Two Birds vs. One Stone = Total Awesomeness

Tuesday afternoon turned out to be another Culinary Misadventure--and I still managed to make it to yoga at 4:30!

I have to admit that I had a lot of good mojo going into Tuesday because I had a rockin' Monday. For starters, while I was at the gym Monday morning, one of the personal trainers, who was doing her own thing over in the abs area, asked me if I was training for some kind of event. "No, just trying to keep the weight off," I replied humbly and honestly. Then she asked me if I took part in figure competitions (y'know, chick body builders strut around in teensy bikinis, their tanning bed-roasted skin preternaturally glistening with Ganesh knows what kind of lube, flexing and posing to show off their overdeveloped muscles). Laughing a bit to myself, I shook my head and offered, "I've lost a lot of weight. It's better I keep myself covered up." Finally she smiled and said I should consider it since it's clear I have the dedication for it.

Dedication. Cool.

Monday afternoon, I had my latest check-in at the weight loss clinic, roughly a month and a week after my last appointment. I gained four pounds of muscle but only lost two pounds of fat mass, so my overall weight did go up two pounds. However, that small loss of fat put my body fat percentage at 10.2 -- down another two percentage points since May. Friggin' unbelievable! That's five percentage points below what's considered essential for adults. And yet I'm just fine.

Cool.

So with all this confidence, I headed into Tuesday afternoon looking to have some fun.

Bird 1: Drop Cookies
As I mentioned in the post I added on Tuesday, I found an oatmeal peanut butter cookie recipe I wanted to try.


Not only did I try it, I rocked that baby.


Oh yeah. I rocked it good.

Looking at that close-up pic right now, the cookies don't look terribly appetizing. Look a bit more like pale, gooey diarrhea from a dog in severe intestinal distress. Blorf! But trust me, the cookies are quite delicious.

Taking a cue from either one of my Cook's Illustrated books or my King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, I let the egg whites come to room temperature (or somewhere close to) before I added the brown sugar and whipped them to a foamy consistency. Taking another cue from The Best Kitchen Quick Tips, I used the whisk attachment for my hand mixer instead of the regular beaters.

(I do have a stand mixer. Mum gave it to me some years ago. But I've never used it. It's another kitchen appliance of which I have a long-standing fear established during childhood. Mum's stand mixer to my young eyes and sensitive ears was a behemoth that looked all too ready and willing to take off some little girl's fingers should she dare get within two feet of it. Perhaps one of these days I'll have to get out my stand mixer and throw another stone.)

Of course, being health-conscious little me, I had to futz with an already "light" recipe. As I so often do, I substituted Splenda brown sugar blend for the regular brown sugar, and I opted to replace the cup of all-purpose flour with half a cup of said flour and half a cup of whole wheat flour. I don't know why I'm reluctant to use more of my wonderful white whole wheat flour; perhaps I'm just not thrilled about spending $5 or more to score another bag when I still have plenty of good 'ol Gold Medal all-purpose and Gold Medal whole wheat.

This recipe was my first time to replace the sweetener (honey) with agave nectar. Ahh, agave nectar--can life get much better? (Perhaps if you had one of the other, better known byproducts of agave--tequila!) The agave didn't seem to affect the cookies at all. I couldn't discern any off taste, nor did it cause them to brown or burn faster. Based on my limited experience and understanding, I'd call this substitution a success and recommend to anyone trying out this recipe.

And, of course, being the culinary misadventurer that I am, I did have a bit of a mishap. I thought I had enough reduced-fat creamy peanut butter, but, alas, I was wrong. So my oatmeal peanut butter cookies have some morsels of peanuts because I used one-fourth cup of cream PB and three-fourths cup of crunchy. Oh well. Greg didn't complain, and I didn't notice a difference.

I was feeling so confident that I even experimented. I had a morsel of the dough after I wrapped up blending all the ingredients, and it tasted just like a regular oatmeal raisin cookie. So throwing in some raisins seemed like a natural thing to try. Granted, I threw in a scant half-cup of raisins, but, hey, props to me for expanding on a recipe (instead of trying to just make do with what I have on hand to meet the recipe's basic requirements).

Now, you have to understand what a monumental event my making this recipe as it was intended--as drop cookies--is. Until this day, I've hated making drop cookies because I'm lazy and too impatient to go through the rigmarole of spooning out the drops of dough, watching bake each sheet of cookies to ensure none of them burn, transferring the freshly baked cookies to wax paper, juggling hot cookie sheets, etc. I've just preferred to slop the dough onto a jelly roll pan, bake it roughly twice as long and cut the baked product into bars and be done with it. But not today!

