Making Boring Dinner - some lessons

Here's what I made for dinner the other night:



I do some art on Tuesday nights, and don't get home until about 8:30. But I still like to cooks something, so here's what got made.

All it is, really, is chicken breast sliced up, dusted with flour, garlic powder, chilli powder, salt and pepper, cooked in a frying pan.



Then I chopped up a leek, removed the chicken from the frying pan and cooked the leek. I boiled some water and put in some spaghetti, then chopped up some broccoli and got the salad ready. I put a smallish jar of nice pasta sauce in with the leeks and let it simmer. When the pasta was nearly done, I put the broccoli in with the pasta and put the lid on. After about 2 minutes, I took out the broccoli and put the spaghetti straight in with the sauce. That was the end of dinner.

Boring, but relatively well-rounded.

So lesson number one for me, I guess, is don't be afraid of the boring dinner. If its healthy, its really good enough.

Lesson number two is something I struggle with, and I image many other people do, too - I hate putting something boring on the table, but a lot of times, that's okay.

For example, I could have minced a shallot and some garlic, measure white wine and made some stock, dirtied another pan and made a somewhatmoretastier pan of braised broccoli. OR, I could do what I did, I just cooked it so it wasn't raw anymore, and put it on the table so it got eaten.

Broccoli, on the table, eaten, is better than veg not cooked because of time and effort needed to prepare them.

Live on the boring dinner and the effortless sides.