Endeavors of the Kitchen

Yesterday, I told my mom that I wanted to make dinner.

She was so excited / relieved, I'm surprised she didn't just throw a dish towel at me and run giggling into the other room.

Ah, the simple joys.

Anyway, tonight my agenda was to make for dinner strawberry & white wine chicken breasts coupled with a salad of fresh lettuce and spinach, strawberries, almond slices, feta cheese, and poppyseed dressing, followed by a dessert of almond cake.

I found the recipe for the cake first, on a new blog I just found called Orangette. Of course, it wasn't until after I baked the cake that I realized she is in Seattle, and so the ingredients might need to be slightly altered, considering I live about 5000 feet higher than her and in considerably less humidity.

Regardless. I made the cake.

So while that sat out to cool all afternoon, I set the chicken marinating in the fridge in a mixture of white wine and rosemary, and went to a voice lesson and a going-away party. When I got back, it was go time.

I'd really been wanting something with a strawberry flavor, so I found a recipe that was not just a salad with strawberries in it, but an actual meal with a hint of strawberry flair.

The cooking was fairly easy, but thinking back on it I would have toned down on the amount of spices put into it, and let the rosemary simply sit in the white wine and mix with the marinade instead of heaping it on top of the chicken in the overly aesthetic way that I opted for.

So when time came to actually serve dinner, it all looked pretty nice.

And may I just say that for the record, if you're ever trying a new recipe or branching out your cooking in a way that you're not entirely 100% certain of the quality of your results, try it out on your parents. Or at least the one who eats the most. They make a great audience. 

Everything was good. Actually, it was really good.

The chicken could have used fewer spices, the strawberry sauce could have been thinner.

And, if you ever get a recipe from a lower altitude than you, it's probably a good idea to be proactive about that.

It was supposed to be crumbly, instead it was a little bit softer and more oily, so closer to a pie than a cake. If you want the recipe so that you can muck it up same as me, you can find it here.

However, once again, the father-eating-audience made all of the imperfections completely okay by gobbling down his piece like a diabetic with low blood sugar and asking if he could "have another, please."

Overall? Not the best dinner I've ever had. It could use improvement. For instance, the next time I go to make the almond cake, I'm going to add more flour and less almond extract, and make sure that the cooking spray on the parchment paper is nice and light. 

But hey, at least my mom didn't have to make dinner.