Monday, March 22, 2010

Dinner for Two - Weekly meal planning

For those of you who are law students or have been law students, or know someone who is a law student you know how limited time is when it comes to cooking, particularly if it is healthy, well balanced cooking. This is particularly true as the daunting finals weeks approach.

Now that I am a couple weeks past the half-way point in the semester, I've resolved to adapt to law school. It is time to be resourceful :)  (  I know, its about time ).  So, as part of my resolution, I made a trip to Whole Foods and picked up some organic produce, organic herbs and organic meat and a few new finds I will mention in an upcoming post.

Yesterday,  I bought two large organic bone in, skin on chicken breast and simmered them in a pot which I will use to not only make a batch of chicken stock for the week, but also prep the chicken my weeks recipes.

Into the pot went 3 small onions (skinned and quartered), a handful of garlic cloves, 1 serrano chile (halved), 1/8 cup fresh ginger  (sliced), the stalks of one bunch of organic parsley, the stalks of one bunch of organic cilantro, 3 organic carrots chopped into big chunks, 4 stalks of organic celery chopped into big chunks, 1 tsp dried basil, 1/2 tsp dried mint, sea salt



In a large pot, place the chicken on the bottom, the remaining ingredients on top, then cover with water so that the water stops one inch from the top. Bring to boil, then reduce to a energetic simmer.

Simmer until the chicken begins to fall of the bone. Remove the vegetables and herbs and now you have a homemade organic chicken broth!

Next, take out the chicken breasts, remove the skin and bones. Separate each breast into pieces and separate into bowls -- one breast per bowl.


I chose to turned one chicken breast into cinnamon chicken -- altering the recipe slightly. Instead of cooking the chicken with all the sauce ingredients (which is a short cut) I simply sauteed the onions, added the tomato sauce, broth and spices and simmered it for about 5 minutes. I then added the cooked chicken and let it simmer for another 10 minutes or so until the chicken absorbed the sauce and the sauce thickened a bit.


The other chicken was metamorphed  into a fusion indian/thai curry chicken (recipe later this week).

To be continued....

1 comment:

  1. I feel ya..half way through the semester and I'm already tired..I take all my classes online which is good/bad...planning healthy meals is time consuming..but your getting organized and you will see how it pays off..glad your back

    sweetlife

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