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Category Archives: cooking

I make! Some kind of baked chicken dish edition

I’m trying to clean out the fridge/freezer/pantry again.  Like always.  I took an inventory just recently.  SMH.  At least my grocery bill will be relatively small for the next few months?  So in this edition of me making stuff, I made dinner with an old onion, a bunch of red potatoes, and chicken thighs.

The potatoes and onion were diced and thrown together with a packet of onion soup mix and oil and then baked at 425degF until tender.  Normal stuff.  I like adding other vegetables to the mix when I make potatoes like that.  It increases the number of vegetables people are eating, thus helping empty the pantry/fridge faster.

The chicken I ended up dredging in a mix of poultry seasoning, grated parm, and red pepper flakes (no measurements, just eyeballed to see if I had enough for all the chicken), then dipped it into an egg wash, and then dredged that in some panko.  I put that in the oven with the potatoes and then forgot that I wanted to take it out before the potatoes were done.  The result was that the internal temp of the chicken thighs (boneless) reached about 190deg.  Oops.  It was ok though.  Chicken wasn’t tough.

I paired the potatoes and chicken with a salad and tada!  Dinner!  I got rid of maybe 2lb of potatoes and 1.5lb of chicken this way.  And it was pretty good.  The chicken baked up nice and crispy and the flavor of the crust was nice, not too overpowering.  Next time, I’ll probably add a little salt to the mix though.

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I make! Banana nut waffle edition

The other day I had some gross bananas.  All bananas are gross to me once they get any sort of brown on them.  Bananas should be eaten when they are still green tipped.

Anyway, I had some gross bananas.  I normally make banana nut bread with my gross bananas but I’ve been trying to branch out.  Banana nut bread is all well and good, but I don’t always want to eat a whole loaf.  I’ve also been curious just how well different types of batters would do in a waffle iron.  So…I made a batch of banana nut bread batter and then dumped it into the waffle iron.

Results?  Delicious.

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But the thing is, because the recipe is for a quick bread and not for a waffle, the results are not quite waffle-like.  I mean, it’s a waffle in shape but not in texture.  The texture is still like that of bread.  Like I said, it’s delicious but not quite right.

So now it’s time to experiment with leavening and also with temperature and length of cooking.  This time I heated the waffle iron to 350degF and left it in for…a cycle.  I forgot to look at the time, but I left it until the iron reached temperature again.  I think maybe I’ll try raising the temperature next time with the same recipe and see what happens.  And then maybe I’ll change the leavening to see what happens.

As it is, it’s pretty good the next day after you’ve toasted it in a toaster (darkest setting on mine).  It crisps up a little and banana bread (or waffle in this case) is always better the next day.

It looks like I’ll have to buy a lot of bananas.