Chicken slathered in mayonnaise

I've more or less decided that every Saturday I'm going to try out a recipe that I've never tried before. Being a first-time cook, this will be extraordinarily easy the first few times. But regardless, since I'll especially be focusing on how easy it is to make the dish, rather than on pointless things like how good it is or how healthy it is, I'll still be mostly doing easy stuff that anyone could do. So be on the lookout for that.

Welcome to the first Saturday Supper, in which your host, yours truly, I, Yifan, will be making something entirely new and foreign to myself (but still childishly easy to make), and try it out. Today's dish is a three-part: baked chicken, spinach, and rice.

Taken with a low-res webcam because Yifan's a terrible planner and has no camera.

The chicken is by far the hardest part, which is to say, on a scale of skill levels from "world-renowned chef" up top down to "newborn foal," it's around the skill level of "sheltered college student," which might be somewhere above "newborn foal" and below "horse." You read the title right - chicken breasts are slathered in mayonnaise all over, and then covered in spices and breadcrumbs.

May I just take a quick paragraph here to extol the glories of my favorite spice: cumin. Cumin is like powdered joy. It's like taking true love and grinding it into a fine powder, roasting it, and stuffing it into a bottle before smoothing it all over raw bloody meat. It's like crushing the wings of a fairy and capturing the pure flavored essence from the fairy's cries of agony. Do I get my point across about how I feel about cumin? Cumin is delicious.

So I covered the chicken in copious amounts of cumin, some other spices, and breadcrumbs and baked it. About half an hour does pretty well. In a spurt of utterly poor planning, I didn't have any oven mitts on me, so Darvin pulled off some clever engineering in order to fulfill his duty of not letting me catch fire.

The spinach is much easier. Get some garlic, get some spinach (fun fact Yifan didn't know: a whole bag of spinach actually doesn't amount to much...), get some oil, get some salt, combine wantonly in a pan, taking care not to have hot oil splash all over you. The last part is important. Take note of that. The rice is even easier. Darvin prepared that part.

So this first Saturday Supper was much more successful than either of us could have imagined. As Darvin put it: "Sadly, this is probably the best Saturday we'll have." He's probably right. Look forward to it.