Chicken Breasts and Quinoa Salad
So A was travelling and R had to work, and that meant that dinner was my own affair. Aaaaaaaall for me. Things are pretty busy, as there’s people coming up this weekend and that means getting around to the stuff around the house that I need to get around to, and not having a lot of time for other stuff, which meant it was also in my best interest to make something that had ample leftovers.
So I got out the sous vide machine and decided on some chicken breasts. I got them into vacuum bags with olive oil and a chicken-focused pre-bought rub* and got them in the water at 145 for 2 hours, which is kind of a bastardization of the two different things you’re told about it.
I cooked some quinoa by toasting it briefly in the pan, then salting it and covering it with water and letting it simmer until it was time to eat.
The quinoa was to be part of a salad, so I got the rest of that together also. I minced a shallot, then cut an apple into small dice, then cut a bunch of little japanese radishes into bits about the same size as the apple, and set all that aside. I also cooked some asparagus on the grill pan** to chop up and add in later.
It needed a sauce for the chicken. Even sous-vide boneless skinless chicken breast is still just boneless, skinless chicken breast. It’s not very exciting, no matter what you put in the bag with it. So I decided to make braised peppers, which amount to a sort of unformed pepper jam. I cut two green and four red peppers into dice, and started them cooking in some olive oil in a pan. When they were well softened, I added a cup of reconstituted stock and let them simmer while I did basically everything else (I actually started this part first, but for whatever reason I’m constitutionally unsuited to writing the parts of the damn thing in order, and I guess I’m certainly not going to go back up to the beginning and paste this up there). Eventually the liquid was basically gone, at which point I added a healthy glug of cane vinegar and some brown sugar, letting it cook down into a glaze, but stopping short of any step where the peppers would break down structurally.
When the quinoa was done and the asparagus had cooled, I added both to the salad, then dressed it with some more olive oil, the juice of a whole lemon and half of an orange (it was a lot of salad), and then tore some basil and stirred that in as well.
The chicken came out of the bags and got a quick trip across the grill pan again to get some color on the outside, and then was cut into slices.
I dolloped the quinoa salad into a deep plate, then followed it with the chicken, then topped the whole thing with the peppers. The peppers were there for the chicken, but they also informed the quinoa, occasionally dropping down into them, which was great. The chicken came out as well and reliably as all sous vide chicken breasts do - that’s the advantage to using such an industrialized process. The quinoa salad was fantastic, and although it didn’t need the chicken (it would have been just fine with some lentils or some walnuts, which is probably how it will live its life as leftovers).
* I don’t mind continuing to mention that Penzey’s is the source of these things, and that it’s because they keep giving things away, but in the future it could be anything, so why get hung up on it now.
** I wanted to use the grill. True story: I just bought a new gas grill. But one of the reasons that I needed a new gas grill is that the old one wasn’t closing the propane line fully, so it was bleeding off propane, which is awful and cannot be allowed to stand. It also means I have an empty propane tank, and my car is in the shop, and has been for two days, so I can’t go out and get more propane. I have a charcoal grill, but it’s cold, and it didn’t seem worth it to cook for one person.