I can cook meat!

Yesterday at the store, I caved and bought some meat, because I was craving some. I looked for some easy-to-cook chicken, and found none, but I did end up finding some Putenbrust for schnitzel (which is already filleted turkey breast). I looked in my trusty cookbook, the More-with-Less, for ideas on what to make with this meat, since I wasn't in the mood for my one default way of cooking white meat: stir-fry. Unfortunately, apart from soup (also something I'm not good at cooking) the book had no words of wisdom for turkey. Fortunately, after doing some impressively quick thinking†, I decided to look under the chicken recipes since chicken and turkey are basically the same thing.

I found a wonderful recipe called something like Honey Chicken, or something to that effect. Great, I thought! This way I can kill two birds with one stone. I can use up my icky honey and make a really cool meal! (The honey I bought at the market last week is partially crystallized and has a really grainy texture I'm not fond of, but that doesn't matter when it's going to melt anyways.) Unfortunately, the recipe said to cook it in the oven for over an hour, and I don't know how to use the oven (and also, I'd have to do some really complicated math†† to figure out what temperature to bake it at). Also, it was already after 7 pm and I didn't want to wait until 8:30 to eat. Fortunately, I did some more quick thinking and decided I would just fry it on the stove.

Unfortunately, the recipe called for margarine, curry powder, and salt, as well as honey, and I don't have any margarine, and I wasn't sure about the curry powder. More to the point, I wasn't sure if I like curry powder. Fortunately, I used olive oil in the pan instead, and quickly located the curry powder and measured some with the palm of my hand and added it to the bowl with the honey. Unfortunately, I them underestimated how easily the salt would come out of its box and poured out way too much. Fortunately, I was pouring it into my hand, and not directly into the bowl, and so I dumped most of it down the drain after failing to get it back in the box. Then I poured the mixture over the turkey pieces in the pan. After a while it looked really cool, like this, only cooler (because this was at the end, when it was cooling down)†††

I then served it with rice, and some freshly cooked green beans.

The good: NO MORE GREEN BEANS! (until next week or until I buy some, whichever comes... oh wait, I guess just until I buy some more) The turkey was actually surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, given the honey) delicious. I also did not overcook the rice. I also added such a minute amount of curry powder I couldn't taste it at all, and instead decided to add cinnamon, which added to the interesting flavor.

The bad: I added too much water to the rice, and would have overcooked it if I had tried to use all the water up. I also scorched some of the green beans. I also may not have cooked the turkey quite enough; it wasn't pink inside, but the texture seemed a bit off.

The verdict: I will definitely be trying this recipe again. I might try baking it next time, to insure that the meat gets fully cooked, and also, hopefully the honey sauce thickens a little bit more. There could be two different variations on this recipe: one with more curry powder and no cinnamon, and the other omitting the curry powder and only adding cinnamon.

† This is a joke.

†† Another joke. All you have to do when converting from Fahrenheit to Celsius is subtract 32 degrees, then multiply that answer by 5/9 and presto! You've got your temperature in Centigrade, where water freezes at 0 and boils at 100! What's that? You can't multiply by 5/9 in your head?!?! Okay, try dividing by 9/5 instead. Okay, okay, you got me, I find it pretty challenging to multiply by 5/9 in my head too. I think it's the 9 that gets me.

††† I really didn't mean to use so many variations of the word 'cool' in this sentence.