It’s Sweeping the Nation

I definitely wouldn’t call myself a cooking enthusiast. Every once in a while I get a bug to cook something, and then I can do it quite well. But mostly, I’m too lazy and I never plan ahead. Last night, though, Mom and I ended up making what turned out to be an awesome warm-weather meal, and I’m going to tell you all about it so you can make it some time if you want to.

Okay, so we had these chicken breasts in the freezer, and we defrosted them and I kind of made up a marinade, based on a couple of actual recipes I’ve seen. Here it is (and note the very scientific quantities I used):

• Some olive oil;
• Lime juice (more lime juice than olive oil), and we didn’t have any actual limes so I just squirted the plastic lime into the bowl for a while;
• Minced garlic – we keep some minced garlic in a little jar in the fridge, and I took the light-up light sabre spoon we got out of a cereal box and dumped a couple of light sabre spoonfuls in;
• Black pepper – I ground it over the bowl until it looked sufficiently pepper-y; and
• A little bit of honey – one honey bear squirt, approximately. Don’t squeeze the bear too hard.

So you dump all that stuff in a bowl and whisk it together, and then you stab the chicken breasts all over with a fork and put them in the bowl for a while, and then turn them over and let them soak for another while, and then throw them on the grill and grill ’em till they’re done. It’s seriously awesome.

And also, I chopped up some mangoes and tomatoes and stirred them together in a bowl and we had that too. It’s good on top of the chicken or you can eat it on the side. I would have never thought to put the two together, but a Filipino friend of ours made this for my parents once and it’s been a favorite ever since.

Yum. It rocked. I wish we had leftovers.

Also, last night we played the inaugural round of our new game, which we like to call American Idol Freeze Dance. Here’s how it all started:

Sammi missed Idol on Tuesday, so she was catching up on it last night before we watched the results show. Vonzell was singing “Chain of Fools” and Mom and I were dancing around like fools and Dad went to check the messages on the answering machine so Sam had to pause the TiVo. And when she did, Mom just froze exactly in her place. Before you know it, it was a game. One person would man the TiVo and would randomly pause it at times, and then we had to all freeze until it started up again, and whoever couldn’t freeze lost and had to do the TiVo for the next round.

Turns out Jamie’s pretty good at it.

For some reason, we had a rerun of Dallas on TiVo too, and I inexplicably freakin’ love the Dallas theme song, so then we played Dallas Theme Song Freeze Dance, and that was fun too.