Chicken And Rice With Lemon, Pepper and Celery

One of my favorite things about learning to cook is throwing a few kitchen staples together with no muss or fuss. I always keep chicken breasts and white rice at the ready, so it’s fun to try out different ingredients with the two.

After slicing up one chicken breast, I soaked the strips in a bowl of lemon juice. While sautéing them in the pan, I boiled a cup of rice in a pot. Adding the mostly-cooked rice to the chicken, I threw in some chopped celery and sprinkled a teaspoon of ground pepper.

All in all, about twenty minutes from preparation to table. My kind of home cooking!

Chicken and Rice with Olive Oil, White Wine and Pepper

As a neophyte chef, you tend to stick to cookbook recipes and shy away from experimentation (read: disaster averse). Which is why I’m proud to report that I recently crossed the threshhold of cooking sans any written guidance -- and was surprisingly pleased with the result.

I chopped half a chicken breast into small pieces and threw it into a saucepan with some white rice. Drizzled into the mix -- 2 tablespoons of olive oil, a hint of cooking white wine, diced onions and chopped green pepper. A sprinkling of ground pepper went a long way toward giving the chicken a little zest. Who knew mixing pepper varieties in one dish could be so much fun?