-
Photo
The rest of Saturday afternoon played out like classic lazy weekend fare.
At around 5 pm, I couldn’t stand that I hadn’t yet basked in the (very welcome) sunny and warm(er) weather outside so I forced my boyfriend to take a walk with me.
And voila. We discovered a new grocery store a few blocks away - a grocery store stocked with an admirable produce, meat and fromage section and, more importantly, space and a lack of droves of New Yorkers - and celebrated this fact by running inside said grocery store and purchasing dishwashing soap, paper towels, olive oil and a 6 pack of beer that may have been purchased solely on the fact that it had a adorable cartoony cow on its exterior. I’m not entirely convinced this store will still be there the next time we try to find it. It very well could have been a mirage or similar to the club that George found on Seinfeld that was a meatpacking factory when he returned with Jerry.
Before heading out for the night, my boyfriend and I enjoyed a delicious and simple dinner of lightly breaded chicken breasts with a salad of boiled potatoes, avocado and arugula.
The chicken (cut in “tenderloin” aka “chicken finger” size) was dredged in flour, dunked in egg, and covered with Trader Joe’s breadcrumbs that I had mixed with the Creole seasoning mentioned in a previous post. I took a large pan, covered the bottom with some oil, and cooked the chicken on both sides for about 3-4 minutes, covering the pan with its lid at the end to ensure the chicken would be fully cooked.
The potato, avocado and arugula salad was inspired by a Jamie Oliver recipe that I can’t seem to find online at the moment. I took some new potatoes (about 5 medium sized/1-2 lbs total), chopped them into large chunks (1-2 inches) and dropped them into a large pot with salted water that I brought to a boil. I cooked the potatoes for about 20 minutes, until they were very tender but not falling apart. I placed the potatoes into a large mixing bowl and added one avocado sliced up, the juice of one lemon, a couple good glugs of very good olive oil and seasoned everything with salt and pepper. The original recipe called for a bunch of watercress to be added at this point, but since I didn’t have any in the fridge, I substituted with wild arugula and found it to work very well.
It was a very delicious, simple meal. Normally, I’m known for going balls-to-the-walls when it comes to even weekday or Saturday morning cooking, but lately I’ve begun to appreciate the beauty in simplicity. While cooking elaborate meals can be very fun and rewarding, there is something to be said for whipping up something delicious with a minimal amount of energy expended. It’s almost its own rewarding challenge.