Oddly enough but somehow not surprising in retrospect, I discovered that I actually enjoyed spooning out each drop of dough. I had three baking sheets, and I only had to reuse one. In fact, I found coordinating the swapping of fresh-from-the-oven sheet(s) for ready-for-the-oven sheet(s) to be, well, rewarding because I did it efficiently and without burning anything. Yes, I truly am that anal retentive that I can find pleasure in project planning a batch of cookies. And even though I actually was pressed for time (ChemFree was schedule to arrive between 2 and 4 PM to check on our ant infestation in the kitchen, and I wanted to have the dirty dishes loaded in the dishwasher, which still needed to be unloaded from the most recent wash.), I was calm as I wrapped up my work. The measuring and dropping was relaxing and meditative--a "brain off" activity that's productive just as chopping veggies and trimming and cubing chicken breasts are. Nifty!

Bird Two: The Pressure Cooker
I've already reported on my first (admittedly shared with Mum) experience with my Fagor pressure cooker, and I've already declared my love for it. So I didn't want to wait too long until I had my first solo experience with my Fagor.

(Gads, that sounds so lewd! But you must agree that Fagor would be an awesome name for a comic book monster. Hell, it probably is. Batman versus Fagor--Gotham City will never be the same!)

Anxious to do some pressure cooking, Tuesday morning while I was preparing breakfast, I took down the handy cookbook that came with my cooker and was thumbing through it, trying to remember which of the recipes had tripped my trigger and the husband's trigger. I rediscovered the Acapulco chicken one, showed it to the husband when he came out to the kitchen, discussed the need to make pizza sauce, debated the virtues of making Acapulco chicken in lieu of the traditional pizza (Tuesdays are Pizza Night at Chez Boeckman-Walker) and mutually decided to Make a Change.

(Deviating from the standard course is highly unheard of at Chez Boeckman-Walker. Usually the only thing that can disturb the natural course of Pizza Tuesdays and Burrito Wednesdays is a delay in the weekly comic books, which would then bump Burrito Wednesday to Burrito Thursday. Yes, we anal retentives live by our regimens here at Chez Boeckman-Walker.)

By the time I wrapped up the cookie making and clean-up (after the brief visit from the ChemFree guy), I only had about an hour until I had to leave for yoga. So I ditched my desires to sit and read for a while, whipped out the thawed chicken breasts and got busy slicing off gooey fat deposits (I enjoy this activity far too much) and then cubing the meat. After that, I threw together the orange juice sauce in my fabulous Windsor pan. While I did have to improvise the one and a half cups of OJ (3/4 cup OJ concentrate left over from...something I made a month or so ago combined with 3/4 cup of cold water), the sauce came out perfectly. I had just enough time to throw some plastic wrap over the top of the pan, put the lid atop that, then put it in the fridge and then turn my attention to assembling the remaining ingredients. After that, I was off to yoga!

The actual making of our Acapulco chicken was so unbelievably easy. The olive oil (didn't use anywhere close to the one-fourth cup of olive oil the recipe calls for) heated nicely in the pressure cooker, the chicken browned quickly enough, nothing burned as I threw in the Splenda brown sugar blend, the cinnamon, the ginger, the jasmine rice, the raisins and finally the OJ sauce. Oh! the smells emanating from the cooker were just heavenly!

Building up to the required high pressure didn't take too long, but I'm still learning how to determine with the pressure really is built and when it's still building. Now that I know where the steam needs to flow from steadily, I started the cooking time at just about the right time. I did wait about a minute or two to turn off the heat after the timed 10 minutes were up, and I did opt to let the pressure release slowly instead of using the cold water shower technique. However, after about four or five minutes of waiting and waiting for the pressure indicator to drop, I tried something new (and a teeny bit scary): I clicked the pressure setting from 2 (high) to automatic release. And voosh! We got ourselves a big 'ol steady, controlled release of steam, and within 30 seconds or so, the pressure indicator dropped, telling me I could safely remove the lid.

I'll admit that most likely because I didn't release the pressure as soon as the 10 minutes were up, the chicken turned out a little bit on the chewy side. But the rice--perfect! And the rich, orange-cinnamon fragrance wafting from the cooker had mouths watering.

Of course, we did have a little pre-dinner drama. Once the kiddo learned we weren't having Tuesday Pizza, he had a hissy. "But it's Tuesday! We're supposed to have pizza!" Yeah, I kid you not--those were his words. Yes, I've raised the most anal retentive almost-five-and-a-half-year-old preschooler, thank you very much. And, of course, he took three bites total, if that, before declaring he would not eat any more of it. Crazy kid....

Despite the kiddo's protests (totally expected), I'd call my pressure cooker Acapulco chicken a success, and I can confidently say I've totally conquered my fear of the pressure cooker. Hazzaa!