After gorging myself on stuffed pasta shells and my kitchen scrap pasta for a few days, I committed to eating a little lighter and cleaner at home for the rest of the week, hoping to cancel out my carb and cheese overload.
The following is one of my healthy meals:
My sautéed broccolini with poached eggs and a side of sweet potato is way more photogenic than the mountain of salads I consumed this week, although, they too, were equally delicious. I also took this short period of clean cooking and eating as an opportunity to cook chicken.
It was the first time I've cooked chicken in over three years. And that is not an exaggeration of any kind.
Growing up with a vegetarian mom, I never really got introduced on how to cook meat. Which is fine. I did great without it. And then in college I learned how to make Hamburger Helper. I was down with ground beef and turkey. Chicken was never my thing because it seemed a little too complicated, but it wasn't until I began working at my first restaurant job that my true fear of chicken developed.
In Oregon, in order to work at a restaurant--no matter if you are a line cook, server, host or bartender--you must take a food safety course, usually administered online. It's a crash course on properly handling, storing and cooking food so it is safe for consumption. This is where I learned how devastatingly dangerous uncooked chicken can be for your health.
When I did attempt cooking chicken, which was an incredibly rare occurrence, I was grossed out by handling the raw cutlets--convinced that I was immersing myself in a layer of salmonella, and I grossly overcooked it. I would rather eat chicken that was as dry as wood chips than risk giving myself food poisoning.
After several anxiety inducing chicken dinners, I just stopped cooking chicken.
Until now!
Just this week, I broiled some boneless chicken thighs and stored them in my fridge as protein for salads the past few days. It was a very big deal. Most of my close friends already know about this. Because I told them. In great detail. Kind of like what I'm doing right now.
And then yesterday, I had my second chicken cooking extravaganza of the last three years. I made the Chicken and Chorizo Paella recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything--the illustrated version. Don't judge me. I like pictures. I'm a visual learner. And I'm bad at math. Which is neither here nor there, but it's still true.
Here's a photo of the chicken browning in the skillet:
It kind of looks gross, doesn't it? Chicken is kind of nasty. That's why I've avoided cooking it for so long.
Moving on...
Here is a much more appetizing photo of the other ingredients:
...minus the chopped chorizo. That kind of looks icky too. Maybe I'm not cut out to cook meat at home.
And then there are no more home cooking photos of the Paella because I managed to burn the holy hell out of my hand.
That is a photo of me squeezing the hell out of a packet of frozen vegetables. And that's an empty wine glass. Thankfully, this paella recipe called for a cup of dry, white wine for cooking. I was very grateful that were still three to four cups of wine left in the bottle to help take the sting out of my burns.
It all began innocently enough. I was cooking the paella in an oven-safe skillet on the stove top, then moved the paella into the oven to bake for 15 minutes. When the timer went off, I moved the skillet out of the oven using oven mitts, but when I went to stir in the last ingredients I grasped the skillet handle with my bare hand. I'm smart like that.
Two hours, three-quarters of a wine bottle, and several episodes of Firefly on streaming Netflix later, I couldn't feel a thing.
Moral of the story: cooking chicken at home is very, very dangerous.
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