Easy Lemon Chicken

Friday night I made Faye's "Easy Lemon Chicken". My technical writing students have already learned to snicker at use of the word "easy" in technical writing. It's a big no-no. Why? Well 1) What's "easy" to you may not be "easy" to your user, and 2)It just doesn't add anything.

I'm pretty skeptical of recipes that include words like "easy", "faultless", "perfect", or "impossible" in their title. What can these words mean? Not much really but they do tempt you as the makers of yogurt have discovered. Local options include "perky peach", "naughty strawberry" and such.

Easy Lemon Chicken was in fact pretty easy. It was even easier the way I made it, without all the transfers Faye suggested. Being raised on a healthy stir-fry diet, I am confused by instructions that tell me to remove ingredients (sauteed onions, say) that will only be returned to the same pan later. I tried to obey for the sake of learning and recipe fidelity but I just couldn't bring myself to do all of them.

For me the barrier to "easy" was in cooking chicken in the first place. I have been a vegetarian for more than a decade. A few factors caused me to reconsider, tentatively.

1) With pregnancy, my tastes have changed. The idea of meat is occasionally appealing to me.
I was worried also at first that there was also some truth in people's concerned cries that I "must" eat meat during pregnancy in order to get enough protein. Not really. Turns out a couple glasses of skim milk take care of your daily needs rather nicely. Add some ice cream, a serving of yogurt or cottage cheese and boom, I'm easily surpassing my daily needs.

2) After we got married, I decided that Adi deserved more meat in the home. When I was single I kept kashrut wonderfully simple by maintaining a meat-free home. When Adi started living with me, meat made some slow invasions. First, I accepted cold cuts, consumed on designated plates. Then I actually bought him some frozen shnitzel which he could heat himself in the toaster oven and eat on same designated plates with designated silverware.
He valiantly respected my rules, despite strident secular protests.

But after our wedding, I vowed to set up my kitchen to accommodate cooking some meat dishes too. I had to do some soul-searching to decide if I really care about maintaining different dishes because it is rather a pain in the tuchus. But I decided that I didn't come all the way here on aliya just to eat treyf in my own home.
So I haven't totally got the separation thing down in a way that would satisfy the most strict... but we basically have a separation.

OK, so I'm making some meat and even eating some too. But I couldn't quite face chicken parts as the recipe called for. I stuck to cutlets. Yes, it's kind of cheating, it's that whole thing about meat not looking like the animal it came from. So be it for now.

To make up for the lack of skin and bones, I added some bread crumbs to make it a bit more interesting. That plus onions, some lemon, broth (example: soup mix), and a couple of disappointing olives thrown in and voila, easy lemon chicken, vaguely North African in style. I thought it was kind of boring. Next time I would avoid pre-boiling the lemons. I would have enjoyed more of their tart flavor coming through.

Adi was visibly psyched when I handed him his plate. So even though I was only able to eat one piece and felt a little funny about it afterwards, it was totally worth it. We rounded out our meal with a tasty impromptu creation of my own.

While cooking I asked Adi if he'd like pasta or sweet potatoes on the side.

"Pasta with sweet potatoes!" he exclaimed cheekily. He got what he asked for. To fusilli I added some sweet potatoes I'd parboiled then cut up and sauteed with onion & fresh rosemary. Yum.

Reminds me of a great New Yorker cartoon. A piece of rigatoni with legs, arms and a face (obviously) is standing at the phone saying,
"Fusilli, you crazy bastard, how are you?"