Chicken with pretty colors

Sometimes while doing odd things, I learn little life lessons. For instance, if you're going to cook meat, defrost it the day before! As a biologist working with bacteria, I know very well their resilience, and so I was in quite the panic as I improv'd my defrosting as quickly as I could in less-than-ideal temperatures. This translates to: procrastination is bad for you and possibly for your physical health. Three cheers for salmonella!

Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will be tossing ingredients into a pan wantonly and hoping they don't react, according to some protocol (or "recipe" as the experts say) I find online and invariably change due to laziness. Today's dish is a mix of chicken cooked with asparagus and red peppers.

Wait is Yifan using a camera here? Oh no, rather, Yifan discovered a cell phone camera that can take slightly better, and easier, pics than a laptop's webcam. Silly Yifan, get a camera.

This week's dish is a trifecta of vibrant color, healthfulness, and of course, simplicity. Cook the chicken in a fair amount of chicken broth, toss in garlic, asparagus, and red peppers, season to taste, serve over rice, and you're done! I honestly can't think of even a single step along this process that was troublesome, and the recipe doesn't even call for much in the way of fatty goodness. Very lean, very light. Turns out heart attacks are actually harder to cook well than, you know, normal food.

I should make a point about spices. I only have three - oregano, basil, and cumin. Furthermore, I intend to put all three in virtually everything. Originally I was going to see when people would notice, but now that it's the second week, I'm starting to realize that nobody is eating my cooking except myself. Oh well. I was extraordinarily disappointed tonight because in my rush to get the dish done, I didn't taste-test the spices enough. In other words, I could barely taste the cumin. That is basically unacceptable. The disappointment was tantamount to being informed that you did the puzzle on the back of a cereal box wrong. It's soul-crushing.

Yeah, something like that...

Also a word about colors. This dish would really have been only half as good as it was for me if it didn't feel like I was eating Christmas with every bite. As someone who eats pretty much brown stuff all the time (more on that in future posts), this was a refreshing change of scenery. How do I even describe it? The red was like the boldness of a weekly foray into the unknown, while the green was like the immense envy I have for people who can write better similes than mine. Something like that.

So that's that, a nice healthy dinner for this week. Maybe next week I'll finally get some bacon or something. And by the way, I don't really consider this a food blog as much as a blog blog, but if you're actually (mysteriously, inexplicably) interested in the specifics of the recipes I'm using, leave a comment and I'll reach deep into my memory to figure out what I was doing in my confused haze of culinary catastrophes.