Day28 - I got curried away.

Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2008: My Kitchen: Paper Chicken and Curried Veggies.


I think that if you have watched half as much cooking channel, PBS on Sundays as I have throughout my life, I'm sure that you've seen at least one episode where they put some meat and veggies into a little parchment pouch and baked the hell out of it. I know I've must have seen 2 dozens recipes about it, but I've never gone for it because I thought it was either 1) too fancy, or 2) too hard.

Well, this blog pushes me to confront both the silly assumptions and kick the hell out of them. With the help of this website, www.cookthink.com, I found a recipe that was simple and healthy. Cookthink.com is actually pretty cleaver in that you can put in the ingredients that your looking for (Chicken, Fruit, Veggies) or just what you attitude is (Southern, Humble, Flavorful). It's really quite ingenious.

Here is the recipe. I didn't have Basil because of my pizza obsession, so I used Italian seasoning. I don't think you can go wrong with that mix.


All of the yummy ingredients:




The flattened parchment with piles of veggies and chicken.




This little guy got away.




I was actually sweating bullets because I was just about out of parchment paper. I just had enough to make these two. Thinking back, I should have just made on large pocket.





I baked the hell out of them and they came out like this:




And this chicken looked like this:






Outstandingly good. The peppers were nice and soft and the zucchini tender. The chicken was moist and extremely flavorful.


This is a bowl filled with about a lb. of squash and 2 granny smith apples.





Sauté 1/2 c. onion and 1 clove of garlicn a large pan, then toss in this and atleast 2 tablespoons of curry and 2 tablespoons of brown sugar. I probably doubled that amount because of the amount of squash I cooked. I actually finished cooking everything in the microwave because of the shear size of it all. I think that the scales at the grocery store were lying when I measure them.

This is what they look like when done.




And this is what the whole shebang looked like when platted. I wasn't sure that the flavors were going to mix: Italian and Indian, but the underlying sweetness did the trick.





The bummer is that my house now currently smells like Indian Pavillion and I'm not sure if it's ever going to come out of the curtains. Fingers crossed.