Get a casserole dish
Put meat in casserole dish
Pick up knife, make slits in meat
Grab a clove of garlic and slice it up
Put slices of garlic into slits in meat
Pour broth over meat
Put in oven at 375 degrees
Chop up two potatoes and carrots
After fifteen minutes, add potatoes and carrots to roast
After forty-five minutes, take out of oven and serve
Breakfast – Soy yogurt with flax seed
Snack – Mandarin orange
Lunch – Taco “salad” with lettuce, black beans, mexican rice, salsa
Snack – piece of organic dark chocolate
Dinner – Stir fry over brown rice
I made the brown rice first and when it was about 10 minutes from being done, i started the stir fry. For the stir fry, I used garlic, celery, broccoli, tofu, mushrooms and spinach. I heated up some sesame oil, threw in the garlic, celery and the broccoli, followed by the mushrooms and the tofu. Put in some soy sauce, then added salt, pepper, and white pepper. I waited till that was all done, then just threw in the spinach to wilt a bit, put it over the rice and eat. Quick dinner. Pretty easy. Some onions and garlic would have made it tastier.
This is The Boyfriend’s absolute favorite meal. It’s a Hungarian recipe that his grandmother used to make for him and actually still does when he visits. She showed me how to make it a few years ago and I now use it as bait when I want something done. “I’ll make you chicken tarhonya if you do the laundry” “Guess who gets chicken tarhonya if he takes out the trash with a smile on his face!” It’s also one of the easiest things to make but of course I don’t let him know this, I sit in the kitchen and rub my head in frustration every few minutes so he can truly appreciate the whole thirty minutes I spend in the kitchen, half of which are spent text messaging about the newest Britney Spears saga.
Your ingredients:
Salt, Paprika (this is necessary! no substituting!), pepper, tarhonya noodles (more on this in a sec), butter, chicken broth, sour cream, half a yellow or white onion, two chicken breasts, a skillet, and a pot.
So of course one of the main ingredients in chicken tarhonya is, yeah, you guessed it: the tarhonya noodles. They are essentially itty bitty drops of egg pasta. The problem with tarhonya is that it’s nearly impossible to find in a regular grocery store. The only time I’ve ever had actual tarhonya noodles has been when The Boyfriend’s grandmother bought them at the Hungarian grocery store in Seattle and shipped them to us. At one point I had over ten bags of tarhonya noodles so I was never in need but then the day came that we ate all the tarhonya noodles and darkness fell upon us. We were really in the mood for chicken tarhonya but there were no tarhonya noodles. GOOD GOD, WHAT WERE WE GOING TO DO?!!! Improvise, of course 
I went to the grocery store and scoured the pasta section until I came upon these little beauties
Still itty bitty, still pasta. The texture is somewhat different from tarhonya but if you can’t get to a Hungarian grocer, these will work just as well. On to some cookin’!
You wanna heat up both your skillet and pot. I normally start slicing the onions while waiting for them to heat up because waiting for an iron skillet to heat up is like watching paint dry on a wall, minus the fun buzz from inhaling all the fumes, so yeah, boring. Then, when they’re all nice and hot, you want to throw in two tablespoons of butter into each.
This is your heart having a heart attack, kids. Trust me, it’s totally worth it.
You then want to put in a cup of the tarhonya/acini di pepe noodles in the skillet and your onion slices in the pot and saute them until they’re clear. Here’s the fun part and what’s so great about this recipe: it’s totally for the novice. See, in order to get the full flavor of chicken tarhonya you have to basically burn the noodles. You want to fry them until they are a good mixture of a deep gold, chestnut, and straight up chocolate color. If you happen to burn a few into black, you’re good, it just makes it so much more diverse. Make sure you keep checking them and stir (!) because, um, yeah, sometimes you get so distracted with, oh, I don’t know, air, and you forget you’re frying pasta and you look at your skillet and it’s black with a few specks of gold. I mean, it’s never happened to me, per se, but I’m just warning you so that it doesn’t happen to you. So check your noodles! They should look something like this after about ten minutes
Now you want to pour an entire can of chicken broth, lower the heat, and let it boil.
Your onions should be pretty clear by now so you want to add your pepper, salt, and paprika. The salt and pepper are really up to you and they don’t really make much of a difference because the fried noodles, paprika, and sour cream make the recipe so you can put as much or as little as you like. The paprika? Oh yeah, you want A LOT of that.
