Every Monday, we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was from   Chelsea at Mmm…Cafe.

Nance’s take:

This week it was Robyn’s turn to pick the recipe.  I was kind of nervous because I’m well aware that Robyn is a huge lover of vegetables.  Now my favorite vegetable is corn (with lots of butter) with my second being potatoes (also with lots of butter).  Robyn eats stuff like squash and okra on a regular basis (and she doesn’t even have the sense to deep fry it).  I think you get where I’m coming from here.  One of us is way more healthier than the other.  Ahem.  I was also in a tizzy because the only rule (for lack of a better word) that I dictated about this venture is no seafood (I hate seafood more than I hate my ex-husband and that’s saying some shit).  Now before you all get yourselves into a snit please note that the rule is only for the tandem recipes.  Miz Robyn may post as many seafood recipes as she would want on here.  She just can’t make me cook them.  Heh.

So the first recipe that Robyn threw at me:  Some kind of garlic shrimp mess and OHHELLNO!  I suppose I should add that I didn’t tell Robyn of the no seafood rule because I figured she would already know that…because we’re friends and friends don’t let friends eat stuff that lives in its own toilet!  Some friend she is.  Hmph.

After a flurry of emails denouncing seafood, etc., she sent me her second choice recipe.  Honey Sauced Chicken.  I was all happy because I like honey and I like chicken!  And then I saw the soy sauce and I was all, “Oh, barf!”   But I decided to suck it up because nobody likes a big baby (or a picky eater).  Wah, wah, wah.

I’m one of those knuckleheads that only reads the ingredient list when looking at a recipe.  The other stuff is what happens when you actually go to make it.  So I never realized that it was supposed to be made in a crock-pot until about 5:30.  Oops!  Fortunately, she includes instructions on how to make it a 30 minute meal.  So that’s what I did.

There are days when things that I do in the kitchen are effortless.  And then there are days when it has to be a todo.  Can you guess what day this was?  I’ll give you a hint.  Iced tea AND coffee cup sitting in my area.  I was obviously having a time of it.  And things didn’t get any better once I realized that I sprayed my dish with Pam…for baking!  I wiped it out and started over.  Sigh.  The recipe doesn’t even call for doing that, but I wasn’t about to have a sticky (hello, honey!) mess all burned up in my dish (I tend to ignore things once I put them in the oven, including the oven timer at times, heh) so I took the extra precaution.

I also doubled the recipe (there are four of us eating).  We (and by we I mean Rick because he’s the resident math dork over here) figured out that 3/4 of a pound of chicken doubled would be about two of those giant chicken breasts you get at Sam’s club.

I was an adult before I liked honey. Isn’t it weird how your taste changes over the years?

This is what it looked like before I put it in the oven. I have to admit I was a little nervous because I had visions of serving up a hearty bowl of soy soup.

I spooned it over rice and was pretty dubious about the whole mess because the sauce had not thickened like I expected it to. I had it in my head that it was going to be like Chinese take-out Sweet and Sour chicken. I then remembered once eating General Tso’s chicken over shredded lettuce so I decided to try it that way.

It was FABULOUS. And the rice eaters loved it too! Everyone agreed that it should go into our family meal rotation and that right there is a freaking miracle!

******************************************************************************************************************

******************************************************************************************************************

Robyn’s Side

Okay, look. To be fair, when I suggested the garlic shrimp recipe to Nance, I DID say “I know you hate seafood, so probably not this one?”

I’m pretty sure that “lover of vegetables” is going to need to go on my tombstone because that cracked me up. I have a friend (this is not Nance I’m talking about, for the record) who eats vegetables so rarely that when she does, it’s a noteworthy event and a couple of weeks ago she posted on Facebook that she’d eaten a salad for dinner and we were all “!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Also, she loathes peas and considers their existence to be a personal affront.

Anyway.

I have a habit of seeing a recipe that looks interesting to me, and printing it out. I have a stack of recipes at least six inches high, dating back three or four years (every so often I go through them and admit that there are several that I’m never going to make), and so when it was my turn to choose a recipe, I grabbed my stack and picked one I thought Nance might be okay with.

(Fred is not super crazy about soy sauce, and since Nance and Fred think alike about MANY things – I’m pretty sure they were separated at birth – I wasn’t sure Nance would go for it. But she decided to be adventurous!)

Your ingredients:

I’d already chopped up the chicken (and salt and peppered it) earlier in the day because I like to get the annoying prep stuff done beforehand. 3/4 pounds of chicken breasts equaled three chicken breasts from our (free-range) chickens. You’ve also got honey (the big-ass bottle from Sam’s. How often do I use honey? How many years do you think I’ll be using honey from that bottle, for god’s sake? It’s already at least a year old! I love Sam’s, but there are some things a two-person household doesn’t really need to buy in bulk). There’s soy sauce, 1/8 cup chopped onion, ketchup, minced garlic, red pepper flakes, and the big-ass bottle of olive oil from Sam’s. The recipe calls for vegetable oil, but the generic “vegetable oil” we have on hand smells funny so I opted for the olive oil.

This recipe really could not be easier – put the chicken in the baking dish, mix up the sauce and pour it over, stick the whole thing in the oven.

(The recipe I printed out has crock pot instructions, but I’m trying to convince y’all that I can make dinner without using the crock pot, so I opted for the oven instructions.)

I hate handling raw chicken, by the way. It ooks me out.

Bake for 10 minutes, stir it, bake another 10, and voila it is ready. We had ours over angel hair.

Fred’s not a huge fan of rice, he’ll always prefer pasta if given the choice. I really like Nance’s idea of eating it over chopped lettuce and will probably give that a try next time around.

I really liked this a lot – Fred, on the other hand, was more lukewarm about it. I think he might like it more if the sauce was thicker, so next time I make it I’m going to add some cornstarch to the sauce and see if I can’t get it to thicken up a bit. If I can’t get him to like it as much as I do, I’ll likely add it to my own personal rotation and eat it for lunches during the week. Two thumbs up from me, and a “Meh” from Fred, that picky motherfucker.