Braised Chicken with Coconut Milk and Curry

Day 20-Something really is wrong with me, somebody should research me. Cooking and I are just not meshing. The basics are not even possible for me. I should just stick to easy recipes with few ingredients. Once I do those well for awhile, I should then move on to more complicated recipes. After last night I’ve completely lost all confidence in myself. If I felt it was okay to just give up and move on I would, but I don’t feel comfortable giving up. Being someone who gets bored easily I give up more often then not. The minute a task gets just a bit too hard and I can’t really grasp the concept, I quit.

Now this doesn’t apply to my entire life, just to hobbies that I’ve tried out. A perfect example is knitting. I knitted a few scarves and could never master finishing them off. Someone else always had to do it for me. Since it seemed impossible, I gave up on it. Last year I decided to start a walking/jogging/running program, it worked out for a couple of weeks, but then my knees started hurting and I couldn’t run for long, so I quit. When the going gets tough, I get out. It’s not that I don’t like to work at things, I really do. But if I believe I just can’t quite reach the skill level to really do something well, then what’s the point of continuing with it. Folks, my brain is starting to feel this way about cooking.

Last night started off badly. I left work and got caught behind an accident and didn’t get home until an hour later. (My drive is normally about 10-15 minutes.) So I was in a great mood once I got home. Then I was going to cook something completely different, until I realized that one of my ingredients had gone bad. So that was out. Switching my brain over to another recipe is not the easiest thing for me. I get so focused on what I was supposed to cook, that what I end up cooking suffers for it.

Finally I decided to make Braised Chicken with Coconut Milk and Curry and serve it with Spinach Rice. I found this recipe in Reader’s Digest and the picture of the chicken with the rice looked really appetizing. I had to do some digging to find the rice recipe since it wasn’t included in the magazine. The one good thing about this recipe is I discovered a new ingredient I’ve never used it before, Sofrito. The taste was good, kind of like a tomato sauce. So I’m assuming that if you want the flavors of onion, garlic, pepper and tomato in a Latin style dish you can add this. I bet it would be a good addition to ground beef for tacos. I could use it in place of the salsa I normally mix my beef with.

The chicken dish was actually fairly easy to make. It calls for a whole chicken broken down, but obviously I wasn’t going to do that, so I bought chicken thighs. Everything else went really well, I’m not going to bother boring you with the details of how to put it all together (use the link on to the right of this post to see the recipe). The chicken smells awesome while it’s cooking. It has my favorite ingredients of coconut milk and curry, which is one of the reasons I choose to make it. Although it reminds me a bit of an Indian dish, it’s labeled as a classic Latin dish. So while my chicken was becoming tender and filled with flavor I moved onto the rice.

This recipe was a tough one for me. There were parts of it that just didn’t make any sense to me. You start the dish by heating up a ¼ cup of canola oil in a pan. Then you add long grain white rice and salt and coat the rice in the oil. Once the rice looks opaque you: “add enough cold water to cover the rice by the width of 2 fingers (about 1-inch). Bring to a rapid boil, and boil-without stirring!-until the water level reaches the level of the rice. Stir the rice once and reduce the heat to low. Cover and cook 20 minutes.” This is where things went very wrong. I didn’t understand the 2 fingers equal an inch logic. So I poured in what I thought was an inch of water. Then I waited until the water looked like it had reached rice level, though I’m still not completely clear on what that means. Next I stirred it and threw the cover on. 20 minutes later, the rice wasn’t cooked at all! AT ALL!! I have no idea what really went wrong. All I know is that I wasted 4 cups of rice!! I made 4 cups in the hopes of bringing the leftovers to work. HA! I did manage to cook the spinach correctly so I still had that to work with. So Anthony suggested cooking up some instant rice and throwing the spinach in that with olive oil and butter. So I did and it worked out fine.

Final Product:

Just because this dinner was saved in the end, does not mean I am happy about it. I’m super annoyed about the rice. Did I not use enough water? Well, who would know with the crazy finger instructions?! Grrr Argh! The chicken was tasty. I would totally make it again, but forget about that rice. I would rather just cook up some basmati rice with this chicken dish. I would still add the spinach to the rice, because that was a nice addition. Anthony really liked this meal even with the instant rice and asked me why I don't make this more often. That's a good sign. Sorry there are not more pictures, but these two things kept me pretty busy and I couldn’t be bothered with the camera.

I’m supposed to be cooking again tonight, but I might retire the duties to Anthony. I feel so defeated. I need to work my way back into the cooking life slowly. Oh and here is a picture of the Black Bean Lasagna from the other night. It was not all the amazing and I think I'll just stick to the classic lasagna that I make well.