Next you want to put in about eight ounces of sour cream. If you want to feel better about yourself, use light sour cream. While you’re waiting for the sour cream to liquefy, you want to cut up your chicken breasts into six pieces.
You then want to add a can of chicken broth to your sour cream/onion mixture, stir that a bit, and then add your chicken. You’ve been watching your noodles, right?
Put a lid on the chicken and let it boil for a bit, maybe about ten minutes or so.
Make sure you keep checking your noodles. You want all of the chicken broth to be completely evaporated. So at this point you might be asking yourself, “Hmm, why did she have four cans of chicken broth in the ingredients picture but only use four?” Mostly because I’m an idiot but partially because sometimes the chicken broth evaporates before the noodles are done so you have to add more broth as needed. I’m like a Boy Scout, always prepared.
When your noodles are done, they should look like this
So pretty right? Ha, not pretty enough to not devour!
Your chicken should be done by now so now it’s a matter of putting some tarhonya/acini di pepe on a plate and then pouring the chicken/sour cream/onion mixture on top. Oh yeah, and don’t forget to eat it. I mean, I know it’s pretty to look at but if you don’t eat it, well, I’m pretty sure a little bunny will cry. Don’t make the bunny cry!
This is a pretty basic, very tasty lentil and veggie soup that I made tonight. You will need:
2 boxes of chicken stock (I use low-sodium, organic, free range chicken broth cos I’m from California)
1 medium yellow onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 large carrot
1 green pepper (Clearly, I used orange because I didn’t have a green one)
2 stalks of celery
1 can of stewed tomatoes (I used diced because like the pepper, I didn’t have stewed tomatoes)
1 large potato (I used two because my potatoes were small. heh.)
3/4 cup lentils (picked over and washed)
Salt, pepper, bay leaf
Lemon
First, chop up all the veggies so you’re prepared. I promise that there is onion, celery and garlic in that white prep bowl:
Sautee the onion, celery and garlic for 5 minutes in the soup pot. I put just a smidge of olive oil in there because otherwise it would stick to my pot.
Next, add the chicken stock, the can of tomatoes, salt, pepper, and a bay leaf or two, and all the veggies except for the potato. (or potatoes)
Also add your 3/4 cup picked over and washed lentils. I usually wash mine in a mini-strainer
Simmer on medium heat for a half-hour or so. In the meantime, chop up the potato (or potatoes. And if you’re in my kind of kitchen, also remove any thing that has started to sprout from the potatoes…)
Add the potatoes and simmer away for about another half hour or until the lentils and the potatoes are tender:
When everything is done cooking, I usually fish out the bay leaves and put them aside. Then I take my handheld blender/mixer thingie and blend a bit of the soup to make it thicker. My mom uses a blender and takes about a 1/3 of the soup out, blends it, and then puts it back in. Just a few pulses should be fine:
Squeeze a bit of lemon into the soup, then serve it up with some fresh, warm and crusty French or sourdough bread. Yum!
I was IMing with M because I am very good at working and IMing at the same time but that’s a different story for a different time. I told M that I wanted to make fish tacos and she gave me this great and simple recipe. I have never made fish tacos and so I decided to give it a try.
You will need fish (I used Mahi Mahi), salt & pepper, cumin, and paprika, lemon for the fish. I added an onion, tomato, avacado, and Tapatio for toppings.
First I rinsed the fish because I’m OCD. Then I put it on a plate and seasoned it with the S&P, Cumin, and because I’m a tard and forgot to buy paprika, I used a pinch of Old Bay seasoning for the fish. Then I put them in a skillet with a bit of oil to pan fry them (obviously you should heat up the oil a bit first).
Cook fish for about two minutes a side. I had to cook that big sucker in center for longer because it was big. After I finished frying up the fish, I put it on a paper towel to drain off some of the oil because I’m weird and trying to be all healthy. Then I threw in the onions that I had diced up to cook in the pan.
While the onions were cooking, I chopped up that tomato, sliced a lime in half (because I forgot to buy a lemon) and because I forgot to buy cabbage, I heated up some black beans really quickly and sliced up an avocado. (We Californian’s are so lucky when it comes to avocados. wOOt!)
After I had all my toppings together, I squeezed the lime on the fish, dropped a bit of Tapatio on it, then put the fish into flour tortillas (forgot to buy corn tortillas too), and then threw in some black beans, the avocado, and the tomatoes.
Yum!
