Not the actual chicken I used.

Once again, I have failed to take a picture of the finished product, so look at this here chicken and use your imagination.

My dad makes a mean chicken biryani. I was visiting home one day, chowing down on some delicious chicken, asking him how he made it.

“Couldn’t be simpler,” he said. He gave me detailed directions, explaining how you mix the paste with a certain amount of water and rub the mixture all over the chicken before cooking it over the stove. He  even offered to give me a bottle of biryani paste so I could try it myself, and I gratefully took him up on it. It certainly sounded easy!

Well, as you know by now, just because a recipe isn’t complicated doesn’t mean I won’t find a way to make it so. I have a tendency to make things harder for myself, usually by not following directions, or not being literate, or forgetting how important eggs are…et cetera. That sort of awesome stuff.

It might have helped if I’d have, you know, written down the directions my dad gave me. Yup.

So I kind of winged it. It’s a good thing I didn’t take a picture of the finished product, because it was not pretty. It was the most un-biryani-looking chicken to have ever been biryanied. It tasted okay, though. Greg was a good sport about the whole thing and to this day insists it was delicious. I think that’s a charitable thing to say.

(Sorry Dad! Next time I’ll listen better!)

Oh yeah, the basmati rice…I made it out of a bag. It was yummy and not challenging at all.

Let’s give this dinner four noms for taste (per Greg) and two noms for the fact that I’m not entirely sure I actually made biryani chicken. We’ll call it three noms overall. Sound fair? NOM NOM NOM.

I realized that the timeline for this project is all kinds of screwy — for one thing, as I pointed out before, I’m writing in September about a project I started in January. And I barely cooked anything between April and July, thanks to wedding planning, the subsequent wedding, and general burnout. Then I got a second wind in August and have since been making several recipes a week, so I’m actually almost caught up at this point.

So, I’ve decided to number the recipes by, well, recipes, instead of by weeks.

That said, I present to you Recipe 5: Southwest Skillet Chicken, with a side of Nachos.

yaaaay i remembered to take a picture this time

I’ll get to the reason I called them the Worst Nachos in the World in a minute. I assure you, however, that it has nothing to do with the recipe (I’m pretty sure) and everything to do with my apparent illiteracy.

The chicken dish called for a blend of frozen veggies that my local grocery store didn’t have, so instead of corn, red pepper, and broccoli, I had just corn and red pepper. The bag size was smaller than was suggested in the recipe, which turned out be a blessing because (a) my skillet was pretty small, and (b) you had to practically dig to find the chicken as it was, since I chopped it up into tiny bite-size pieces.

My substitution worked out pretty well. I didn’t miss the broccoli in the recipe, and the extra corn provided a sweetness that perfectly complemented the, uh, picante of the salsa. It was tasty, though it didn’t totally knock my socks off, so I’m giving the chicken three noms.

As for the side dish: the reason I picked nachos is because I figured I’d be clever and use up the rest of the peppered Monterey Jack cheese that was left over from the Pepper Jack Turkey Burgers. That was a disaster. Not having made nachos before, I had to look up a recipe (yeah, yeah, I know, who needs a recipe for melting cheese on chips? Me! I do!) and it told me to broil the nachos for five minutes at 475 degrees.

Okay, folks: the key word here is broil. That is a word I completely missed, because evidently I can’t read. I also didn’t “keep a good eye on them,” as the recipe suggested. (Ooops!) So I popped a tray full of chips ‘n’ cheese into the oven, and five minutes later I had a pan full of charred, uncheesy tortilla chips. Some of them were salvageable, if barely so, and I sneaked those into the picture above, but most of them were pretty terrible and, uh, kind of resembled asphalt. In fact, I am fairly certain that these were the world’s worst nachos. Zero noms. :(

I’d like to try the nachos again and this time actually broil them. Maybe it still won’t work (the temperature seems awfully high to me) but maybe it will. Who knows? I remain cautiously optimistic!

Oh yes, you read that right. Black bean brownies.

I forgot to take a picture of the brownies, so here are some beans I didn't take a picture of.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Becki, are you out of your mind? Why would you put BEANS in BROWNIES?”

My response to you, dear reader, is: don’t knock it ’til you try it. Believe it or not, these brownies actually pretty good.

Here’s the secret: they don’t taste anything at all like beans. Which is good, because I despise beans. Despise them. Like, if a black bean broke down on the side of a road, I wouldn’t stop to give it a lift. I might go so far as to say I would laugh at it.

Well, now that you must be certain I’ve lost my marbles, I’ll explain how this recipe works. There are three ingredients (I nixed the fourth — decided I didn’t need chocolate chips). And those ingredients are one (1) 15-oz. can of black beans, one (1) cup of water, and one (1) box of Betty Crocker Fudge Brownie Mix (I couldn’t find low-fat at my local grocery). That’s it.

All you have to do is puree the beans and water together, and then combine the result with the brownie mix. Half an hour in the oven later, you’ve got brownies! Moist, fudgy, un-beany brownies. (As long as your blender blends properly, I promise you will not taste the black beans at all.)

Before you run out and buy your can of beans, here’s a pro tip: use the right size pan. I only had a 11×15, 5 qt. baking dish, which is, probably not surprisingly, a lot different from a 9×13 pan. I remembered long ago seeing my mom change the size of a pan by inserting a tinfoil barrier into it, so I hastily wadded up some Reynolds and made a little wall in my baking dish. It helped a little, but the side of the brownies closest to the foil kind of had an uneven, wavy texture, because my wadded-up foil wasn’t very smooth or straight, and the brownies still ended up being very thin and very dense.

In fact, if they were any denser, they’d have been black holes. Black hole black bean brownies. I think that’s got a ring to it. Don’t you agree?

Three noms for the too-thin but very chocolatey black hole black bean brownies.

Week 3’s recipe was Country Style Chicken, made with a McCormick Bag ‘n Season, uh, bag. It was an impulse buy; I passed by and thought it sounded both easy and delicious, so I snatched it up.

And I was right: it’s virtually idiot-proof. (Seriously, this time!) This is all you do: put boneless, skinless chicken breasts in a bag, which they give you, then put a bunch of spices and junk, which they give you, in there with flour and water and then just wait 35 minutes! Seriously, if I can do this, anyone can.

Could not be any easier!

(At some point I need to get Greg to teach me how to use his SLR so I can actually, you know, take decent pictures.)

I picked up some biscuits and saffron rice, because I was in the mood for both. It’s kind of an unusual pairing, I guess, but it wasn’t bad.

I’d consider making this again for the easiness factor, though it didn’t smack me in the face with deliciousness or anything, so I’m calling it three noms.