Chickenpiece – A Retrospective

The following post is from the old version of this website, posted originally on 9/23/23. This day shall always live in infamy for me (and has thankfully (?) been memorialized further by this blog post) as the day the insane plumber from Gary, Indiana plundered our new apartment for 8+ hours, inventing problems and excuses not to fix them for as long as he possibly could be until he was essentially forcibly extracted from the premises. I had locked myself in our spare room while he “worked” in the kitchen, doing his best impression of a thinking person, hoping I could pass the time by writing my first cooking blog. While it is unfinished, I think it is a fun little slice-of-life excerpt from when we had first moved to Chicago and I was adjusting to and trying many new things. 🙂 Enjoy!

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Okay, before we start. I just need to make a quick comment, and I swear it’s the only time I will do this on this blog. It is SO weird to me that I am being prompted to use AI-generated text to help me write this post. Like.. why? I prompted it to “write about a recipe I made with chicken, zucchini, and lemons” just for fun, and… sure enough, it generated a whole bland paragraph about just that. The fact I’m sitting here pondering the prospect of living vicariously through AI, and how many people are probably doing that (or at the very least, generating a seriously alarming number of articles on the internet these days), makes me feel quite.. human, actually. Anyway!

Today’s recipe is from Milk Street Magazine’s May-June 2023 Issue, tucked away in their “Tuesday Night” dinner pages. I 10000% reject the notion that simply prepared food has to taste simple, and this recipe here is a wonderful example of quick cooking that is actually interesting to eat. Here are the ingredients:

So.. full disclosure, our apartment is still chaotic. But I am very slowly learning in life that every single thing doesn’t have to be picture perfect to create wonderful moments and memories. Just gotta be in the moment. I picked this recipe out on.. Tuesday night, of all nights, because I knew we had some veggies in the fridge that were getting wobbly.

I couldn’t find most of the spices listed out in the recipe, so I created a rub using what I had: steak seasoning, curry powder, garam masala, a little cayenne. I took two GIANT deboned chicken thighs out of the fridge (because who honestly likes chicken breasts, come on) and laid a plastic bag over top of them so I could smack them out into cutlet-esque thinness. I think I used my little salt cellar as my beat down tool. Have to admit, I REALLY enjoy doing things like this without telling Kev first, so he can look on while I deadpan beat the hell out of a chicken thigh with no context. He is honestly used to it at this point, so I don’t get muuuch reaction, but I still savor even the slightest raise of the eyebrows. Once I deemed them flat enough (side note: they were totally not flat enough), and seasoned, into the frying pan they went. I haven’t used a gas stove in years.. and I must say, having one now is a total delight. Getting beautiful color on basically anything is so easy now.