Dinner tonight: Sauteed Chicken with Herbed Soba

This was a meal that I had planned to make earlier this week but didn't due to my cold. I'm kind of glad that I waited until tonight, since it involved my food processor, which is not a tool I pull out very often on weeknights because it's annoying to have to clean it. In any case, this recipe for Sauteed Chicken with Herbed Soba was quite easy to prepare and was another nice light dish with bright flavors.


You begin by making an herbed pesto-like sauce out of fresh parsley, cilantro, ginger, minced garlic, chopped scallions plus a little vegetable oil and rice vinegar. After giving that a whirl in a food processor, you set it aside and turn your attention to the other two components of the dish: soba (Japanese buckwheat noodles), which just need about four minutes in a pot of boiling water before being drained and tossed with the herbed "pesto" and chicken cutlets, which you saute in vegetable oil and season with salt, black pepper and cayenne pepper for 4-5 minutes. When the chicken is done, let it rest on a cutting board for a few minutes before slicing it thinly, then plate the dish by putting some of the herbed noodles in a bowl and placing the sliced chicken either on top or alongside the noodles.

Mr. Fritz and I both liked this (we're two for two today!) and I really appreciated that it was a different twist on a typical chicken and pasta dish. Cilantro and parsley are inexpensive and easy to come by at the grocery store even in winter (unlike basil) and very little chopping is needed to pull the whole thing together. I will definitely make this again -- it would be nice for a summer picnic, too, as I think you could easily serve it cold.

Dinner tonight... Steak Tostadas with Cilantro Sour Cream

Here it is: part two of Monday's cliffhanger! As promised, I made Steak Tostadas with Cilantro Sour Cream using ingredients intentionally left over from Monday's dinner. Because I'd prepped everything in advance, this meal came together in about 10 minutes, which is just about as good as it gets for a home-cooked meal.

On Monday, I sliced the remaining flank steak into thin slices, chopped up a couple of scallions and put those ingredients plus the leftover roasted mushrooms and a small can of well-drained corn into a big tupperware container, each ingredient in its own little pile. I also mixed up the sour cream/lime juice/cilantro topping and put that into a smaller container alongside the rest of the ingredients. So tonight, all I had to do was mix everything together, put it on top of two tortillas topped with cheese, and heat the tostadas in a 475 degree oven for a few minutes.


A couple of notes: they say to put the cheese-topped tortillas in the oven for 4-6 minutes first, then top with steak mixture and put them back in the oven for another 6-8 minutes. I found this led to a really hard tortilla in the end. I think it would be better to just put the cheese and the steak mixture on the tortilla from the start and let the entire thing spend only 6-8 minutes in the oven. I also thought the flank steak was overly chewy, but that might just be because I don't like meat that much. Amusingly, at the end of the meal, I'd left a lot of the meat on my plate and Mr. Fritz had left a lot of vegetables on his. Together we'd make one really good eater (or one really bad one, I guess!).