Changing It Up

It’s Sunday, and you know what that means – Marathon Training Update! If you didn’t realize that Sunday meant that, I suppose you do now.

Though it was only week 2 of training, I decided to mix things up a bit. This mix-up came in two forms.
Form 1 - I bought new shoes! More specifically, I bought a completely different brand of shoe than I typically wear. I’ve been a Saucony gal ever since I started running – the Ride my shoe of choice for my neutral foot. Alas, the good folks at Saucony keep making minor tweaks – and after the latest I started noticing a rather unpleasant pain to the side of my right knee. I suspected the shoes due to a few factors – the timing of the pain, the fact that it would feel better with rest but return as soon as I ran again, and the frequency with which I needed to re-tie my shoes. The last sounds odd, but I suspected that my foot was rolling more and loosening the laces. Luckily, the fellow at my local running shoe emporium confirmed my suspicion, and fitted me into my new kicks – the Brooks Defyance 2 (nope, I don’t know why they spell it that way, either). After this week of training – no more knee pain! The big triumph here was not only that the pain is gone, but that I accurately diagnosed the problem. Makes me feel like I know what I’m doing!

Form 2 – I’ve been mixing it up with my training. For the first week I really just went out and ran however many miles the coach suggested for that day. This week, I added some hill training and speed play. I had two reasons for doing these things – the first was simply to keep it interesting. We’re not yet going long enough distances that the workout alone is enough. The second is that I am painfully slow. While I have no need (or real inclination) to become amazingly fast, I’d like to get a little bit better so that I can finish the marathon in a reasonable time. Both hill work and speed training should help with that – it will be interesting to see how this develops.

On the fundraising front, I am well on my way to meeting my first target of $1000 by December 13th! So far I’ve hit $984! Thank you to everyone who has bought raffle tickets, baked goods, or made a straightforward donation to my page! Incidentally, I’ve decided that donations of $50 or more will earn the donor a mile of the marathon dedicated to that person. This is retroactive, so if you’ve made such a donation, let me know what mile you’d like! I’m reserving the last .2, though – that one’s for me.

One last marathon note for this week, and then tomorrow it’s back to food – shellfish, in fact! You may have noticed a new link section on this here blog, reserved for my teammates who’ve started training blogs. You should make sure to visit them! Next week I think I’ll give a specific run-down of each one and what it’s about, but Jess, Kelly, and Laura are all great, fun writers – so go give them some love!

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

Thanksgiving is, no surprise, my favorite holiday. This has quite a lot to do with the food, of course, which in our family includes homemade cranberry sauce, loads of sides (especially boiled onions!), and enough desserts for each person at the table to have one personally along with the turkey. There’s more to it than that, however. I love Thanksgiving because, more than any other holiday, I feel like it’s about getting together with the people you love and just being together.

It’s been a long, strange year filled with a lot of change. My oldest friend had a baby, my youngest sister got married. People near and dear to me have lost loved ones, and I’ve seen some close calls on that front, too. I decided to run a marathon. What a crazy, tumultuous year, and all of it, even the sad parts, give me reasons to be thankful. Thankful I have a job, and a family who loves me, and some of the best friends a lady could ever have. Thankful most of all for my dear, sweet boyfriend, who supports and aids me in all of my crazy endeavors, including this blog.

So to all of you, my family and friends, who make me feel like everything I do is worth doing: Thank you. I love you. Have an amazing Thanksgiving, and I can’t wait to hear what you ate!

The Edgar Allan Pomme

Back in October, you may recall, I hosted a cocktail naming contest. This provoked heavy competition – the readers of this blog are seriously talented in the arena of bestowing names. In addition to the eventual winner, there were several names that intrigued me to the point that I decided I would create cocktail to fit the moniker.

One such was the Edgar Allan Pomme. This name, suggested by my dear friend Nandi, appealed strongly to my love of wretched puns. For those not up on your high school literature and French classes, this is of course a play on the name of famous writer and ne’er-do-well Edgar Allan Poe, combined with the French word for apple. Unfortunately for the purposes of my contest, there was not one whit of apple-related anything in the cocktail that came to be known as Demeter’s Lament. The joke doesn’t really work without it, so I swore I’d create an apple-based concoction in its honor.

So! This cocktail would include apple. I toyed with the idea of applejack or some other apple brandy, but in the end decided to go with plain old sweet cider – having something non-alcoholic to start would give me more options, I felt. But what would really speak to the essence of Poe?

