Chicken Lo Mein

This is a lot like fried rice from way back when. However, I think it's a little more exciting. Or at least, I took some more liberties with the recipe. This turned into an add-whatever-you-want kind of recipe so I can't provide precisely how much of everything I put in. However, I can say with confidence that the meal is pretty robust.

Ingredients:

1 lb	dry spaghetti (I prefer whole wheat)
5	carrots, grated coarsely or sliced thinly
8	asparagus stalks, chopped
2	small broccoli heads, floreted
4	celery stalks, chopped
1	jalapeño pepper, seeded and diced
1	onion, chopped
3	garlic cloves, minced
2	eggs, scrambled
1/2 lb	chicken, cut small
1 can	sliced water chestnuts
maybe 1/4 cup	soy sauce
a few tbs	cock sauce
to taste	whatever you want

Procedure:
Cook the spaghetti mostly, leaving it a firm al dente. It'll finish up later. Drain and set aside. If you're not running the vegetables concurrently, you may want to toss them with some oil to keep them from clumping while they wait.



Cook the chicken most of the way through. Add vegetables. You can add sauce as you go to prevent you from needing more oil. Stir this all around until they start to soften.



Add the pasta and stir a lot. At this point it's also time to go crazy with sauces. The pasta isn't quite done yet, so it's really thirsty. I stuck with mostly soy sauce and hot sauce. I also threw in a few tablespoons of brown sugar, a floop of barbecue sauce, some lemon juice, and a bunch of black pepper. It turned out not particularly sweet, so I think another avenue would be to use a lot more brown sugar as well as some jam.





Cook this until it's done. There are plenty of noodles, so ever so often you can just grab one out and eat it. This will also allow you to keep tabs on your seasoning. If you cook it for too long your pasta will start to dry out. This is why you want your vegetables to be mostly cooked at the point where you add the pasta.



Makes 6 large servings.

This is a really fun recipe because you can really throw in whatever you want. If you screw it up, you've just invented something new ("it's not a bug, it's a feature"). The choices of vegetables and sauces are completely free.

I had chicken in this but it's really not an important feature. The noodles really trump it; this meal would lose little by the omission of the meat. The eggs were similar. I would next time either up the egg count to three or skip them entirely. They come up sufficiently infrequently that you forget about them, then, every time you get a piece, you wonder what it is.

I've found that I really like asparagus. Make sure to not cook it into a mush though. You cut the carrots small so they'll cook before your asparagus is obliterated. Same for the celery.

Enjoy!

Sweet Potato Breakfast Scramble

This recipe is based strongly on one I found here. I did change a few things, but in some cases I suspect it was for the worse.



Ingredients:

3	Andouille links, sliced
1	sweet potato, sliced
1	onion, sliced
1	garlic clove, minced
1	jalapeño pepper, seeded and diced
	salt
	black pepper
	cinnamon
	cumin
	eggs

Procedure:



The whole point of this meal was to use up some sweet potatoes. I cut up two, which you will probably realize when you cut up just one and note how much more I have than you. Two was too many, not only for the meal, but for my pan.

The preparation here isn't particularly exciting. Fry the sausage until it's mostly done, then add the sweet potatoes (and probably some additional oil). Cook those for a while then add everything else. The cumin won't really matter in the end as far as i can tell but go crazy with the salt, pepper, and cinnamon. Especially the cinnamon. Trust me. Mix well then serve with a fried egg on top.



Child's play. The recipe makes three hearty servings, each of which should be topped with a fried egg.



What excites me about this is that I don't think I did it particularly well but it was still good and unusual. The egg on top really does make this feel like it's going to be a salty greasy breakfast food (though it actually is not particularly greasy). Then BAM! Spicy cinnamon sweetness.

I imagine this will make your breath terrible, so I recommend eating it before spending time with people you have no interest in smooching.

The biggest mistake that I made was slicing the sweet potatoes instead of hashing them. My concern was that sweet potatoes are hard, so hashing them is a pain. But slices were more of a problem for me than hashing a potato would have been. They were too thick to cook in a timely manner and too wide to really fit on a fork with anything else. And with this dish, it's all about getting a little bit of everything in every bite.

As I've shown before, it is possible to cut sweet potatoes into fries or hashes. Perhaps the more clever way to go about doing so would be to boil (or microwave) the potato for a few minutes to soften it up and make it take more easily to a cheese grater or fry slicer.

The recipe I worked from did use cilantro, which I did not. I'm skeptical about whether it belonged.

That's all for now; we'll see if I can write up Lo Mein for tomorrow night.

Photodiary 4: Stir Fry

I'm surprised that I haven't done this one before. The stir fry is really my proto-meal. Almost everything I make is a stir fry in some manner of disguise. This one is in the worst disguise, I guess.



I've got two more updates in the queue; expect them soon.