The End of a No-Good, Awful, Rotten Week

I realize it's been a while since I've posted. I didn't post much after the boy's birthday because that weekend sort of wiped me out. I'd barely had time to catch my breath and gather my wits when we got slammed by some oh-so-fun behavior problems at school.

Namely, the boy seemed on his sixth birthday to become so out-of-control freak. I mean, he pushed a little girl in his class while they were lined up to go to gym or music or art or whatever, and when asked why he did that, he said he didn't know--although he said he didn't do it because she first pushed one of his friends. For that little incident, he got himself 25 minutes of before-school detention. To say that I was most upset by this little incident is the understatement of the year.

Anyway, all this crappola with him has just...it's a huge headache because it just seemed to come out of nowhere, and we can't pinpoint why it's happening--or happened, should this crap hopefully just have been confined to last week. So I haven't exactly had the wherewithal to put together any post, save the one about the cilantro haters. Oh well.

V-Day
Remember Valentine's Day, Gentle Reader, back in the day when it was all about picking out your favorite cartoon character cheapie paper Valentine's set with the bonus teacher card or maybe, if your family was rich, the Valentine's cards that came with a Lifesaver sucker for each, and those Valentine's cards you'd address, one each, to every member of your class so that at some point before the classroom Valentine's Day party, you and your fellow students would deliver them into whatever brown paper sack or shoe box you each had to cover with construction paper hearts, maybe some ribbon or bric-ab-rac, maybe some stickers (again, if you were rich) or maybe those heart-shaped paper doilies your Mom scored at TG&Y? Remember those days? Before you dressed in black on Valentine's Day and scoffed at the heart-shaped Mylar balloons and extravagant rose bouquets your other classmates carries around with them from class to class because those damn things wouldn't fit in their locker and the florist had delivered them after lunch, when they could have taken them home? Before you were disgusted (or really even aware) of the crass commercialism surrounding this nonholiday and just saw it as a chance to do nifty things with red construction paper and to do special things for a lot of people?

Yeah, my memories of those days are fading fast too, Gentle Reader.

Anywho, I'd volunteered to bring cupcakes for the boy's classroom Valentine's Day party because, hey, ya wanna make a few happy memories of grade school Valentine's Days for your kid, right? With that impetus, I even went a step further in my cupcake making and made almond bark (tinted pink, of course) heart-shaped candies from an old Wilton candy mold I'd bought back in my hard-core Martha Stewart-y days to put atop each cupcake. Did I get Valentine-themed paper cupcake wrappers? Hell no, Gentle Reader. Those things are expensive and ridiculous. What kindergartener really gives a rat's ass about the paper around her or his cupcake?

They look pretty scrumptious, don't they? Low-sugar plain white cake topped with a fairly generous helping of homemade chocolate buttercream frosting and decorated with a homemade almond bark candy heart. What more could a kindergartener want at a Valentine's Day party? (Don't answer that. And if right now you're dredging up memories of Knox Blox in holiday-appropriate shapes that one kid's mom always made for every frickin' classroom party that all your classmates thought were so cool but you thought were tasteless and kitschy the way I am, then I feel sorry that you had to suffer through those things as I did.)

And you'd never guess that chocolate buttercream frosting started out as a mass of white, gray and blue buttercream frostings I had leftover from the boy's R2-D2 cake, would you? Nope, there's enough Nestle Toll House cocoa powder and milk mixed in that you'd never would have guessed it had once been a puce-colored mass of buttercream frosting. Yeah, I'm pretty proud that little culinary misadventure worked out surprisingly well because I had my doubts while I was whipping it up. Yup, I had some pretty serious doubts.

Lovey Day Food
So what did the human residents of Chez Boeckman-Walker eat to celebrate Valentine's Day? Well, we started with lunch at Madras Pavillion. We would have gone to Rangoli, but, alas, Rangoli is no more. (We discovered that last Saturday.) And since we'd just visited Indian Palace the week prior, we opted for Madras Pavillion, and it was delish as always.

Since stuffing ourselves stupid at Madras Pavillion's buffet is always a given, I planned on a lighter supper. My initial idea was Acapulco chicken (that link is not for the recipe I use, Gentle Reader, but it gives you an idea of the flavor), but I didn't have all the ingredients I needed, and I'm not keen these days on making special trips for ingredients when I have a pantry full of ingredients for other recipes I could make. So that's what I did--I dug into my giant folder of chicken recipe bookmarks and dug out one of the very first recipes I'd bookmarked for future use: raspberry chicken using raspberry jam. Believe you me, Gentle Reader, I've had a jar of low-sugar Smucker's raspberry jam sitting on a pantry shelf for months and months, just waiting for me to use it for this chicken dish or a raspberry-chocolate bar recipe I made once a long time ago that the husband loved that I've yet to revisit.

