Adventures in Cookbooking -- Week 5

And here we are with another cookbook that I'm surprised I haven't used before. It's 500 Five-Ingredient Recipes. Truthfully, it looks like a great springboard for meals. I can see adding fresh herbs or vegetables to some of these. It's not five ingredients any more, but I can live with that. By the way -- salt and pepper -- not included on the list of five ingredients. Is that cheating?

The recipe we chose was for orange molasses chicken. I would say that I used the essence of the idea and the ingredients, but I kind of changed it.

The idea is to make a glaze out of frozen concentrated oj, molasses, and onion powder. You broil some chicken and brush the glaze on it.

I needed to get the chicken cooked quickly, so I sliced it and sauteed it in some butter and olive oil. The boy helped me turn the chicken on the stove. Not bad for an almost-six-year-old! I made a sauce from regular oj, pomegranate molasses, and onion powder. We used it to deglaze the pan. I let it thicken a minute, added the collected chicken juices back in, and let it thicken some more. Then we poured it over the sliced chicken.

It was really good! It was simple and tasty, and everyone voted this on our "Let's make it again" list. I could see adding a few fresh herbs to make it even better. I served it with brown rice, and the nutty flavor of the rice blended very well with the sweet tang of the chicken sauce.

There's not much recipe to post. This one is pretty easily faked.

I'm off next week. We'll be on vacation. I'll continue my challenge after we return.