Home - is where I want to be / But I guess I'm already there /I come home -
she lifted up her wings /
Guess that this must be the place...
- Talking Heads, "Naive Melody"

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Chicken with Kale and Wild Mushrooms

Yesterday we packed up the cookbooks, and most of the metal bakeware (the cookie cutter collection may need its own box...). It was a long, tiring day, fraught with annoyance over the past week's unreliable--meaning mostly absent--hot water supply and our landlord's efforts to get it fixed. The kids are watching a lot of TV these days while we pack. I was happy to get out for an hour by myself and visit the grocery store, where I bought a bunch of veggies and things pretty randomly. I already had chard from the Thursday market, and I was thinking vaguely of mushrooms. I came home and plugged search terms into Google and came up with this:

Chicken with Kale and Wild Mushroms

One thing about getting more experienced is that I rely a lot less on recipes than I used to. Which is not to say that I don't use them, but rather that I am better now at identifying the places where it's possible to go a slightly different route and still get to an acceptable place. I wasn't about to blanch my greens separately (for one thing, we were running out of clean pans) when I could throw them on the mushrooms for a minute. We don't have any decent wine right now, but a sauce of all chicken broth would do all right.

The one thing I forgot was the lemon juice, which probably would have helped; I found the flavor a little dull. Next time I might try throwing in some herbs, too. It wasn't a particularly ambitious meal, but it's the first we've had in a while that wasn't takeout or put together in a state of advanced exhaustion after a bad commute.

Come Tuesday I'll be 25 weeks along with Baby To Be Named Later, who has already developed a nice strong kick. Three of those weeks will be consumed by preparing to move, much of the next month by settling in to the new place, and then school for our newly minted first grader. October will be here before we know it.

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