A New Family Favourite: Chicken with Soy-Lime Sauce

Long time no see! I really love writing this blog but dayum, it's hard to keep at it in any kind of consistent way. Please forgive me.

This delicious number comes from a favourite cookbook that I refer to constantly, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

Look there's even a stovetop burn on mine! So authentic.  

It's a great reference book - if you have an ingredient you're not sure what to do with, or if you have something like a chicken breast and are looking for some inspiration. I was actually reading another food blog, www.dinneralovestory.com, and she referred to this recipe, which I then looked up in the book. Dinner:  A Love Story is a great blog. God I spend an inordinate time on food blogs. I remember once being on a train from Ottawa to Toronto, and basically spending the entire four and a half hours consulting all my favourite food blogs. At the end of the trip, the woman sitting beside me said "You must be a chef! All you've been doing is looking at recipes and photos of food the whole train ride!" I explained I was actually just obsessed with food. I felt like I had been caught doing something a bit weird. Anyway. As I've said before on here, I'm a big fan of chicken thighs, drumsticks, or cooking up a whole chicken. And though I certainly went through a loooong phase where the only cut of chicken I ate was breast (I used to buy the big boxes of frozen ones from M & M, you know those - it was a staple during university), I'm certainly not in that phase no more. Chicken breasts can be boring, and dry, and even tasteless. But, they're healthy and easy and usually not offensive to anyone, so I pick them up from time to time.

Here are the limes I sliced thinly to put on top of the chicken. So it turns out,
limes are actually pretty gross to eat as a garnish. Pretty, yes, but inedible
and therefore not recommended.

This recipe involves dredging either a flattened chicken breast, or those thin cutlets you sometimes see them selling on their own, in some cornmeal, then a hot visit in a frying pan to brown them, and then a quick sauce made in the saute pan. It's so delicious and easy. Crunchy, super flavourful, and a little bit special, I'm gonna say.

Chicken with Soy-Lime Sauce
recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything

1.5 pounds chicken cutlets             (please excuse me while I get a bit preachy re chicken:  buy good chicken. Avoid factory farmed chicken and aim for antibiotic and hormone-free. Local. Happy chickens taste better, for reals. If you use breasts, pound them until they're nice and thin. Cutlets are thin enough on their own.)
Oil, vegetable or olive is fine
1 cup cornmeal
1 minced garlic clove
4 scallions, chopped finely
1/2 cup of chicken stock
2 tbsp soy sauce
juice of 2 limes          (again, ditch the thinly sliced limes on top of the chicken due to their not actually tasting good)
a handful of chopped cilantro

Salt and pepper your chicken, and then dredge the pieces of chicken in the cornmeal. Saute over medium-high heat, making sure not to cook too many at once and crowd the pan. If you have to do more than one batch remove the first batch and keep warm on a plate in a 200 degree oven, or just tent it with tinfoil. Add more oil if you need to for the second batch. The chicken should take about 8 minutes total to cook, about equal time on both sides. The cornmeal will create a crispy crust, and get nice and browned. Once you remove the chicken, turn the heat down to medium, add a bit of oil, and saute the garlic and scallions for a minute or two. Then add the stock, soy sauce, and lime juice. Scrape up any browned bits and turn up the heat to high, letting the sauce simmer for about a minute. Serve the sauce overtop of the chicken, and sprinkle with the cilantro.  

Summahtime: Corn Salad with Bacon and Green Onions

This was a dynamo of a side dish that I'll most certainly be making many times throughout the month of August. It's corn season in these parts, and I find it hard to walk past hefty, luscious looking corn on the cob without buying some. And it's always priced for five cobs or whatever, and of course that means that I MUST buy five instead of buying, say, two cobs, which would be a much more reasonable number based on the number of people in my household. But no matter, one can never have too much corn when one lives in Ontario and one likes to enjoy the summer's bounty.

Summer in a saute pan.

So, say you gots lots of corn and you want to do something different. Not because you need to, but because you want to. You could do the whole mayonnaise and parmesan treatment, as I've written about before. It's ridiculously good. We've busted that one out already this summer. Or you could incorporate bacon, which is very rarely a bad thing, and go this route. It's a little ditty that will not disappoint.

Corn Salad with Bacon and Green Onions

2 big fat cobs of corn

2 slices of bacon, cut into a small dice

2 green onions, sliced thinly

Butter, just a wee pat

A handful of halved cherry tomatoes

A small handful of chopped cilantro

Salt and pepper to taste

Saute the bacon in a large frying pan on medium to medium-high heat - you want the pan hot enough to really crisp up the bacon. During the time that the bacon is coming to its crucial crispy point, slice the corn off two cobs. The easiest way to do this is to stand your ear of corn up on a cutting board or similar and slice down on each side of the cob. I usually do the bottom half first, then flip the ear and repeat.  It seems to minimize the amount of corn clean up. I've recently seen a plethora of tips and tricks on various food websites about how to cut corn off a cob without making a mess. I guess if the way you cut corn off a cob results in corn everywhere, you should check those out. I, for one, am probably not going to change my method to save seven kernels. But you should do what you want. Anyway, put your corn into the pan with the bacon, and then add your sliced green onions. Stir everything around and add salt and pepper to taste. Saute for about five minutes, and then add the halved cherry tomatoes and the cilantro, and stir those in well. Let it go for a few more minutes, and you're done! Oh wait, not quite! At the very end you should add that little pat of butter. It will make you and everyone who eats it happy, trust.

Corn, plated.
Also, people should eat more drumsticks. 

Serves two as a side dish. Or, you could put it all in a big ol' bowl and sit on your porch and eat it and not share a single kernel.