There are, after all, many rumors about the cause of his death and the controversial substances he may (or may not) have indulged in. I considered absinthe, though it’s likely that his use of it is a myth, or whiskey, which is less so. I pondered and pondered – and then it hit me. Amontillado!

Amontillado is a type of sherry – medium dark and on it’s own, not particularly sweet. It has a strong nutty flavor that I suspected would pair well with the cider, and even better, was featured prominently in a Poe short story, The Cask of Amontillado. You can read the full text by clicking the link, but the gist is that the nameless narrator, tired of being insulted by a gentleman named Fortunato, decides to take revenge by walling the inaccurately named fellow in the catacombs. The narrator’s lure to get Fortunato right where we wants him is none other than the titular cask.

Perfectly fitting for my drink! Sherry and cider alone seemed a bit dull, however, so I decided to add a bit of dark rum – a traditional cider accompaniment, a dash of bitters, and, rumor or no, an absinthe rinse. (Except, lacking absinthe, it’s actually a Pernod rinse, continuing the ambiguity.) I played with the proportions a bit, and settled on 1:1:1 cider, rum, sherry. You could probably bump the liquors up to 1.5 – this is a somewhat light drink – but I liked the way they melded this way. This is a lovely fall drink to serve at Thanksgiving, and the sherry on its own makes a perfect digestif!

Without further ado, The Edgar Allan Pomme:

1 oz sweet cider
1 oz Amontillado Sherry
1 oz Goslings Rum
2 dash Fee’s Whiskey Barrel Aged Bitters
Pernod to rinse

Combine all ingredients except the Pernod in an ice-filled shaker. Shake well. Rinse a cocktail glass with Pernod and strain the contents of the shaker into the glass. Write tortured poetry and beware black birds.

We Have a Winner!

I’ve decided that henceforth, from now until April 19th, Sunday posts will be devoted to training updates.  Apologies to those who prefer food to running, but fear not!  I will try to keep a food element in these posts, whether it’s training nutrition or the winner of the pie raffle.

Oh, hey, we have a pie raffle winner to announce today!  What a coincidence.  The winner of the November raffle is:
Ticket number 340027: Jessica Baker!

No, I’m not kidding, that is really her last name, and she is both a co-worker and a member of my marathon team! Visit her blog! Congratulations, Jess – just let me know what kind of pie you want!

So, week one of official training is completed – 12 miles down from the 576.2 that I’m traveling to the finish line.  Since I’ve trained for half marathons before this week was pretty light.  I made it more difficult on myself by running with my gigantic trail backpack, which I fully believe played a part in increasing my speed in my second half marathon.  (For those of you who don’t know, I’ve run two.  I’m quite slow, but did manage to improve my time by 8 minutes the second time around!)

We had our first coalition run on Saturday – the Boston Partners in Education team shares a coach with four other teams.  Our coach has run an impressive number of marathons and coached literally thousands of people through Boston, so this should be fruitful.  This first group run was just four miles – from Back Bay over the Mass Ave bridge and back.  It was a gorgeous day for a run, and the group dynamic was a lot of fun, not to mention providing a show of strength at street crossings and the like.  I won’t be able to make every coalition run due to some other Saturday commitments, but I do intend to be at as many of them as I can squeeze in.

On the fundraising front I am up to $802 – 20% of goal!  This is thanks to the wonderful donations of family and friends, as well as the crazy number of raffle tickets and baked goods sold at the Museum of Toys and Pop Culture‘s Nightmare Before Christmas event. (The exhibit is up until mid-February and is only $3 – go see it!)    Check out the super-cute cupcakes that my guy and I made for the opening:

The Jacks were golden cake, the pumpkins were, appropriately enough, pumpkin flavored! Both were frosted with vanilla buttercream. I also sold chocolate chip cookies, my go-to, no-brainer baked good. Thank you so much to Comicazi and MOTAP for giving me the opportunity to raise money at your event – you guys are my heroes! Support your local businesses, folks – this whole mission is about community and these guys have been big proponents of it for almost ten years!

Here’s hoping the next 21 weeks of training will be as good as week one! Thanks again to all of you for your encouragement and support!

LUPEC Tiki Bash!

My whirlwind weekend continued on Saturday with LUPEC Boston’s Tiki Bash! LUPEC – Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails – is a ladies cocktail society largely made up of some of the best bartenders in Boston. The Tiki Bash was a benefit to support On the Rise, a community for women in crisis. Since I have a strong interest in cocktails, feminism, and social justice, this seemed like the perfect event!

