easy

Homemade Sweet & Sour Chicken

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Everyone loves Chinese take-out. I am no exception to this, but I don’t have the money for Chinese take-out right now. Thankfully, most recipes are rather easy, especially fried rice. All you have to do is throw some leftover rice in a pan with some oil, add whatever frozen veggies you like, soy sauce, and an egg and you’re done! If you wanna get even fancier, you can also add meat. In the past, we’ve added meats like char-siu pork and different Chinese sausages. Tonight we were going to add chicken since Luke had started defrosting chicken thighs, but I wanted to mix it up a little so I looked up a recipe for sweet and sour chicken. We also had a pineapple, so that aided in the idea.

This was the first recipe that came up on Google when I searched “sweet and sour chicken”: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sweet-and-sour-chicken-recipe-1957986.

I can post it this time because this time, I basically followed it. The things we changed were that we had no bell peppers, we used chicken thighs instead of breasts, we used fresh pineapple, and because it was fresh pineapple, we had no pineapple juice so we subbed in limeade that we had in the fridge. We also floured the chicken before frying it because it added a bit more depth to the dish.

It came out spectacularly. The only thing that we probably could have improved upon was that I think I didn’t cook the cornstarch long enough because I left the heat up too high so it reduced too quickly. However, the pineapple was super warm and tender, the sauce was sweet and sour, and the chicken was crispy and delicious. It all went really well with the rice too, which had corn and green beans in it.

The best part of it all, we have leftovers. I love leftovers. Who has Chinese take-out and doesn’t have leftovers?

Budget-and-Lazy-but-Still-Delicious Chicken Parmesan with Angel Hair.

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Last night both Luke and I didn’t know what to eat for dinner. We’d been making meals in the Crock-Pot the past few nights but wanted something different. I looked around the kitchen and found the large container of fresh basil that his mom bought us and immediately thought to do pasta. Not having any pine nuts, we couldn’t do a pesto (which is my favorite), but I then saw a can of tomato paste in the pantry and decided to do a red sauce with basil in it instead. This would have been all well and good to do a vegetarian meal for the day but the only other vegetable we had to go into the sauce was onions, not even mushrooms, so I had to start thinking again. This is when I pulled the last two chicken thighs out of the freezer and threw them into the sink to defrost.

Here I present to you: Budget-and-Lazy-but-Still-Delicious Chicken Parmesan with Angel Hair. 

Red sauces are one of the easiest things to make from scratch (especially if you’re not picky about flavor) and pasta is always an easy go-to as well. The part of it that we didn’t think of until the last minute was to flour and sear the chicken before putting it in the sauce.

We don’t have a bag of flour in the apartment right now. This is not just because we forgot to get one from the store, it is because if we have flour, we will bake bread and other yummy baked good that we are trying to cut out of our diet. I did, however, have a small bag of whole wheat flour that was left over from a Blue Apron box that didn’t make it to me on time (the meat went bad but all of the dry ingredients and veggies were still good). It was just enough flour to coat both thighs. Those were then seared in a hot pan and removed once they had a nice golden color and then we threw the onions and garlic straight in after them and cooked everything else on top of that. One-pot/pan recipes are always great because you a) don’t have to clean a million dishes and b) all of the flavors stay together- perfect for the lazy foodie.

In the interest of being a lazy foodie that I am, I’m not going to post a whole recipe/step-by-step because a) lazy and b) I really don’t have a recipe. So many dishes that I cook are not fully thought out until they have to be. I fly by the seat of my pants and just go with what I’ve got. It’s much more fun that way.