So Many Dishes

Sorry for being so quiet this week. I had great plans for a post on Monday, with the recipe that I cooked on Sunday, but it definitely needs some tweaking before I can share it.

The dish is a Cooking Light recipe called Shireen Palao, and it’s described as an Afghan chicken and rice—a different version of pilaf. I’ve made this several times, and it’s delicious. The only seasoning, apart from salt and pepper, is saffron. The recipe calls for orange zest, and I add the juice of the orange to the cooking liquid. The result is really tasty. This is definitely one of my favorite ways to eat rice.

But, oh, the chicken! The chicken makes the timing really tricky. I brown the chicken and then remove it as I cook onions, add the other ingredients, and then nestle the chicken in the rice mixture to finish cooking while the rice cooks. The first time I tried this, the chicken was undercooked, and the rice dried out before it the chicken was ready. So I added time to the browning step. I hit it once, but mostly I end up with tough, overcooked chicken.

I’m going to try again, but with boneless chicken pieces. I’ve played with the other ingredients and have the rest of the dish perfected, and I so want to share, but it’s just not ready. Sigh.

Ken cooked one of his specialties last night, spaghetti with red clam sauce, which is just so good!

We talked about sharing this recipe, but the problem is that Ken doesn’t actually have a recipe. He tried to memorize a recipe he saw in a book somewhere, so nothing is really exact. He uses canned chopped clams, and lots of them. There’s white wine in the sauce, so we enjoyed a glass while the sauce was cooking. It’s just so yummy. I wish he’d make it more often.

Some adventures coming up in the next couple days. Some will involve food. I’ll be sure to fill you in.

Happy eating!