Finally and for a limited time only, the chicken breasts at Ralph’s is $2 per pound again. Oh, how I have waited for this glorious day!
About $30's worth of chicken breasts... plus Justin's TV dinners
As a certain idiot I know is fond of saying, “Oh! You are definitely the Chicken Monster!”
Since I have all of this lovely breast at my disposal now, I am declaring the time from now until I go on Winter Break National Chicken (Breast) Month. I’ve had this idea to do themed months for a while now. Basically, I’ll pick one ingredient, or form of food (such as sammeches), as the theme, and for one month I will play out all its variations. During this month I will make, amongst other things, Chicken Marsala, Chicken Kiev, Chicken Parmasan, Chicken Cutlet Curry… You get the idea.
I play with the ingredients I have, so today, I made this… I guess if it had a name it would be something like Tea Fried Chicken… with Mushroom. This is something I noticed on my trip to the motherland, that they would use tea in their dishes as herbs, like we would use basil. I tried looking up the recipe online, but couldn’t find it. All the tea chicken recipes I found would use tea, the beverage, for the sauce. The dish I had in mind is very dry, and uses the tea leaves as herb.
So, I winged it (I have got to remember this one for National Wing Month). It was kind of scary going solo, but it worked out okay, I think.
Ingredients: chicken, oil for frying, (green) tea leaves, and mushroom
These are apparently mushrooms that grow on tea trees? I am not sure.
Rinse & soak in warm water. I think I should have cut the mushrooms in half; they’re kind of long.
Cut the chicken into bite size cubes, dry, and rub with some salt. Fry.
When chicken is done, add–dried chili, tea leaves, and I used a bit of garlic. I have long learned that if you put the spices in first, they will get burnt because it takes so much longer to cook the meat. So what I do is fry the meat spiceless until it’s basically done, then push the meat to the side of the wok so that the bottom can heat up to sufficient frying temperature, then add the spices. Or you can take the meat out if you’re making a sauce.
Add mushroom and sauces (I used a dash of soy sauce–chicken broth might also be good, or the water from soaking the mushroom); salt again.
Moneyshot
