Chinese Chicken Salad and Oatmeal Chocolate Cookies

It seems as if most of the cooking was done by my husband this week, but I have had two successes so far of my own.

On the healthy side, we have salad:

One of my 2021 goals was to lose some of my quarantine weight, and incorporating more salads are an obvious way to tackle that goal. So on Tuesday night, we had Chrissy Teigen's Chinese Chicken Salad from her Cravings cookbook.

Chrissy Teigen's Chinese Chicken Salad

The dressing for this is the real MVP. The salad is basic enough: shred up some rotisserie chicken (or really any chicken you have), thinly slice some cabbage, cilantro, red onion, and scallion. Julienne a carrot. Chrissy's recipe calls for red cabbage, but I skipped the red cabbage because it always stains, and I've never liked the taste as much as green cabbage. But the dressing!

Honey, sriracha, rice vinegar, canola oil, sesame oil, soy sauce, Chinese hot mustard, and garlic all blended together to make a relatively fluorescent dressing that I want to take straight sips of. My husband and I both inhaled huge bowls of this salad on Tuesday night and we had enough leftover for our lunches Wednesday. Protein and veggies for minimal effort aside from shredding the chicken and getting out our blender.

And on the indulgent side, we have cookies:

Although the first cooking adventures on this blog have primarily come from Cravings by Chrissy Teigen, I would be remiss if I fail to explain how much Gaby Dalkin of WhatsGabyCooking.com could be considered the unofficial sponsor of our first six months of marital food. We have made breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert from her site and her cookbook Eat What You Want. 

We have made her curried turkey meatballs, cauliflower shawarma bowls, avocado migas, chicken schnitzel, and dutch oven steamed salmon so many times that we hardly need to reference the recipes.

So although she hasn't been mentioned much yet, please know that in addition to Bombas, this could be a fan site for Gaby Dalkin.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies have about as straightforward a cookie recipe as you can get. Cream together butter and brown sugar (no white sugar: maybe that is a bit unusual). Add in eggs, vanilla, dry ingredients, and then the add-ins of oatmeal and chocolate chips. You might notice from the above picture that our chocolate chip supply was languishing. Fear not!

I just unwrapped and chopped two handfuls of Hershey's kisses and called it good. Waste not, want not! Refrigerate the dough for about an hour--mine were closer to three hours.

*Chilling the dough is absolutely key. Cookies are sincerely so much better if the dough can chill before going into the oven! There are exceptions, but if you're doing a basic recipe like this one with creaming and mixing, everything will be tastier if you just give it a little time.*

Then bake for about thirteen minutes on 350 degrees. Easy as pie... or, easy as cookies. 

Today's Delights:

• Senator Sasse's floor speech yesterday;
• Senator Bennet's floor speech yesterday; and
• the Peace Prayer of Saint Francis.