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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 12:44 pm and is filed under cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.