Accidentally abstract

What's red and white and green all over? This chicken penne I made for dinner. Since I'm about to be out of town for a week, I know I need to get rid of all of my fresh produce in the next few days, so it's time to start throwing shit together.

I decided I wanted to make some penne pasta tonight with my chicken breast, but it wasn't until I started pulling stuff out of the fridge and pantry that I decided on what I was going to do. I went ahead and diced up some red bell pepper, radish, and some red onion, and crushed and sliced some garlic cloves. I decided to use the mushrooms two ways: I removed and thinly sliced the stalks and dumped those in a bowl with the pepper and radish, then kept the caps whole in a separate bowl.

Next, I peeled the grape tomatoes. This is not the most painstakingly fucking tedious process in the world, but it's probably top 10. I did not do a perfect job, but I think I did pretty damn well considering it's a pretty new experience for me. I figured I'd go ahead and remove the skin before cooking the tomatoes just to simplify my life. My life was not fucking simplified; I just moved and intensified the effort. The result was pretty baller, though, so I won't complain too much. When the tomatoes were peeled, I put them in their own bowl and lightly salted them.

I cut my chicken breast up into bite size pieces, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and gave it a light flour coating before frying it up in some vegan butter. When it was getting close to done, I dumped in my red onion and garlic. I let all of that cook together until the chicken pieces were  fully cooked, and then I removed the chicken.

I added in the radish and bell pepper, dropped in a pinch or two of salt, and let everything simmer until the radish started getting soft and juuuust started bleeding its color. That's when I dropped in my peeled tomatoes. I just kept everything simmering for a few minutes more until the tomatoes got soft enough to crush up with my wooden spatula.

So, in case you couldn't infer this, I crushed the tomatoes with my wooden spatula, then added a dash of white wine, mix everything up pretty well, and stuck my mushroom caps (gill side down) into the sauce. 

I let the mushrooms cook for a couple of minutes before flipping them over and spooning some of the sauce inside of them. I didn't really want to fully cook the caps, just give them some flavor while still retaining a bit of their original texture, like a slightly soggy vegetable facsimile of a meatball. I also wanted to keep some of the mushrooms' actual flavor because I fucking love mushrooms.

Once the mushrooms seemed to be at the point I wanted them, I dumped in my cooked pasta (boiled in salted water because of course it fucking was) and chicken and stirred all that shit together. If you were making this and wanted to stop at this point, that's perfectly fine. I, however, did not.

You see, I still had a bit of that parsley oil left over and needed to use it up before it went bad. I don't know what it's shelf life is, but I'd rather be safe than sorry. I just squeezed the rest of the bottle into the pan and mixed it in to give everything a nice finish.

Plating was kept pretty simple. I separated the mushrooms from everything else and just scooped a bit of the chicken and pasta into the middle of my plate, then I stuck two of the caps on top. I just now noticed that it's vaguely face-like with the mushrooms positioned like that, so you can be damned sure that I'll be making a face next time I use whole mushroom caps. If you were making this and wanted to stop at this point, that's perfectly fine. I, once again, did not.

I noticed there was still a little bit of parsley oil in the bottom of the squeeze bottle, so I unscrewed the cap, turned the bottle upside down, and shook it around like I was a mid-bender Jackson Pollack, and fuck me, it actually ended up giving the plate a neat, semi-abstract look. Like, if you pretend that I know what the fuck I'm doing, this actually is a pretty neat presentation. If you instead acknowledge that I'm a complete dumbass, you'll wonder what Slimer was doing in my kitchen.

The flavor of this dish was alright, like maybe a B. It was missing something; I spent a bit of time thinking about it, and I'm torn between some kind of citrus-type flavor, like some lemon juice, or maybe some briny capers. It needed something to kind of cut through. Overall, it wasn't bad, just not great. They can't all be home runs, though.