Today's Secret Ingredient: Desperation

We haven't bought groceries here in probably two weeks, aside from individual items for single meals, so the pickings are getting slim. But necessity is the mother of invention, and everybody needs to eat. Coming from a family that only bought food when there was absolutely nothing left to eat in the house, I've long realized that the days before a grocery run are often the most ingenious and prone to outright failure. The bright side is, like camping food, you're too hungry to turn anything down, and everything gets the benefit of the doubt.
Remember last post's chicken? I still had about a pound left, and my roommate had a bunch of corn meal left out from frying okra. So lightly-breaded, pan-fried chicken sounds pretty good, and I figured I should run with the Tex-Mex theme of cornmeal and add some chile powder and cumin to the mix, sort of an on-the-border chicken fried steak.

The Chicken:
1 lb Chicken Cutlets
Corn Meal
1 egg
Tabasco and Frank's Red Hot (optional)
Salt, Black Pepper, Chile, Onion, and Garlic powder to taste

In a bowl, beat the egg until the white and yolk are well-mixed. I like spicy foods, so I added a few drops of Tabasco sauce and a good shake of Frank's Red Hot.
To coat the chicken, toss a handful of cornmeal, a couple tablespoons of chile powder, some ground salt, black pepper, a pinch of cumin, and a shake or two of the garlic powder and onion powder, mixing it all together with a fork.
Lightly oil a frying pan, and let the oil get hot over a medium flame. Dip the chicken in the egg, and then roll it in the cornmeal mixture until evenly coated.
My cutlets took somewhere in the area of three to five minutes per side. You can cut into one to make sure it's cooked through.
Here's the cornmeal mixture, with one coated cutlet.














The challenge now is to find something to go with chicken. Tortillas and bread are out, because we're out. Biscuits would work with the Tex-side, but I've got nothing to set up as a gravy, and enchilada sauce, though and inspired option, takes me a little while to put together properly.
I feel like I'm in competing in Iron Chef against myself, with no sous chefs and no $12,000-per-show budget. But if "chicken" is my secret ingredient, I see no fault in using multiple stages of its life or varieties of its preparation in a single dish, actually, I aspire to do such things. So I scrambled to prepare some eggs before the chicken got cold.

Eggs:
4 eggs
1 Onion (small)
1 Green Pepper
3-4 Cloves Garlic
2-3 tbsp Butter
Brown sugar
Cheese

So that the eggs were appropriately dressed up to fit our goal here, that being unnecessary attention spent on food, I added fresh garlic and chopped onions and green peppers.
Start by mincing your garlic and dicing your onion and pepper to about fingertip size.
We're still out of olive oil, so I used butter to sauté the vegetables before adding the eggs.
Have your eggs out of the fridge as long as possible before cooking them, room-temperature eggs are more fluffy when cooked.
I tossed the garlic, onions, and green pepper in a frying pan with the butter once it melted, and then a bit of brown sugar, having learned my lesson about undercooked onions. Once the onions had caramelized, the garlic toasted, and the peppers started to brown, I tossed in four eggs, and then scrambled the lot together. Once the eggs were done, I also added a handful of shredded Mexican Blend cheese I found in the back of the fridge.
Here are the eggs, almost done. Yes, I cook with chopsticks, I can stir, flip, taste, and whisk, and they'll never scratch the non-stick finish. I suggest you try a reusable set, I got twenty pairs at our local Asian market for a buck and change. Or just save the free ones from your Chinese takeout, but these tend to splinter and don't wash well.














Here's the final product. I still haven't gotten my pictures quite figured out, maybe I need some sort of background. Or better lighting in the apartment. Or to move.
















Final thoughts - The chicken turned out really well, but I'd have liked a bit more flavor in the breading, and the chili powder on its own can be a little bitter. I'm averse to adding anything sweet, so some extra salt would probably help, and some lime juice at the end. And green peppers helped to pick up the eggs, but some diced or sun-dried tomatoes, and red or orange peppers would have added a lot color-wise. I'm also completely biased towards any pepper that isn't green if we have any, so the appeal for others might be completely aesthetic.
Today's Lesson: Undercooked onions equal smelly breath.