Wheat Salad – Meh, Oven-Fried Chicken – Thumbs Up!

Posted by Cynical Sarah on June 30, 2010

It’s nectarine season! I know Spring/Summer has finally come to Vancouver when I can head to the little fruit and veggie stores near me and see one of my favorite fruits amid all the usual apples and oranges.

Sure, I could probably get nectarines or their fuzzy cousins, the peach, year round at the big chain grocery stores, but the little, less expensive stores within walking distance only get them when they’re in season. They’re so much better in season – I’m not really sure why. Perhaps it’s because they can be picked a little closer to ripe since they don’t have to be shipped so far. The ones that get boated up from South America in the dead of winter are hard as rocks still and never do ripen up very well.

In honor of the lovely nectarine season, I tried the Cracked Wheat Salad with Nectarines, Parsley and Pistachios recipe for my June Culinary Adventure with Cooking Light.

It sounded like a pretty simple side dish, and I was intrigued that it included fresh dill and parsley. I hadn’t used either herb in a recipe before. To me, parsley has always been that sprig of green on the side of a dish in a restaurant.

I was right in how easy it was to make. The only thing you have to cook is water, and that’s just to boil it and then let the wheat soak in it. Everything else is prep-work of chopping up herbs and nectarines. Simplicity isn’t quite enough though to make me want to make something again.

This dish was missing something – and not something I forgot to put in. I went over the recipe a few times to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. All it had for dressing to add flavor with the herbs were olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

I’m not sure bland is the right word for a dish with dill and vinegar in it, but that’s the best word I can come up with for it. The mix of flavors wasn’t quite right. If you got a lot of nectarine in your bit of salad, it was better, but overall it wasn’t anything special.

I don’t think I’ll be making that one again unless I can figure out what special ingredient it needs to make it better.

On a positive note, the recipe called for one tablespoon fresh dill and the smallest amount of dill I could find to buy was plenty more than that. I decided to use some of it to make some refrigerator pickles. I found a recipe online that I used as a guideline for the amounts of vinegar and sugar to use in it, then I put in the dill, garlic, onion and some jalapenos with my sliced cucumber. That was waaaaaay better than my cracked wheat salad.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to duplicate it since I didn’t pay attention to the amounts that I added aside from the vinegar and sugar, but man are they tasty.

I also didn’t want to end June on a negative Cooking Light review. So far the recipes have been really good, so it was disappointing to stumble on one I couldn’t rave about. The next one I tried was more of an “inspiration” or “guideline” for what I actually made.

The recipe was Walnut and Rosemary Oven-Fried Chicken. What I made was Pecan and Oregano Oven-Fried Chicken. Obviously I made a couple substitutions right off the bat – I didn’t have walnuts or rosemary. Then I used milk and honey Dijon salad dressing instead of buttermilk and Dijon mustard, and crushed cereal instead of Panko breadcrumbs.

So I guess the recipe was more of a guideline of the types of ingredients I needed to put together to get an oven-fried chicken with crunch and flavor.

The only issue I had with this one is that the bottom side of the chicken didn’t get crispy like the top side did. And I even put it on a wire rack like the recipe called for.

Otherwise, this one was a rousing success. The chicken stayed juicy and the crunch was ok, but the flavor was what really won me over on this one. It could have stayed soggy, and the mix of parmesan, oregano and the honey mustard would have still made this dish a winner.

I actually got my July issue of Cooking Light the other day and I’ve already got several recipes tagged to try. Stay tuned! There may be a lot of grillin’ and burger recipes coming up to check out.

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Tags: chicken, cooking light, nectarines, recipes

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