Chicken Piccata with Sauteed Mushrooms

The classic Chicken Piccata gets a delicious twist in this version.

I've been playing with leftovers and little bits of this and that I find in my fridge to make creative dinners during my time off due to the recent heavy snow which gave me several days off to play house husband. This easy and quick main came out beautiful and yummy!
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Chicken Piccata with Sauteed Mushrooms


2--boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1--gallon ziplock bag
1 egg
1/2 c flour
1 T salt
1 t black pepper


1/2 lemon, juiced
1--lime, cut and juiced
1--juice from mandarin orange
1 c--sliced mushrooms
1/2 sliced red onion
2 T--capers
3 T--olive oil

Place the chicken breasts in the ziplock along with the flour, egg and salt and pepper. Shake the bag and squeeze the ingredients until well blended.

Meanwhile, slice onions and mushrooms. Heat a pan adding olive oil. When hot, place the chicken breasts into the pan (shake off excess coating in the bag) and brown each side. Add mushrooms and onions and saute as the chicken finishes. When the mushrooms and onions are caramelized add in the capers and the juice from the lime and lemon. Toss in the lemon and 1/2 a lime. Add in orange juice. Let the juices meld with the chicken.

Remove the chicken from the pan and spoon out the vegetable mixture over the chicken. Toss the lemon and lime halves. Serve over rice, pasta or salad greens.

Bon apetit!

Asparagus-Stuffed Chicken Breast

Home all day today. No school. Snow Day. So, I made a quick trip out to Fred Meyer to pick up a few items, just in case the snow storm turns into a multi-day event.

I found some locally grown, fresh, chicken breasts on sale. Got 'em home and tossed a couple into a zip lock. Then I started looking through the fridge for some likely ingredients for a marinade. There on the self were bottles of tamari, Sriracha sauce and some peanut sauce. Rubbing my chin and scanning the fridge shelves, behind, underneath, tucked way back, I found the rest of my ingredients and began formulating my plan. Here is what I came up with for dinner tonight.

Asparagus-Stuffed Chicken Breast

2--skinless, boneless chicken breasts, butterflied
6--large white mushrooms, sliced
1/4 small red onion, sliced into rings
6 green onion tops, sliced
6-8 small fresh asparagus spears
4 pats of butter
olive oil
1/4 c cooking sherry

Marinade for Chicken
1/2 cup Tamari Sauce
2 T Sriracha Sauce
2 T Peanut sauce
1 t salt
1 T black pepper

Place chicken breasts in a gallon zip lock bag. Pour marinade ingredients into bag. Zip closed. Slosh chicken and marinade together coating the chicken. Turn the bag several times during marinade period. Allow to marinade for at least 3-4 hours. The longer the better.

When ready to put the dish together, remove the chicken from the bag and let drain. Butterfly each breast.

In a frying pan add 2 tablespoons of olive oil and 1 pat of butter. Toss in onions and mushrooms. Saute, stirring until mushrooms are golden brown. Add sherry and continue cooking a couple more minutes. Remove from heat.

Spoon 1/2 of mushroom mixture into each butterflied chicken breast. Place 1/2 of the asparagus along the length of each breast. Place pieces of butter around the vegetable mixture and fold over the butterflied half of the breast to cover the mixture. Place in a 9 X 12 casserole. Cover lightly with olive oil and salt and pepper.

Place in a pre-heated 375 degree convection oven and roast for 1/2 hour. Remove from oven and let rest for 10 minutes. Pour pan juices over the breast and any sides.

Serve each breast over a bed of rice, mashed or boiled potatoes.
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This dish went over well with my wife. She had been working on our taxes all day, so I would have to say that the least I could do was to make a nice dinner. Thanks sweetie for all you do for us.

My NookColor E-Reader

I recently had the opportunity to spend some of the final dollars available to me for classroom technology through a 2-year grant from the state of Washington. With it I purchased the Kindle e-reader with wi-fi and 3G, a Pandigital e-reader and the new Nook Color e-reader. I have been playing with both devices now for the past couple of months and I've come to some conclusions I thought I'd share.

This blog entry may begin to sound a bit like a commercial for my favorite e-reader and so you don't have to wait several paragraphs before I tell you, let me come right out and say that the Nook Color is my choice among the devices I have tried.

Now, while I have absolutely NO love for Barnes and Noble or any other predatory type of business, I must say I was totally taken in by this little gadget. I had been looking into the idea of an e-reader for some months before the Nook Color came on the market. Mostly I'd been drooling over the Kindle sold by Amazon.

