Lemongrass-Cilantro Chicken with Honey Dipping Sauce, Food and Wine February 2011
I won't be making this dish again. It needed to marinate overnight, but despite this it was basically unflavored. And, the chicken breasts were pretty thick, so they took much longer than the suggested 13 minutes to cook on our grill pan. By the time they were cooked through, they were kind of tough and dry. The only good thing is just that all the cutting was done yesterday, so today it was just grilling. But that would've been true of the fines herbes chicken too, without any time for marinating, plus it was way more flavorful, AND I now actually own fines herbes. So this recipe is in the recycling bin.
Today I read Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, or most of it anyway. I was about a quarter of the way in and finished it today. This was helped because while I was eating delicious leftover Beef Tagine for lunch, I all of the sudden got hot and weak-- like I was going to pass out minus the black vision. Which is weird, because on a fairly regular basis (like this morning a few times, for example) I get the black vision minus the rest of the sensations you get from fainting. So I figured it would be best to just stay in my PJs on the sofa all day, dozing and getting excited for food blogging.
There are some similarities and differences. Her recipes are much more complicated than mine, and also more comprehensive. But at the same time they are highly repetitive-- in particular because she follows one chapter at a time, she can get stuck on one type of meat for a while. And everything calls for butter. I do intend (intend...) to try recipes that will push the edge a bit, although unlike Julie I can't cook for hours everyday, and so more complicated recipes are already getting overlooked in favor of <40 minute ones. My recipes are selected from a preapproved short list of recipes that look awesome-- no aspic or offal for me. I like to think that I am nicer, although I do have a tendency to get angry while cooking, especially when cutting teargas onions. But, for example, I would never write that I sometimes want to slam [my husband's] head into a sharp rock. Or write a book about having an affair, after said husband had put up with a year of kitchen tantrums. Along that line, the book is probably only half about actually cooking, and another half about her dramatic life. My life is (thankfully) not so dramatic, and I don't think people would want to read about me watching worms grow up and counting green dots in the dark. Although that's another difference-- Julie, starting when blogs were still scarce and novel, immediately was followed by non-family/friend fans who somehow found her blog. Anyway, it did make me think that G and I should probably weigh-in before moving on to the second month, to see how we do against Julie's 20 lbs of butter weight. It will be a contest to see who wins out-- Cooking Light or Food Network? It also made me think that a year is a very long time to stay true to a blog. But, we'll see how it goes. Jokingly, I pulled out my two huge editions of The Gourmet Cookbook from the sixties and threatened to work my way through those after the magazines. These things are beasts, and filled with the contemporary sentiments that make me so fascinated by vintage cookbooks. G thought something more modern would be better-- The Good Housekeeping Cookbook maybe? And we each pulled out our editions, 38 years apart. They're pretty different in most ways, but they both have boeuf bourguignon.
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