It’s strange the way I decided to make this recipe. On Friday, I was working out my menus for the rest of the week, and at some point my attention deficit got the better of me, and I ended up on the webside for The Guardian, a UK publication of mixed reviews — some love it, some loathe it. My feelings about the authors, editors, and readers aside, my attention was immediately captured by one piece in particular, essentially calling for the knighthood of Jamie Oliver.

Honestly, I’d never heard of Mr. Oliver until I lived in England in 2005. During that year, repeats of Jamie’s School Dinners (in which he visisted several public schools and decried the “food” being served while trying to dish up some nutritious food under budget and palletable to student tastes) were very popular, but my husband was one of those Britons who do not particularly care for Mr. Oliver. So, we never watched it. Then, during an ad break — probably while watching CSI, House, or another American inport on 4 or 5 — I saw an ad for Sainsbury’s in which Jamie Oliver — in the time it takes for one commercial to air — showed the viewers how to prepare roasted new potatoes with rosemary and garlic, and suddenly my interest was piqued. I gathered the ingredients at ASDA, and the next night made the potatoes for my future in-laws. There was some smoke where the olive oil slightly over-heated, and some of the garlic stuck to the pan, but the potatoes were still delicious, and I’d begun to soften my husband to the “Naked Chef” as Mr. Oliver’s show was called.

I took that potato recipe to heart, as my own, and made it any time I needed a starch and had new potatoes (or in a pinch, cubed red potatoes) at hand. As a present, years later, my husband purchased Jamie’s first cookbook — The Naked Chef — after I went on about Jamie’s School Dinners when it finally aired in the US and continued to make the new potatoes recipe whenever I could. I was so excited to receive it — my first real cookbook from a real celebrity chef — that I leafed through it eagerly upon unwrapping it, only to put it on a shelf and forget its existence until we moved.

You’ll notice from the photos that I, in fact, used a George Foreman Grill for dry-grilling the chicken instead of a cast-iron or hard adonized grill pan, and there’s a very good reason for this. I don’t own one. The closest I have come to owning one is when I was trying to figure out how to spend a $20 gift card from my boss in Marshalls/Home Goods recently, and I stumbled across a $40 calphanon griddle/panini pan with heavy lid/press. But that’d be an extra $20 plus tax out of my pocket, and honestly, I really needed that bathroom scale I purchased for exactly $20, which meant I only had to pay sales tax.

Honest.

And, there for example, is why I’ve only recently cracked open the Jamie Oliver cook book — I just don’t have the equiptment or access to the foods he wants. Until recently, when we moved into an area with a Wegmans, we didn’t have the money or the super market really needed to buy some of these items, and now that we have access, we have the problem of equiptment. (And my finicky eating which means that I only eat chicken and fish — which cuts out about 60% of the recipes in the book.)

But George Foreman to the rescue.

A few thoughts about his recipe. One, it cooks very quickly — if you have enough hands, or your husband is handy in the kitchen — you can put this whole thing together in ten minutes hands-on time; slightly more to prep, and if you use pre-minced garlic like we do, it’s that much faster. I started the broth and the water for the noodles at the same time. By the time the chicken was finished grilling, the noodles and veggies went on at the same time. One minute before the veggies finished, I cut the chicken, and then it was all about assembly.

Second, this recipe does not make a lot of broth; it says “dry-grilled” in the title, but it is meant to be a soup, and yet it wasn’t particularly soupy, since most of the broth went toward steaming the veggies. If I’d known it’d drain so much, I’d have cooked the broth separately in a deep pot and used the shallow, wide steamer pot to boil the ramen water — then boil the ramen in the pot and steam the veggies above.

Did we enjoy the first meal out of Mr. Oliver’s cook book? Oh yes. Sure, it was no Brooklyn Pad Thai, but it was warm and comforting and just spicy enough to take the chill off a bone-chilling, 10 degree, snowy day. Should Mr. Oliver be knighted, as the Guardian suggested? Um, that’s another question that this recipe didn’t exactly clarify for me. Maybe I’ll have a bit more of an epiphany when I’m eating the leftovers tomorrow for lunch.

Dry Grilled Chicken with Ginger, Chinese Greens, and Noodles in an Herb Broth

Ingredients

• 4 chicken breasts
• salt & pepper
• 4 cups chicken stock (Jamie says make your own — I used the stuff out of a box)
• 1 heaped teaspoon finely sliced fresh ginger (I grated mine.)
  
• 1 clove of garlic, minced
• 11-14oz Chinese greens (I used napa cabbage left over from another dish and fresh broccoli)
• 1 lb Asian rice noodles (I used ramen)
• 1 or 2 medium/large fresh red chillies, seeded and finely sliced (I used chili sauce instead)
  
• 1 handful of cilantro leaves, torn
• 1/4 c. soy sauce
• 1 lemon or lime

instructions

1. Bone and skin the chicken breasts, trimming off any excess fat (I used boneless, skinless, thin-sliced breasts to avoid this step.)
2. Get a ridged griddle pan (or your Foreman grill) very hot, add the chicken breasts, and cook both sides until done. (I find if you turn the breasts 90 degrees when you flip them, you get an awesome criss-cross pattern that rocks, and ensures a more even color overall if you’re using a Foreman grill). Remove to a board and allow to rest for 3 minutes, then slice at an angle, around 1/2 inch apart.
3. Meanwhile, bring the chicken stock, ginger, and garlic to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. I like to steam my Chinese greens above the stock until tender (which is how I did it — about 3-4 minutes time), or in the broth if you prefer.
4. While the stock is simmering, cook the noodles in boiling, salted water, drain, and divide between 4 deep broth bowls. Divide the greens among the noodles, then place cooked chicken slices on top, and sprinkle with chili, cilantro, and soy sauce.
5. Finally, check the seasoning of the broth and pour it over each bowl (you could serve it at the table, as mentioned in the introduction). Finish with a squeeze of lemon or lime juice.

