I'm hungry and I have a new digital camera! () Let's tear apart the kitchen looking for things to cook with! Oh, there are onions and chicken tenders and all the ordinary crap that's in my kitchen all the-OOOO. PINEAPPLE! And bell peppers? Well my my, how extravagant! Since we're dealing with chicken breasts, which are the culinary tabula rasa, we'll need to marinate them in something!



When I make a marinade for my meat, or whatever else I'm, well, marinating, all I do is throw together the dominant flavors of what I'm making. In this case, about a tablespoon each of ginger, garlic, orange marmalade, and honey.



I deliberately fished liquid out of the marmalade jar, so there's more of it there than it looks like there is. I used the soy sauce and a bit of the rice vinegar to thin these out enough to coat my chicken.



Which is cut into retardedly small chunks. Why? 1. My wisdom tooth is still ouchy and I need to slightly favor the other side, and 2. Makes it feel like I'm eating more food.

I set this to marinate for a couple hours. It doesn't really take much longer than that in this case since I cut the chicken so small and chicken doesn't take much time. If you were going to marinate it longer, I'd take the rice wine vinegar out of the marinade. (The rice wine vinegar was a 'dammit there's no cooking wine or apple cider vinegar, what the fuck' kind of deal.)

[time elapsed: however long it took Giovanna to piece together the mercifully few panned shots in episode 29]

Yay! Let's actually make our dinner now.



From left to right:
The marinated chicken chunks, there's like three very small tenderloin fillets there.
Pineapple chunks. No idea how much is there, but it's slightly more than the chicken. I chopped the pieces up smaller than they are here.
2 bell peppers, medium sized. I have an orange and a yellow, but any combination would work. I would avoid green bell peppers for this though, their flavor doesn't quite agree with what I'm doing here.
Peanut oil
(the honey wasn't used again)
2 small onions (I ended up using three because one of those was still green in the middle.)
Orange marmalade
Red pepper flakes
(the vinegar isn't used again)
soy sauce



CHOP CHOP CHOP! Bite size pieces! In the cup is about a tablespoon each of crushed garlic and ginger. I crush the ginger over the cup because it lets out a lot of juice and there's flavor in that I don't wanna miss. There's also a couple liberal pinches of the red pepper flakes there, as well as the pineapple juice that had collected in the tupperware.



I cooked the pineapple on its own on very high heat, as high as it would go, to brown it a little bit and bring out the sugars, which in my experience doesn't really happen if I cook it with everything else. If you were doing this as a proper stir fry, you'd probably be able to pull that off, but since I don't have a wok and can't get the pan quite hot enough anyway, we're cheating on the stir fry.

Once that's done I set the pineapple aside and oil the pan again and throw in my onions. I always start with my onions because I like them a little softer than the rest of the ingredients in my final product. If you want a more even crunch, put the peppers in first, then the onions, then the chicken when the onions are almost done. For me, I toss the onions on medium-high heat until they're just barely softening, then throw in the peppers. At this point there's enough going on in the pan that I'm not risking burning my garlic even on high heat, to I throw in the garlic, ginger, and pineapple juice, as well a couple tablespoons of orange marmalade.



(You can see the marmalade above.) I'm cooking on a high enough heat that I would make a huge god damn mess if this wasn't tossed constantly, now that you have the sugars in the marmalade and the garlic to worry about. Once they're in, add the chicken (drained obviously), and a little shot of soy sauce and cook until it's done. A moment before that, throw in the pineapple. Had I had any, I would have chopped up a couple scallions and thrown them in right at the end for color.



Money shot! As you can see, every good meal REQUIRES BOOZE. This is the super-yummy passion fruit wine mom got me for my birthday at the ONLY GOD DAMN COOL THING IN MY AREA, a fruit winery. If you're ever down here, I recommend stopping there and getting loaded. But if you're down here, what the crap, you better let me know so I can tag along.



Oh my! The food is so hot. I guess I'll drink first!

I make this once in a while, and use what was in this case orange marmalade as the variable flavor. I've done this with pomegranate molasses, balsamic vinegar...if you weren't dieting like me you could use curry and coconut milk, in which case...you have curry. Whatever you like, is a template thing for me. One thing I've noticed that I was reminded of here is that frozen chicken breasts don't stand up well to being marinated and chopped up small, the texture comes out a bit different in a way that leads me to suggest you get fresh ones for this sort of thing, or that you leave the chicken breasts whole and kinda place them on top of the rest of the ingredients cooked up on their own.

Food!