Garlic-Lemon Chicken

Photo Copyright 2011 Katie Peters

I decided to do something else Asian-inspired for dinner tonight. Like always. My parents, though not Asian, made a lot of Chinese food. Oh, I'm also Korean, in case you're wondering.

So I had originally planned on making good old lemon chicken, but thanks to my obsession with garlic, I decided to try that instead, and I'm definitely happy I did!

This recipe uses whole wheat flour breading because it's the only flour we have in the apartment, but it turned out wonderfully just the same. You can't really tell once the sauce is all over it, anyway. Regardless of the actual benefits, I felt healthier for it. The unhealthiest part of this whole meal is the oil you fry it in...but you really don't need too much, and you can very easily bake the chicken instead.

I hope you enjoy it! It's a recipe I love!

Mm. Lemons! Photo Copyright 2011 Katie Peters

Garlic-Lemon Chicken

Ingredients:

-2 ½ tbsp. corn starch

-1 c. whole wheat flour

-1 egg

For the Chicken:

-olive oil for shallow pan-frying

-1/2 lb. boneless chicken breast, cut into medium-small chunks

-1 tsp. salt

-1/2 tsp. black pepper

-1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper

For the Sauce:

-1 tbsp. olive oil

-1/2 c. low-sodium soy sauce

-juice of 1 lemon (make sure to keep a couple slices for garnish!)

-3/4 c. water

-3 cloves garlic, minced

-1 tbsp. honey

-1 tbsp. brown sugar

-1 heaping tsp. fresh ginger, grated

-1/2 tbsp corn starch

-green onion for garnish

1.       Separate corn starch and egg into two different bowls (make sure the bowls are big enough to fit all your chicken!). If you have a large paper bag (Ziploc or big tupperware are also great), pour the flour, salt, pepper and cayenne in.

2.       Pour the chicken chunks in the corn starch bowl and mix around, making sure that you get every piece coated. There should be little to no corn starch remaining in the bowl. Next, pour the chicken into the egg bowl and coat well. Continue to make sure the pieces are separated. Lastly, pour the chicken into the flour-filled paper bag, close the bag up, and shake, shake, shake! Open up the bag and separate the pieces if they’re stuck, then close the bag and shake one more time.

3.       In a large saucepan, add the olive oil for frying. When the oil is hot, add the chicken.  When the bottoms have browned and crisped, flip the chicken (or do what I did and wait a couple minutes, stir everything around, and repeat).

Gotta love fried chicken. Photo Copyright 2011 Katie Peters

4.       While chicken is cooking, heat up a medium-sized pot. Add olive oil, soy sauce, lemon juice, and water. When it begins to warm up, add the honey, brown sugar, garlic and ginger.

5.       In a small cup, combine corn starch with a little bit of water. Stir with a fork until dissolved. Add to sauce and stir until thick.

Photo Copyright 2011 Katie Peters

6.       Pour sauce over chicken and keep hot, stirring to coat every piece.

7.       Serve with white rice or plain noodles. Top with lemon and green onion slices for garnish.

Photo Copyright 2011 Katie Peters

Happy Eating!

My Cooking Philosophy and My First Recipe Post

Being not only a student in college but an aspiring actor (ie. "starving artist") as well, food needs to be affordable, healthy, AND delicious. Though I have always valued leftovers, I find myself incredibly bored if I have to eat the same thing all week. Cooking has interested me from a young age-- I was too short for our kitchen counters and had to stand on a stool in the kitchen if I wanted help my dad make Saturday morning pancakes! My parents have been tremendous enforcers of balanced diets and good, home-cooked meals. Every evening we would sit down to a delicious array of foods that one or both would make, and we got such a wide variety of flavors. Some nights we'd have Mexican food, other nights Chinese, sometimes the usual American burgers or ribs, and always lots of rice and veggies. I have learned so much about cooking and found my love for it through my family (and having several summers of boredom in high school helped, too).

