April’s Culinary Adventures

Posted by Cynical Sarah on April 17, 2010

It’s the second month into my Cooking Light magazine subscription, and I’m still on track with trying at least one recipe per month. In fact, I was what Canadians call a “keener” and tried three recipes so far this month.

I started with a Chicken with Lemon and Olives recipe. I’m always looking for new ways to jazz up chicken since we eat a lot of it. There are only so many variations on stir-fry or flavors of chicken legs I can come up with on my own.

Basically this chicken leg quarters recipe involves a citrusy marinade that gets turned into a sauce after the chicken is baked. Baking the chicken with green olives on top also adds a brininess to the sauce at the end. It was good and definitely something different from our usual Cajun spice or barbecue sauce.

The final product got a thumbs up from Troy, so it’s something we’ll try again. I’ll just have to do a little experimenting to make the final sauce less greasy to be completely happy with it.

Troy had the option of picking a recipe this month as well. Initially he said “the second recipe” without even looking at the magazine. When it turned out to be halibut with a lemon-fennel salad, he decided maybe he should at least flip through the magazine and see what his options were.

We do eat fish and even have some halibut in the freezer, but in general, fish is not his go-to kind of food. And really, the only thing special about that recipe was the fennel salad.

So what did he settle on instead? Chicken Carne Asada Tacos with Pickled Onions. Pretty much just chicken tacos, and he even added that I didn’t necessarily have to use that recipe; he just wanted tacos. I guess that’s what I should have expected since I asked someone who didn’t care that much to begin with. After all, this is the same guy who answers “dinner foods” when I ask him if there’s anything in particular he wants for dinner.

Rather than give in to “just tacos,” I stubbornly stuck to trying out the recipe (minus buying fancy cheese). The only big difference between the chicken tacos I would normally make and this recipe was the pickled onion. It turns out that’s a pretty tasty difference.

The onions stink up your kitchen (and an entire condo if you ask Troy) when you boil them for pickling, but they’re worth it in the end. The orange and lime pickling solution makes them a perfect complement to the chicken in the tacos. I also added a little cilantro with my baby spinach in the tacos to give them even more of that citrus flavor.

If I was a beer drinker, I could totally see eating these with an ice cold bottle of Corona or Dos Equis on the side.

Even Troy liked the addition of the picked onions. He even gave them a fair shot by going without the usual hot sauce and salsa on his tacos. In my book, that makes this recipe a success as well.

My third choice for the month was the Hot and Sour Soup with Tofu. I occasionally have cravings for Hot and Sour soup and was excited to give this one a try. It turns out this was also the one I’m most happy with this month too.

I’ve looked up recipes for Hot and Sour Soup before and been too intimidated to try them based on the laundry list of ingredients. This one looked fairly simple and turned out to be as simple as it looked. Most of the work is prep work, and then it’s just about boiling and adding ingredients at certain times.

Most importantly, the flavor is almost spot on to what I was hoping for and it’s low in calories. You can’t get much better than that.

There is at least one more recipe I would like to try at some point from this month’s issue. It’s a dessert, though – a coconut cake – so I have to find a good time to make it when we’ll have more people to share it with, so I’m not eating cake for a week.

Or perhaps it’s better to say so I won’t have cake tempting me all day long, every day, for a week.

It should be awesome, though, because so far Cooking Light hasn’t disappointed me.

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Tags: cooking light, eating healthy, recipes

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