Brain Food

I have recently made a goal to not use a recipe for the majority of my cooking. I still like to peruse my cookbooks for ideas, but try not to actually look at a recipe while I'm making dinner. I like to call these dishes my "Brain Food". It is something that I really enjoy doing, and know that if I want to be good at it, I need to practice and use the knowledge that I gained at culinary school. It's been four years since I graduated from it, and stuff is starting to fade, which I hate because I read recipes and realize that I have forgotten that I know how to do something (i.e. blanch and shock).

Another motivation for cooking this way is that 90% of the time Ryan enjoys dinner more when I don't use a recipe. I'm hoping that I can continue to keep that percentage!

The only "bad" part about not using a recipe is that it makes it a lot harder to share my concoctions with you because I never measure anything. On Tuesday I made something I called Tomato Basil Chicken. Ryan raved about it, and insisted that I write down the recipe. So I did! The measurements of the spices are guesstimates, but everything else is pretty accurate.

Let me know if you try it, I'm curious to hear if you enjoyed it as much as we did!

Tomato Basil Chicken

Ingredient list:

1 lb boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into strips

2 garlic cloves, minced

Olive oil

5 whole white mushrooms, sliced

1 large tomato, blanched and shocked*, diced

1/3 C chicken broth

1-15 oz bottle of light Alfredo sauce, divided

1 tsp dried basil

1 T dried minced onion

Salt and pepper to taste

Sauté garlic and chicken strips in olive oil. Meanwhile, in a separate sauté pan, cook mushrooms over medium heat in small amount of olive oil, adding minced onion and chicken broth after 2 minutes. Allow to simmer. Add tomatoes and Alfredo sauce, bring to a slow simmer. Add basil to cooked chicken; stir to incorporate. Season both sauce and chicken with salt and pepper. Serve sauce over chicken.

Yield: 3-4 servings

*Blanched and shocked: cut out the leafy top of the tomato and slice an "x" into the bottom of the tomato. Plunge the tomato into boiling water for 30-60 seconds, or until the skin begins to break. Remove from the water and immediately put into an ice bath. This allows the skin to easily be removed and brightens the color of the tomato.