Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Eat Your Colors! Asian or Italian? Both!

This is making something from nothing.
Home alone one evening last week, I only had myself to feed and I wanted something healthy and colorful.
The fridge was looking poorly with a little of this or that lying about in half empty bags or plastic containers.

There was a half bag of sweet red, yellow, and orange peppers, a few carrots, a quarter cabbage hunk, an opened container of once fresh mushrooms, 4 small inner stalks of celery, 4 or 5 green onions, and lots of garlic.

There's always lots of garlic here.
I pulled the poor veggie refugees from the fridge and chopped them up.
A frozen chicken breast got the same brutal treatment, plus a little soak in a teriyaki, wine, vinegar, red pepper, ginger, cornstarch marinade.


Then there was a little stirrin' and a little fryin' in the trusty wok.
Some peanuts and two datil peppers jumped in to liven things up.

And ... VOILA!
(That there is Francais, ... I don't know how to say VOILA in Chinese)

Two days later, I'm at it again.
But, this time, I'm feeling Italian.
No one has been to the grocery store, so the pickings are almost the same.
No cabbage this time ... that doesn't strike me as very Italian, so two plum tomatoes agreed to take the cabbage's place.


Before the chicken breast went into the cast iron skillet, I squished it around with a mixture of kosher salt, oregano, basil, and cayenne until each piece had a good coating.

Then the veggies hopped in.

Later, whole grain pasta was conjured from pure boiling water ... yes, it seems like magic to me also.
This went into the skillet too.
A splash of cheap wine, a gurgle of chicken broth, and a healthy toss of romano cheese ... or was it parmesean ... whatever ... they went in too.


And ... VOILA!
That is still French, I don't know how to say "VOILA" in Italian.
Two different meals.
Two different countries' quisine.
Same (almost) veggies.
Same poor chicken ... well, it's possible.
Same white chopstick bowl.

Feels kind of DEJA VU.

That's French for ...


8 comments:

threecollie said...

Bon! That's French for good!

Anonymous said...

Hi FC,

Yes indeedy, those meals look very tasty!

Here you go~~~

看清在那裡- Chinese
vedere lì-Italain


מאוחר יותר 'גייטורלנד', (Hebrew)

Patio

Anonymous said...

Oh no! It didn't pick up the Chinese! It was pretty awesome.

Oh well.

P

相同在那里

Deb said...

Asian or Italian, it all looks good to me.

MamaHen said...

YUM!!!! both look awesome!

Hey, I don't know why your comments are not showing up on my blog (if you have noticed). I get them in my email though. Just wanted to make sure you knew I wasn't up to no good. At least about that. ;)

Thunder said...

Both dishes looked tasty! I always have fun creating stuff from the leftovers. Not sure how to say "Voila" in Mandarin, but "Hao Chi" means: Delicious!

Anonymous said...

Yum! That pretty much looks like what we eat all the time. If you change the seasonings one more time -- add some cumin, coriander, cayenne, and tumeric-- you've got the start of some delicious Indian food. It's all in the seasonings!

R.Powers said...

Merci y'all.