Monday, October 17, 2011

Revisiting the Cocina de Andrews

Well, I haven't been cooking much lately but I have tried these two recipes fairly recently.

The first we tried tonight, and Koby and I both agreed that it tastes remarkably like 'Country Club' food.  Just tasty enough that you'd finish the whole thing, just rich enough to hurt your stomach just a little bit, and just bland enough that you'd forget about the dish as soon as it came time to eat again.

Bacon Wrapped Chicken
Grade: C+

Here's what I'd change: I'd swap the cream cheese for something with a little more zest and perhaps add garlic.  I'd season the chicken breasts and I saw on one of the comments that someone had also wrapped the chicken in spinach, which I thought sounded good.  Some people also mentioned substituting sour cream for the mayo.  Also, I'd cook the bacon a bit before wrapping it around the chicken.  Or I'd totally revamp the recipe and try something with some pesto.  Definitely a rich dish, almost no matter how you spin it.  I chose it because it had the highest number of stars on my AllRecipes app, and it had lots of positive reviews, but I really can't figure out why...

The second I liked A LOT, but I also changed up quite a bit as I cooked.  Let's see if I can remember, it's been a few weeks.

Chicken Marsala
Grade:  solid "A"

So... I added onions, sundried tomatoes and 'Italian' seasoning and left out the mushrooms and sherry.  I want to say I did something else spur of the moment but I can't remember just what.  Hmmm it may have been that I added cherry tomatoes.  I think that's what it was and it was really good.  Koby says it would be an A+ if I would just stop cooking with penne pasta.  And there you have it.

This would probably be a whole lot more interesting with pictures, but I don't have any of the food (it's hard to take pictures before eating when there's a very tiny window of time in between 'cooking' and 'eating') so I'll leave you with this.




Oh!  I've just remembered.  On a related note, I did almost set fire to the cocina de Andrews over the weekend.  That may be a slight exagerration, but real talk y'all... there was a LOT of smoke.


You might notice how you can so precisely see the sunshine streaming in through the windows?  If you'd like to be able to see the light in this way, you could do so easily by building a small bonfire in your house.  Took about a year off my life.  Let me tell you what happened.  I started cooking some bacon and stepped just out of sight for thetiniestofseconds to try and win something on this blog ... seriously, it was just a millisecond of time, and next thing I know, smoke is billowing out of the kitchen and it smells like bacon-scented garbage.  Did you know that bacon will disentegrate in its own grease if cooked too long?  So I grabbed the skillet off the burner and stood in the kitchen, pan still smoking out of control, completely frozen.  Do I pour the grease out in the backyard?  I'm envisioning our poor dogs being terribly surprised and scalded after trying to eat the bacon-lava.  Do I run through the house and pour the grease out in the front yard?  I'm seeing now smoke throughout the ENTIRE house and somehow tripping and spilling fire-hot grease onto my baby, who is sleeping in the other room about fifteen feet from the doorway... Seriously, it took me way too long to make this decision. 

I finally opted to go out the back door and poured the grease near the fence, and managed to escape the entire experience with only one small burn on my hand.  And the dogs didn't eat the grease, either.
Luckily, the weather was absolutely gorgeous and I was able to keep the doors open for at least 3-4 hours to get some of the stank out.  To no avail, apparently.  When Koby got home from his football game around 1:30 that morning and woke me up, the only thing I remember him saying is "We won," and "The house smells really bad".

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