Kevin in the Kitchen

After two years of living with my roommate, Kevin has decided that he wants to do some of the cooking. I still have some dry rub left over that I was hoping to use on a pork shoulder, but I figured I'd take the opportunity to back away. Kevin has been watching me cook for most of the two years that we've been living together, and now that I'm leaving, he's taking up cooking.

So today he made chicken. He put about 1/2 a cup of onions on the stove with olive oil and while preparing two breasts of boneless chicken. While that was sauteing , he sprinkled chili flakes and chili powder on both sides of the chicken, then chopped the chicken into one inch cubes. These got thrown in with the onions for about 15 minutes total, and mushrooms were thrown in about 5 minutes into the cooking,

For my part I cooked up 1.5 cups rice rice. Half a jalapeno and clove of garlic went in with a little bit of olive oil and I also threw in the rice for about five minutes to toast it. I'm not sure what this does, but I read about it in a Spanish rice cookbook, and the results seems good...

After five minutes I poured in a can of chicken stock and another half can of water. I added tomatoes, tomato paste and a few slices of lemon and a bay leaf and simmered it covered until the rice was done.

Finally we steamed up some broccoli and half a red pepper. The meal was pretty good, a little too much chili powder on the chicken left us feeling like there were a few too many flavors floating around, but the meal was filling and sure felt healthy. That was until we had dessert: homemade vanilla iced cream with dark Swiss chocolate fudge from sanders....

edit: after reading through the post I realized that a little context is in order. For example: Kevin also made breakfast this morning: Krusteaz blueberry pancake mix (just add water -- now with artificial blueberries). I think this is a major step forward.