These days, college has taught me that I don't have all the ingredients I want and I also don't have the money for it (visiting home and opening the fridge/pantry is AWESOME), so how would I be able to eat nice things while being poor? Easy. Take different recipes (books, online, family recipes) and 1) use less expensive ingredients, 2) find shortcuts with frozen and canned items, 3) do everything in your power to make it healthy, and 4) make it your own! And I seriously mean "make it your own" by mixing it up with new flavors and new ideas. My parents and my boyfriend would tell you immediately that I RARELY follow recipe instructions. I read "1 tbsp" and I pour in what I figure it must be. Through this carefree and perhaps reckless cooking strategy, I have not only gotten more accurate at estimation but have learned how to flavor things myself without the help of uber-specific numbers. However, this has brought me to a whole new place with the start of my blog...now I have to start writing things down. And it's a big mess trying to put things into tablespoons and cups for me...but I'm doing it! And you should be happy for me. It'll help you if you ever want to try something out, too! That said, though, I will ALWAYS encourage you to try my recipes, then feel as free as a bird to tweak and adapt! I find that's the only way people ever really "learn to cook", anyway. :)

So be on the lookout for all sorts of recipes, all messed up by me (haha), and I can guarantee you that a majority of them will be completely affordable and very healthy! Here's a recipe to start!

Firstly, I had the wrong noodles. I know, I know, Asian girl with only Italian noodles in her possession...but when I make it again, I'm definitely getting the right noodles. Again, being lazy and poor means using what I have sometimes! Extra-firm tofu is great for this recipe because it will hold its shape after all the cooking and tossing. Firm will probably do all right as well, but I personally wouldn't venture into soft tofu unless you want it scrambled up with the rest of the ingredients. I also used canned green beans instead of fresh based on availability, but feel free to use fresh! I'm sure it's even better. Make sure that you rinse the beans well because most canned items have salt included--the rinsing gets some of that extra sodium out of there! Speaking of, don't expect the flavor from this Chinese-inspired dish to be purely from added salt! The soy sauce and peanut butter add a lot of salt on their own, but I made sure to keep the dish relatively sweet-tasting with the brown sugar. If you're a salt-lover, add away!

Cold Sesame-Peanut Noodles with Tofu and Ginger

Ingredients:

-1 tsp salt

-3 cups fusilli noodles (or any other pasta—I’d personally recommend soba or thick rice noodles)

-1 carrot

-1/2 package extra-firm tofu

-1 can (14.5oz) green beans, drained and rinsed

-4 tbsp. sesame oil

-1 tbsp. olive oil

-2 tbsp. low-sodium soy sauce

-1/2 c. water

-3 tbsp. peanut butter (I used all-natural chunky style)

-1 tbsp. brown sugar

-5 cloves garlic, minced

-2 large green onions

-2 tsp. fresh ginger, grated

-salt, cayenne pepper, black pepper to taste

Photo Copyright 2011 Katie Peters

1.       Bring salt and a pot of water to a boil. Add noodles, cook until al dente.

2.       Slice the green onions, cut the carrots into matchsticks, and cut tofu into ½ inch cubes.

3.       In a large saucepan, add 2 tbsp. sesame oil and the olive oil. Add tofu and fry for five minutes, stirring throughout. Add carrots and green beans and sauté until tender.

Photo Copyright 2011 Katie Peters

4.       Drain the noodles and return them to their pot. Add the veggies and tofu and stir.

Photo Copyright 2011 Katie Peters

5.       To the used saucepan, add remaining sesame oil, soy sauce, and water (for even more flavor, combine half to a full chicken-flavored bouillon cube to the water to make a basic broth). When it begins to bubble, add peanut butter and stir constantly. I used the back of my spatula to squish the peanut butter around and melt it faster. When a nice, thick sauce begins to form, quickly add brown sugar, garlic, ¾ of the green onion and ginger. If you’d like a thinner sauce, add more water/broth and soy sauce (be careful, though, if you don’t want too much salt).

6.       Add the sauce to the noodle pot and mix well. Season with spices as you see fit. I love lots of cayenne and fresh-ground black pepper. Garnish with remaining green onion.

Tasted better than it looks! :O Photo Copyright 2011 Katie Peters

Happy Cooking!

P.S. If you don't know already, I am a BIG fan of spicy foods. At almost any occasion, I will add copious amounts of garlic, hot peppers, black pepper, etc. to everything. If you don't like it, remember that you don't have to make it that way!

