Real Food Dinner

Lately, I've really been craving the kind of food I would normally cook back in America: baked chicken, corn, salad, rosemary potatoes, frittata. So today I decided to make mashed potatoes, sauteed chicken strips and some veggies. I usually dislike mashed potatoes, but I find them a lot more enjoyable when the potato skin is also in the mix.

I went to the store to buy ingredients and ran into Guild Leader X. We decided to make dinner together, as we sometimes do, because we share a love of all things food. I forgot to take a picture of everything this time, but we used about 6-8 baby potatoes, one pack of chicken strips, one clove of garlic, about 4 -6 stalks of aspara, one small head of broccoli, butter, milk, and some olive oil.

So the first thing we did was prep and boil the potatoes. First, we set a pot of water on to boil. X scrubbed the potatoes clean, and I chopped them into about 1 inch squares. After we used a ladle to drop them into the boiling water, because the water splashed a lot when we tried to plop them in. Unfortunately, these two didn't make it. RIP potatoes.

So then we let the potatoes boil for a while. During this time, X and I searched Craigs List, looking for lvl 8 Norwegian brawler warriors to complete our circle of luv~. Alas, all those we found were allergic to cats. Better luck next time.

So, after the potatoes were done boiling, X got started mashing them up and adding milk and butter as she saw fit. Btw, you can tell when the potatoes are done when you stick a toothpick or knife in them and it comes out easily. These were pretty small pieces so it only took about 10 minutes for them to boil.

While X was doing that, I got started chopping the aspara and boiling the broccoli. I put another pot of water on the boil, and chopped the broccoli up and tossed it in. I let it boil just long enough to let the broccoli turn a nice bright green, then drained them. I diced the garlic and chopped the aspara. I got a pan, put some oil in it, added the garlic and turned it on medium heat.

After the garlic flavors the oil for a but, I put the chicken strips in and didn't touch them until it was time to turn them. They didn't get as brown on the outside as I had wanted, but I think it's because I didn't have the heat up high enough, but any higher and the garlic would have burned.
So after I flipped them, X and I decided that we should toss the broccoli in too. And that pretty much completed the dish. We got some plates, used complex physics equations to split the meal in half, and dug in. It was exactly what I was craving. Good stuff!