geek + red sox + cooking = peter ryan

Embarking on my sauteed chicken fruit exploration that I mentioned at the conclusion of my last post I decided to take my chances with Mango and Lemon.

I did a google search for mango lemon chicken and came up well..with nothing. So the idea I had while in the local supermarket could be a disaster but I figure I’ll steamroll ahead.

The ingredients I am starting out with are:
Ingredients

• 1 whole boneless chicken breast
• 1 mango
• 4 lemons (2 sliced into quarter inch slices, the other halved for squeezing).
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• salt
• pepper
• 2 cups prepared rice

Preparation
I peeled the mango using a great large peeler I got in Chinatown I got a few years back, and sliced the mango into bite sized slices, discarding the core.

I sliced the tops off two lemons and sliced them into quarter inch thick slices with the peel still attached.

Next I chopped about half of medium sized white onion and started to think about what I was actually going to do. I had some green beans I had just purchased but didn’t really feel preparing another side and I didn’t feel like cooking the green beans with the mango and lemon so I decided to leave them out and thought about having rice on the side. At that point I said “well I could fry this together if I chop the chicken”.

So you can see where I am going now. I prepared two cups of rice (1 cup of water, 1 cup of rice) and chopped the chicken into pieces.

I placed a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil heating the oil under medium to high heat until it ’shimmered’ which is a term I read for “when the oil is hot enough to saute with” but I really don’t know if what I think a shimmer is, is in fact a shimmer.

I added the onions and once they started to show the slightest color I added the 8 lemon slices and chopped chicken and let them cook for two minutes.

After the two minutes I rotated the chicken, pushed down on the lemon slices to release some juice, and added the mango.

I left the mango sit on top of the chicken for a minute and a half before I tossed the entire contents of the pan and mixed everything together.

Next I took another two lemons and sliced them in half in preparation of drizzling fresh lemon juice onto the final mixture.

After a minute of letting the mixture cook I removed the sliced lemons from the pan and discarded them and added the 2 cups of prepared rice. I stirred everything together and then added soy sauce, salt, pepper, and squeezed 2 lemons worth of juice onto the mixture.

After I stirred everything together I deemed my creation complete.

Tasting

I gave my creation a taste and was a bit disappointed. Overall I used too much lemon - the citrus flavor was somewhat overpowering. The chicken I cooked was a bit overdone and so was a bit stringy. The mango was nice but overall I need a lot more than 1 mango for a 2 person serving. There just was too much chicken in proportion to the mangeo. It wasn’t a total disaster - I went back for seconds - but I felt like I could have done a better job.

I’ll continue to explore mango / lemon combinations but next time I will certainly think a bit more about the proportions.

For the second time this year I adapted this recipe for sauteed strawberry chicken. Beth had made her mom’s raspberry chicken recipe a couple times for me and it was delicious. As a fan of strawberries I said to myself “why not try something similar with strawberries” and after some searching around decided to give it a go. The rasberry chicken differed from the recipe I used as it involved baking and used a raspberry jam.

In the middle of summer I used fresh strawberries as opposed to the frozen. I hulled them but otherwise left them intact. The first time I tried this recipe I did use the pears but this go I didn’t get any at the market.

I wasn’t quite sure why the recipe asked for “2 lg. whole chicken breasts, cooked, deboned”. I used raw boneless chicken breasts which I split and cooked similarly to how I cooked the chicken in my sauteed italian chicken recipe.

The technique of using sauteed chicken plus mixing in a sauce in the same pan is an easy quick way to cook. The options for a sauce are limited by the imagination. I really enjoy using fresh fruit in these dishes and would like to try more.

In November once clementine season hits I’ll try something with that.

On my current project I am playing an iteration manager role. Coming from the development kingdom I have avoided excel like the plague it rightfully is. However I am unable to avoid it any longer and I’ve been playing around with charting. I was creating a simple iteration burn up chart from a series of values. The table itself was simple:

My challenge was the red highlighted values. I wanted to make my table smart so it summed the total complete based on the days progress. That was simple (by summing that days plus the previous day’s total complete value). I used the if(condition, value if true, value if false) function to set the value to blank (”") when there was no value present:

=IF(ISBLANK(C4),"",C4+D3)


This worked visually but then when I charted the values the blanks were displayed as zeros which considering the values were at the tail end of the iteration looked rather silly on top of being inaccurate. It’s not often when a team undoes all the work it has done the last 2 days of a 5 day iteration!

A bit of searching yielded the charting solution. I found this excel newsletter which described the na() function. All na() does is set the value of the cell to “no value available” which the excel charting is clever enough to ignore. My table now looks like this:

And the Total Complete function now looks like this:

=IF(ISBLANK(C4),NA(),C4+D3)


This is not as preferable as a null which could display as a blank but for the sake of the burn up chart it will have to do. I have no doubt this is hardly worthy of the designation “excel tip” and is something any seasoned excel veteran is familiar with but I found difficult and also found the solution (buried away on the Windmill Software Newsletter #62 from October 2003) difficult to find as well.

As an aside I was reading some excel forum and some guy signed his posts with the phrase “Keep Excelling”. After you get over your involuntary shudder I suggest you all take a look at OpenOffice calc which I have had great success with.