P.P.S. My camera sucks. Ehhhh. I'm going to borrow Ethan's next time and see if it's any better, but I'm apologizing now. I always look at pictures and get SO jealous...a beautiful image always makes the food look THAT much more delicious...so don't judge if my food is ugly. One day I'll have the money to have an apartment/house with sunlight (our apartment has windows but faces another building...) and a fancy camera. Hee. :)

Fighting and Florence

We had a crazy-amazing day today in stage combat and I'm testing my typing skills. My hands have been tremoring non-stop for at least twenty, twenty-five minutes, and when we sat to write things down, it looked like the chicken scratch of a three-year-old. Not even joking. We got to punch things today...and no, not just staged combat where no one gets hurt. Well, nobody really got hurt in this, either (minus the skin that is now missing from my middle knuckle), but we got to actually throw punches with a partner wearing mitts. Ethan tried to teach me to punch a year ago but I was too nervous. Now I've done it, and I think I'm pretty good at it. This is brilliant. Maybe I'll know how to defend myself in Italy!! Well, perhaps that's not funny.}
Meanwhile, Danny and I are prepping to go to Italy for spring break, starting this Friday! SOO excited. I am so fortunate to have an opportunity like this! Looking into tickets for Amsterdam in April as well, but that's not going as easily. Anyhow, looking forward to beautiful sights, stereotypical accordion music and legit pasta dishes! Hoping that with all my dieting and exercising, I won't lose all the hard work to lasagna, fettuccine alfredo, bruschetta, shrimp scampi...mmmm...anyone else hungry yet?

Still on the job hunt for NYC. Hard to do when you don't have a "current address" or telephone number while in the UK. Using Ethan's address in the city and telling them in my cover letter that my temporary number is my UK number. Turning in my internships on Thursday (need to go buy large manila folders and international stamps...I should get stamps anyway so I can finally send all my postcards!), and have applied to about ten jobs so far (five of them being Starbucks). Still searching!

I really wish I had a keyboard...I realized that my small crappy one is in Ithaca, so if I'm in NYC for the summer, I won't have a way to make music...guess I should start saving up to buy a good one...or bug my parents.

So much to do, so little time...Up, up,and away!

Cheers!

Moving Right Along!

The five of us have successfully found a flat! After around a dozen viewings, we decided on a lovely little place in Bayswater. It is such a great area with lots to do, ranging everywhere from a mall to pubs/bars, a bowling alley/ice skating rink to an Asian food market (obviously my favorite part). It's a mere walk away from the Tube, and we have friends close by. The location is great and most everything is literally within blocks. I believe we're signing the lease today and moving in this weekend, so things are finally starting to move along before classes start on Monday. Meanwhile, I should probably begin to figure out my class schedule and what times I need to be where. I have a couple more days, so I'm not too worried. I should also print out my Dublin tickets so I'm prepared when my friends and I take our journey there next weekend.

And now, I shall address an ever-popular subject among Americans: British food. Personally, I don't really like it much. Tuesday night, we traveled to a pub near the hotel, and Danny and I decided to get the fish and chips. Mind you, I absolutely love fish and chips. I was ecstatic to try the "real" thing in a "real" pub. Our food arrives, accompanied with a whiskey and lemonade (apparently nobody likes to make whiskey sours in London...I've tried more than once already), and I'm thrilled to dig in. Unfortunately, there was more breading than fish--I dug the fish out of the batter and ate it. :( The chips are fabulous, though! Sarah, who was in London the previous semester, said that when you go back to America, the chips are never the same. I need to stop ordering things that come with them, though, or I'll gain too much weight! Damn delicious carbohydrates.

Speaking of losing weight, Ned and I asked about gyms in the area, and I think we might be in luck. The idea of paying between £40-60/month is not the most appealing, especially after the free use of the fitness center in Ithaca, but I'm willing to pay it. I haven't been to the gym or stretched since the Sunday before I moved and I'm definitely paying the price already. Five days gym-less makes me sad. The lack of stretching is my own fault, I'll admit...BUT. Things are looking up! Plus, in my defense, I have been walking around a lot in the last couple of days. :)

Well, that's all for now!