Peeps, I am utterly exhausted.  All this wedding stuff has me drained.  This past weekend was wedding portraits in Charlottesville on the UVA campus, putting wedding favors together, and making some last minute wedding plans.

Fiance has been in and out of town, he is at a conference in San Fransisco and was in Miami.  When Fiance is out of town, I really despise cooking from scratch for myself.  So the night before he went to Miami we went to Caribbean Grill and got a whole chicken.

Caribbean Grill is pretty good, the chicken isn’t near as good as El Pollo Rico, but they have good sides.  I need to try some other places I have heard about such as Pio Pio, because as much as I love my El Pollo Rico, fries and coleslaw are not what a girl watching her figure should be eating often.

Instead we get the baked plaintains and cuban rice, or baked yuca at Carribean Grill.

So I came home the next night, looked in the fridge.  I had mushrooms, a green pepper, lettuce, carrots, greek yogurt, soft corn tacos that needed to be used, and some good fresh salsa.

So I took about 1-2 tbsp of olive oil threw it in my skillet to let it heat up.  Cut up half my green pepper, put the other half in the fridge, cut up some red pearl onions and tossed them in the skillet, cleaned the button mushrooms with a damp cloth and tossed them in too.  Let this cook a little, while I took the meat (with a tiny bit of skin for flavor) off the bone of 1/4 chicken.  Chopped up the Yuca which had been stewed with garlic and onions.  I then tossed this in the skillet put some Worcestershire sauce in, probably about 1 tbsp and about 4 tsp of dried basil.  Let cook until all of that was warm and looking good.  Poured it all into a small corning ware dish put the warm skillet back on the stove top.  It still had oil residue so I popped a tortilla on, let it get warm and pliable, flipped it and then did the same with another.  Filled the corn tortillas with some of the chicken mixture, some cut lettuce, fresh salsa and a little greek yogurt.  It was good.  Couldn’t have taken me longer than 15 minutes.  Highly suggest it.

Put the leftover mixture in the fridge, there wasn’t much left I was hungry.

Next night, still the same things in my fridge, although now a little less of some of the items…

Cut the other half of the green pepper into strips, cut a carrot into matchstick pieces, cut up a little onion, a clove of garlic.  Threw it into a hot skillet with about 1-2 tbsp olive oil.  Cleaned more button mushrooms, thew them in, used the last breast of chicken took it off the bone pulled it apart into smaller pieces tossed it all into the skillet, put in some soy sauce probably about 1/4 cup, red pepper flakes and some ginger powder because I was out of real ginger.  Let it cook, threw an Uncle Ben’s 90 second packet of brown rice into the microwave.  Took the rice out let it cook a bit put half the rice into a bowl with the chicken mixture, threw the left over rice and mixture into the corningware with the other chicken to take to work.

Oddly enough there was one last thigh which is odd, they must have given us more chicken than we deserved, so I pulled it apart, mixed it with the mustard sauce, and a little of the chopped pepper mixture, put it on some olive oil rosemary bread with some goat cheese and took it to work.  Very tasty.

All fast, all easy, all from one trip to Caribbean Grill and some odds and ends in the fridge.  If this doesn’t prove cooking is easy and just all about tasting your food and adding what it needs to taste good, I don’t know what will.  I rarely use a recipe, most of the time it turns out good, if not well this month Taqueria Poblano had a buy one entree get the other 1/2 price coupon in the Clipper Magazine, and their shrimp taco entree is darned good.

You can also find promotions for local restaurants at GoOut2Eat.com

Currently they have promotions for Pietanza, Dungarats, and a bunch of other places in the DC, MD, VA area, even Dr. Delivery!  So if you really don’t feel like cooking, or screw soemthing up, at least you can get some good food on the cheap.

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