Tonight's Dinner: July 14, 2014

With my full marathon only two weeks away I decided that it was time for me to get my legs back moving.  It's far too late for me now to have any type of high expectations, but as I've said all along, I just want to finish.  Since the big move and the hot weather, I haven't been on a run since before our last Spartan race.  Tonight was rough.  Really rough.  It was extremely hot and humid which totally exacerbates the problem.  There were even a few sprinkles, which is practically unheard of in California during July.  It's like living back in New York all over again.  After coming home in a sweaty mess, even Emmy looked too hot to go any further, I settled on some kettle bell swings and high pulls.  I broke down and bought my own kettle bell because I just haven't had the motivation to go back to Crossfit after the wedding and kettle bells can be a full body workout if you know how to do it. Luckily, I spent enough time being a meat head to pick up a few tricks of the trade.  Aside from being a gymnast and swimmer in my youth, I was in the best shape of my adult life when I was Crossfitting regularly.

After the work out, I started on dinner.  Since we have more waste than I'd like to admit (a problem we've struggled with for a long time), this week I went really bare bones.  I got two giant heads of broccoli, an acorn squash, and cilantro in the vegetable department and a whole chicken and some chicken drumsticks in the protein.  Normally, I would get twice the amount.  Where a whole chicken would make one meal for us with a lot of left overs, tonight I cut it up into parts to separate for the week.  I'm currently marinating the quarters and wings in a diluted Sichuan marinade and started a pot of jook going with the chicken carcass.  For dinner tonight we made a spinach pasta with plenty of veggies and the chicken breasts.  I'm hoping that we will be seeing our refrigerator clear out more than it gets jam packed of Tupperware. One can only hope.  We'll see if one chicken for three days will work for us.  It appears that I only know how to cook for an army.  Even with transitioning to full-time raw feeding Emmy, my tab only came out to $21.00 for the whole week.

Before I move on to the actual dinner, I'd like to say that I've used up most of my canned goods.  This is something that I'm particularly pleased with.  I've been working for months to get away from canned food.  Being that we both come home exhausted and have had nothing to do but unpack or craft (I know, totally optional but still tiring) dinners have been made with quite a few Cream o' Mushroom soups as a base.  I am very pleased to get back into healthy, whole food eating.  Now I just need to kick my nasty Taco Bell habit.

What was going to be a simple meal of chicken and garlic noodles, turned into a full blown dinner process.  This is not something I really wanted to do after getting a late start.  On top of that, since I was making the jook for tomorrow night on one burner, I didn't want to have a bunch of pots dirty so I kept this meal as a one-potter.

I had some wine that we opened on Friday when a friend came to check out our place.  I didn't want to drink it myself so I poured it into the pan with the chicken.  I had originally planned to make a garlic oil and toss the spinach noodles, but with the wine in the pan I added the garlic and cilantro to help with the cooking flavor. 

Once the chicken was cooked through, I added two fresh tomatoes (seeds in).

I let those cook down and added a teaspoon of butter and a drizzle of olive oil.  I normally don't use butter, but it really does make a big difference in flavor and I kept it to a minimum. 

Next up was to add the noodles and broccoli to toss. 

An hour later we had our one-pot chicken with vegetables and noodles.