Wednesday, August 13, 2014

What's for dinner? Lysol Chicken!!

So....Rachel will be arriving home from her mission in less than three months!  Hardly possible, right?
She has had amazing experiences in the mission field, and is so glad she made the decision to serve almost two years ago.   Our ward has seven missionaries right now, and the other three are serving in Russia, Portugal and Peru!  Oh, the things those missionaries have had to eat!   Poor Drake has had to swear off hamburger which smelled extremely strange while cooking it, and was full of chunks of bone when he ate it!  Paige proved herself to be a  true peruvian when she ate a chicken foot, and endeared herself to the people with her enthusiastic consumption of something which is completely foreign to our american palates.  Mitchell would eat next to nothing when he left home, and now eats just about anything in Portugal.

  Jerry asked recently,  "What do you think Rachel would like to eat when she comes home?"  I , rather sarcastingly, retorted, "hmmm...she has been eating anything she likes here in the states, I'm sure she craves nothing.!"  However, Rachel is a foodie.  She is the one who went to Europe when she was 16 and took pictures of all her dinners so she could drool over them when she got home.  No four hundred year old castle pictures for Rachel!  Nope...she took a picture of that good soup in Germany!    When she was little and at family gatherings, she'd disappear from sight and  we always found her eating somethingat a lone at the table. It has long been our joke that she would be a chubby , red haired girl when she grew up.  Well, she has beautiful auburn hair, but  she is the slimmest of us all despite her love of food.
   I think I will make Lysol Chicken and baked potatoes.  I peel the potatoes, dip them in butter and onion soup mix and bake them.  Rachel loves them.  The Lysol Chicken is pretty easy too!  You simply marinate it in one cup of soy sauce, one cup of oil, and one cup of sprite. If you want a little bite, add a tsp or two of tabasco.   Then you grill it, and it's a tasty meal.  At this point you are probably thinking... did I not  read  "lysol" in the title of the chicken?  Why yes you did,  and I actually have used lysol (yep, the cleaning agent) in the  preparation of this tasty dish.

  Let me go back a few years to when I was making up the marinade one night for Sunday dinner the next day.  My niece , her husband and kids were coming up from Orem and I had my own seven kids to feed as well.  I was going to use one whole package of premium chicken from Harmons, (because it is trimmed so beautifully and it's the only kind I like although it's pricey)  , and have dinner all ready to go except from the grilling part.  I had my nice big bowl out, my chicken was cut length-wise in half, and I was multi-tasking by talking on the phone while I assembled everything.  I have since always made the marinade first and then added the chicken, but in those days I did it backwards.   Chicken in bowl-check, add soy sauce-check- add oil (from large yellow container in cupboard-check.... As I poured from the large yellow container which should have contained vegetable oil...strange fumes arose, and in horror I noticed that I was pouring from a large container of lysol cleaning agent.  What the heck??  Why was this container in the cupboard above my oven?  Because those boys had put it to the side of my oil instead of under the sink.  I hung up the phone, and removed that chicken immediately.  I had to save it!  Chicken is expensive , especially Harmon's chicken!!  I carefully and tenderly washed each piece under hot water and massaged it vigorously.  I smelled it, and could not detect any lysol, which you know is pretty strong!  I made up a new batch of marinade, and patted myself on the back for an averted sure disaster.  Whew!!  What a close call!

Sunday afternoon came and the table was set, potatoes were baking, and the kitchen was even cleaned up in anticipation for our dinner guests.  All that had to be done was grill all that chicken.  I went out into the sun and stood there musing on the loveliness of the fall day while I stood at the grill.   The delicious smell emanating forth gave me no cause for worry......until I brought it in and cut off a small piece to taste for doneness.  Arghhhhhh!!!  LYSOL!!!  Having never ingested it before; I still knew exactly what it was even if I didn't know what had transpired the night before.  There was no mistaking it, and the fastidious washing of the chicken had not removed the toxic chemical from its tender flesh.  I , of course, went a little crazy and declared that dinner was ruined!!  Jerry said, "well, we have baked potatoes and salad!!"   "NO", I shouted, "We need meat!"  There was only one thing to do....I called Dorma, my next door neighbor and friend of forty years and asked to raid her freezer.   She is the complete opposite of me in every way, (organized, prepared, motivated) and had turkey steaks conveniently downstairs.  I thawed those babies out , and we had a delicious dinner after all.
  Dorma now often prepares Lysol Chicken, and we don't even smile at the name as we mention to each other that we are fixing it.  This is the name of our  chicken if we prepare it, with or without the lysol.
 I actually made some today because it is good to make ahead and use in salads and fajitas.  I freeze it quite often after cooking it, and you've got tasty chicken for any recipe.  I admit it, I am more of a foodie then Rachel!  I have tons of cookbooks just because I like to look at the pictures and read the recipes.  Rachel is my one child who likes to cook as much as I do, and I can't wait to see her very soon now.

  She just sent  pictures of a church with great entrance and exit signs, how fun!


Yes, it's fully cooked, the light is just being funny....

                                                             yes, it's fully cooked...the red is just the light being funny...

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