Foodin' #2

Sometimes, I get bored of chicken. Like, really bored of it. We seem to eat a lot of chicken, since it is an easy item to cook, healthier than other meats, and cheap. Emphasis on the cheap part. I like to buy the whole "broiler" chickens, and break them up if I don't want to use a whole one (I learned how to butcher a chicken here). If they're on sale, I'll buy a few, butcher them, and freeze them in packets of two breasts, two thighs, etc. I've found the cheapest place to buy them is Trader Joe's. You can't really beat $1.99/lb for a humanely treated chicken, but I do admit that I will buy the Foster Farms chickens from Safeway when they're $.77/lb.

But like I said, sometimes I get bored of plain old chicken. So I've been buying the chicken sausage that they have at Trader Joe's ($3.99 for five sausages) and Raley's ($3.99 for four sausages). Trader Joe's has a great mango chicken sausage, and they had samples of it prepared with a ginger mango chutney and plain couscous. I got some that night and made it for Pat, and we both really enjoyed that.

Last night, I went to Raley's on the way home from school. I was looking for something easy and healthy to make, since Pat and I have both had midterms this week and are feeling the pressure this week before spring break. I found some chicken andouille sausage by the Raley's Full Circle brand, collard greens, and crimini mushrooms. I grabbed some garlic bread and headed home.

This was my first time with collard greens, although I am familiar with swiss chard, since we have it growing in our backyard. I decided I would cook the sausage in a little bit of water in the wok, just to get the andouille flavor into the water that I was going to use to essentially steam the collard greens. I par steamed the collard greens, put them aside, and then continued to cook the sausage, with the mushrooms, until they were pretty much done. Then I added the collard greens back in to really get them nice and limp, how I've had them before in restuarants. The result was quite delicious, and took about thirty minutes total.