Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Fall Lunch Audition
 baked chicken and creamed vegetable soup

Okay so, I completely thought I was going to start right back up with turkey meatballs, I loved turkey meatballs last fall, but it was so weird, I just could not get next to that for lunch; this is the difference a year makes, last fall I hadn't started yet with meat, greens, and rice and now that's real right spacefood to me. And I finally figured out that turkey meatballs taste like dinner to me. Fine, turkey meatballs can be dinner. I still need something for lunch, though.

While I was racking my brain for lunch options, I was eating eggs shakshuka for lunch and coffee with blueberry muffin for breakfast. Which I was super fine with, sometimes that's how it goes down. I don't believe in feeling guilty about anything, well, murder would be bad, but not anything food. Like I really dislike the notion of no-guilt food, because that should be all food. You eat what you eat, and what happens happens. If you want to know what a month of blueberry muffins does for you, well, if you're pretty lean, your thin layer of fat plumps right back up and there's something to be said about being able to see that direct connection. Like I know that this muffin top was literally made from muffins. It just is what it is, it's been a long blueberry muffin moment that too shall pass. I'm about experiencing it while it lasts, is what I'm saying. And then the next moment.

Anyway I went back to the drawing board, back to the idea of chicken and vegetable for lunch, and I picked this baked chicken and creamed vegetable soup combo out of the vaults, boy this soup goes way back.

baked chicken and creamed carrot soup

Which was all well and good as pictured, but there were some problems with this for work lunches. I tried to tell myself that it would be fine eating baked chicken with my fingers at my desk, but I'm just not fine with that. I mean, I'm at the reception desk. Then also, I'm not about to separately reheat a piece of chicken and a bowl of soup, naturally I'm going to drop the piece of chicken in the bowl of soup and nuke two birds with one stone. Which means there's me fishing the piece of chicken out of my soup and then eating it with my fingers.

And you may be wondering, you can't just use a fork and knife? Like in the picture? And the answer is, I can't get all the meat off the bone with just a fork. And I can't leave meat on the bone, I'm hungry!

Actually do you want to hear a terrible story, I guess when I was around eight, my mom started paying me a quarter not to eat with my fingers, so I'm pretty much making twenty five cents per meal, which is a lot when you're eight and also was a lot in the 70s, when I was eight, so here I am, making serious bank, and my mom's like, ha well I'm not paying you just to eat your food and stopped the quarters, and then I'm like, ha well guess I'm going back to eating with my fingers. Though I totally get what I deserve two weeks later when my sister sells me on the idea that we should pool all our coins and evenly divide them, so she gets half my quarters and I get half her pennies and nickels.

Okay so, there's this new fried chicken restaurant in Avondale that I really wanted to try until I found out that their fried chicken is boneless, aahh, I really want to be open minded, but fried chicken to me has the bone in. And you eat it with your fingers. Weirdly that simultaneously demotivated me from wanting to try that fried chicken and at the same time, which is what simultaneously means, inspired me to try deboning this baked chicken. I initially resisted the idea because the beauty of this baked chicken is that it couldn't be easier, did I want to add a fussy deboning step? I debone my slow chicken and chicken stew, but that's after cooking and the meat just falls off the bone. I finally sternly told myself that deboning chicken is a skill and not inherently fussy, and stop conflating difficult with I don't know how.

So where I'm at now is, I debone the chicken before baking and then slice the boneless chicken before reheating in the soup.

baked chicken in creamed carrot soup

Ehh aesthetically I still object to this a little bit, the chicken still looks sort of creature from the deep rising out of the soup like that. But, it is really delicious. So I keep eating it. But I also have some other ideas.