Chicken Satay-ish

Probably one of the awesomest things about living in an apartment this year (besides my WONDERFUL roommates) is that I can constantly make food and have people over. Today, I did both (sort of)--so much fun! My friend J came over early this afternoon, and helped me make the rice and adjust the ingredients for the sauce, since I know absolutely nothing about cooking with curry and he is apparently familiar with Thai cuisine. R (one of my roommates) set the table, L (another roommate) dropped by, and we had a lovely time eating dinner!

Main ingredients:

• 5 chicken breasts, cut into bite-sized chunks
  
• 2 cups long-grain rice + 4 cups water (in rice cooker)
  
• Extra-virgin olive oil for skillet
  
  Sauce:
  
• 5 gigantic spoonfuls of apple sauce
  
• 3 gigantic spoonfuls of chunky peanut butter
  
• 1 spoonful curry
  
• 1/2 spoonful chili powder
  (Microwave until the ingredients mix together smoothly, or ~3 minutes.)
  

Cook chicken in skillet. Add sauce and push around until well mixed. Serve on rice, with additional curry and chili sprinkled on top if desired. Absolutely delicious, and SO filling.

I will definitely have to try more "different" recipes. It's easy to shy away from the odd ones, since they're a bit intimidating, but this shows that they can be very WIN!

Recipe ripped off from foodnetwork.com. Thanks to my awesome mother for finding it for me!

Applesauce

Since I had a few apples lying around, a brand new bottle of ground clove, and a neat recipe, I decided to try applesauce as my next foray into slow-cookery.

I found this recipe on About.com:

• 3 apples, peeled and minced
  
• Water
  
• Cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg
  
• Sugar
  

If you take the time to actually go to the page and check out the recipe, you'll see that I modified it slightly. Namely, I decided to use way less apples (I don't need 10-12 apples' worth of applesauce), added clove and nutmeg, and made no attempt to gauge the amounts of the other ingredients.

All I did was prepare the apples, pour them in, add the spices and sugar, pour in water (way too much, as I discovered later on), and set Gretel to “Low.” I finished this all at about 10:00 PM and turned Gretel off at about 8:00 AM.

It was pretty good. Sweet (the sugar probably wasn't necessary; I'm not sure why I included it in the first place), spicy, and cozy. Also, it made the room smell comfy and spicy, which was great. (The picture doesn't really capture the essence, as I'm sure you've deduced--the only camera I have is the webcam on my mac.)

I don't know that I'll make it again—I enjoyed it, but not enough to justify peeling three apples (easier said than done) and not being able to use Gretel for 8-10 hours. I might try this with another fruit, though; nothing comes to mind immediately, but I really like the idea of slow-cooking fruit for hours and hours with a bunch of spices.