Experiments in the Kitchen

I have been trying to spice up my food life lately, I've grown so tired of my limited choices. Yesterday when I was watching NCIS online at cbs.com, they kept popping up a mayonnaise commercial for chicken with Parmesan cheese. I love Parmesan, I had it in my fridge. I also had chicken. And I figured I could steal some mayo off of my roommate (I offered to cook for her, but she would have given it to me regardless). The only thing I didn't have was breadcrumbs, but I did have some Shake and Bake, which seemed like a substitute with potential : D.

So I set off to experiment. A couple things you should know about me: I'm on the fence about how I feel about mayo (thus making it surprising that I would make a recipe with it), although I have some slight OCD tendencies I don't follow recipe directions very well, and I'm a pretty picky eater.

I pulled out our light mayo and cheese, dumped some spoonfuls into a bowl, and added a few fistfuls of cheese. When it seemed like a sufficient mix, I let it be. I also defrosted and repackaged our incredibly frozen chicken. Then I spread the mayo/cheese on top of the chicken and whipped out my Shake and Bake. We had ranch with herbs and original. Unsure which would taste better, I just mixed them together and tossed them on top haha. Then it baked for about 20 minutes. As the 20 minutes passed by, I became more apprehensive and skeptical of what I had just created.

When it was finished, my roommate volunteered to take a bite not knowing anything about the baked dish other than it was chicken. Such a brave soul! We both ended up liking it, and although it really looks nothing like the picture (probably because I didn't really follow the recipe!), it was still pretty tasty. Recipe

Tonight we made a chicken and rice dish. The only thing notable here is that I don't really like rice. I like sticky white rice with Chinese food (mm how I miss that!), and that's about it. Not really sure why, I just don't find it very thrilling. However, I am getting tired of potatoes and pasta, so I decided to try out something new for a change. This was some sort of wild and long grain rice and we cooked it with chicken. It was also pretty good. Not sold on rice, but I didn't hate it, so it can stay for a bit. Perhaps one of these days I will have other epiphanies and no longer dread lunch and dinner decisions!