You. Reek. Ugh.
Oh, sorry, I meant “Eureka!” Didn’t mean to imply that you smell. Although, seriously, just between the two of us, you kind of do. Might want to take a shower or something. Right, anyway. I just thought I’d share a happy accident that I had.
Last night I didn’t get around to making dinner until it was late. I wanted something fast, and the instant yakisoba on top of my refrigerator was calling to me. Then I looked in the fridge, at the half carton of milk and 5 eggs which have to be chucked because they are past their expiration dates and I changed my mind. There were other items in need of immediate use, or they too would join the queue, waiting around for trash day to come so they can hop in the lovely yellow burnable garbage bag and head to the incinerator. I thought I should make an attempt to use what I had and stop wasting money. So, I did something that I rarely do, and rinsed out a skillet then plunked it down on the gas range.
I had no plan. I just looked through the stuff and started by killing the last onion in the net. I cut the top and bottom off, peeled it, and sliced it in half. Then I gutted the middle, cause that sucker was already sprouting. Once I had the hemispheres of good white onion layers left, I rough chopped them and tossed them in the pan with a dash of vegetable oil and a pinch of salt to let them sweat on low heat. (This bought me time to figure out my next move.) I knew that the onion should be a background element, because onions kind of get bitter when they sprout. At least, according to Alton Brown. Anyway. I also had an apple left from the 3 that I bought from the nearby mini mart. They sucked. Bad. They were crappy tasting. I didn’t want to eat the last one plain, so I thought, heck, why not dice it up and throw it in with the onion? Did it and kicked up the heat.
As my onions started to caramelize and the apple heated up, things started smelling good. In my opinion, once you have grilled onions you have a good dish, provided you don’t royally screw up the main part of it. But I digress. I had some ground chicken meat (which I honestly bought for novelty’s sake, because I had never before encountered chicken breast ground like beef chuck). Just over 100 grams of it. Tossed it in on top. Found that I had a couple of pieces of bacon left over from the last care package I received. REAL BACON. What a Godsend. Seriously. Anyway, I needed to use it and was out of eggs with which to pair it. But hey, don’t a few restaurants advertise apple-smoked bacon on their burgers? I pulled it apart into tiny pieces and tossed it in. Then I added a pat of butter, cause, why not?
I decided to make it a weird savory sweet thing. So I put a pinch of crushed chili pepper on followed by some liberal dashes of ground cinnamon in. It started smelling really good. Apples and cinnamon always smell good, but throw the other notes in on top and it got nice and savory. I figured the apples were shrinking and condensing their juices (and flavor), so I let that sweetness just do its thing. I pulled the new bottle of crushed basil out and flipped it open, smelling it next to the pan. Smelled kinda nice, so I put just a bit in. The apple chunks kind of looked like Greek potatoes at this point. Once the meat was thoroughly cooked, I killed the heat and gave it the gusto with some nice famous Hakata salt and some freshly ground black pepper.
As I seasoned, I figured out how I could serve my …chicken apple onion cinnamon basil stuffing of sorts. I grabbed the last three soft corn tortillas (also from my last care package…my family rules) from the fridge and a couple of paper towels. I ran my hand under some water and flicked it onto the paper towels so that they were damp (like the joke where you fake sneeze on someone) and sandwiched the tortillas in between the damp towels. Then I microwaved ‘em for 40 seconds in my 500 watt denshirenji. I spooned my concoction onto them, rolled them in Moe’s brick burrito style, and feasted. Let me just say that I would have paid money for it. Ha ha ha. Knowing my luck, I’ll never be able to reproduce it. Oh well. I was thinking it would work great with crumbled tofu too. Anyway, that’s my happy accident. I’m trying to learn how to cook, and some of my experiments go horribly awry (like those chocolate grits I did once…what the heck was I thinking?), but some go really well. Do you guys cook? We should get a recipe exchange going. I find it hard to learn here, because my available equipment and ingredients are pretty different from the standard stuff at home in the States. Anybody? How ’bout it?
