A Day In The Life (a.k.a. Blackened Chicken Italiano)

Sooo, we’re settling here on Noe Street. Things are starting to get a little less hectic, emphasis on a little. Let’s go for a typical (week) day in our lives:

6:10AM: Jenn wakes up, etc
6:30AM: Alex’s alarm goes off
6:35AM: Alex’s alarm goes off again
6:40AM: Alex’s cell phone alarm goes off
6:45AM: Alex’s cell phone alarm goes off again
6:45:15AM: Alex wakes up, etc
7:30AM: We head to the bus stop
8:00AM: After waiting around the 24th St. BART Station and “people watching” the locals, the shuttle to work arrives. We board. Jenn opens her laptop and Alex puts in her iPod. Jenn doesn’t believe in iPods.
9:05AM: Barring any insane traffic we arrive at work. What goes on there is more than enough material for another entire blog. We’ll save that for another day
7:00PM: We arrive back at the 24th St. BART Station and literally RUN off of the bus in hopes of catching our connecting bus home. We either just miss it or…well… just miss it. We wait. And wait. And, in today’s case, we give up and walk. The bus never showed up.
7:30PM: Start cooking dinner. THIS is where the fun begins…

So, we go into our kitchen, chock full of appliances from what seems to be the late 70’s, or in the case of our silverware, probably even the 1950s. We decide what we want for dinner (and if the past dictates the present, it’s bound to be either rice and chicken, pasta and chicken, rice, pasta, or sandwiches) and commence cooking. Since we’re are microwave free here in our time-warp of an apartment, we’re stuck using the stove, which, if you’re not careful will seer off one of your eyebrows because evidently “lite” means “make a flame reminiscent of the atom bomb“.

As you’ve probably deduced, we have 3 specialties: Rice, Pasta, and a lovely dish we like to call “Blackened Chicken Italiano (a la Alex if we’re fancy)”. Here’s the basic recipe:

1. Place Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack in CD player and press play
2. Remove chicken from package. Leave styrofoam behind
3. Place chicken in gladware. Douse with Italian dressing
4. Shake. But make sure the lid is tight first.
5. Light stove, taking previously mentioned precautions
6. Place 300 year old, non-nonstick pan on stove and place chicken in pan.
7. Cook until pan turns completely black
8. Remove from pan, serve, and enjoy

8 simple steps to a delectable meal. And we’re serious about step 1. It’s an important part of the process. And we’re serious about the delectable part too. I’m going to start ordering my chicken like that in even the fanciest of restaurants!

8:30PM: clean up, stick on the TV, and veg in front of our laptops
10:00PMish: sleep

Rinse and repeat. Now, this may not seem all that out of the ordinary, but if I gave away all of the idiosyncrasies of this place in one blog, you’d have nothing to look forward to, now would you?!

In true soap opera fashion, a few teasers:
Knives. Showers. Robots and Taquitos. Pride Weekend. Heat. Locals. Public Transportation. And who knows what else!

Until next time…

Frozen Chicken and Burnt Rice

Instead of going back into the archives of the many slip-ups A and I have amassed over this past week, I’m going to start fresh and save that stuff for when we get into a rut. Although this isn’t a true “Adventure on Noe Street”, since, as Alex said, we’re stll in her aunt’s guest house, it’s an adventure in preparation for our imminent move.

On Saturday we decided we should probably cook the chicken that was in the freezer before it went bad. Plus, we were hungry. So we pulled the chicken out of the freezer, decided that we should probably stick it in the microwave to thaw it a bit (called Alex’s mother to confirm that we shouldn’t keep it on its styrofoam tray) and then proceeded to extract it from that tray. One tiny problem – the chicken was stuck to the paper that is supposed to keep it from sticking to the styrofoam tray. Oh the irony. We tried to peel it off, but no such luck. After about 30 minutes of letting it run under warm water and poking and prodding at it, we decided to give up, stuck it in the fridge, and headed out to Robert’s (a deli sort of food / convenience store) to buy sandwiches.

Last night we went for Attempt #2 since it the chicken wouldn’t last much longer in the fridge. We finally got it off of the tray and stuck it in a GladWare with some Italian Dressing to marinate (anything to avoid putting oil in the pan… interns have bad luck with that sort of thing). Later in the evening we mustered up enough energy (and guts) to attempt to cook it. Alex took over chicken duty. I was in charge of the rice.

Everything was going smoothly. We didn’t have butter or margerine for the rice, so we improvised with Italian dressing (something tells me we’re going to go through a lot of Italian dressing this summer). Things were cooking! Imagine that!

17-22 minutes for the rice. OK. Cool. I sat down on the other side of the kitchen island to wait it out. A few minutes later the kitchen started to smell verrry familiar: burnt rice. I ran over and checked on it… Yep… the entire bottom layer of rice had adhered itself to the bottom of the pan. Not just stuck, GLUED. Blackened and all. I managed to salvage the top layers of rice which ended up being just enough for the two of us. Phew!

I doused the pan in dishsoap and water and let it soak while we ate. After a good 30 minutes of chipping away at the pan, I managed to salvage it. It looks as good as new, if I do say so myself.

After a lot of work to finish it, dinner turner out to be a success. The chicken was cooked through, though a little tough and the rice that wasn’t burnt was good. All in all, it was satisfactory. An A effort.

We’re willing to cook for large parties and corporate events. Do contact us if you’re interested!