Normally, I don't have any "female issues." No cramping, bloating, fatigue, or whatever else they list in the Midol commercial. But I have not been well this week, and have been having a lot of trouble deciding what to eat. On Friday night, my mom suggested Hollis sandwiches, which are one of my favorite things ever, modeled after the sandwich served at the Pav at UVA by the one-and-only Miss Hollis. But when she suggested it, I felt nauseous. So then, she suggested Chinese and that sounded so much better. Sweet, fried, spicy. Perfect. Yesterday, I at the leftover Chinese food, so today I was left trying to figure out what to eat now that it was gone.
I settled on a Weight Watchers recipe that I got when I joined. It's called "spicy over-fried chicken" and my mom made it once, but it was kind of... bland. So, I decided to add some more Tabasco and see if it was any better. Here's the recipe:
If you're having trouble reading that, you should be able to enlarge it to full size. I'm not sure where you could find this on the site or if it's exclusive to joining. I hope WW doesn't sue me for putting it on my page, though. It's just so good!
And it is good. The almonds in the breading really make it crunchy, which helps deceive you into thinking it's deep-fried. I ground a few out of the mixed nuts using a microplane. I used fat-free half-and-half instead of low-fat buttermilk, primarily because I had the former without going to the store. I also used chicken breast, because, again, it was already in the freezer.
The resulting chicken, right from the oven, and cooked to an internal temperature of 170 degrees. It made the whole house smell great while it was cooking, which is weird, because it was really just baking a chicken breast. The areas with the larger pieces of almond are the ones that got particularly brown and crispy.
Because I added a lot of Tabasco, I figured this would be spicy, so I served it with blue cheese dressing on the side. To lighten the blue cheese dressing a little bit, I used a small amount of regular dressing and added crumbles of reduced-fat blue cheese. Blue cheese (which I'm not spelling bleu cheese bc I don't want to deal with the little red underline for misspelled words) is one of my favorite foods and I would pretty much put it on anything, and this reduced-fat kind, which I found at Giant, is really good.
It turned out it still wasn't all that spicy, so maybe next time I'll add a hotter type of hot sauce or more of it. I don't really like spicy foods, but I do like buffalo-style food, and that's the idea behind this, in my opinion. But it met my criteria for foods I've been craving the last couple days: sweet, fried, spicy. It was a great decision, and I don't feel like I totally destroyed my diet, despite eating Chinese food this week, which is not good for you at all, but tastes so good.
So that was my first recipe entry. I'd like to do more of them, and I'll take more pictures next time. I didn't think to make it a blog post until I was at the end, so next time I'll have more in-progress pictures. I'm also planning some "to-do" list kinds of posts. This is one of them: working through some recipes I want to try through the blog. I also want to document cleaning projects (I'm kind of a slob), make my way through my nail polish collection, and make my way through my shoe collection and wardrobe. If I can't find a use for something, I'll donate it to someone who can.
But for now, I'm going to go back to watching the Nationals and the Phillies and lay on the couch feeling generally crappy, but with a full and content stomach.
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| From recipe (on screen) to finished product (on plate) |
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