[music]
Hello everyone it's Chef Dominic Stewart with EFNEP - the expanded food and
nutrition education program with USU Extension. I'm here today to talk to you
about quick meals, okay? So obviously that implies that these meals will be fast and
easy to prepare.
So prior knowledge, what you need to know about quick meals is they're very
dependent on how well you stock your kitchen and how well you plan in advance.
Quick meals don't really lend themselves to spur of the moment things. We find a
lot of times in our society today we'll run down to the local fast food joint to
get some food because we're a little pressed for time. That's not always the
healthiest option and nor is it the most cost effective option. I'll show you today
that by making some fast and easy meals that you can keep some money in your
pocket as well as you'll be eating better. Okay?
The meal we're going to make today is my recipe for apricot chicken. We're also
going to serve that with some sautéed spring veggies and some wild rice.
So to get started here I have some boneless skinless chicken breasts that
I have padded dry. You want to make sure that the surface of the chicken is really
nice and dry.
We're going to season that pretty liberally with some salt and pepper.
Okay?
So we have our salt.
We have our pepper.
We're going to turn that over and we're going to season the other side.
We're going to season these with salt and pepper.
And we're going to let that sit for about 10 or so minutes just so the flavors
can meld okay?
Alright so our chicken has been sitting and its nice and melded. The salt has
started to permeate the surface of the chicken.
We use kosher salt today. I always like to use kosher salt in the kitchen just
because it is a larger flake on it.
If you want to close up on there. We have a larger flake here.
So you get a nice even better distribution of your salt over your meat when you use
this. And also it tends to be less salty than iodized salt and it doesn't leave
that weird after taste in your mouth. And that after taste being from the
iodine. You're more than welcome to buy iodized salt, just most of us get our
iodine from other sources now. So it's not necessarily a necessity to have in
your kitchen.
So I have a skillet preheating here. We're going to add some olive oil to this and
then we're going to start to sear off our chicken okay?
Just a little bit of olive oil it's about a table spoon or so
I'm going to swirl that around to coat the pan.
Okay?
And we're going to place our chicken in there.
I'm going to let this chicken cook on each side for about four minutes until it's
nice and golden brown.
When you put your chicken in the pan I don't want you to touch it, I don't want
you to move it, you got to pick a spot and stick with it.
When you start moving your meat around in the pan whether it's non-stick or not
that's when you start to rip the chicken, or if you've ever noticed that your meat
has torn on you when you're trying to cook it's because it's not ready to be flipped
over okay?
So we're just going to let this sit and brown for about four to five minutes on
the first side.
Okay, so while your chicken is simmering and cooking away you're going to start on
your sautéed spring vegetables. Now I say spring vegetables so that means we're
using vegetables that are in season. So right now it's around the end of April so
asparagus is in season now
also peas are in season as well. So what we're going to do we're just going
to sautée some asparagus with some peas with some garlic and onion.
So we're going to start by turning on our burner about medium high
This is a really quick sauté. I'm going to add some olive oil to our skillet.
Alright so now that our oil is nice and warm we're going to add in some onions
and some garlic.
And we're going to let these sauté
until the onions turn translucent and become not so oniony okay they'll smell
more so sweet and not so pungent
As you can see most of the recipes we're doing today, the chicken are sautéed
vegetables, they're pretty simple in that they don't require too many steps I feel
like and so I hope that you feel confident that you can achieve these at home.
So many people are choosing the quick route and eating a lot of fast food
and that's not only detrimental to your wallet in that you're spending a lot of
food for your family for just one night, but it's also detrimental to your health
in the long run because they often are loaded with preservatives and fat, salt,
things like that.
Whereas if you cook at home you can control the amount of salt that you're adding
to your food and it's a lot cheaper in the long run to make a whole bunch of
food and you can eat on it for one, two to three days, have your left overs, you can
morph your leftovers into another meal
So now that our onions are starting to get nice and soft we're going to add in
our asparagus. We might not add all of this asparagus just some of it.
okay?
I'm going to season our asparagus and onions with salt and pepper
and this entire meal comes together in about a half an hour or so.
Half an hour to 45 minutes depending on how quick you are.
Like I said while your chicken is finishing cooking and bubbling away
you can be making your sautéed vegetables like we're doing now.
And how we're going to finish this dish is with some-- a nice little convenience item
we're going to do some wild rice, but instead of cooking wild rice from
scratch because it'll take about 45 minutes to cook your wild rice we're
taking a little bit of help from the grocery store in that we're going
to use our little 90 second Uncle Ben's Ready Rice.
This is a great kind of store hack when you're wanting to get grains into your
diet but you don't necessarily have the time to cook them as long as they need
Uncle Ben's does a really good job in making these 90 second rice pouches
and we're doing wild rice today to kind of bump up that health factor.
As soon as your asparagus starts looking nice and bright green we're going to add
in our green peas and these are just frozen thawed green peas
and we're just going to add these at the end to kind of warm them through.
Your asparagus cooks really really fast
Add just a bit more salt, seasoning our layers as we go
So our chicken is nice and brown on both sides.
Not necessarily done yet but when we make our sauce we'll finish cooking it in our
sauce so we want to take the chicken out of the pan
we're going to place that on the plate
we're going to set that off to the side
meanwhile you can see we have beautiful drippings in our pan here,
we're going to use those drippings to make our sauce.
So into the pan we're going to add some sliced onion
we need just a little bit more oil
stir those around
season those lightly with salt and pepper and this will be the base for our
apricot sauce for our apricot chicken
So we're going to let those kind of saute, start to get translucent
next thing we're going to add is our garlic and ginger
so we're going to let those kind of cook
so once your onions start to break down, you can see they're getting nice and soft
and translucent, they're picking up a little bit of color
get off that
we're ready to add in the rest of our ingredients.
So we're going to add in some rice vinegar please stand back when you add your rice
vinegar unless you want to clean out your sinuses.
We're going to add in our soy sauce
and our chicken stock
we're also going to add in our apricot preserves
we're just going to stir that in
to kind of disolve
the apricot preserves
Once it comes back up to a boil you're going to slide your chicken back in
any remaining juices from the pan
kind of nestle them down there in the sauce
we're going to cover this and let it cook for maybe about 15 minutes or so until the
chicken is done all the way through
Alright so to finish this quick meal we have our sautéed veggies here with our
peas and asparagus we have our ready rice here
just heat this up to your packet's directions and you can also see we have
our apricot chicken beautifully browned and cooked and our sauce has kind of
reduced and thickened a little bit
to finish your vegetables we're going to grate on some fresh lemon zest
with our trusty microplane here
and what this is going to do is this just kind of brighten up your vegetables and
make them taste really good.
And also we're going to add just a little bit of juice to them as well.
Now we add our juice at the end because the juice during the cooking process runs
the risk of getting bitter so we add it at the end so that it stays nice and bright.
You just want to toss those through, make sure everybody has a little bit of zest on
them.
And remember with your plates you want to make half your plates-- half your plate
vegetables, fruits and vegetables so we're going to have vegetables today.
So you want a nice large portion of vegetables, more so than everything else
okay?
And then we're going to bring our chicken over
and just kind of rest that like that
and we'll get some of this awesome sauce
and we'll put that sauce over our chicken
So this is our apricot chicken with sautéed spring vegetables and wild rice.
I hope this has encouraged you to maybe cook some more meals at home.
Remember all of our recipes are available on our website and I want to thank
everybody for watching.