Lemon Chicken & Curried Coconut Cauliflower

Do you remember looking in the refrigerator as a child and thinking there was nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, to eat?  That’s exactly how I felt last night.  I knew the Payaso and I had chicken breasts that needed to get used.  There was a head of cauliflower begging for attention, and I had some lemons that were just about to shrivel up in protest from not getting used.  Then I remembered our impulse buy of canned coconut milk from Costco.  The chicken and lemons would be happy together, but what to do with that cauliflower?  Staring absent-minded into the cupboard, my eyes focused on a jar of curry powder from Penseys.  Curried coconut cauliflower (say that three times fast)?  To my surprise, the curried cauliflower baked in coconut milk as a side dish to the lemon chicken made for a party like we were back in 1999, but with the 2018 remix.

Really, as I write this post, the lemon chicken recipe is a modified version of chicken piccata.  There’s usually some butter, okay a lot of butter, thrown in the lemon/wine sauce in a chicken piccata recipe, but oh golly, when I lifted the foil off that baking pan, the whole house filled with the fresh scent of lemon and I forgot all about butter.  Think of this recipe as a lower calorie version of chicken piccata.  Here’s a picture where you can see the brown sugar tucked in under the sliced lemons.  Absolute perfection.  I may or may not have been heavy handed with the capers.

I was really apprehensive about the curried coconut cauliflower, which I’ll start referring to as “CCC” – sorry, it’s my legal background that forces me to define terms like that; it drives the Payaso loco.  I spent 20 minutes trying to undersell it to the Payaso just in case it turned into a giant belly flop.  On its own, the CCC was delicious, but when it hit the sauce from the lemon chicken, it was like fireworks.  I know it might sound strange, but take a chance and make this easy side dish when you make the lemon chicken. And even better, there’s only three ingredients!  Here’s the recipe:

Both of these dishes take about an hour to make and bake.  I know that seems like a long time, especially on a weeknight, but I think they’re easy enough to put together and give you plenty of time to tend to other things around the house while you wait for them to finish cooking.  While I was waiting for dinner to finish, I decided to do a little workout on our newly purchased Total Gym. Yep, that’s the one – the machine in the infomercials with Chuck Norris and Christy Brinkley. I just need a head band and some wrist sweatbands and I’m set!

For years I talked about getting in shape and losing weight for health reasons, but I’ve never done it.  Let me tell you youngsters, when people tell you that their metabolism changed at 40, believe them.  I’m beginning to wonder if mine went on strike this past year because I look at a piece of chocolate, and I go from Fonda to Bootylicious in 5.0.  For the past three years, the Payaso and I contributed to a local gym but never went.  Like. Never. Went. Butt [get it?], the time has come and there’s no excuse when the gym is in your basement and a nary 5 feet from a workout.

We actually set up the Total Gym this past weekend while we were waiting for wine braised ribs to finish in the oven (recipe to come).  When the Payaso wasn’t looking, I crept down to the basement and tried to do a mini-workout.  Here’s the problem, the Total Gym uses your body weight and provides resistance to cables you, the user, hold. The gringo has a LOT of body weight, okay?   A sliding board goes up and down with each push/pull of the cables. For those of us who are uncoordinated, getting on the darn thing is a workout in itself. After a few minutes, I’m sitting on the board with cables in hand, only one arm was by my side and the other was stretched, okay, more like stuck, in the opposite direction above my head.  I literally felt like I was being pulled in two.

Gringo: “Amor, can you come help me!?”

Payaso: “Hold on, I’m in the middle of something.”

I think to myself, “I am holding on – holding on for my life as I’m stretched to the point of needing to add another 3 inches height to my driver’s license.”

Gringo:  “Um, I really need your help.  I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”

Payaso:  “What did you say?”

Gringo:  “Just come down here and help me before I’m ready to audition for Cirque du Solei!”

Payaso:  “What are you yelling about down there?”  After a few minutes, he FINALLY comes down to my rescue.  Not only does he come to my rescue, but so do all four fur babies.  “Great, now I have an audience,” I think.   “What happened?!” he asks.

Gringo:  “I’m stuck, literally.  I cannot move because the arm behind my head won’t move.”

Payaso: “You do realize you can just put your feet on the ground, right!?”

Gringo: “Oh, yeah. Oops. Never mind.”

It certainly wasn’t my smartest moment, but it still gives us a chuckle.  Luckily, my subsequent workouts haven’t been that complicated.  Only Paco comes down when I exercise and he likes to hang out under the board as it slides.  He’s either extremely confident it won’t collapse on him from my weight, or he has a few lives to spare.

Enough of my poor coordination and back to food.  To round out the plate, I threw on some mixed greens, a few cherry tomatoes, and added some homemade ranch dressing.  It was a great dinner with lots of flavor.  In part of our weight loss quest, the Payaso and I don’t eat a lot of rice or pasta these days. But, the Payaso brilliantly suggested that the sauce from both the chicken and the cauliflower would be delicious over some rice or cous cous and I couldn’t agree more.  So if you’re eating carbs, by all means make some to be absorbed by either – or both – of the sauces.  Here’s the cauliflower once it was out of the oven and ready for its close up and a plate of the entire meal.

Buen provecho!