Dinner

This is my sweet kitchen. Obviously, there's lots of room to move around. Tonight I made a sweet chili couscous with chicken and shrimp.
I used chicken, shrimp, couscous, snow peas, onion, and sweet chili sauce. I used mirin, bay leaves, and saffron for seasoning. There are asparagus in the picture, but I decided to not use them, last minute.

I started out by dicing half an onion and a handful on snow peas. Before dicing the peas, I washed and peeled the peas. Then I chopped up the chicken into cubes. I like to peel, devine, and chop the shrimp last because they can be really smelly and I don't like it when the shrimp flavor overpowers everything else. So, first I peel and devine the shrimp and then I rinse them under some cold water and pat them dry. If you really wanted to kill the smell, you could rinse them in salt water and then rinse them again in plain water and pat dry, but I'm lazy and that's just too much work for me. After that's done, I chop the shrimp up into cubes.

After all my chopping was done, I got started cooking. Cous cous cooks reallllly fast, so I didn't start on that until after cooking most of the other ingredients. I added a little olive oil to my pan and when the oil was just starting to pop I added the onions and peas. After a minute or two (I was really hungry) I pushed the veggies to the sides and tossed the chicken in.

Around this time, my water for the cous cous was boiling so I poured some cous cous in and added the bay leaves and saffron. I ended up draining the cous cous because I added way too much water, but it came out great anyway. I think the trick is to watch it and make sure it doesn't over-cook.

After draining the cous cous and finishing the chicken and veggies, I combined them in the cous cous pot, so I could cook the shrimp. I tossed the shrimp into the pan and let them cook without stirring them. To get them unstuck from the bottom of the pan I added some mirin. After I added them to the pot (minus any liquid that the shrimp and mirin created). I also added a spoon of minced garlic. Last minute, I decided to add sweet chili sauce. You can really add anything you want--good salsa, butter, herbs, cheese, whatever. The sweet chili sauce gives it a nice hot sweet taste, which I love. Lastly, I mixed it all up and that was that. Oh, also don't forget to remove the bay leaves. You don't want to eat those.

It came out really well. I was even kind of surprised. I expected it to be a little bland, but it was perfect. I stupidly had seconds and now I'm overfull. I expect I'll be eating the rest for lunch tomorrow. Yay!