This Week's Menu

Leftover Orange Soup


Enough chopped veggies to choke a rabbit. A herd of rabbits, even.


Tree Birthday Chicken—A recipe purportedly in honor of Tu B’shvat, but which, in truth, has a lot more to do with the fact that I have to use the damn oranges I bought about five weeks ago because they are so healthy and low in points/calories and I was going to eat two every single day and (as I do every single time I buy oranges) I did not eat them.


Ingredients

1 kg chicken breasts
Three somewhat decrepit oranges
Eight dried apricots
Spices: Salt, pepper, Cumin, Ginger, Hot pepper. I think that is it, but I may have tossed something else in there.
White wine (optional, because I do not have any white wine, but I wish I did because it would go really, really well.)
There is no celery in this recipe. If you still have the celery you bought not to use for last week’s recipe, please throw it away now. As you do, please do take a moment to remember that those starving children in China are your fault.

Instructions

1. Rinse the chicken breasts, cut the excess fat and slice into strips and place into a mixing bowl
2. Ask yourself if buying chicken at the shuk was a good idea.
3. Sniff the chicken. Note that it does not smell especially putrid. Not like the turkey you bought that time and allowed to sit for a week in your fridge before you got around to taking it out for cooking.
4. Whatever. Too late now. And won’t cooking kill the bacteria? Of course it will! Yofi! Great! Set the chicken aside.
5. Slice the oranges in half. Is there any visible mold? No? Excellent! Squeeze the oranges into a bowl.
6. Add the spices. Debate whether to add cumin. Sniff it. Sniff the orange mix. Hmmm…. Debate some more. In the end, decide to add it because the colors go well together and that means the tastes are complementary.
7. Sniff the orange juice mix again. Zut alors! It needs more spices! Add another dose of all the spices, including the cumin.
8. I learned “zut alors” from The Little Mermaid. “ Zut alors! I have missed one! Sacre bleu! What is this? How on earth could I miss such a sweet, little succulent crab. Quel commage. What a loss! Here we go in the sauce. Now some flour, I think. Just a dab. “
9. You do not have to say "zut alors". Any random expression in any foreign language you do not know will do.
10. Pour the marinade over the chicken. Mush it all up well so that the chicken is well covered and put aside
11. Chop up the apricots into little bits.
12. Take a deep-ish baking dish. Layer the chicken and chopped up apricots. Pour whatever marinade remains in the bowl over the chicken. Poke at it a bit.
13. Put the baking dish in the refrigerator. Allow it to marinate for as much time as you need to write up the recipe as a blog post.
14. When you are at this point in writing up the recipe, realize that you forgot to pre-heat the oven. Turn it on to…ummmm….190 degrees Celsius (375 degrees Farenheit)? Okay!
15. No no NO! This is a recipe! You should have a proper temperature! Go online and check out various recipes to try to figure out what the temperature should be. Discover that you should have browned the chicken first. Damn. Next time. Okay—temperature.
16. According to this website, when cooking chicken breasts in dry heat, you should cook at a high temperature for a short amount of time. Does roasting with lots of liquid constitute wet or dry heat?
17. Oh, fuck it. 190 degrees Celsius it is.
18. Take the baking dish out of the refrigerator. Cook the chicken until done.

Seeing that my chicken is still in the refrigerator stage, I have no idea if this recipe is any good. I will make sure to update you.