Yesterday when I was canning all the eggplant salsa, I knew I was going to need a jar of it for today’s dinner but figured out of 33 jars, at least one would not seal so I canned them all and, of course, they all sealed and I had to open one today. Seems wasteful but had I held out enough for dinner and one not sealed, then I’d have to find something to do with that jar. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t! 🙂
Chicken breasts these days are so thick and I don’t like to cook or eat them when they’re really thick so I slice them into two thinner pieces and by slicing lengthwise, they still look like a whole chicken breast when they’re cooked. In fact, one was so thick, I sliced it into three pieces. I seasoned them with cajun seasoning and coated them with flour and fried them in olive oil. Don’t ask me why I have a cabinet full of spices when I mostly just use Cajun Redhead seasoning mix. The chicken breasts were placed in a greased baking dish.
I dumped the pint jar of eggplant salsa into a small pot and cooked it down so there wasn’t much liquid, added about 1/2 cup of white wine and about 3/4 cup of sliced green olives, simmered all that for a few minutes, spread it over the chicken, topped it all with thick slices of mozzarella cheese and baked it about 20 minutes at 375. Everything was already cooked but was no longer hot so I wanted it all to heat up and the cheese to melt.
The chicken was served with asparagus from the garden and Mushroom Rice Side from Knorr. Don’t judge! Vince bought 12 packets of the rice mix for $2 at the pallet store. I don’t think I’ve ever bought that . . maybe once or twice. I actually like it but it isn’t something I’ve served often but for less than 20 cents per packet, we’ll eat it!
I told Vince . . I hope you love this chicken because we will have it 32 more times. He said he’s fine with that. I’ll probably come up with something else we can do with it. I think it would be good over blackened fish.
We haven’t had asparagus from the garden in a while. I stopped harvesting in late June or early July. It was so dry by then and I always make sure there’s plenty of asparagus spears that grow into the tall ferns because that’s what feeds the plant to make it through winter. I noticed last week that, with the cooler days and a bit of rain, the asparagus had produced more so over a few days, I was able to pick enough for us to have for dinner tonight. I’ll leave the rest alone.
Kitchen is closed. I’m back to cross stitching .. though actually I have to rip out a whole word. I was one thread too low and after I stitched “stitch”, I realized that I wasn’t starting each stitch below an “over” thread and had to go back and figure out why. Thank goodness it was just one word that needed to be ripped out.
Tee says
I’ve never seen our asparagus send out shoots after the spring. I will have to go look, because my asparagus is so old, the spears are bigger than my thumb, sometimes bigger than both thumbs put together. They are healthy, for sure.
judy.blog@gmail.com says
Ours here and in Texas will send up shoots til we have a hard freeze but it does slow down once the heat gets bad and the rain stops. Ours is fairly new (planted in spring, 2021) so I didn’t harvest much of it this year. It was three year old crowns but I only harvested what we ate for a few meals this year. Next year I’ll harvest a bit more and hopefully by 2024 be back to having enough to freeze dry some.