Experiment 2: Mexican-Style Chicken

Figure 1.  Check out those colors.  Can't beat that.

Introduction:

Okay, we have to come clean.  We didn't actually have pumpkin cinnamon rolls for dinner last week.  It should have been our main course, though, given that we spent most of our nine-hour cooking marathon bathed in a deluge of sugar and butter.

The truth is, we made Mexican-Style Chicken (Figure 1).  I'm sorry we can't be any more specific in the title, but we have to work with what we were given.

Figure 2. Our NFPA Ratings for Mexican-Style Chicken

Materials:
1) Chicken pieces - 2.5-3.5 lbs (cut from boneless chicken breast)

Figure 3.  One onion CHOPPED.

2) Butter - 1 tablespoon
3) Olive Oil - 1 tablespoon
4) Chopped onion - 0.5 cup
5) Clove of Garlic, 1 medium
6) Tomato sauce - 8 oz (1 can)
7) Chicken broth - 0.75 cup
8) Vinegar 1 tablespoon
9)  Chili powder - 0.25 teaspoon
10) Salt - Dash*
11) Green olives - 0.5 sliced, stuffed
12) Golden raisins - 0.25 cup
13) Green bell pepper - 1 cut in strips.

Procedure:

Figure 4.  We used the heaviest skillet we could find (~10 lbs),
but then we realized we didn't have a cover for it.

1) Heat butter or oil in a heavy skillet (get your weights out) over medium heat.  Brown the chicken.
2) Add onion and garlic (Fig. 3).
3) Add tomato sauce, chicken broth, vinegar, chili powder, salt, olives, and raisins.  Cover and simmer for 30 minutes (Fig. 4).
4) Add green pepper, cover and cook for 10 more minutes.

This dish is best served with hot, cooked rice.
Serves 4-6 people with leftovers for four-legged friends.



Explanation of our ranking (Figure 2):

Prep time
Most of your time will be spent sitting and waiting for your chicken and vegetables to simmer.  And remember: watched chicken never simmers.

Difficulty
We are still getting a handle on our difficulty scale, so take "4" to mean that this recipe is not that hard at all.  It has many ingredients, but very few steps.  Just keep an eye on the chicken to make sure you don't overcook it, because then it will be really dry and gross.


Course
This dish is too elegant to be served anywhere but at the dinner table.

Results
Overall, the chicken was a welcome addition to our culinary repertoire.  However, the dish left us seeking a bit more flavor.  More specifically, we wanted a little more spiciness.  Additionally, we didn't have any garlic cloves, so we switched that out for a tablespoon of garlic powder, which probably wasn't the best idea.  As a fan of stir-fry, Ben knows what a good amount of garlic tastes like.  This chicken didn't have it.  Dana is a fan of garlic in pasta sauce and agrees that the chicken was...well, it wasn't pasta sauce.

Figure 5. The finished product.  Mmm...

We also stood our ground on our selection of garnishes.  We share the same view on olives (ick!), So we avoided those.  Same story with the raisins.  Perhaps those would have added some texture and flavor.  It's fortunate that we kept in the green peppers as those really added to the chicken.  The contrast between the sweet, crunchy pepper and the soft, savory chicken made for several delectable, though not spicy, bites.

Remember how we said that this dish is best served with rice?  Well, we forgot about that.  But we thought of a better idea, so it's ok.  Stay tuned for Experiment 3, where we will explain our fabulous idea in more detail.

Discussion
This meal was full of two things we love: calories and protein.  Here we will discuss these two concepts in greater detail:

The energy we get from food is measured in Calories (note the capital 'C'), which are equivalent to kilocalories (1000 calories - small 'c').  One calorie (small 'c') is the amount of energy it takes (4.2 joules) to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) at standard atmospheric pressure.  One chicken breast has 30 grams of protein.  Proteins, like most carbs, provide four Calories (big 'C') per gram (Merill and Watt 1973).  Hence, the protein in one chicken breast will yield 510 kilojoules energy, which is enough energy to keep me writing for about 20 more minutes.  Fat yields the most amount of energy per gram, but it also takes a lot longer to digest.  As mentioned in Experiment 1 (See Discussion), carbs are digested the fastest.  Proteins offer a happy medium, where they provide a moderate amount of energy in not too much time.

Figure 6. Mexican-Style Chicken with 

Roasted Rosemary-Garlic Potatoes

You've probably heard of the four basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter.  However, there is a fifth: umami.  No, this is not a misspelled abbreviation for the University of Miami.  Umami (literally means "pleasant taste" in Japanese) is the savory flavor of meat.  Your taste buds have receptors that are sensitive to glutamate, which is a component of most proteins and signals the umami taste.  In fact, monosodium glutamate (MSG), is added to foods to enhance the savoriness of meat and vegetables.  Umami gets to your brain in a very similar way as sweet taste (See Experiment 1), therefore a little goes a long way.

In addition to meat, umami is also present in vegetables such as ripe tomatoes and mushrooms.  The umami flavor itself is not palatable without an accompanying savory scent, but it's especially tasty when mixed with salty taste.  Then again, salt makes everything taste better, right?

Future Directions:
As you see in the pictures, we made some roasted rosemary-onion potatoes to go along with our chicken (Fig. 6).  See Experiment 3 for the details (link coming soon!).

References:
Merill, AL and Watt, BK. 1974. "Energy Value of Foods." Agriculture Handbook.  Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture. Energy Value of Foods

Rattray, D. 2012. "Mexican Chicken Recipe." About.com Southern Food.