like the truly responsible person i am, i started the evening with an hour's worth of torture (otherwise known as plyometrics). after sweating at least a small part of my ass off and most likely severely pissing off the person in the room below me as i'm jumping and pouncing around my room, i set about making dinner.
thus the best laid plan! dinner: balsamic chicken, spinach and feta stuffed mushrooms, and broiled pesto tomatoes.....mmmmmm delisc! was intended to be a wonderful evening of workout, dinner, a little criminal minds, bubble bath, reading then to bed. my reality was somewhat different........
the balsamic chicken asked for two cloves of garlic (yes two whole cloves) and in an effort to be super healthy i decided i could use fresh garlic. plus there's another recipe that i want to cook later in the week that wanted two cloves as well so i set about chopping it all cause why not chop 4 if i already had to do 2 right?!?! oh WRONG! so, an hour after beginning this quest i had all of it to it's raw and wonderful form, half of it chopped, and hated every last little diced piece cause it seemed to be reproducing or at least never ending. by now it was 8:30 and i was STARVING.
second issue with the chicken was that i happened to notice as i was cooking it that the garlic, rosemary (also fresh - dunno why i decided to try to go gourmet), salt, and pepper was supposed to sit on the chicken in the fridge overnight - oops!! oh well fuck it, i'm hungry and moving on.
third issue with the chicken was that i was supposed to use non stick cooking spray and of course had none. had one pan which i was attempting to figure out how to share that with the broiled tomatoes....again, whatever moving on cause i'm hungry. actually at that point i think i decided to give up on the tomatoes cause i was too hungry to be bothered with them at this point. so, naturally i poured some olive oil on the bottom so the chicken wouldn't stick, put the rub of garlic etc on the chicken, a little more olive oil on the top to keep it from drying, and stuck it in the oven. off to tackle the mushrooms......
the recipe called for frozen spinach and you're supposed to plop it into the pan once the water is boiling. well, that can be difficult when you only have two pans and one is huge but the other is tiny. managed to get the spinach into the pan though also managed to splash boiling water all over the kitchen and my shirt! i suppose i was just trying to warm up in this frozen land of albany?
at this point i figure i should check the chicken........which now had burning garlic and rosemary and filled the kitchen with a little smoke! i can handle this! i turn on the ventilation van to high and figure that has to take care of it.
back to the mushrooms! got the stems sauteed and put into the pan with the spinach for the stuffing part of the mushrooms. got the tops of the mushrooms into the pan to cook and figured i was good for a while and that dinner was finally coming together. wrong again!!
the olive oil starts really flaring up and i can't for the life of me figure out why. well, it's cause some had slopped into the tops and that was now spilling into the pan and throwing up showers of magma made of oil all over the kitchen.....yippee!!
i figure fine, i'll flip it over so i'm cooking the tops cause that's gotta keep the lava from spewing out of the pan and all over my arms, the stove, etc. well, that took about a half an effing hour cause it's a LOT harder to flip the tops of mushrooms over than i'd ever imagined cause the tops are round and they like to flip back to where they were splashing yet more hot liquid mess all over the damn place!!
i get 'em all flipped over and about done cooking when i look around the room and low and behold the entire room is filled with smoke! a realllllllllllllly bad idea when you're in a hotel room with a kitchen and lots of smoke detectors and sprinklers!! of course i'm panicking that i'm about to set the alarms off for the whole complex of rooms in my section thus soaking everything i own, they own, and severely pissing off a group of sleeping people........mind you at this point it's 9:30, i'm in albany, and i'm sure they're all asleep by this point.
like a mad woman i opened the door letting in freezing winds and start flapping a towel around to attempt to encourage the smoke to go out the door and not toward the detectors! quite a hilarious sight i'm sure though i was frantic at the time.
with most of the smoke out of the way, i finally assemble the mushrooms of which i bought way too small of caps so after loading them up i still had half the spinach mix left and you couldn't really see that there were mushrooms under the mix but fuck it, i finally had something on the damn plate!
after putting the chicken alongside the mushrooms, i drizzled the chicken with a bit of balsamic, and realized that it actually didn't look half bad! and much to my amazement was actually quite tasty. sorry i do not have any video of the fiasco though i did take pics of the mountain of dishes and the dinner itself and will post them if i get the chance.
hope i brought a bit of entertainment into your life with my attempts at gourmet cooking :) i did learn a valuable lesson.........cooking is best done in pairs and i'm excited for mine to be here soon!
~danban
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