When I discovered I could use my tech grant funds to purchase an e-reader or two, I thought, why not use this as an opportunity to see what's out there and how they might best be used in education. With the Kindle I purchased a couple of down loadable books and started checking out its other capabilities. Almost from the start I had some real issues. It wouldn't, for an example, allow me to do much of anything beyond using it as a book device. It is black and white (the e-ink format is a plus as it seems more realistic and reads more easily outside by the pool than devices without this technology). Another problem with the Kindle, and this is its biggest issue, is that it is proprietary, meaning that it can only download books from Amazon. Almost all the other devices out there allow down loads from other web book sellers. It also won't allow access e-books from public library systems. As I approach retirement and begin looking at less expensive options in life, this seemed a pretty good option in my mind.

The Pandigital e-reader I bought through the local Kohl's department store was a color unit. It had so many issues that I erased everything off its memory and returned it for a refund. Similar in size to the Nook Color, the Pandigital device also had limitations as to who and how I could access e-books. No good!

Then, just before Christmas 2010, I discovered the Nook Color being sold in Barnes and Noble and Best Buy for $245. I went in to my local B and N store and not 10 feet inside the front door was the Nook sales desk. I had a sales person all to myself to ask all my questions. She was very knowledgeable and eager to help. I walked out with one when I found out it could do nearly everything I was looking for. And what it couldn't do were issues the Nook people were already preparing to address. Here are some of the perks of the Nook Color:

• Full color screen
• 7" glare resistant screen
• Non-proprietary
• Touch screen navigation including pinch zoom
  
• Allows me to down load books from my local library free
• Allows me to purchase books from competing sources
• Allows speedy access to Internet
• Allows speedy access to Facebook and E-mail
• Comes with apps for Pandora (great), chess, crosswords
• More apps in development
• Free wi-fi access anywhere it is free and at Barnes and Noble stores where you can read any book free for an hour
• Get a free beverage with the coupon on the in-store w-fi system
• Free Book Fridays
  
• Free 800 tech support number
• Automatic free device upgrades
• The device is beautifully designed
• Weighs about on pound
  

Wow! So what's wrong with the Nook Color? Well, I suppose that depends on what you were looking for to begin with. It doesn't, for an example, have the apps the Apple Ipad has (what you see is what you get). Nor the Ipad's screen size (nearly twice the size). Nor the I-pad's weight of around 2 pounds. However, the Nook folks assure us that they are working on app development and that an app store is in the offing. The Nook would be better off if it operated with a 2.2 OS instead of the current 1.1. That, too, is on its way. I think I was really looking for a mini tablet and not just an e-reader, so the Nook Color has all but given me that. It still doesn't play video (other than MPEG-4) so Netflix and Hulu are out of bounds, but I am told with the upgrade to the Android 2.2 coming later this year, the ability to use Adobe Flash will be included. That will finally put the Nook into tablet territory and make it far more competitive with the popular Apple Ipad which costs twice as much.

What I have not done is to tell you anything about the other number of e-readers on the market. Sony has a popular one. Borders Books sells the Sony as well as ones made by Kobo and Velocity.

Do your homework carefully. Ask lots of questions. What features do you want from your e-reader? Do you even need one? What's your budget, etc.? A lot of folks are, like me, smitten with the Nook Color. In fact it just ran away with the top honors for e-gadget of the year award. We gadget hounds are a fickle lot and when the next big thing comes along our Nook Color readers will no doubt wind up in the bottom drawer of the desk with our old PDA, and other outdated devices. But for now, the Nook Color has my heart.

Some of My Favorite Food Photos

The Barcelona, Spain Market Place. The nut stand.




Lettuce in the Grandville Island Market. Vancouver, B.C.

An Orange

Cottage Pie On A Cold Winter Night

Looking for an easy to make comfort food for dinner? Here is one that is a favorite around our house. Having a son-in-law who happens to be a Brit helps.

We were in Wales with family and friends a couple of New Years ago. Nick and I were tagged as the dinner maker for New Year's Eve Dinner. We decided to make a Shepherd's Pie. Making it with lamb is considered Shepherd's Pie, with beef is a Cottage Pie.

Turned out we had all the ingredients except for the tomato products usually added in--usually catsup and or tomato paste and sauce. I suggested using Daddy's Sauce, a sort of A-1 Steak Sauce tasting concoction, which we did have. This is what we came up with. It was delicious. Daddy's Sauce is available here in the States but it is pricey!

2 pounds of ground beef or lamb
1 onion, diced
2 carrots, diced
2 handfuls of peas (frozen is fine)
1 clove of garlic, minced
3/4 cup of Daddy's Sauce
1/4 cup of beef broth

options:
1 stalk of celery, diced
8 ounces of mushrooms, sliced
salt and pepper
5 pounds of potatoes
1/2 stick of butter
1/ 4 cup of milk

Peel potatoes and cook in salted boiling water until soft. Drain and put back in the pot. Add milk and butter and use a mixer to blend into potatoes until they are mashed. Salt and pepper to taste.Set aside.

