new eats and good lighting.

Morning, chickadees!

Last night, my sister, my pals MM, MC, and my family decided to do a little cooking with one of my gifts to JP, Smitten Kitchen’s new cookbook.

You guys, Smitten Kitchen is my favorite.

Except for the time we made her poptarts.

But I digress.

In any case, we settled on a kale salad and chicken milanese.

We also made roasted potatoes, for good measure.

My sister gave me a couple more camera pointers, and then let me loose with my new toy.

I would just like to note here that knowledge is power, and things are already looking less dark, blurry, and weird in my life.

Onto the food.

The recipes were fairly easy to do, especially since we had four pairs of eager hands to help out.

Glasses of wine are also good incentive for projects like this.

To make the salad, we toasted up some pecans.

 

Then we washed, de-ribbed, and julienned kale until we filled up a salad bowl.

Also, slice up four radishes (or really, however many you want).

 

At this point, throw in some dried cranberries.

Also, goat cheese, which I just now realized I never added.

Don’t be like us.

Add the goat cheese.

 

Our dressing was made of dijon mustard, rice vinegar (use what you’ve got hanging around your pantry), honey, olive oil, and some s&p. Add twice the amount of oil as you do vinegar and mustard, honey and s&p to taste, and shake it all up.

Next up, it was chicken frying time.

One of my favorite times, really.

We sliced chicken breasts and thighs lengthwise until they were about 1/4 inch thick, and then dredged them in flour, then egg white, mustard & garlic, and finally rolled them in panko.

Rinse and repeat.

Don’t actually rinse though.

Just a little joke.

Next up, we poured some more wine, and got to the frying part.

We used a half inch of olive oil, but I suspect the kind of oil is negotiable.

 

JP and I are at this point discussing the ins and out of chicken frying.

I’m skeptical, obviously.

Yes, we have matching aprons.

 

Both parts of this meal were delicious and easy- especially because of our red wine supply and the help we had in making all of it.

I don’t have too many shots of the potatoes or the OTHER salad we made (sometimes, after Christmas binge sessions, you need two salads in a meal), because the light wasn’t great and this is a thing I am learning about.

We roasted the potatoes with olive oil, s&p, and rosemary, and the salad was dandelion greens (should have been arugula, technically, but we were at an Italian market, and dandelion greens is what they had) and thinly sliced fennel.

 

This was an awesome meal and impressed pretty much everyone. The cookbook looks like it’s full of really tasty, easy-enough-to-do projects, and I’m only sorry I didn’t order myself a copy.

And now I’m off to another day of family hanging and photo taking.

Enjoy the sunshine if you’ve got it chicks.