Tonight Dad asked what we had to cook for supper. It's been a kind of a hot and tiring day, and a good meal is what we need - not a scrounge-supper of bread and cheese or a dish of cereal, or something insubstantial like that. Besides, that's what I had last night.
I had a lot of salad stuff that we'd accumulated over the past week - lettuce, cukes, some cherry tomatoes, string beans, dill and peas that Ber had brought last weekend; a couple of good fat summer squashes. I'd also bought a package of chicken thighs today, and so thought of having a salad with marinated chicken pieces.
While Dad de-boned 6 chicken thighs, I washed lettuce - two kinds, a salad bowl and a boston-type. I washed, trimmed and sliced 2 medium-sized pickling cukes, and rinsed the dill, and left it standing in a glass of water.
Then the marinade - nothing fancy, but enough flavor without masking the richness of the thigh meat. Extra-virgin olive oil (a mainstay), and a couple of tablespoons of good, nutty toasted sesame oil. I ground a good bunch of black pepper into the mix, and sprinkled in a half-teaspoon or so of granulated garlic, the same amount of dried marjoram and a little less than that of dried thyme. A couple of dashes of soy sauce went in, and I mixed it all well. Dad cut the chicken into small bits and mixed it well with the marinade, and we let it sit.
I took a fat summer squash and a smallish zucchini and cut them both into 1/2" thick slices, cutting the biggest slices of yellow squash in half. This would be boiled, floated in just enough water to cover them and boiled hard, until the flesh becomes translucent, and the seeds come out. This is a tasty, subtly sweet dish, delectable with pepper and butter. Mmmmm.
Dad snipped the beans, and they went into the steamer; he snipped and pulled the strings from the snap peas. I washed the pint of golden, red, orange and pinkish cherry tomatoes, and set them in a bowl beside the sliced cukes. Over the cukes I sprinkled a little of the dill, shredded to little bits.
I also made a cruet of my favorite dressing - cider vinegar, 2 cloves of garlic (minced fine), top up the cruet with EVOO, and sprinkle in crushed dried basil leaves and a few good grinds of black pepper. Of course it's still "raw" and won't have its best flavor for a couple of days, until the garlic and basil have infused into the liquids, but it's still pretty good when newly made.
The chicken was cooked in more olive oil, and drained on a paper towel, so as not to get too much oil in the salad. To complete the meal, we have some brown rice that was leftover from 2 days ago, to warm up and have on the side.
The steam from the pot of squash smells heavenly; the scent of dill and cucumbers is making my stomach growl. I have to go eat!
