For those of you who are just joining, here's a quick recap: I'm in a dinner rut and to get out of it I am working my way through an advanced copy of Dinner: A Playbook. At the beginning of the week I picked some recipes and made a meal plan for seven days. I've also been following some of Jenny's tips for how to make dinner easy and breezy (which I will recap at the end of the week). For now, here's the first night's dinner: Buttermilk-Herb Baked Chicken Fingers.*
CHICKEN FINGERS? BEFORE YOU GET ALL JUDGE-Y ON ME INTERNETS, I KNOW.
Right, so I've obviously made chicken fingers before. I've made them from scratch and prepared them from a box. So, let's just say, I'm an expert at chicken fingers. But these are marinated in buttermilk, something I've never tried. Not to mention that I have a lot of chicken from my CSA and, lastly and most importantly, this is a kid approved food in my house. You have to start somewhere. I always start with an easy win, then I go BIG. That's my playbook.
I was also trying the strategy of serving something familiar with something unfamiliar, a tip suggested in the book. For sides I added snow peas (sauteed in butter and lemon) and baked potato wedges. Sigh. Josie ate the chicken, her blueberries, and passed on the snow peas and potatoes. Instead she asked for toast and hummus. My husband liked the chicken, though, and so did I. I added a dipping sauce of my own making. What I like to call I'm Not Gwyneth Paltrow Green Goddess Dressing. It goes something like this: add three big scoops of greek yogurt, a handful of dill, basil, cilantro, mint, a few cloves of garlic, pinch of salt, and squeeze of lemon to your food processor. Pulse. Serve. Maybe some day I can get specific on the measurements, but for now, that's all I got.
Here's the love story part: we ate outside under the trees. It was breezy. Josie asked, What's breezy? We all talked about how trees dance in the wind.
*I will not be posting recipes from the book. You will have to wait until the book comes out and buy it for the recipes. Or visit Dinner a Love Story, maybe some day Jenny will share it with you. In other words, as I say to Josie 5,000 times a day, you have to be patient.
