Chomp!

By Ron Aiken

 

Chomp!’s an honest-enough chap to admit things that aren’t flattering about himself.

One of those things is that … I’ve … done it.

You know, that thing you’ve done, too? Sometimes alone, in moments of loneliness or desperation, usually in the privacy of your own home. Other times wedo it right in front of the one we love. Sometimes, even, WE DO IT WITH CHILDREN WATCHING.

I’m talking about buying a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, of course! I’m talking about that shameful moment where you abandon all the benefits of healthy eating and careful food preparation and forfeit your dignity for the ease of a pre-cooked chicken you hope – oh God, how you hope – was prepared within the last 72 hours and has since been turned over to the care of a lightbulb.

It’s a pitiful surrender when we make that decision at the store to just say, “You know, to heck with everything, family. We’re eating lamp-cooked chicken tonight.”

And THAT’S assuming you’re getting it for a family and not just yourself, which is an even sadder moment (and DO NOT try to tell Chomp! you’ve never gotten that lemon chicken, taken it home and eaten it by yourself with a fork in front of the television right out of its little wobbly black plastic bottom. DO NOT EVEN TRY TO DENY IT!)

Chomp! understands you, you dear, confused person. Chomp! gets it. Sometimes we work late, things come up and cold, hard decisions have to be made. Kids must be fed, after all, and sometimes that happens in ways we’d rather not shine the light of day into, thank you very much.

Sometimes, though, we fight back. We get creative. We take that cold chicken, the universally recognized white flag of nutritional surrender, and we reassert control. We’re the bad boys here, not some dumb bird!

Alright! You ready to do this?! We’re gonna take that chicken and turn it into something EXOTIC! We’re gonna make a wonderful curry chicken outta that sucker and both delight AND entertain our family in the process! Yeah!

First, the ugliness.

 

Looks kinda like a mugshot, right? Just a nekkid bird on a plate, cold and with a dim future. But wait, what’s happening next???

 

Chomp! has taken that chicken, cut it in half and carefully (and messily) removed all the white and dark meat. He’s placed it in a pan on medium high heat and begun to bring it back to life!

 

Now, with the shee-kin in the pan, here’s what Chomp! used for his curry sauce (sadly, on this night he was NOT up to making a curry sauce from scratch):

 

Pretty good stuff here. I recommend it in a pinch.

 

Now, after adding the curry sauce to the chicken, I let that simmer and Chomp!’s significantly better half got to work cutting fresh zucchini, carrots, beans and half a jalapeno.

The fresh veggies, all ready to be sauteed in butter!

 

Also going on the stovetop at this time are the cellophane bean noodles. We used this brand:

 

For all your cellophane noodle needs, use Ty Ling Naturals for God’s sake! (Feel free to use that slogan, Ty Ling!!) 

 

Now, here’s where things got a bit hairy, Chomp! has to confess.

We didn’t have enough curry sauce.

The one bottle, she was not enough for the whole chicken, a fact that became painfully obvious as the cooking process advanced and the curry sauce had all but dried up completely. What was a family to do with such a calamity as this closing in like the walls of the Death Star trash compactor? Act cool and quick, of course, like Han Solo! EZ ball it!

First, Leesa grabbed some chicken stock. Sploosh!

 

Here’s the brand we had that’d been waiting patiently in the fridge door for this precise moment of heroism!

 

Next, how do we replace the heat? Ha! This is a job for Sriracha!

 

Here’s the Sriracha-cha-cha!

 

And here’s me adding it to the chicken. Bang!

 

After this INCREDIBLE on-the-fly save, we had a curry chicken with a surrious bite that looked like this:

 

The grocery store rotisserie chicken, now completely transformed!

 

Served over the noodles with the veggies on the side, the dinner was a humongous hit with everyone, not the least of those impressed being the very creators of the dish themselves (those humble devils!).

So smashing was the success, so gargantuan the glee that we had to keep the mojo going and make Chomp!’s signature jalapeno-coconut cookies for dessert.

 

Here are the cookies prior to hitting the old oven with, as you can see, some liberal use of such fresh on-hand ingredients as pineapple, strawberries, a red jalapeno pepper and some fancy Alpine and Asiago cheeses. Score!

 

Until next week!

 

 

 

 

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