Cooking.

Cooking is one of my very favorite activities. I find it so relaxing, just putting different things together to make a meal that is absolutely delicious. And my friends seem to appreciate it as well.

I learned to cook from my mom, someone who is no slouch herself in the culinary department. For as long as I can remember, I've been helping her in the kitchen- from mashing bananas with my hands for banana bread (something I still do today; don't judge me, it's fun to get messy) to learning to cut vegetables to making my first batch of edible pancakes. It hasn't always been pretty- there was an awful failed experiment with scones that even the dog wouldn't touch, and my French toast still leaves something to be desired, but I've got a few staples that I can always pull out that are delicious no matter what.

I very rarely cook from a recipe. I was taught to throw in "some" of this, "a little" of that, and to measure salt in my hand instead of with a teaspoon. I had a hard time "learning" to make chocolate chip cookies in eighth grade home ec, because I had been making them for years and hadn't used a recipe since I was ten. I remember telling my group to ditch the recipe, and our cookies were judged to be the best. I always think it's funny when people ask how much "a pinch" is- it's a pinch! Some! A bit! Cooking is always an activity that I feel my way along, instead of measuring and weighing and portioning. It's an intuitive thing, something you just do instead of thinking about.

That being said, I don't discount recipes. Sometimes they're necessary- when making something new, for instance, I'll always base whatever I'm doing off of an existing recipe. But I very rarely make anything exactly as the recipe specifies.

Tonight I'm making chicken kiev for a dinner party we're having. I asked my mom how to make it the last time I was home. While she didn't give me an exact recipe, she showed me how to do it. So here's my attempt at a recipe for some of the most delicious chicken you'll ever have (and that's saying a lot, because I eat a lot of chicken):

Ingredients:

4 boneless, skinless, chicken breasts

butter (~half a stick, give or take)

mustard (I prefer honey dijon, but almost anything works, as long as it's not that nasty yellow mustard that people put on hot dogs)

olive oil

breadcrumbs (you can buy plain and then mix them with whatever you like- I prefer italian seasoning, salt, and a little bit of parmesan cheese)

cheddar cheese (sharp, but not too sharp)

Prep:

Melt some butter in the microwave just until it's soft enough to be easily smushed with a spoon. You don't want it to be liquid. Whip it up until it's not chunky anymore, and mix in some mustard. You want it to be a nice mustard-tinged butter, not too much or too little. (Wow, this is harder than I thought it would be.) Refrigerate your mustard butter for a while, until it's hard again.

Take your chicken breasts and (this is the best part of the whole thing) whack them. Hard. Seriously. Put one of them in a plastic bag and smack it as hard as you want for a while. Then do the rest. Use any blunt object you want. My mom prefers an ice cream scoop- I personally am going to go with my metal water bottle- but whatever you're most comfortable with! You want to flatten the chicken out pretty evenly, until it's about as thick as an edition of Sports Illustrated. (Not one of their double issues, though, and not one of those skimpy issues they put out sometimes. A normal, average-sized issue.)

Take your now-hard mustard butter (bustard? mutter? hmm...) out of the fridge and spoon some of it onto the center of one of your pieces of chicken. A couple of scoops, not too much...basically divide your butter into four equal amounts and put one of each on each piece of chicken. Obviously.

Along with the butter, put a few pieces of cheese on each piece of chicken. However much looks right. Use your best judgement.

Then roll the chicken around the filling and secure the edges together with toothpicks. You want to close it up as tightly as it is possible to close chicken with toothpicks (i.e. not very, but as long as the major holes are closed it's all good). You can also use butcher's twine if you've got it, but I don't, so I use the toothpicks.

Coat the chicken with breadcrumbs- if you want to use something to make the breadcrumbs stick better, go for it. I personally prefer a little bit of mayo, but I didn't put it in the ingredients because I didn't want the very first recipe on my blog to include two kinds of cheese, butter, olive oil, AND mayo.

Drop the chicken into about a quarter-inch of hot olive oil, just long enough to make sure that the breadcrumbs won't fall off the chicken. Make sure all the sides get touched- you don't want to cook the chicken this way, though.

Once all of your pieces have been stuffed, secured, and taken a dip in the oil, put them in a pan, drizzle with a bit more oil, and pop in a reasonably hot oven for a while (until they're cooked).

Before serving, make sure you take out the toothpicks. You don't want people getting mouth splinters. Serves 4.

So there you have it: the most amorphous recipe ever. But it's delicious, and really bad for you, and I'm excited to make it for my friends tonight. :)