What You Should Have Eaten #39

Chicken in a Fresh Tomato and Eggplant Sauce with Spaghetti

I had a problem right off the bat with the wine. It was an older bottle, a 2002 vintage of Xanadu Margaret River Sauvignon Blanc to be exact, and the cork did not want to leave its home. It was comfortable, I guess. No amount of corkscrewing was getting this badboy out. I ended up sticking a small steak knife in there, slowly slicing my through the cork along the inside edge of the neck, and I was actually able twist the cork out with an extremely small amount actually falling into the bottle. I was very pleased with myself.

This was the first time I had ever cooked with eggplant, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. There were clumps of seeds randomly scattered through the inside. It wasn’t a problem, though. I think the only problem was the amount I used. I could have used a bit more.

I went against my usual leaning and included a small bit of onion. I was cooking for an old friend, so I decided I wasn’t going to stray from the recipe all that much.

One way I did stray was to prepare extra spaghetti and chicken. I knew my kids wouldn’t eat the night’s final product, but they eat chicken and they eat spaghetti, so I just made extra a didn’t combine them. They got plain chicken and some spaghetti with Parmesan cheese. The kids are a bit weird in that they’d rather not have sauce.

I made two pounds of spaghetti, but I didn’t adjust the amount of boiled water, so I ended up with some sticky pasta. I don’t know how the kids choked it down without any sauce, but when it was mixed with the chicken, wine, broth, etc., it all ended up coming together.

My dinner guest had a dessert treat for the kids: sundaes. Snickers ice cream, strawberry ice cream, caramel and brownie ice cream, bananas, Hershey’s chocolate sauce, cherries, butterscotch sauce and sprinkles. The kids were in heaven, and they were so wired until bedtime.

This was a simple but tasty dinner. I think this’ll be something I fix again in the future.

Probably for the rest of the month I’m going to whore myself out with an impassioned plea: click on the ads. PLEASE click on the ads. I don’t care if you exit it out of it immediately or actually look around. This isn’t some professional blog where I believe in the products I’m shilling. These are automatic ads placed by Google. But my experiment this weekend proved to me that I actually AM making a spot of cash whenever the ads are clicked. So I’m going to put this little disclaimer on the bottom of all my posts for the next month or so, and I hope you’ll take an extra 10 seconds after reading my blog to click on an ad. Thanks so much!