I purchased tickets at my friendly neighborhood bar and convinced a friend to accompany me in these shenanigans. The tickets got us, in addition to 4 drink tickets, some free cocktail appetizers from local restaurants, a burlesque show, cocktail demonstrations, hula lessons, dancing, and a performance by Uke Springsteen, to my knowledge the only man covering the oeuvre of Bruce Springsteen on the ukulele. What wonders were awaiting us!

When we arrived, nearly everyone was in either period costume or their best tiki garb. For those who don’t know, tiki-culture has had several revivals. It was started way back in the 1930s by Don the Beachcomber, an American who’d traveled the world and brought back various influences from his time in the tropics, which he incorporated into his California restaurant upon his return. The movement really gained ground in the 1950′s, however, when American service-men returned from tours of the South Pacific. Tiki-culture, while stylistically influenced by Polynesian mythology and aesthetics, is really an American invention. It’s characterized by the use of tropical imagery, lots of fruit, and in the case of the cocktails, an incredible amount of rum.

The spirit of American tiki was certainly alive in that room! Dress styles ranged from the 40′s to the 70′s, and the food included amazing Dan-Dan noodles from Myers + Chang, pineapple cake from the Franklin Cafe, and oysters from Island Creek Oysters.

This party marked the first time I’d ever eaten raw oysters, and I’m sad to say that I neglected to take a picture. Fear not, for I plan to return to a proper oyster house and do it right! That said the Island Creek Oysters were delicious. Served from a long boat of ice, they were fat and salty, with a sweet taste. I did have a shudder-moment from the texture, but not enough to put me off of doing it again!

Cocktails included the classic mai-tai,, which is widely considered the classic tiki drink. A blend of rums, orgeat, and citrus, this is my preferred tiki cocktail for its relative simplicity. Also served up were Painkillers, Fogcutters, and my NEW favorite tiki cocktail, the LUPEC original Ken-Tiki. This beauty captured my heart mostly through the virtue of being the only drink there with a base of bourbon rather than rum, but it was also a wonderful balance of tart and sweet fruit flavor.

All in all it was a wonderful event, and I can’t wait until the next LUPEC benefit bash! Apologies for the lack of photos – the only ones I ended up taking were of Uke!

(Visit here for a more pictorial write-up!)

Getting A Head

This past weekend was a whirlwind of adventure, both food and otherwise! I hope to capture all of it, but for now I will just address the events of Friday night, and the triumph of myself and my good friend Nandi.

It all started, as so many of these things do, with a trip to Craigie on Main. For those of you who don’t know, Craigie is a Cambridge restaurant that prides itself on the use of locally-sourced, organic, and seasonal ingredients. The cooking has its roots in French cuisine, but working with those local ingredients and with the occasional eye toward fusion. Originally known as Craigie Street Bistrot, the restaurant started life in a tiny, living-room sized space in the basement of an apartment building located, appropriately enough, on Craigie Street. Almost exactly a year ago they traded that space for a much larger one over in Central Square, on Main Street (you can see how they’ve kept the naming convention simple). In addition to quite a bit more seating and a more convenient location, Craigie on Main (COM) has the advantage of a fully stocked bar, with accompanying bar menu. It was here that Nandi and I were headed; we are both avid proponents of the bar menu in fancy restaurants. This philosophy may be the basis for entirely its own post, in fact. In the meantime, here is a picture of the lovely Prospect Park cocktail that I had when we were seated:

Now, in addition to serving very local, very fresh food, the owner/chef at COM, Tony Maws, is known for his fondness for utilizing the less common cuts of meat. His “Chef’s Whim” prix fixe menus often include sweetbreads, or kidneys, and one of the appetizers on the bar menu are crispy pig’s tails, a delightful little harmony of crispy skin and soft fat. This is a restaurant for adventurous eaters.

When we sat down, the bartender gave us menus and told us there were two specials that night. The first, brand new, was a whole roasted chicken, served on a bed of soft polenta. This sounded excellent, and we were tempted, until he told us the other special.

Half of a piglet’s head. Roasted.

Well, there was no question about which way we would go! (Actually, that is totally untrue. We deliberated for what felt like hours, and made the poor bartender strain his adjectival repertoire describing each of our choices. Never have I heard the word beautiful so often in the service of food.) In any case, the pork won out in the end, aided by the fact that it is confited before it is roasted, and the idea that the opportunity might not present itself again. We also ordered a side of Brussels sprouts cooked in duck fat, for health reasons.

