It looks delicious, and darn it, it should have been. But it was just alright. I don’t eat a lot of meat, so when I do I want it to be extraordinary. And this time I didn’t follow a recipe. Well, I followed a basic one:
Take chicken, coat in Dijon mustard, then a blend of spices with salt, let marinate like this for awhile if you have the time, then bake at 375F for about 30 minutes or a meat thermometre reads 160-165F for the thickest part of the leg meat. 160 is fine if you’re going to tent it after removing from the oven to let it rest. It’ll keep cooking.
Anyway, the spice blend I used was the Kuzhambu Podi powder I’d made for a South Indian curried cauliflower recipe. It was nutty and flavourful, but I forgot it had no salt in it. And I used mustard powder rather than Dijon, trying to keep it a little more authentic. The mustard powder was bitter. And I tried to sprinkle the chicken with salt after it baked, but to no avail. So I ate a bunch and froze the rest, planning to shred it and use it for stir-fries, soups and whatever else you need a little chicken for – salads, sandwiches, etc.
Fortunately, I didn’t mess up the zucchini and carrots. With 20 minutes left in the chicken roasting time I tossed these slices of zucchini with some of the juices the chicken had released and sprinkled a little salt on both them and the chicken (this was when I remembered that I’d forgotten), and popped the baking sheet in the oven. I flipped them after 10 minutes. And I steamed the carrots, because I find them sweeter that way. They also cook faster.
Onto some greens and a scoop of homemade sauerkraut. Essentially, it was a lightly-spiced, low sodium chicken salad. Low fat too, I guess, because with sauerkraut I don’t use dressing. It’s pungent enough. You can do better, I’m sure. But I get by.
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