(the second post from guest blogger J)

…diet (yeah yeah, I know) and I knew Marika was coming to spend the weekend at my place. I wanted to surprise her with a dinner, but since she is such an enthusiastic cook herself (like you probably know already), I didn’t want to serve her ground meat or canned tuna, nor beef jerky. I wanted to make something fairly light but still tasty, like… a normal dinner. I had cut more or less all the carbs from my daily diet, so that posed a slight problem, but I came up with a solution that would serve us both (not too much fat and low on carbs).

I was wandering around the grocery store and I got the idea of making some chicken breasts in the oven with some stuffing in them. I pondered different combinations I could stow in the breasts, with the only constant component being blue cheese. I mean, even that would have rocked, but still, I wanted to give her the impression (or maybe an illusion, more like) that I can actually cook. And score some points with that, of course… After more than a half an hours of mindless roaming in the shop I was ready. In my trolley I had pesto, a few pears, bacon and blue cheese. I had also found some wooden skewers, some frozen veggies including broccoli and some other… green thingies, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, and a bag of pre-made sauce with some random herb-taste. As for the drinks I had gotten a cheap, foil-packed carton of red wine, which was bad, but it didn’t matter ‘cause I ended up drinking more or less all of it while cooking. My diet is kind of a flexible one…

I made the chicken breast flatter so that I could put the stuffing inside and kinda roll the breast around it, but since I don’t own a steak hammer, I had to use a slightly more primitive way to flatten them: I put a chicken breast on the table, placed an empty casserole dish on it, and with a little help from raw muscle power and gravity I got the job done – I had three beautiful, flat breasts on my table waiting for me to give them some dimension. I cut some pretty thin slices of pear and placed them in the middle of the breast, covered the pear slices with chunks of blue cheese and lastly pour a pretty good amount of pesto on top of them. I guess I got too excited while filling the breasts ‘cause I had pretty hard time to “roll” them shut. The wooden sticks helped me on that and the result was tolerable. Finally I covered the chicken creations with bacon, and utilized the skewers to hold those chicken-thingies in form. Threw them in the oven and turned on the TV.

I continued sipping the wine while surfing the TV-channels (it was bad, but I was doing it for her – the more I drank before she arrived, the less she would have to deal with it). I have this one channel which shows music videos from the early 80’s, they were so ridiculously bad and tasteless that I just had to keep on watching… what they were thinking back then? At some point I managed to lift my ass from the couch to toss the frozen veggies into the oven and they served only a slightly shorter sentence in the heat than the meat. I also cut some fresh vegetables onto the plates to wait for the other stuff. I guess it took altogether something like ~40 minutes for the chicken to be serviceable, and just before I took them out from the oven, I simply heated up the sauce (water, sauce-flavor and some butter).

Look at the pretty bacon…

Just a few seconds after she came – I didn’t allow her to come to the kitchen – everything was set. I still had some wine left to serve with the meal, but politely she switched to water pretty quickly – so I had to deal with the rest of the wine. All in all, it was a success, in every sense. I even think I saw some elements of a positive surprise on her face, but might be she was just acting or I was hallucinating. Or drunk. I mean, she knows I can easily eat ground meat with macaroni and ketchup weeks in a row and live a happy life doing that, so I guess she wasn’t expecting anything so… different. It was a good dinner, the company was sweet, plus she liked it too – score!

-J, The Cooking Poro