The head takes half an hour to prepare, during which time we nibbled bread and speculated on whether Nandi’s husband, the Panda, would disown us for undertaking this adventure without him. We concluded that it was worth the risk. With a certain degree of pomp and circumstance, the head arrived.

It was beautiful.

Nandi took on the task of dividing the meat perfectly, starting at the chin. The skin offered some resistance, but the meat beneath could have been cut with a spoon. The crispy skin crunched in perfect opposition to the buttery fat and sweet, perfectly porky meat. This was the tails turned up to 11. This was pig nirvana.

We made our way through the entire head. The ears were fantastic – not quite as soft as the marinated version at the Gourmet Dumpling House,, but not nearly as chewy as I feared. While the cheek is generally considered the n’est plus ultra of the pig head eating world, we were particularly enamored of the snout. It seemed to offer the most variety of tastes and textures.

The Brussels sprouts were also amazing, but alas, didn’t stand a chance against the sheer onslaught of pork.

This was a particularly rich indulgence, and certainly one I wouldn’t partake in too often – god knows what our cholesterol levels were at the end of that meal. We were proud to have done it, however, and if you are a lover of pork, I can think of no truer expression of it.

And Now For Something Completely Different

I have so many food-related stories to tell you all! I finally made the fig and bacon Brussels sprouts! I ate more unusual pig parts! Strange seafood was tried!

But you’re going to hear about all of those things tomorrow.

Today I’m going to write about something that has very little to do with food, but it’s important to me and I hope that you’ll bear with me. It’s about education.

You see, when I was a kid, I grew up in a pretty small town outside of Boston. It wasn’t exactly the country, (and even less so, now) but it was hardly a city. By the time I graduated high school, there were only 52 kids in my entire class. That boiled down to a lot of individual attention in school, which I needed. I was smart and capable but had difficulties due to some minor learning disabilities having to do with writing (these have largely cleared up thanks to the rise of the personal computer. I can write, as long as it has nothing to do with physically making marks on paper) and having several teachers take an interest in making sure that I didn’t just waste away almost certainly got me through high school. I was also lucky enough to have parents who cared to help me and who believed I had the tools to succeed, if I could just tap into them.

The thing is, many kids, especially in an urban setting, are not so lucky. Their parents and their teachers DO truly care about them, of course, but there are too many students who need too much help for their teachers to put as much time into them as mine did into me, and those same kids often have parents who are stretched thin trying to keep them fed, or who want to help them with their schoolwork but don’t have the tools themselves.

Fortunately, there are organizations that are trying to fill that gap. I’ve been involved with one of them, Boston Partners in Education, for eight years in one capacity or another. What they do is work to fill the need for individual attention for Boston Public School students by providing them with volunteer academic mentors. These are people who give up their time to spend an hour or more, once a week, helping kids in the subjects they’re struggling in. Along the way they develop a connection with those kids, and are sometimes able to help them in other ways. Since 2001 I’ve been an academic mentor for Boston Partners. In 2006 I increased my involvement with the organization and began working for them, first as a program manager and eventually as Program Director. Now, in 2009, I’m committing myself to Boston Partners even more.

As of today, I’m going to be training for the 2010 Boston Marathon®. This is a big honor, and the culmination of one of my other interests, running, but I’m able to do it because of Boston Partners. They’ve given me a number – in return I’ve committed to raising $4,000. I’m nervous about the size of that goal, but excited at the same time – excited to meet such a challenge, and excited about what it means for the organization I care so much about.

Clearly, I’m writing about this here because I’m hoping that some of you will sponsor me. Some of you already have, and that’s amazing. For those of you who would like to do so, I have an online donation page at http://www.firstgiving.com/erinmcgrath. My first fundraising goal is $1,000 by December 13th – a quarter of my goal.

However, donations are not all I’m looking for, and I hope I have something to offer in return! The main thing I need is support. Starting today, when I run my first official two miles of training, until I cross the finish line on April 19th, I will run 576.2 miles. I will be so grateful for any words of encouragement that you can offer, and I hope that those of you who know me personally will come out and cheer on race day.

I’m also going to be running some fun events, and many of those are related to food! Starting this week I’ll be raffling off a chance to win a homemade holiday pie, and I’ll be selling cookies at a few local events. Raffle tickets will be a dollar each – five dollars will get you six tickets. Feel free to contact me via email if you’d like tickets, or make a donation on the Firstgiving page and put RAFFLE in the comments. Comment me if you’d like more info about where I’ll be with cookies for sale.

