Another Attempt to Poison My Offspring

I made a chicken stir fry tonight, thinking I might capitalize on an earlier breakthrough.

A few weeks ago, after finding strip steaks on a ridunculously good sale, I grilled steaks for dinner and those family packs assume there are at least four people in a family, so I had some leftovers that were too good to waste and too small to make a meal of by themselves.



So I stir-fried them with some rice, egg, onion, etc., bit of soy sauce and so on and the girls liked it.

They reacted positively to my dinner plans tonight, which was to cook up:

Tame Chicken Stir-Fry
1/4 cup canola oil
1 tbsp. fenugreek
1 tbsp. tamarind extract
black pepper
soy sauce to taste
2 cups brown basmati rice cooked in 1 quart of chicken broth
4 eggs
1 enormous red onion
8 oz cubed chicken breast
8 oz sliced baby portobello mushrooms
4 cloves minced garlic
1 green bell pepper, sliced
8 oz mung bean sprouts
2 tbsp. Smart Balance (or butter if you wanna live on the edge)
1 bunch cilantro
alfalfa sprouts (as garnish)
Heat oil in wok on highest setting (I have an electric wok that goes to 400ºF and makes oil smoke pretty quickly, the idea is you want it HOT); add onions and fenugreek and keep it moving until the onions are translucent, then add garlic, black pepper and chicken, continuing to pester it with a spatula for a few minutes. When the chick is looking at least half cooked, add the tamarind extract, then the rice and eggs. Dowse with soy sauce as you continue to stir everything, then add the peppers, shrooms, bean sprouts, stirring maybe sprinkling a bit more soy sauce in. If it looks like things are getting too dry but not quite ready to eat, throw a couple tablespoons of Smart Balance in and continue to stir. Then add the chopped cilantro, reserving a bit for garnish. Serve with cilantro and alfalfa sprouts.

Credit where it's due, Em thought this looked pretty weird but enthusiastically dug in before declaring it tasted 'weird.' What was weird about it? She couldn't say, but it was weird.

Maybe the tamarind was a mistake, but Mo just flat refused to even try a bite. They ate leftover salmon and rice from last night when it became clear that they really would rather go hungry than eat this stuff.




And here I'd withheld the super hot Thai chilis that should have gone in with the fenugreek out of hope that this was a dish the whole family could embrace. I put a liberal dose of crush red pepper in the leftovers before putting them away for my lunches this week. Won't be quite the same, but there it is.



Was it the tamarind? Where did I go wrong? Too much cilantro? Besides the fact that's not possible to have too much cilantro, Mo stole half of it to eat straight while I was still cooking.