Peter's Cooking Blog #21

Well its still my birthday as I am writing this, I want to say thank you to all of those who wished me a happy birthday, I didn't do all that much on my actual birthday, other than some cooking and hanging out with a friend, but at this age I don't really need a whole big hoopla. I spent time with my mom, and also got some birthday deals at restaurants earlier in the week.

This is the cake that I made with my mom, homemade whole wheat chocolate cake and also homemade coconut pecan frosting. She did the baking of the cake, and I made the frosting, which I honestly had no idea how to make this specific type of frosting, but its just stirring everything together while making sure you don't cook the egg yolks. I actually really liked the whole wheat chocolate cake, I was raised eating whole wheat, but it added some depth of flavor that I really liked in the chocolate cake.

My friend that I hung out with this evening made me some coconut cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and toasted coconut on top, they are just absolutely delicious and I am lucky to have a friend who would brinf me cupcakes on my birthday.

My cooking today started off wish some green beans, they weren't local or in season at all but I thought they would go really well with the peanut butter chicken that I was making so I created my own recipe to make with them. I cut the stems and any dry ends off of them, and the cut them into smaller pieces.

I put the beans into boiling water for about 3-4 minutes before i flashed them into some ice cold water to stop the cooking. I did this because I was going to cook them in a pan as well.

I let the beans cool off a bit, and then drained all of the water off the beans.

Some oil in the pan heating, and then I added some minced garlic and cooked the garlic for about 5 minutes before adding the beans.

I tossed the beans in the oil and mixed them around with the garlic and let a lot of the extra water cook out of them on medium high heat for about 5 minutes.

I splashed some soy sauce into the pan and covered them and cooked on medium high for about 5 more minutes.

This is the final result, it was kind of a Chinese food inspired recipe, the green beans are not cooked all the way though, but i like them with a little texture left in them.

I cubed up a few pounds of chicken breasts, and stirred them into some oil, soy sauce, and garlic chili sauce. I let them marinate together for about an hour.

This was the peanut butter sauce that I made for the chicken, it was water, soy sauce, and some chunky peanut butter. The recipe called for creamy, but I wanted chunky.

I whisked the ingredients together until they were smooth, or until they were as smooth as something containing chunky peanut butter could be.

I cooked some more garlic in the pan for about 5 minutes. I then added the chicken to the pan and cooked the chicken, stirring every few minutes.

I continued cooking the chicken until it had been cooked all of the way through, it already smelled really good before I added the sauce.

I covered the chicken in the peanut butter sauce, and simmered on medium high for about 10 minutes, I also added some red pepper flake to the pan as well which you can see in this picture.

This is how I served the food I made, I actually used the steamed broccoli to mop up the peanut butter sauce that was left on the plate and it all worked really well together.