Okay, okay, I can hear you now: I thought you were going to update this daily, and it’s been a week since your last update, you bitch! I know, I know — if I were you, I wouldn’t read this blog any more either, since I’m a rather selfish woman who won’t drag herself out of bed when afflicted with an upper respiratory infection unless a massive mountain of email requests sends her flying to the kitchen.

Okay, that’s not exactly true — if no one reads this blog, then how can any email requests compel me to the kitchen? But I am battling a nasty upper respiratory infection, which was not pretty and not particular condusive to cooking, especially not nice meals for a blog. But, fearless readers, I have perservered, and still slightly under the weather now come to you with a recipe that I made last week.

Oh, you should feel special!

One of my goals (we’re not calling them resolutions, just like we don’t use the zed word when watching Shawn of the Dead) for this year was to lose weight and eat healthier — one of which should lead to the other, it would seem. So I went out and spent some hard-earned cash on a copy of Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook. To be honest, most of the recipes in the book aren’t particularly inspiring for someone like myself, who thrives on flavor, most of which is usually derrived from fat. Want me to be vegan, macrobiotic, or even raw? I’m all over any eating system you can throw at me — even Atkins if necessary — as long as I can have FLAVOR! Unfortunately, most healthy recipes are sorely short on this oh-so-crucial element of cooking.

That is, until this recipe.

This recipe is full of yummy apple goodness — if you’re like me, the kind of girl who loves fall because of the perfect, crisp weather and the abundance of your favorite foods which are only in season in the fall, then this is your recipe. There’s apple cidar, apples, and apple cidar vinegar — if it has the word “apple” in it, there’s an apple involved. In fact, to cook this recipe, I had to listen to Fiona Apple while reading the recipe off of a MacBook and say the magic words “Pomme manzana ringo”₁ over and over again in order to get the recipe to turn out right.

Oh, and there were some other ingredients too, but I don’t remember what they were.

Honestly, my biggest issue with Weight Watchers recipes is usually exactly what most people like about them — the simplicity. I don’t really want to take something from a package, mix it with something else from a package, and end up with something that’s kind of food-like. I want to take raw ingredients and get food. My last experience with a Weight Watchers recipe went something like this: canned fruit plus box of cake mix equals muffins.

Um, no. Flour, sugar, spices, binding ingredients, leavening ingredients, and flavor equals muffins. One can of something manufactured plus one box of something manufactured equals, “I should have just bought the damned prepackaged Weight Watchers muffins.”

Yet, I was pleasantly surprised by this recipe — enough recipe to make me feel like I was actually creating a meal from raw ingredients — which were surprisingly inexpensive because it was all basically in season (Then again, isn’t everything always in season somewhere? Isn’t it also five o’clock somewhere, so I should be drunk now?). And yet, the recipe was simple enough that I was done cooking within an hour, able to kick back, relax, and sip a snifter of apple schnapps while listening to the Beatles recordings from their Apple record days and recall trips of my youth to farms to pick pumpkins and drink apple cider every year around my birthday.

Not that this made me obsessed with apples or anything.

Chicken with Apples and Cider

Ingredients:

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 Granny Smith apple, cored and sliced

1 tbsp packed dark brown sugar

4 (4 oz) skinless, boneless chicken breasts (I used skinless, boneless chicken tenders)

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp freshly ground pepper

1 medium onion, thinly sliced into rings

1/2 c apple cider

1/4 c apple cider vinegar

2 cups hot cooked wide noodles (I used No Yolks egg noodles)

Instructions:

1. In a large, non-stick skillet (I used a seasoned cast iron skillet) over medium heat, heat 1 tbsp of the oil. Saute the apple until lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle with brown sugar; cook, stirring frequently, until tender, 3-5 minutes longer. Transfer to a plate.
2. On a sheet of wax paper, sprinkle the chicken with the cinnamon, salt, and pepper. In the skillet, heat the remaining 1 tbsp oil. Saute the chicken until browned, 4-5 minutes on each side. Transfer to another plate.
3. In the skillet, cook the onion, covered, until tender, 6-8 minutes; stir in the cider and vinegar. Reduce the heat and simmer 2 minutes. Return the chicken to the skillet; simmer, spooning the sauce over the chicken, until chicken is cooked through and liquid is reduced by half, 4-5 minutes.
4. Return the apples to the skillet; cook until heated through, about 2 minutes. Arrange the noodles on a platter; top with the chicken mixture, pouring any remaining juices over the chicken

Serves 4; Points Value: 8.

_{1: These are the word “apple” in French, Spanish, and Japanese, respectively}