Fatty Greens Make Me Smile

Sometimes whole meals can be influenced by just one ingredient. I'm a fan of collard greens (really, greens of any shape or size), and picked up a nice looking bunch last time we went to the local grocery store. Looking around the kitchen, I didn't really see a meal materialize in front of me from all the stuff we had, so I peered deeper, and found a seed for a pretty good plate of food with this humble leafy green.

I start my greens with a source of fat. We had a rasher of bacon chillin in the fridge, so I chopped half of it and rendered it down.

This new stove cooks pretty fast, so I had to speed my normal leisurely process a bit: I rinsed the collards, chopped off the bottom stems, and rough chopped the leaves into 2" squares.

As soon as the chopping and so forth was done, the bacon was perfect. Just dark enough in color to show off the brown/red, no burnt parts, and no clear fatty parts. I added the greens and stirred. Within seconds, this dish was done. Note how the leaves get REALLY SHINY from all the bacon fat. Best part? The bacon lends so much flavor that you don't really have to season this dish at all.

With the star of the show complete, I had to find other complimentary dishes that I knew I could cook quickly. I was a line cook for a few years, so I know frozen chicken breasts can be cooked in a matter of minutes. I transferred the greens to a smaller pot (to keep them warm longer), and got to business.

I started with some olive oil, dropped the chicken (to make a dark crispy exterior), then added about a half cup of water to steam. Cover tightly for about 2 minutes. Then remove the breasts and chop into 2" cubes, return to the pan. Add some salt, pepper, garlic powder (not garlic salt, that stuff is horrible), and sage. Recover and stir occasionally until all the pink is gone from the interior of the meat.

I added a head of broccoli to give us some color and fiber and all that. Recover and let the broccoli get dark green but not brown.

One last thing: from the start I was also making a quick box of Uncle Ben's broccoli cream rice stuff. No one said you can't make some short cuts!

Magical Meal

I find it refreshing when someone presents me with a cooking challenge. Not something stupidly hard like that crap they air on TV where they have four hours to cook for thirteen thousand people... but stuff like, "We don't have any food in the house.*"

Really? No food... well then, I see a few cans of tomatoes, some chili beans, a box of tostadas expired from last year, one chicken breast in the freezer, and a half-head of lettuce. Also the pitiful remains of some cream cheese and some weirdly shriveled cucumbers in the bottom of the fridge.

Clearly our meal was going to have a mexican theme, and there probably wouldn't be enough chicken for everyone, so I whipped everything together in a frenzy (because we were _HONGRY_), and set stuff out. First step was to slather some beans onto the toasted tostadas. Get a good base going, you know.

Next up was to make a lattice of lettuce. Some veg, you know, for the growing minds and bodies of our household.

The chicken was cubed and pan-seared with some oil and onion slices, then I added a can of Ro-tel with chilies. It came out spicy as hell, but really, when you combine everything together, it isn't so bad.

Top it off with some bits of cream cheese and sliced cucumber. The cream cheese melted a bit, and the cucumbers turned out to be some sort of gee-whiz gourmet variety that embodied the very essence of cucumber. Very tasty.

And that's it. No weird shit like spam, no scraping together enough change to run to the store for this or that. Just simple stuff combined together to make a meal out of nothing.

Magic is both awesome and delicious.

*footnote: We hadn't gotten paid yet since moving to the new house, so we were clinging to the remains of food from the other house. We've since gotten paid and have filled the house with food.