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| Making a surprise appearance in this photo.... me. Not an ingredient. |
I'm following menus this week in case you haven't heard. Tonight we made a Chicken and Orzo Skillet Dinner from Cooking Light magazine. While I was flipping through the magazines I was looking for things to cook that seemed easy (not time consuming) and had reasonably priced ingredients. The picture of this looked delicious and the photo with the name led me to believe this was a one skillet dish. This photo is misleading:
So obviously it turns out this was not a one skillet meal. I'm sure if you had more time you could make it a one skillet meal, but we were going for speed, not dish use. First we put the water on to boil while we chopped the tomato and cut the chicken breasts. I put a pan on the stove to warm up for cooking the chicken and coated it with EV Olive Oil.
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| Chicken and Orzo |
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| The actual recipe |
We removed the chicken and put a pot on for the final "one skillet", added some pasta water from the orzo, tomato paste, and chopped tomatoes.
As I continued to read the recipe (full recipe linked above) I noticed a few things... 1. I forgot to get Feta Cheese 2. This was going to be bland. I started to think of some ways that I could add some flavor. Cooking Light by my experience tries very hard to cut sodium, and sometimes flavors are affected. S suggested that we add some basil so I grabbed some off of our plant.
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| I added the Orzo and the Chicken to the tomato mixture. |
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| Then came the spinach |
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| After the spinach had wilted and cooked in |
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| I rolled a few basil leaves to then snip over the prepared mixture |
In place of the missing Feta Cheese I used some Mexican Cojita cheese. It has a salty flavor and crumbles similarly to feta. I added it liberally for the additional flavor. The end result:
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| Not so fancy, but from our kitchen |
Overall I think this is a good base recipe to add more to. It was very subtle. In the words of S "It tastes pretty good as long as you get some cheese in each bite." Not a raving review, but still. I think this is a good recipe to play around with. You could cook the chicken in the same pot that you combine everything into in the end and you could even cook the orzo ahead of time. It might add some flavor to do some finely chopped red or green peppers. There are lots of possibilities for this and the recipe in it's original form was not that bad. I just found it somewhat bland. If it wasn't for the basil and the cheese it would have not been a very enjoyable meal. Knowing that, I would cook it again and maybe marinate the chicken in a cumin rub or some other fashion. S suggested some chopped olives which might be nice if you were going for more of a Meditteranean flavor. You would want to use feta for sure when doing that.
So here we are. Oh, I steam cleaned some of our rugs today and wanted to share some good news: when you remove the reservoir, a steam vac turns into toddler chair.
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| Where's the steering wheel? |
Maybe leftovers tomorrow, maybe more new recipes. What there is no maybe about is that I am heading to BED. Toddler Tantrum days wear me OUT. More on that later or never. Call me maybe.
-RT
Love your blog and have a question. When you make new meals like this, do you give them to your daughter or do you plan different meals for her? We are trying to budget and cook more at home with a 3 year old and a 14 month old. I just can't seem to wrap my head around meal planning.
ReplyDeleteHey Tricia. Thanks so much!
DeleteSo it is kind of a gamble, but I do assume that L will eat leftovers of our meals. She will probably love this one since she is obsessed over pasta, tomatoes, spinach and cheese. I could see her picking out the chicken.
I bought a small salmon filet for her to spread around for her meals and also knew there would be leftovers. If she happens to not like the food, I would just fall back on our fridge and freezer stock.
We also always have frozen veggies and every week at the store I stock up on the fresh fruits and veggies she likes. Our store run this week was actually pretty reasonable considering I planned on cooking from three different recipes.
Does that answer your question?
I have a 2.5 year old at home and I always assume that he will eat the same thing I do. The one good thing I have going for me is that he's not a picky or finicky eater. (Or at least, he wasn't until very recently.)Like RT, we keep stocked up on lots of fall-backs like favorite fruits and freezer veggies for those times when he just doesn't want whatever we're having. There's no need to be a short order cook. Moms have WAY too much other stuff going on!
DeleteThe times I tend to feed my son something different than what we’re having is if it’s an issue with timing, or our plans that night, or if it’s something I worry about with allergies (although that doesn’t happen as often the older he gets.)
RT, love your blog!
Thanks for the replies. SOOOOOOOOOO helpful. I feel like the biggest idiot in the world when it comes to parent things.
ReplyDelete