In a skillet, add veggies except peas and add meat. Cook until meat is browned and veggies are nearly cooked through. Drain oil from pan. Add in Daddy's Sauce and broth stirring into mixture. Salt and pepper to taste.

In a 9 X 13 casserole pour meat and veggie mixture into the bottom and smooth out filling the bottom. Pour mashed potatoes over the meat mixture and spread uniformly across the top. With a fork, rough up the top of the potatoes leaving small peaks. These will brown and caramelize as the casserole bakes. Place in preheated 350 oven for 45 minutes or until the top of the potatoes are browning.

Enjoy!

It Just Makes No Sense

Senator Gabriella Giffords, the Republican Congresswomen from the 8th Congressional district in the Tucson, Arizona area, is shot in the head by a deranged, lone gunman with a record of violent and disruptive behavior. So violent and disruptive that he is permanently banned from his college campus. His parents knew of his issues yet apparently remained in denial and did little or nothing to help this disturbed young man.

Giffords, a crack shot with her Glock hand gun and a representative of a part of Arizona where most of the constituency would rather die with their gun in their cold, dead hand than to allow any gun control laws, was the latest victim in a nation that just can't seem to agree on what to do with the problem of her mentally ill and the issue of gun control.

Jared Loughner is also the victim here. He is a member of the invisible part of our community that desperately needs help but either doesn't get it or has no one to advocate for him to get it. We live in a society that has chosen to toss aside our mentally ill and homeless (often the same people). Instead, we cross the street rather than walk past them, avert our eyes when we have to stop at a light and one of them stands with a sign in their hand not 10 feet from our car asking for help. Many of these people are sick and often through no fault of their own, they are unable to get the medical help they need. The system is too broken and convoluted for most of these folks to be able to navigate through the endless and complicated maze of bureaucratic red tape without giving up and slipping into the dark abysses of society.

What to do? The Supreme Court has rendered it almost impossible for persons who are mentally ill to be kept against their will in any confinement. Hence nearly all of the horrid mental hospitals made infamous by the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are closed. Most of those institutionalized today are there due to criminal offenses. Their commitment was after the fact. In other words, they had to commit a crime before they were 'locked up.'

Nothing can be done for these people with our current societal attitudes towards taxation (a whole other blog entry). However, when we do finally tire of innocents like 9 year old Christina Green being murdered for no other reason than she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, then there are some answers.

1. Streamline the system, beefing up the staff of the governmental organizations who are tasked with helping the mentally ill.
2. Assign the ill to an government advocate who has a case load that is easily managed to help monitor these people, helping them with their medications, homelessness, jobs, reconnecting with family, etc.
3. Increase government funding to and for homeless shelters. The individual's advocate can also act as the inspector to these shelters to make sure they are being run effectively.
4. All of this will, of course, take money. When we as the fellow citizens of those who have no voice are finally sickened enough by the violence and the growing throngs of the disenfranchised all around us, perhaps we will elect to do something positive about it.

Until then, who among us is next? Where will the next random act of violence take place? Whose niece, grandaughter, son or daughter will be the next senseless victim?

A New Jazz Club in Town

Last night, January 5, 2011, I attended the grand reopening of the Bellingham art gallery The Blue Horse Gallery Cafe and Wine Bar as it debuted as the newest jazz club in town.

The Mike Allen Quartet featuring pianist phenom Miles Black, talented bassist and singer Adam Thomas and local celebrity drummer Julian McDonough.

Mike, a well-known jazz sax player from Vancouver, B.C., was recently hired as the jazz studies coordinator at Western Washington University. He brought along his quartet to not only help teach at the school but also to promote the program through demonstrating their combined talents out in the greater community.

Last night, they wowed the Bellingham community when they took the new stage at the Blue Horse. I love Mike's quartet for lots of reasons--they are all obviously masters at what they do. But most of all it is their obvious love for the music. They have so much fun when they play together and my life is lifted to a much better place when I listen to them.

The gallery is a great venue for music. It has a very open feel, yet it is intimate with warm colors, lots of wood and great acoustics. There was plenty of space in the main room for the 50 or so attendees to sit at tables and chairs yet the adjacent rooms allowed conversations and roaming through the gallery's ample art display while still easily hearing the music playing in the next room.

As I sat listening with friend Mark Fuller I leaned over and mentioned, "Who needs New York City when we have this to listen to?"

The cafe and wine bar plan to open with regular hours soon and music is planned as a regular event as well. You can see and hear Mike Allen and Julian McDonough every Wednesday night with guest musicians playing with them, Miles and Adam will join them every other week. They play from 7 to 9, though last night they played until 10. Be there!