Cooking Adventure: Asparagus and Chicken

Asparagus. My arch nemesis. It has a taste like no other, and that's not a good thing. The texture, flavor and smell of asparagus is extremely off-putting.

That said, this is the only dish I will eat asparagus in and I love it.

Oh my stars and garters.

This is a very simple dish with very few ingredients and it tastes very good.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 lbs chicken (white meat)

1 bunch asparagus (about 10 stalks, give or take a few)

soy sauce

Present and accounted for.

Chop up all the asparagus into 1-2 inch pieces. Get rid of the white or purple bottoms - they're very tough, won't cook well and are flavorless. If your asparagus is particularly thick, you can chop it in half lengthwise for more even cooking

If you're like me, you can pretend you're Paul Bunyan, felling trees.

Throw them in a pan with a bit of oil and 1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce. I recommend using a nonstick skillet. Stir everything up to get the asparagus well-coated and spread them out evenly in the pan. Cover with a lid and go cut up the chicken.

Can you tell my skillet did not come with a lid?

Cut the chicken up into bite-sized pieces. NOTE: The super-cheap grocery store brand meat is certainly inexpensive, but you'll end up cutting off giant chunks of fat, gristle, tendons and odd-colored bits. High-quality meat will hardly need any trimming at all. By experiment, the cheap meat and the quality meat prices come out to about the same once trimmed. The picture below shows how much I had to cut off four fairly large chicken breasts (good quality).

Suitable for kitty.

Stop every now and then to give the asparagus a stir. The asparagus should be tender, but not mushy. The sliced stalks will cook faster. When the asparagus is done, remove it from the pan and put in a bit more oil and 2 tablespoons of soy sauce. Add the chicken and stir to coat it.

Raw chicken never looks good.

Cook the chicken until no longer pink on the inside. I like to have a medium-high heat on when I cook it. Once it's fully cooked, throw the asparagus back in and stir it up.

Mmmmmmmmm.

Eat it with rice! If you don't like rice, eat it with...something.

Lunchtime!

Happy cooking!