Adventures in Cooking
7:28 PM Tuesday, June 21, 2011Because I no longer have children at home on a daily basis to go, "Eww, that's gross, I'm not gonna eat that!", I have gone recipe hunting on the internet over the last few months to find new and exciting recipes to try. I usually hit up Eating Well and Cooking Light in an entirely vain effort to lose weight while still eating delicious food.
The food is delicious. The vain part is trying to lose weight.
Tonight, I decided to try this recipe for Lemony Chicken Saltimbocca. I went to the store a few days back to do my shopping for the week and had the list of ingredients for this recipe on my shopping list. One of the items on that list was prosciutto.
I live in a small town. Apparently, prosciutto is too fancy for our local Walmart.
So I bought deli sliced ham instead because prosciutto is ham. Probably. I see that the recipe calls for sage leaves. I'm 99% certain I don't have whole sage leaves but I'm certain I have sage of some sort or other. Coz sage is a pretty typical spice to have, right? And if you're doing lots of fancy cooking, you're going to have lots of spices, right?
No, no sage at all. I have three bottles of cumin and two bottles of allspice, two different types of ginger, minced and powdered versions of both garlic and onion. But no sage.
Of course.
Assembling the food, I'm supposed to wrap two slices of prosciutto/ham around each 4-oz chicken cutlet. I'm supposed to have four cutlets but instead have two approximately 8-oz boneless chicken breasts. I find that wrapping the ham around the breasts is not working so well because the ham slices are too small to wrap around each breast.
So I attempt to pull off the ham I've wrapped around each chicken breast so I can cut the breasts in half, intending to re-wrap them with the ham.
Only, the ham is deli sliced.
Which means they're really thin.
Which means that as I pull the ham off the chicken, the ham falls apart.
This is really not going well, I think. I look over at my 4-legged tub of lard, affectionately known as Logan, lying on the floor by the end of the counter. He's just waiting for a scrap of something to fall to the floor so he can snarf it up. So I decide to oblige him by flinging a shredded piece of deli ham at him.
He's normally very good at catching food in the air. For a walking ottoman, he's got lightning quick reflexes when it comes to food.
But the ham sticks to my fingers as I fling it at him and it lands on the top of his head. He lifts his head but hasn't realized he has ham on his noggin. I stare at him, wondering when he's going to notice the ham on his head.
I reach out to pull it off his head and in one swift movement, he's off the ground, leaping up to snap at my fingers like he's a dolphin going for fish in a show at Sea World.
The ham topples off his head and lands on his back.
He remains painfully unaware that he has ham on his back. I'm not sure if that's because he's so fat, he can't feel it, or if it's because he has fur like velcro and he's used to having all kinds of stuff stuck to his fur.
(It's not unusual for him to have small branches or multiple leaves stuck to various parts of his body. In the fall, I find branches all over the house and I'm never quite sure if they're there due to him carrying them in his mouth or if they hitched a ride on his back and only fall off when they get tired.)
While I'm debating how to get the ham off his back without him biting my hand off, our other dog, Sunny, comes running into the kitchen. Ah ha! Sunny will see that ham on his back and eat it and then I won't have to worry about losing a finger or two.
And she sits there next to him, looking all freaking adorable, completely oblivious to the ham on Logan's back.
Sighing, I toss a couple more shredded pieces of ham at the two nincompoops and turn my back on them to finish dinner. I glance out of the corner of my eye a few minutes later and see that Sunny has finally discovered the ham on Logan's back and is eating it.
In the end, the dinner turned out well, despite the lack of sage and prosciutto. And Logan remained ham-free for the rest of the night.
Only, I have no sage.
No, no sage at all. I have three bottles of cumin and two bottles of allspice, two different types of ginger, minced and powdered versions of both garlic and onion. But no sage.
Of course.
Assembling the food, I'm supposed to wrap two slices of prosciutto/ham around each 4-oz chicken cutlet. I'm supposed to have four cutlets but instead have two approximately 8-oz boneless chicken breasts. I find that wrapping the ham around the breasts is not working so well because the ham slices are too small to wrap around each breast.
So I attempt to pull off the ham I've wrapped around each chicken breast so I can cut the breasts in half, intending to re-wrap them with the ham.
Only, the ham is deli sliced.
Which means they're really thin.
Which means that as I pull the ham off the chicken, the ham falls apart.
Nice.
This is really not going well, I think. I look over at my 4-legged tub of lard, affectionately known as Logan, lying on the floor by the end of the counter. He's just waiting for a scrap of something to fall to the floor so he can snarf it up. So I decide to oblige him by flinging a shredded piece of deli ham at him.
He's normally very good at catching food in the air. For a walking ottoman, he's got lightning quick reflexes when it comes to food.
But the ham sticks to my fingers as I fling it at him and it lands on the top of his head. He lifts his head but hasn't realized he has ham on his noggin. I stare at him, wondering when he's going to notice the ham on his head.
He doesn't.
I reach out to pull it off his head and in one swift movement, he's off the ground, leaping up to snap at my fingers like he's a dolphin going for fish in a show at Sea World.
The ham topples off his head and lands on his back.
He remains painfully unaware that he has ham on his back. I'm not sure if that's because he's so fat, he can't feel it, or if it's because he has fur like velcro and he's used to having all kinds of stuff stuck to his fur.
(It's not unusual for him to have small branches or multiple leaves stuck to various parts of his body. In the fall, I find branches all over the house and I'm never quite sure if they're there due to him carrying them in his mouth or if they hitched a ride on his back and only fall off when they get tired.)
While I'm debating how to get the ham off his back without him biting my hand off, our other dog, Sunny, comes running into the kitchen. Ah ha! Sunny will see that ham on his back and eat it and then I won't have to worry about losing a finger or two.
And she sits there next to him, looking all freaking adorable, completely oblivious to the ham on Logan's back.
You wouldn't get this kind of behavior with cats.
Sighing, I toss a couple more shredded pieces of ham at the two nincompoops and turn my back on them to finish dinner. I glance out of the corner of my eye a few minutes later and see that Sunny has finally discovered the ham on Logan's back and is eating it.
In the end, the dinner turned out well, despite the lack of sage and prosciutto. And Logan remained ham-free for the rest of the night.
Is it just me, or is something just not right about that dog in the background?
Anonymous June 22, 2011 at 4:47 PM
Why is the ham gone?
Marcus June 22, 2011 at 8:34 PM