Thursday, March 2, 2017

Three Beautiful Things 03/01/17: Riddles and Puzzles, Salsa Test, Fried Chicken Dinner

1.  The temperatures neared or surpassed 80 degrees today and then storms moved in with high winds and some rain and I stayed put, reading last night's presidential address and a lot of analysis of it and commentary about it. Later, I took a break from pondering the riddles of government and spent time puzzling over a few acrostic puzzles, which at least give me the satisfaction of completion.

2.  The Deke and I have not been happy with the salsa I've bought at the store recently, so I found a recipe for salsa blending canned tomatoes, white onion, jalapeno pepper, garlic, cilantro, cumin, sugar, lime juice, salt, and pepper. Tuesday night I made a batch. This morning, for breakfast, I fried a handful of little potatoes and broke a couple of eggs over them and topped the scramble with some salsa. The salsa worked -- I think there's room for improvement -- but I think this batch will enhance some of our meals and snacks.

3.  I bought four chicken thighs at Wegman's the other day and today I heated up olive oil in our large cast iron pan and made a mixture of all-purpose flour, garlic powder, pepper, salt, crushed red pepper flakes, and garam masala. I covered the chicken pieces with the flour mix and loved the pop and crackle that resulted when I dropped them into the hot oil. Earlier, I had taken out the last of the chicken stock I made a while back and used it as the liquid to make basmati rice. While the chicken fried, I chopped tiny cucumbers, some slightly larger than cherry tomatoes, and red onion and combined them with lemon yogurt sauce/dressing, with the idea that this sauce/dressing might also taste good spread on the chicken, if either of us wanted to do that. It turned out to be a very successful dinner.  Oh! And I was right about the lemon yogurt sauce on the chicken. I ate some with and some without the sauce and enjoyed both approaches a lot.


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