Take the Bad With the Good

We have all done it, ladies.



You sit down in a restaurant, and your internal monologue goes to work: "saladorburgersaladorfriedchickensaladorgrilledcheesesaladorpizza?"

"What can I get for you?", asks the server. It is time to make a decision.

YOU: "I will go with the salad today. Light dressing on the side. 86 the cheese."

SERVER: "Is there anything else I get you?"

YOU: "Well since you asked, let's add an order of fries...you know for everyone. Oh, I will also have a diet coke."

And so it goes. We make ourselves feel better about the bad by simply tacking it onto the good.

Ordering pizza? Add a salad.

Juicy burger? Leave off the Mayo.

Ordering fried chicken? Slap it on top of a salad.



Well, it is that mentality I worked off of here. It is not that this chicken is so so bad for you, but it was certainly made worse by the fact that I was adding a huge chunk of No Fail Bread slathered with my new original recipe for Bacon Rum Butter (recipe soon to come) on the side. This recipe is very easy. The inspiration came from a Paula Dean recipe for scallops which I will likely try one day as well, but since I have a 10 lb bag of frozen chicken in the freezer I decided to go with that. Bacon. Mustard. Chicken.

Bustard Chicken

(makes 2 chicken breasts)

4 strips smoked bacon
2 tbsp whole grain mustard
2 boneless skinless chicken breasts
Peanut oil (you can also use vegetable or canola if that is all you have)

Ahead of time:
Cook the bacon (not too crisp) by microwave or on a skillet.
Drop the bacon and the mustard into a food processor (from the hole in the top while it is already running).
Keep the food processor on until the mustard and bacon is thoroughly mixed or even pureed.
Coat the chicken breasts with the bacon/mustard mixture and place them in a ziploc bag. Place the bag in the refrigerator and let sit for at least 5-6 hours.

To cook:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Heat oil in a heavy-bottomed skillet (should be about 1/4 inch thick).
Take the chicken out of the plastic bags, making sure to use every last bit of the bacon mixture to coat the breasts.
Once the oil is hot, Use tongs to place the coated chicken breasts into the hot oil. Cook for about 1 minute on each side.
Transfer the chicken breasts to a small baking pan, making sure to scrape up all the bits of bacon/mustard from the skillet and putting it on top of the chicken on the baking pan. Place the pan with the chicken in the oven.
Bake for about 20 minutes or until the chicken in cooked all the way through.



I served the hot, crispy chicken over a nice fresh salad which included tomatoes, light ranch dressing, sharp cheddar cheese and chunks of toasted no fail bread.

PotatoE

June 15th, 1992 was officially the worst day of former Vice President Dan Quayle's life. In a single day, he destroyed whatever he had managed to build of a political career. I don't think I can tell of the events of the day better than the following excerpt from this article:

In [his] book, Quayle said he knew little about his next stop, in Trenton, other than it was to help spotlight the city’s Weed and Seed program, which still provides anti-drug education to grade schoolers while they also are being watched by adults until their parents get home from work.

When he got the Munoz Rivera School, Quayle spoke with some women involved in the program, saw a drill team perform and looked in on some self-esteem classes before his aides started hustling him off to another classroom for a staged spelling bee.

"What are we supposed to do?’’ I asked Keith Nahigian, the advance man who had prepared this little photo op,’’ Quayle wrote.

"Just sit there and read these words off some flash cards, and the kids will go up and spell them at the blackboard,’’ the handler told the VP.

"Has anyone checked the card?’’ another aide asked.

"Oh, yeah,’’ responded Nahigian. "We looked at them and they’re just very simple words. No big deal.’’

Enter William Figueroa, 12, a sixth-grader from the Mott School in the South Ward who had been bused to Munoz Rivera to take part in the vice presidential event.

Figueroa knew how to spell potato, and he wrote it in a legible script on the blackboard when Quayle announced his word for the spelling bee.

Quayle looked at the blackboard, then at his contest card, and gently and quietly told the boy, "You’re close, but you left a little something off. The e on the end.

"So William, against his better judgment and trying to be polite, added an e’’ and won applause for it from those assembled in the classroom, including Mayor Doug Palmer, Quayle wrote.

The misspelling wasn’t mentioned until the end of the press conference afterward, when one reporter asked Quayle, "How do you spell potato?’’

"I gave him a puzzled look, and then the press started laughing. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized anything was wrong,’’ Quayle wrote.

"None of the staff people had told me. Caught off guard, I just rattled on a little to fill the air — something about how I wasn’t going to get into spelling matters — but I knew something was really amiss.’’

Imagine. IMAGINE. Something so seemly small exposed this man in such a big way. This story is sad on many levels:

Level #1: The VP of the United States could not spell the word potato.

Level #2: I am pretty sure I learned the "no E at the end of the word potato" rule because of this incident (even though I was only recently reminded of it).

Level #3: According to the rest of that article, the boy who did know how to spell "potato" ended up as a high school dropout and fathered a child by age 17.

Level #4: Dan Quayle took the rap for everyone really. Although he should have known better, the word was misspelled on a card the school had provided him. It doesn't really seem all that fair. Someone prone to explain stories like this by way of conspiracy may wonder if someone misspelled the word on the card on purpose to see if they could cause the blunder.

