Playing Chicken With A Drunken Goat

I bought Marina flowers tonight, mostly because I'm a nice guy. Mostly. That was the primary reason, a good 87% of the reason, in fact. The secondary, hidden, ultrasecret corollary reason was because I was about to cook again and I wanted her to be predisposed to a favorable review.

So. The first step was to choose the appetizer, cheese and crackers. I went with two cheeses I've tried before with success, a dill Havarti and Drunken Goat, discussed before in these pages (pixels? Screens?). As for the crackers, I saw a brand touted as the 'preferred cracker of wine enthusiasts.' As the premise of this blog makes clear, I can't claim the distinction of being a 'wine enthusiast,' but I am enthusiastic about wine, so I figured I would try these crackers to see if I too preferred them.



Preferred might be too strong a word. They were light and fluffy, with enough substance to support a hefty chunk of cheese, and I had no objection to them, but I think it would be stretching it to say I preferred them. Crackers aren't something in which I feel capable of developing a preference for one kind over another. They're crackers.

To go along with a dish of chicken and couscous, I decided to use my fancy rice cooker/vegetable steamer to steam some broccoli and asparagus. This cooker/steamer has been a marvelous help over the years. I bought it from my friends Peter and Roni when they emigrated to New Zealand--before they boomeranged back to Seattle--yes, wrong country, I know--and I have been using it regularly ever since, but only for cooking rice. Steaming the vegetables turned out well enough; they were tender, but they lacked a certain flavor, and Marina suggested that next time, I move the vegetables into the couscous before serving up to allow them to absorb that flavor.

The chicken I cooked much as I've cooked before, in olive oil in which I cook garlic and lemon. This time, I let the lemon stay in the olive oil for much longer, to allow the chicken to absorb more of the taste.



I can't say that the taste was different this time, but the chicken did seem juicier, for whatever reason. I placed the chicken on a bed of couscous again, with the steamed vegetables on the side.



And again, from closer up, because who doesn't like looking at cooked chicken from close range?



A light dinner, tasty, easy, healthy. What to do for dessert? Originally, I planned on fruit in light cream, but because I could not find any cream at the store, I chose, instead, plain non-fat fage, into which went whole blueberries and sliced strawberries. Fage is thicker than the yogurt I am used to, but overall, it was quite satisfying.



All in all, I was pleased with another meal prepared without relying on peanut butter or a microwave.