Coming up will be more baked goods, some trivia, and a lot of other good times with fun people! I hope you’ll forgive the occasional hijacking of this blog for updates on my training and goals. This is a big part of my life and I thank you all for helping me with it!

Vegetable Therapist – Let’s Talk About Squash

Winter squash, that is.  While both summer and winter squashes are members of genus Cucurbita, they differ in that summer squashes are harvested when they are tender, innocent babies, whilst winter squash are eaten as hardened adults. This lends the winter squash considerably more sweetness and flavor, but also makes cutting it up a challenge, and greatly increases cooking time. Thus, family members though they may be, I will discuss what the heck to do with a summer squash another time.

Technically, one can eat all of the above-ground parts of the squash (I’m guessing you could eat the roots as well, but there’s not much to them). Stems and leaves can be munched like any other green, and even the flowers are tasty, most famously when battered and stuffed with cheese. The fruit, however, is the bit we’re interested in today. Yes, I said fruit – the bit with the seeds in is always the fruit! Squash fruit is specifically a type of false berry known as a pepo, a fact that I personally find fascinating. The falsehood apparently has to do with the fact that most of the flesh is not the ovary – it’s extra meat to help protect the seeds.

I personally find that plant-meat incredibly delicious. Winter squash is a bit of work, but the reward is some of the sweetest, butteriest vegetable that a person can eat, even without adding any sugar or actual butter. While I do enjoy it boiled and mashed, in the Menace household we usually eat it roasted – simply chop it to bits, drizzle it in olive oil, salt, and pepper, and throw it in the oven at 375 or so until it turns brown and caramelized. You can peel it first if you like, but that’s an awful lot of work. If you’re making acorn squash (or any smaller, cup-shaped squash) you can add a little brown sugar and butter for an extra-tasty treat.

To really take it to the next level, however, invest in a little more work and make a stuffing for that baby. I made a recipe that I found on Chow last week and it was divine. Look at how beautiful it was:

What’s great about this recipe is that it becomes the entire meal. There’s starch and protein from the rice, a bit more protein from the nuts (confession: I used walnuts rather than pecans because that’s what I had in the house. It was very tasty, though perhaps a bit less decadent) and of course, plenty of vegetables. Sweet, salty, and savory tastes all getting together in harmony – it’s a beautiful thing, and the presentation is great.

Does anyone else have a favorite squash recipe? While I enjoy squash soup, particularly the Red Kuri Squash Soup at Myers + Chang, I’ve never made it. If you’ve got a great recipe, put it in the comments!

Yeast Extravaganza!

Let’s talk about yeast, my friends. It’s absolutely fascinating stuff, when you think about it. We all know that without yeast there would be no bread, and no beer, but did you know that yeast was the first eukaryote to have its genome sequenced as part of the Genome Project? It’s also being used to help clean up the environment – the yeast eats up nasty chemicals that leach into the soil. Pretty heady stuff for a simple one-celled fungus!

Well, this weekend I did not spend any time sequencing genomes, nor did I attempt any bioremediation with the instant yeast in my fridge. I did, however, make several kinds of bread that I’d like to share with you.

The first was a monkey bread for my nephew’s third birthday. Monkey bread is forbidden in our household, so I really only make it once a year for this event. Essentially yeasted rolls dipped in butter and sugar and then baked into a sticky, caramelly mass in a Bundt pan, it is forbidden because you simply pull apart the balls of dough and pop them into your mouth. This is rather addictive and given that monkey bread is maybe one of the most egregiously bad for you desserts in my baking arsenal it is not allowed in the house for waistline-security reasons.

(That’s last year’s batch. This year’s was slightly less deadly-looking, as it lacked the glaze on top).

Here is the one I made this year:

Some people will tell you that you can make monkey bread with Pillsbury Rolls from a can. These people are wrong. I think that the true appeal of the monkey bread is that, underneath all that butter and sugar is a beautiful, hardly-sweetened yeast bread. Yeast makes bread rise, of course, but it also imparts its own wonderful flavor to a baked good, a warm mustiness that cuts through the sweetness of whatever the treat is and adds depth. It seems a shame to lose that in favor of convenience.

Next we made pizza! This is another place where people will go out to the store to buy dough, and I just don’t understand. It’s incredibly easy to make your own dough, and even easier if you have a food processor. Since it only takes an hour to rise, even time isn’t so much of a consideration. The etymology of the word yeast comes from a word meaning “to boil, to bubble over.” In On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee notes that “this derivation underlines the way in which fermentation seemed to be a kind of cooking of the cereal gruel, a transformation from within.” Watching your homemade pizza dough go from this tiny, tight little ball to a great shaggy mass is a fine first hand experience of that transformation. In addition I think this weekend we made one of our most beautiful pizzas yet!