Level #5: If it were not for spell check, this blog post may suffer from several more misspelled words (because I know there are some that fall through the cracks). Then again, one could argue it is in fact spell check itself that leads to students not learning how to spell properly in the first place. Some simple words I will bashfully admit to consistently spelling incorrectly include: sandwHich and refriDgerator.

Level #6: Dan Quayle cannot use the spell-check-leads-to-students-not-learning-to-spell-properly excuse.

You know what goes better with a potato than the letter "E"? Mustard.



I know it sounds strange, but my trusty friend over at the Smitten Kitchen food blog said it would be great, and it is. When I made these potatoes, Zach actually commented on them before I asked him how they were. They are easy, flavorful and go well with steak and red wine.



Dan Quayle Roasted Mustard Potatoes

(adapted from Smitten Kitchen - serves 4)

Cooking spray
1/2 C whole grain Dijon Mustard
1 tbsp Olive Oil
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp minced garlic
1/2 tbsp dried oregano
3/4 tbsp kosher salt
1 1/2 lbs small potatoes, quartered or halved (depending on the size) into about 3/4 inch wedges (use any variety you like or mix a few different types)
Fresh ground black pepper

Preheat to 425°F. Spray cooking spray onto a large baking sheet. Whisk mustard, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, oregano and salt in a large bowl until blended. Add potatoes; black pepper and toss until the potatoes are completely coated. Spread potatoes in single layer on the baking sheet.
Roast potatoes 20 minutes. Remove from oven to flip them. Roast them for another 20 to 25 minutes until the potatoes are crusty on the outside and soft on the inside (about 40 to 45 minutes in all).

Not So Secret Ingredients

I used to work at a restaurant. I started out as a hostess and eventually became a server after working there for a year or so. This restaurant was an upscale steakhouse, one of the nicer ones in my college town. Everything on the menu was and I imagine still is delicious. When you start working at a restaurant, there is usually some sort of menu test you must pass before you are able to start. The menu test for this particular place was incredibly involved but very straight forward: memorize the menu. I remember being handed a packet of papers with just the names of every item on the menu. It was up to me to fill out a complete and thorough description of each dish along with the restaurant's abbreviation to put on the ticket to give to the kitchen. For example:

MEDITERRANEAN SALAD:
A Mediterranean blend of kalamata olives, French beans, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, mushrooms, pine nuts and feta cheese, served over a bed of fresh baby field greens and spinach tossed with herb-vinaigrette (abbreviation: MED)

We had to know everything about the food and drinks, from the big entrees to the appetizers to the desserts all the way down to the ingredients in the salad dressings. We had to know that the Caesar Salad dressing was eggless and that the cows the steaks came from had been corn-fed. And this was just to become a hostess.

It was a huge hassle to have to memorize all these things at the time. However, I cannot say that I am disappointed I was made to do it. The first reason for that is it made my job a whole lot easier. I didn't have to refer to a menu every time I took a to-go order over the phone, and it made the transition to becoming a server very smooth. The second and much more important reason I am glad I had to know all these things was it inspired my next recipe.

The only thing I remember about the Balsamic Vinaigrette dressing was the abbreviation, "BV" and the fact that one of the ingredients was either dijon mustard or honey mustard...I cannot even remember exactly which one. When my sister-in-law showed how she makes her own balsamic vinaigrette dressing by shaking balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and a packet of splenda together in a bottle, it got me experimenting. I started trying to make my very own creamier version of this dressing. I went through a bunch of random-seeming ingredients to make this work until I remembered the secret ingredient in the best Balsamic dressing I have ever had: mustard. Since I happened to have some dijon mustard on hand ,magic was made that night. I still felt something was missing so I continued experimenting until I found my own even more secret ingredient: lebne (also spelled "Labne", "Labneh" or sometimes called "kefir cheese"). It is a type of Middle Eastern yogurt cheese that comes in a tub and has a consistency slightly thicker than sour cream. My dad used to buy this yogurt from a small Lebanese grocery store when I was younger, and we would eat it by dipping pita bread in it. It is really flavorful and a nice alternative to sour cream or cream cheese. It goes well on toast, in sandwiches, and with veggies (instead of ranch dressing) so it is worth having a tub hanging out in your refridgerator.

All of these ingredients made their way into this recipe from different places:

Tossed Salad Balsamic (for your tossed salad):

1/4 C Balsamic Vinegar
1/4 C Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 small packet of Splenda (or any artificial sweetener)
1 tbsp dijon mustard (you can try honey mustard for a sweeter BV dressing)
1 tbsp Lebne*

*You can find lebne in any middle eastern grocery stores. Otherwise you can substitute plain yogurt (found in the dairy section of any grocery store).

Put all ingredients in a large bowl and whisk thoroughly until blended just before serving over salad. It may be even easier to put all the ingredients in a bottle, secure the lid and shake 'em up.



This dressing will go with any type of salad (like the one pictured above). I like my Balsamic dressing a little thicker than a vinaigrette and slightly sweet, but you should definitely play around with the ingredients and add more or less of things based on preference.