef is higher in omega-3, which I hear rumours is good for allergies.  

I usually buy the family pack of whatever % is on sale of ground beef + freeze it in roughly 1lb chunks.  Today, I thought I'd buy the higher-quality grass-fed stuff - but it was 9$/lb!! For ground meat!  And apparently, that's a fair price!  I bought the 3lb family pack of conventional for about 9$ total, instead.   Of course, it looks like my co-op has antibiotic/hormone free ground beef for $2.99/lb this week - I should stock up. 

I also looked into meat CSAs in my area - Chestnut Farms has a meat share that starts at 10lb/$80/mo for some regular and some high-quality cuts.  That's currently a bit too expensive for me, but it's better than $9/lb for the cheapest cuts!  

Oh well - that part of dinner was a little light on the vegetables, so I'm going to go have a "second course"!