Simultaneous to the pizza cooking I decided to make some wheat bread in the bread machine to have the following morning. I have a friend who makes gorgeous artisan loaves at home, and it always makes me feel a bit guilty about the bread machine. Certainly you don’t get the same kind of bread out of it – it’s quite uniform and dull, and necessarily cannot have the beautiful shiny crust of a well-baked bread in the oven. However, I can have wheat bread cooking at the same time as a pizza that requires a 500-degree oven, and it makes perfectly lovely toast for breakfast. This winter I do hope to spend a bit more time on bread from the oven.

Alas, I don’t seem to have a picture of the bread! Half white, half wheat, it has a lovely airyness due to the yeast – the little fungus lightens and tenderizes baked goods by eating up the sugars in the dough and expelling carbon dioxide, making the bubbles that you see as the holes in your bread. A tiny bit of extra sugar makes the yeast go wild and makes very light bread, but a large amount of sugar decreases activity, which is why a sweet bread like a cinnamon bun is more dense than sandwich bread.

It was nice to get back to harnessing the power of yeast – in the summer I don’t use it nearly as much. I hope to use it again soon to make bagels, and perhaps return to brewing beer. What have you been making with yeast lately?

A Menu for Friday Fun

A few friends of mine are as excited about food as I am, and as we all get along and live close to each other we often get together on Friday nights to enjoy a meal and conversation.  Since going out all the time can get exceedingly expensive, we thought it would be a good idea to have rotating dinners at home.  I additionally came up with the idea that rather than bringing something over, we could each pay the host a few dollars – otherwise we end up eating nothing but snacks and drinking far too much wine, as that’s what people tend to bring.  Essentially we’re starting an extremely low-key and limited supper club.

I offered to host the inaugural event of the new system, and since it went pretty well I thought I’d share the menu with you all!

For an appetizer I put on my beloved relish plate some marcona almonds, aged Gouda cheese, and some Devils on Horseback.  For those who don’t know, the latter is a classic party appetizer – dates stuffed with blue cheese and an almond, then wrapped in bacon and cooked until the bacon crisps. Essentially the result is the perfect food – sweet, salty, crispy and a little funky from the blue cheese. Unlike Martha in the link I used Danish Blue rather than Stilton. I hope my friends forgive me.

For the main meal I decided to make my infamous “Chicken Breasts Marinated in Something, then Breaded and Fried.” I say infamous because this dish is the one that prompted me to write this post. The Something in which the chicken breasts are marinated in changes depending largely on what is in the house at the time of creation. Truth be told, the post you’re reading now is my attempt to recapture last night’s recipe, because I was rather pleased with the results. Ephemeral recipes be damned!

I decided to make a vaguely Asian marinade for these particular breasts. I’m afraid there are no precise measurements, but it consisted of:
A healthy pour of rice vinegar
Even more soy sauce
A blob of honey
Fresh grated ginger
Fresh grated orange peel
1 clove garlic, also grated
Fennel and pink peppercorns, crushed
A pinch of cardamom
Olive oil (regular, NOT extra virgin)

Whisk everything together until it’s blended, then throw in your chicken breasts. I always butterfly these – who needs to eat a two-inch thick chicken breast? Besides, they’ll cook much more quickly and uniformly if they’re thin. I let them marinate about half an hour, then dredged them first in egg, then in a mix of panko and rice flour. This combo makes the crispiest danged breading you’ve ever eaten in your life, in addition to keeping nicely with my pseudo-Asian theme. Heat some oil in a pan and toss those in for about three minutes per side. Do NOT flip them over until the breading crisps if you have any interest in keeping it on the chicken. The number one key to properly cooking breaded cutlets is to be patient. Keep the heat around medium and don’t play with the food!

We had brown rice and my favorite brussels sprouts for sides. The sprouts weren’t really in keeping with my theme, but we all know I love them and particularly wanted a couple of my friends to try them, since I’ve been talking them up so much. There were also some rolls, but to be honest I just bought those at Foodie’s. Cut me some slack – I worked a full day before all of this.

For dessert I just threw in a few of my chocolate chip cookies – I make dough ahead of time and freeze it so as to have cookies at a whim. Folks had a couple of the Demeter’s Laments, some wine, and some good conversation. For a few dollars each I think it was well worth it! Restaurants can be wonderful, but I’m looking forward to more nights at home.