I'm home alone tonight, and as always when cooking for dinner for one I felt excited about the opportunity to try something different. It's easy to fall into a food routine during the week, especially when you come home tired from work and the broccoli in the fridge has yellowed but you know you're going to add it anyway.
So tonight, with the balcony door open letting in the mild evening and the incessant tune of the ice-cream van, and with the promise of another hour of daylight, I decided to plan my meal at my leisure. I thought I'd ask Google what I should eat, before customarily disregarding anything it said.
"Dinner for one" (Google told me cheerlessly.) "Cheese omelette. Onion omelette. Cheese and onion omelette. Toastie with cheese. Tortilla wrap with guacamole, chicken, and a pale, joyless tomato."
Wait a minute, I thought to myself. Just because I'm cooking for one doesn't mean I have to eat sadness for dinner. Is this how other people live? I love cooking for myself and for others. I've made, for me alone, a tagine with an entire chicken in, disjointed myself, of course. And several roast dinners, and my special five-hour curry. Because I'm worth it.
So, as predicted, I ignored everything the internet suggested and decided to make a variation on a recipe my brother has been making recently: chicken breast wrapped in bacon. Here's what I did:
Ingredients
-chicken breast, whole
-streaky bacon or pancetta
-leek
-mushrooms
-green pepper
-garlic
-thyme
Chop up the veg to a tasty size, add some olive oil and thyme sprigs. Wrap the chicken breast in streaky bacon. (By the way, on Saturday I made a delicious bacon sandwich with six slices of bacon, and I did wonder at the time whether six was too many. It turned out tonight that it was, because I only had two left, so I filled in the gap around the chicken with some salame piccante*. I would have used chorizo but I ate it all yesterday. My brother makes a stuffing with cheddar cheese inside his chicken, but I've eaten two different cheeses today so I decided to forego the third. Ergo, you can see the paths down which my food choices lead me.) Put the veg in an oven dish and the wrapped chicken on top. Roast it at 200°C for half an hour, and eat with gusto, or with some nice bread.
*Salame piccante is 'salami', or 'pepperoni'. Pepperoni means 'bell peppers' in Italian so I prefer to call it by its proper name.
[Post dinner update: I had the pleasure of eating this in the company of my brother on FaceTime, who queried my decision to omit the cheese, but who had himself eaten a rather unsatisfactory tête de veau (boiled cow's head) for lunch.]
So tonight, with the balcony door open letting in the mild evening and the incessant tune of the ice-cream van, and with the promise of another hour of daylight, I decided to plan my meal at my leisure. I thought I'd ask Google what I should eat, before customarily disregarding anything it said.
"Dinner for one" (Google told me cheerlessly.) "Cheese omelette. Onion omelette. Cheese and onion omelette. Toastie with cheese. Tortilla wrap with guacamole, chicken, and a pale, joyless tomato."
Wait a minute, I thought to myself. Just because I'm cooking for one doesn't mean I have to eat sadness for dinner. Is this how other people live? I love cooking for myself and for others. I've made, for me alone, a tagine with an entire chicken in, disjointed myself, of course. And several roast dinners, and my special five-hour curry. Because I'm worth it.
So, as predicted, I ignored everything the internet suggested and decided to make a variation on a recipe my brother has been making recently: chicken breast wrapped in bacon. Here's what I did:
Ingredients
-chicken breast, whole
-streaky bacon or pancetta
-leek
-mushrooms
-green pepper
-garlic
-thyme
Chop up the veg to a tasty size, add some olive oil and thyme sprigs. Wrap the chicken breast in streaky bacon. (By the way, on Saturday I made a delicious bacon sandwich with six slices of bacon, and I did wonder at the time whether six was too many. It turned out tonight that it was, because I only had two left, so I filled in the gap around the chicken with some salame piccante*. I would have used chorizo but I ate it all yesterday. My brother makes a stuffing with cheddar cheese inside his chicken, but I've eaten two different cheeses today so I decided to forego the third. Ergo, you can see the paths down which my food choices lead me.) Put the veg in an oven dish and the wrapped chicken on top. Roast it at 200°C for half an hour, and eat with gusto, or with some nice bread.
*Salame piccante is 'salami', or 'pepperoni'. Pepperoni means 'bell peppers' in Italian so I prefer to call it by its proper name.
[Post dinner update: I had the pleasure of eating this in the company of my brother on FaceTime, who queried my decision to omit the cheese, but who had himself eaten a rather unsatisfactory tête de veau (boiled cow's head) for lunch.]
______
If you enjoyed this post, you can follow me to receive new posts by email. Thank you for reading!
Or see more posts here: Get in the tuktuk, no time to explain
Comments
Post a Comment