eating at home, finally!

Between M's dental horrors and my 2-week absence, there hasn't been much action here. I'm home today, finally, and he welcomed me with a huge platter of chicken parm. After restaurant food for 2 weeks, this was just wonderful:

Lemon chicken cutlets habanero

Here's the deal. Start with a creative cook (sorry, if you don't have one on hand I can't help you) and then buy a batch of really colorful and really hot peppers. Something like this:

Dice a stack of those peppers. How many? However many your mouth and stomach can handle.

Then buy some really nice chicken breasts, boneless. Pound them. Pound the hell out of them. Dip them in egg-flour-egg to give them a little coating. Fry them so they're moist and yummy. Meanwhile, make a tangy sauce of onion, butter, fresh lemon juice (lots), garlic, cumin and the finely diced peppers.

Pour the delicious sauce over the chicken, and then sprinkle with rough-chopped fresh cilantro. Voila:

This was amazingly good, spicy enough in the back of our throats to make us hiccup and cough a little, and to leave our mouths wide awake. Tangy with the lemon, spicy hot with the peppers, layered with the butter, garlic and onion. Really, really delicious.

Chicken under a brick

So it's an old way of cooking chicken: flatten it by putting a heavy brick on it, and fry it quickly. The result is crispy crunchy outsides. He took another step for me, because I appear to be constitutionally unable to eat chicken off the bone without it looking like a massacre took place -- he deboned the chicken from the inside out. It's flat as a pancake; the only bone left is a bit of wing. He even deboned the leg. It's hard to appreciate from this picture just how flat it is:

He didn't use a brick, he used our very heavy Korean hot pot,
on top of a rack to distribute the weight evenly.

Here is the deboned chicken half, kind of looking like a bearskin rug.
A delicious, crunchy bearskin rug.

Indian red rice, very nutty, and some leftover garlic pasta from dinner last night.
Plus the delicious chicken, of course:

A great addition to tonight's salad, toasted walnuts to accompany
the blue cheese and thinly sliced red onions.
Plus his signature olive oil-soaked crouton bits.

There are two things you can't really appreciate from these photos: #1, just how thin that chicken was when he deboned it, and #2, the impact of learning to use my flash today. The light is magnificent, all the better to show you his luscious food. Expect to see nicer photos of his great food from now on.

Chicken with egg garlic cream sauce

Really luscious on the tongue, this moist chicken with a thick, creamy and eggy garlic cream sauce -- with a great romaine salad and bread for dunking in the sauce:

Chicken and eggplant parmigiana

I'm not so crazy about eggplant, but M and A are, so he went to the trouble to make both eggplant and chicken parmigiana -- so good. First he prepared the chicken and eggplant:

On goes the spicy tomato sauce

And then lots of mozzarella with romano sprinkled on top,
baked until bubbly and golden (cliche! but it's golden, what to do?)

and here's my plate of chicken parmigiana with my favorite bread.
And we had a crunchy green salad with balsamic vinaigrette.

So delish. Wish you were here.

chicken francese

More pictures of dinner to follow.

And, for dessert, homemade pumpkin ice cream and pumpkin cheese cake.

Broiled chicken

The pan was deglazed with lime and white wine, and the chicken was so juicy and moist inside. I would've taken a picture of the wonderful inside, but I ate it too fast.

Our salad was loaded up (hey, we're on Atkins) with chunky blue cheese dressing, heavy on the blue cheese. SO good.

Pan-seared chicken with lemon, garlic and thyme

Man, if you can be on Atkins and eat like this, you're a lucky person. (Like me.) The pictures are a tiny bit blurry, if you click on them and see them up close -- sorry, my mouth was watering so much my hands weren't all that steady.

fried chicken and caesar salad

Since he's on Atkins, he couldn't make a thick crunchy crust on the chicken. I don't know how he did it, but somehow he did it anyway, without much flour. So crispy and crunchy, and so juicy and moist.

And he makes his own caesar salad dressing from scratch, coddling the eggs, grinding the anchovies, blending the garlic and all the other good stuff. I wish you could taste it.

chicken cutlets with mustard cream marsala and capers

missed two dinners

Thursday night -- roasted pork loin, tomato & aged provolone salad, and crusty bread. The sauce for the roasted pork loin was sherry, cream, and mustard, really luscious on the tongue.



Friday night: oven fried chicken and salad. The chicken was coated in a mixture of mustard, heavy cream, wine, and seasonings, then tossed in bread crumbs. It was really moist and delicious, in a very crispy crust.