Raspberry Chicken1/2 t dried thyme
1/2 t rubbed sage
1/4 t pepper
4 boneless skinless chicken breast halves (4 oz. each)
1/4 C seedless raspberry jam
2 T orange juice
2 T red wine vinegar

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
   
2. Combine the thyme, sage and pepper, then rub it over the chicken.
   
3. Lightly brown the chicken in a skillet coated with cooking spray.
   
4. Transfer the chicken to a 9" square baking dish coated with cooking spray. Cover and bake for 15 min. or until the juices run clear.
   
5. In a saucepan, combine the jam, orange juice and vinegar, then bring it to a boil. Let the sauce boil for 2 min. Serve with the chicken.

Yield: 4 servings

Nutritional Info
Calories: 174
Fat: 3 g
Cholesterol: 73 mg
Sodium: 65 mg
Carbs: 9 g
Protein: 27 g

The Faudie's Futzings
Not only did I buy the raspberry jam for this recipe months ago, I'd also bought the thyme and sage for it too. Those little bags have sat neglected in my Gladware container of little bulk spice bags until Saturday--and then I only used the sage because I have bundle of fresh thyme on my counter that I opted to use instead. The fresh stuff is far more aromatic and flavorful than that dried crap.

I wound up pouring the boiled sauce over the chicken because the chicken was nowhere near cooked through after 15 minutes in Lumpy. I think I needed almost 20 additional minutes of cooking time for the chicken to be ready, and I figured, Hell, I might as well let the chicken absorb some of the sauce's flavor, plus having that liquid in the pan might keep it from drying out. I'm guessing I needed all that additional baking time because the breasts were pretty damn thick. You can't get thin chickie boobs here. They're plumper than a set of double-D silicon implants, thank you very much.

That sauce, by the way, is quite tasty. I was a little concerned the vinegar would throw it off, but it didn't. And I have to admit, Gentle Reader, that I feel no better than Poppy Cannon now when I make sauces from ingredients such as jams and whatnot. I mean, doing that is no better than whipping up something with a can of cream of mushroom soup, right? But I just don't do from-scratch sauces and glazes. I can't afford fresh raspberries (yeah yeah, I know--eat according to the season and all that crap), and I don't have the interest nor, more importantly, the skills to put together a respectable sauce or glaze from scratch.

Of course, I couldn't just serve the chicken and its sauce by itself. No, I needed a side dish. I didn't have much for veggie choices--some frozen sugar snap peas, frozen zucchini slices I'd put away, some carrots and that's about it. None of that set my taste buds atwitter, so I fell back on our family's side dish standby: rice. Specifically, basmati rice. From there, my thoughts went to a rice pilaf of some sort, but what?

Not long ago, I found myself in search of a suitable rice pilaf to go along with pork chops and had considered some kind of pilaf that included mushrooms. I found myself once again pondering a rice and mushroom recipe even though the boys loathe 'shrooms. This time, though, I prevailed.
Mushroom-Chive Pilaf1 T olive oil
1/2 C minced fresh onion
1 garlic clove, minced
2 C low-salt chicken broth
1/2 t salt
1/2 t white pepper
1 C uncooked basmati rice
1/4 C chopped chives
1/4 C thinly sliced green onions
1 8-oz. package mushrooms, chopped

1. Heat the oil in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat.
   
2. Add the onion and garlic, then sauté 2 min.
   
3. Add the broth, salt and pepper.
   
4. Bring the mixture to a boil, then add the rice. Cover, reduce the heat and simmer 35 minutes.
   
5. Remove the rice mix from the heat, then let it stand 5 min.
   
6. Stir in the chives, green onions and mushrooms.

Yield: 6 servings (serving size is 1 cup)

Nutritional Info
Calories: 161
Fat: 3.2 g
Sat fat: 0.5
Protein: 4.1g
Carbs: 29.1 g
Fiber: 1.2g
Sodium: 226 mg

The Faudie's Futzings
Only did two futzings with this recipe:

• I didn't have any chives, so I used half a cup of sliced green onions. Besides, is there really much difference between chives and green onions to faudies and the like?
  
• I only had a four-ounce can of mushroom pieces and stems, which is probably for the best since I was the only person who'd be eating them.

That said, the next time I make this recipe, I'm going to reduce the amount of chicken broth to just 1.5 cups since that's how much water I typically use when making rice. The husband and I both have found the 2:1 ratio of liquid to uncooked rice is wrong, and I feel it is in this recipe too.

Also, I'm going to halve the amount of white pepper because all three of us found half a teaspoon too overwhelming. Perhaps the problem is that the ground white pepper I have is very fine. It's not at all like the more coarse black pepper I get from my mill. Perhaps the recipe should specify a fairly coarse white ground pepper.

Oh, and not only was the raspberry sauce very good on the chicken, but when it mingled with the rice, it gave the rice a nice flavor too. If you're disgusted by the idea of letting a fruity sauce mingle with a rice pilaf, Gentle Reader, all I can say is this: Get over yourself.