Today I was planning on making pecan crusted chicken for lunch/dinner but I knew it was going to take awhile, so I decided to get a little something special for myself before I started cooking. I meandered off to MontHelado (I think that's what it's called) and got some marble cheesecake and a manzanilla (apple tea). It was fantastic, but huge.
Afterwards I headed off to a chino store to try and find a nutcracker. I had finally been able to find pecans at Carrefour (the biggest grocery store here) but they were still in their shells. I thought at least some of the chino stores were open during siesta, but appears they are not. As I was wandering around trying to kill time until 5:30 when the stores open I ran into Irene, who was having tapas with 2 of her friends. She is getting married and had just bought her wedding dress with her bridesmaids. Bridesmaids aren't a common thing here, but she studied in the US and decided she wanted to make that part of her wedding. I told Irene that I was on the hunt for a nutcraker and she laughed. Apparently not a common thing for a guiri to be looking for. Anyways, finally around 5:30 the stores opened up and I found a nutcracker. I ran home and began the nut cracking process. This recipe is not hard. In the US it would maybe take 10 minutes. Here, however, I probably spent a good hour cracking nuts with a crappy nutcracker and then smashing them (a couple weeks later I did end up finding pre-smashed almonds in Carrefour, so my life will be simpler from now on).
The recipe also calls for bread crumbs, which I didn't initally find so I bought these crouton-like things that I smash. Again, later I did track down breadcrumbs so it will be easier in the future.
Chicken, into greek yogurt, into mashed pecans with bread crumbs and spices.
Into the pan with olive oil (I've never used so much olive oil in cooking in my life. You can definitely tell I'm in the world capital of olive oil).
And I was even more impressed with myself that after all that the kitchen is still clean. I'm getting pretty good at multi-tasking cooking with dish washing.
The finished product. I wasn't totally convinced it was going to be worth all that work...
...but I think it was...I'll probably make it again, especially now that there are pre-smashed almonds available. I tried it with dijon and with tomato sauce. Mixing the 2 together ended up being best. Later I was planning on going out for tapas with Kristin. When she rang my doorbell I went outside and saw this...
...a small army of Santa hats. I have no idea what was going on, but they were all gathered outside of Chippies Bar and Restaurant. I headed off to Santuario with Kristin for tapas and Jessica met us there. We had a couple tintos de verano and some tapas for dinner, and then we headed off to Mentidero for more drinks and tapas. Bea, Alfonso and a couple other friends met us there too.
Jessica, Bea, Kristin
Let me introduce you to vodka verde (green vodka) aka apple vodka, pretty darn good with Sprite. We were a little unsure at first because it's green, but turned out to be way better than our normal drinks. We stayed at Mentidero a couple hours, then eventually went to Azulejo and Kharma, although I didn't stay at Kharma for more than half an hour. I got myself dressed up hoping to trick myself into being Kharma ready, but it just didn't work. Oh well.
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