Baked Lemon Tarragon Chicken

When dinner has to be quick-and-easy, I don’t usually think of baked chicken. But this recipe fits the bill.  You can make it in less than an hour and most of that time the chicken bakes unattended. The dish requires few ingredients and it is delicious cold if there are leftovers. 

If those attributes aren’t enough, baked lemon tarragon chicken is a budget meal too. I made enough for 4 people for about $8, including the price of the seasonings. With rice and a salad, this meal costs less per serving than a Chipotle chicken burrito, a McDonald’s McChicken meal, or a grilled chicken sandwich at Potbelly Sandwich Shop. And it tastes a heck of a lot better too!

As you are making this recipe, remember the chicken basics, especially rules #1-7 and #10.  It’s always better to be safe than sorry when it comes to handling poultry.

Lemon Tarragon Chicken

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Pasta Primavera

Last night we came home famished after a fun afternoon.  My growling stomach said “think fast, cook faster.”  Dinner had to be satisfying and on the table before I started snacking.  A perfect night for pasta primavera.

My version is not so much a recipe as a set of tips.  This “recipe” requires only a bag or box of pasta, random vegetables, a few tablespoons of olive oil, salt and pepper, and a few tablespoons of soft goat cheese.  If you’ve got a container of goat cheese, sun-dried tomatoes and basil appetizer lurking in the freezer, so much the better, but plain goat cheese works fine too.  (The appetizer freezes really well; I try to keep small containers frozen – labeled and dated of course - to pull out for just this type of occasion.) 

No measurements here – this is about improvising and ratios.  As Michael Ruhlman points out in his cookbook Ratio, the key to much cooking is knowing how to combine ingredients to get the result you seek.  I simply gathered available vegetables and figured out how much pasta to use to make the dish well-balanced.   

My basic pasta primavera formula is 3 steps, 2 of which are simultaneous: (1) cook pasta; (2) sauté vegetables (cooking them quickly in a pan, using a small amount of oil); and (3) when they are both done, combine them, add a dollop of goat cheese, mix and add a bit of reserved pasta water, salt and pepper. Stir again.  Vegans can easily adapt this recipe by skipping the goat cheese. 

Boiling the water for pasta starts immediately; when you begin cooking vegetables depends on which vegetables you’ll use.   If the pasta gets done before you finish the vegetables, drain it, add a drop of olive oil, and return to the pot until you’re ready to add it to the vegetables.

5 Tips for Great Pasta Primavera 

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Not-Quite-Homemade Chicken Mole

Chicken with chocolate sounds weird, no?  But if the chocolate is spicy and not sweet, in a sauce that envelopes shredded chicken and the dish is served (in an enchilada or on its own) with rice and a salad of oranges and red onions, the result is delicious.  

Maybe you’ve had mole in a Mexican or Tex-Mex restaurant and didn’t even realize there was chocolate in the sauce. This quick-and-easy version uses prepared mole in a jar, but it’s still good enough to serve company.

I do plan to make mole from scratch someday, using Pati Jinich’s recipe for mole poblano, but that requires many ingredients and lots of patience.  By contrast, this chicken mole has only 4-5 ingredients (salt is optional) if you don’t count water.  I checked the ingredients in the 2 brands of mole in a jar that I have recently used (Goya and Dona Maria); both brands contains many of the ingredients in Pati’s recipe and no preservatives or other additives. 

Chicken Mole

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