Dinner is Served!

Okay, so my first content post! Tonight I made Soba noodles with Chicken, sauteed green onions, broccoli, & garlic, and shiitake mushrooms in a roasted peanut sauce. It's really easy to modify box dinners, they often include suggestions right on the box.

I started with a frozen chicken breast and a box of Simply Asia Roasted Peanut Noodles.

The first step was to get the chicken cooked.

We have a really nice electric griddle my wife got from her parents, and it is a treat to cook chicken on. It even had some leftover bacon grease, so I didn't even need to oil it. [Bacon grease is one of the greatest fats to cook things in; it hardly imparts any flavor to what you're cooking, it doesn't burn like butter can, and doesn't dry out meat]

Well, I guess the first step was to put a pot of water on the stove to boil for the noodles, but I figure that's unnecessary to show.

I cut up the chicken breast while it was still partially frozen, it was thawing in the fridge since breakfast. If you're cutting meat into bite-sized pieces before cooking it, it's best to cut while it's still partially frozen. This gives you much more control over your knife moving through the meat; when meat is room temperature and uncooked, not only is it really malleable, but the fat can be nigh impossible to slice through cleanly, unless your knives are scalpel-sharp (mine aren't)

Here's the chicken on the griddle, cut up and starting to cook. However, I still need to season the chicken. As I mentioned, the bacon grease doesn't season what you cook, so I'll have to add something else.

I chose to use Rice Vinegar and sea salt. The vinegar also tenderizes the meat a little, due to the acid in it. The vinegar cooks off quite quickly so I just needed to cover the griddle, and suddenly I'm steaming the chicken in addition to cooking it on a hot plate! This keeps the chicken moist.

So the chicken is now cooked through and a lot of the vinegar has cooked off. This means I'm ready to set the meat aside and get started on the next thing, right? Nope! I like to brown chicken when I'm putting it in something like the noodles tonight, or when making chicken salad. How do you do this? Just keep cooking it. Eventually the effluvia will start to carmelize and then you're ready to start watching the chicken to make sure it doesn't burn. With the bacon grease and vinegar as a buffer, it's unlikely to burn, but there's always the chance.

Look at that! Isn't that beautiful?

Now it's time to put aside the chicken and start cooking the next additional ingredients. But wait! Now the bottom of the pan is sticky with carmelized food bits! [These are the "brown bits" you're often told to scrape up when cooking meat in a stew-pot for a stew recipe]

It's hard to see, but the brown bits are there. How do you get rid of that without having to wash the pan?

There's a secret: while the pan is still hot, pour come cooking sherry or other wine vinegar into the pan. The alcohol soaks the brown bits and then boils off very rapidly, loosening them from the bottom of the pan. You can do this even while your meat is still cooking, it'll just season it some more.

Whoosh!

And now I can scrape my spatula along the pan and the brown bits are almost gone! There they are floating a the bottom. I just poured it into the garbage, because I'm not doing anything else with it.


So now, on to the vegetables!

To start, I cut up the green onions and broccoli [From the Farmer's Market!]
I included the broccoli leaves as an experiment, I tasted one and it tasted like broccoli, so I figured it might cook like spinach leaves and add some texture to the final dish.

Now, I needed a new oil to cook the vegetables in. I decided to keep with the asian theme and use sesame seed oil. Now, sesame seed oil has a very strong flavor, so if you want to use it as an alternative to vegetable or olive oil, be aware that you should use a little less because otherwise it'll overpower a lot of your other flavors, like putting too much dried celery into a broth.

Back in the griddle again. I turned the heat down a little because I didn't want the onions and broccoli florets to cook too much before the broccoli stems did. Once things started going, I just put the cover back on and let it go.

By now the water was finally hot enough to put the noodles in.

After the prescribed 5-7 minutes the noodles were looking very nice.

Here's my plate of extras. At the top is some dried shiitake mushrooms I forgot we had, and decided the throw in at the last minute. The dark spots on the broccoli is minced garlic, which I put in about halfway through cooking the broccoli on the griddle. At last! time to put everything together.

Here's everything but the sauce, I put an extra half-cup of water or so to thin the sauce out to compensate for the extra goodies in the dish.

Everything with the sauce. I let everything boil for another 3 minutes or so, stirring constantly so the noodles didn't glue themselves to the bottom of the pot. I added a dusting of corn starch to help thicken the sauce as well.

At last! Dinner for me. The sauce thickened beautifully. My only thoughts are that I should have let the broccoli stems cook just a little bit more, and soaked the mushrooms a little more before throwing everything together.

All in all, it's another successful meal. From start to finish it took about 45 minutes.
I'll have to wait for my wife to get home so she can have some and tell me her opinion about it.