30-Day Challenge: Three Day Stride
Day: 03
Days Left: 27
Some days nothing goes as planned. I don’t know why. It just does. I’m still new to yogurt-making and so I can’t say just what went wrong, but something did. No yogurt for breakfast—which is a good thing, really. I wanted to shake things up with this challenge and if I find a comfortable, reliable breakfast the first day and never progress from there, then I’m defeating my own purpose.
That said…
I love the fact that I can buy my eggs from the farm stand up the road. Sometimes they run out, and I have to wash them off myself (gasp!). The extra effort is well worth the comfort of knowing that there is nothing in my eggs that shouldn’t be there; the hens that laid them roam freely—I can go visit them if I have a mind to—and they’re not fed anything they shouldn’t be fed. All that leads to both a better egg and peace of mind for me.
Breakfast, then, was a scramble of eggs and kale and onions from a nearby farm stand, accompanied by whole wheat bread and butter—both of which I made myself. I should mention here that I don’t actually spend my entire day kneading bread and churning butter. As much as that kind of quaint lifestyle appeals to a certain part of me, there’s another facet of me who is truly appreciative of modern conveniences like bread-makers and blenders. That’s not to say that I haven’t made both butter and bread by hand and from scratch, mind you…
Around lunchtime, I found myself experimenting with the wheat berries I cooked yesterday. The end result was a wheat berry salad with tomato, cucumber and onion tossed with a drizzle of olive oil, lemon and a little salt. On impulse I pinched a few mint leaves from the plant on my deck and added them, finely chopped, to the salad. I thought it was pretty good… That is, until I went back to the salad bowl for dinner. Can I just tell you what a huge difference a few hours in the fridge can make? So fragrant and delicious.
On to dinner…
I fell in love a while back with clay-pot cooking. Serious, head-over-heels, butterflies-in-the-stomach, chills-up-my-back l-o-v-e. Everything I’ve made so far has been out of this world. I found my first clay pot (I now have four) a couple of years at a tag sale. Pristine and unused. I didn’t even fully realize what it was, I just liked it and shelled out the whopping $1 it took to make it mine. Later—much later—like a year (I don’t always get to things right away), I came a clay-pot cookbook from the mid 1970s—and everything I’ve made, from Curried Chicken with Guinness to Eggplant Imam Baaldi, has been so tender and wonderful and just indescribably delicious.
So for dinner I decided to revisit the recipe that got me hooked—Garden Fresh Chicken Breast. Here’s the recipe and a piece of advice:
If you have a clay-pot, use it; if you don’t, go out and get one—and then use it.
Garden Fresh Chicken Breast
Ingredients:
6 to 8 chicken breasts, halved (I like to use thighs or tenderloins, instead)
2 T flour (I use whole wheat)
2 tsp. salt
½ tsp. pepper
2 T butter (I use olive oil)
1 clove of garlic, crushed
½ lb. mushrooms, sliced thin (great to experiment with different kinds of mushrooms here!)
1 C shelled peas (I leave these out due to childhood trauma over having to eat my peas)
2 bay leaves
2 stalks of celery, chopped fine
½ C dry white wine
2 T fresh parsley, chopped
Instructions:
Soak the pot (top and bottom) in water for at least 15 minutes.
In a paper bag, mix together the flour, salt and pepper. Add the chicken and shake until coated.
Brown the chicken in butter (or oil) and garlic. Put the browned chicken in the bottom of the clay-pot. Add the sliced mushrooms, shelled peas, bay leaves and celery.
Heat the chicken drippings in the pan and add the white wine and parsley. Mix well and pour over the chicken.
Place the covered pot in a cold oven (this is important—do not preheat the oven). Set temperature to 480 degrees and cook for 45 minutes.
Ta-da! So fabulously delicious—trust me. Just as an aside, I was out of dry white wine and I haven’t yet gone to a local winery to get more, but I did happen to have the right amount of sake leftover and sitting in the refrigerator just waiting for a purpose.
The above recipe is from “The Clay-pot Cookbook: A New Way of Cooking in an Ancient Pot” by Georgia McLeod Sales and Grover Sales. (Atheneum, ©1974 Georgia MacLeod Sales and Grover Sales).
