Iron Chef Flax

I've been cooking a little bit recently. I don't exactly have crazy chef talents, but I can generally follow a recipe, and I wanted to cook for Alma on Valentine's Day. I perhaps ambitiously decided to make chicken breasts stuffed with spinach and goat cheese, not really taking into consideration how long it might take to do so.

First I had to chop up some shallots, which made my eyes sting like crazy. Then I pulled the stems off a bunch of spinach leaves and wilted them in a pan with the shallots. Once that was done I crumbled in the goat cheese and stirred it together to make the filling. Next I had to cut pockets into the raw chicken breasts, which was easier said than done even though I use a nice sharp knife. The chicken breasts weren't huge or anything, and in a couple cases were shaped such that a cut into the side of one end of the chicken would poke through the bottom of the chicken near the other end. This meant, of course, that when the filling was pushed in, it would start to seep out the bottom. Great.

Fortunately I was mostly able to hold the filling in place by completing the next step, which was breading the chicken. I rolled the breasts in flour, dunked them in an egg bath, and then rolled them in bread crumbs. After they sat in the fridge for a few minutes to set up, the breasts were pan-fried for a couple minutes on each side, and then put in the oven to bake for 20 minutes.

While the chicken was in the oven I worked on making a pasta side. I had decided to make my own sauce, a light lemon-butter-white wine number, but I hadn't read the recipe quite as carefully as I should have; at one point it instructed me to quarter the lemon, then drop all four pieces into the sauce and simmer for 20 minutes until reduced by half. At this point it was already almost 9 pm and I didn't have the time or energy to do that, so I just squeezed the lemon juice into the pot instead and skipped the rest of that step entirely.

In the end it took me around two hours to do everything and we didn't eat until about 9:15, but at least it was all good. The next night I actually made the same thing (this time with some steamed green beans as well, since we hadn't had a vegetable the first night), since I had bought more than I ended up needing the first night; the recipe called for four chicken breasts, but they come in packages of three. So I bought two of them, but decided that opening the last package when I wasn't going to use most of it was dumb and just saved it for the next day. Even without pasta, it still took about an hour and 45 minutes the second night, so I guess this is just a complicated recipe. The really annoying thing was spending over an hour on Sunday afternoon washing all the dishes from the previous night only to dirty most of them up again later that evening (and subsequently having to spend another 30-45 minutes doing dishes on Monday).

This weekend I told Alma I would cook for her again, and I decided to make lamb chops. Deliberately selecting the "quick and easy" filter on epicurious.com, I found this recipe, which seemed simple enough. However, I ran into a couple of issues at the store. Number one, the only ground cardamom they had was a small bottle retailing for 16 dollars, which I could not possibly justify (at that price it would have cost more than the lamb). Number two, the only lamb chops they had - and you could argue this is my fault for going no further than Dominick's for my meat purchasing needs - were loin chops, not rib chops as the recipe called for. I asked after rib chops but was told this was all they had; the guy held up an enormous package of lamb and suggested that I could cut it however I wanted, but needless to say that wasn't going to be happening (I don't know that I could even have identified the rib chops, let alone cut them out, and what would I have done with the rest of the lamb anyway?).

The cardamom was not missed. I threw a pinch of cinnamon into the marinade to make up for the sweetness (apparently you can approximate cardamom with equal parts cinnamon and nutmeg, so I wasn't far off, although we didn't have any nutmeg and I didn't find this out until I got home), but you couldn't really tell anyway. The rest of the marinade was a bunch of chopped garlic and a good deal of lime juice (I was just finishing fully squeezing out the second half of the lime I'd bought when Alma said, "Does it call for the juice of one lime?" Realizing I hadn't really looked, I saw it actually only called for two tablespoons, but I think it was fine; I had been worried that the marinade as called for in the recipe wasn't going to have nearly enough liquid to coat all the lamb, so it worked out), plus salt, pepper, cumin and olive oil. While the lamb marinated for 15 minutes, I started work on the sides, making couscous (from one of those Near East boxes, so as not to overextend myself like I perhaps had with the chicken) and vegetables (a Bird's Eye microwaveable steamer bag). Finally the lamb got cooked about 3 minutes on each side in a frying pan.

I think it turned out quite well; parts of some of the pieces didn't get completely coated in the marinade while in the bag (it was a little tricky because once they were in the bag they had a tendency to bunch up a little, since they were relatively thin pieces of raw meat), and because the lime juice had a slight pre-cooking effect (as it does in Peruvian ceviche), the pieces that didn't get fully coated (which were still red when I put them in the frying pan, as opposed to most of the lamb, which was darkening towards brown) were perhaps a little tougher post-frying. The pieces that were good, however, were really good. Alma and I easily finished off all the lamb between us.

So: cooking. I'm enjoying it. I always like doing nice things for Alma, of course, but it's also pretty fun for me and I'm glad I've been able to turn out edible things thus far (I bought a pizza at the store last night just in case, but fortunately we didn't need to use it). We'll see how much more of this I do in the months and years to come, but interesting developments will probably turn up here.

Oh yeah: how about that lack of posts in February? Man. Good job by me there.