Chicken with Rosemary Sauce

Working on presentation…half way there.

Hello, chicken! This dish was big for me for several reasons.

1. I’ve only been cooking pasta/Italian meals lately. They’re easy and basically effortless, so I felt accomplished with this one because it actually took some thought and planning!

2. I haven’t cooked chicken in over 4 years! After a year-long stint as a pseudo-vegetarian/pescatarian (save for a good cheeseburger now and then) I began eating all meat again except for chicken. I’ve only just recently added chicken back into my food repertoire but this is the first time I’ve actually bought and cooked chicken myself. My vegetarian experiment–that’s another blog entry in and of itself.

3. This dish was big because it turned out really (and surprisingly)  freakin’ good.

I got the recipe from Cooking Light and if you follow the link you’ll see a much prettier picture of the chicken than what I have. I used rosemary from my spice jar instead of  the fresh kind, and used way more than a teaspoon. I also added some flour to the sauce to thicken it up. The chicken was super moist and delish. The recipe was relatively healthy and stupid easy so I will be making this again!

Ingredients:

• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 4 (4-ounce) skinless, boneless chicken breast halves
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 cup chopped green onions
• 1/4 cup dry white wine
• 1 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary
• 1/2 cup fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth
• 1/2 cup half-and-half

Directions:

Heat olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat.

Sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper. Add chicken to pan; cook 3 minutes on each side.

Add green onions, wine, and rosemary; cook 30 seconds. Stir in broth; cook 2 minutes.

Add half-and-half; cook 2 minutes.

Asian Chicken Salad

Ramen noodles? Yes, ramen noodles. I had promised myself that I would never eat ramen noodles again after graduating college. Every broke and starving college kid understands that ramen noodles are a means to an end while in school. Graduating college means a lot of things–getting a degree, a real job, paying bills and never eat ramen again!

So I was kind of opposed to this recipe at first. My sister had learned it from a friend and wanted to share it with me…and more importantly, she wanted to cook it for me.

To my surprise, the ramen was just pan-fried. No seasoning. No microwaving. They’re just the crispy noodles in the salad and they are actually the best part of the salad!

We pan fried the noodles with almonds and Sesame seeds until everything was crispy.

Next, we pan-fried chicken–just the precooked stuff that’s meant for salad and the like. Later, we added that to the noodles and tossed it with lettuce, coleslaw lettuce, and carrots.

The Asian dressing we made was soooooo good. I want to put this on everything! Just put the ingredients in a saucepan and boil until the sugar is boiled out.

1/2 cup sugar
1/8 cup rice vinegar
1/8 cup  apple cider vinegar
3/4 cup of vegetable oil
2 tsp of soy sauce

And bam! There you have it: the least authentic (but very tasty) Asian salad of all time!