Yogurt, Chicken, Villas, and Happiness

The five of us have been extraordinarily self-sufficient food-wise, making dinner for ourselves two of the three nights we’ve been here. Nicole’s sister Jennifer is a restauranteur, so she gave us a dinner-for-dummies recipe on our first night. We found a lovely lovely little specialty grocery store in Kuta, Dijon Food Specialties, and made the taxi trek from our villa in Jimbaran Bay on our first day. We all were a bit overwhelmed by all the non-rice food, and had to put back more than half of the exorbitant amount of food we snatched off the shelves. But as for Jen’s recipe, we got chicken, onions, lemons, greek yogurt, cucumbers, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, goat feta, dill, and brown rice. Along with all that, we got a bunch of muesli (our new post-ku de ta favorite), hummus, salami, and the makings of huevos rancheros. Making Jennifer’s dinner proved a tiny bit difficult in our two-pot, two-knife, one-cutting board, but we did a real nice job sharing and finished with great success. And I think this may be the first time I’ll post a recipe right on anna cotta! So here we go.

To make Jennifer’s Easy Bali Villa Dinner you’ll need:

-3 Canadians, 1 New Yorker with an excellent chef as a sister, and 1 Idahoan

or…

-A bunch of onions, enough to cover the bottom of a pot (We used 4.)

-As much chicken as you want (7 medium-ish chicken breasts)

-Lemons to cover the chicken (2 ish)

-1 container of plain Greek Yogurt

-Fresh dill

-1 cucumber

-Some garlic (2 cloves, thereabouts)

-Brown rice

-Goat feta

-Sun-dried tomatoes (The kind we got were in yummy olive oil)

Clearly, not a recipe of exactness. But that could be my aversion to exactness just getting forced onto the recipe. Either way. Here’s how you do it:

For the chicken: Chop up all the onions and put them in a big pot with a little olive oil. Slice lemons, dice garlic. Pan cook the chicken a little. (We did this after waiting and waiting and waiting for the chicken to cook in the pot. I’m sure if you waited long enough it would cook, but if you’re impatient, help it out in the pan first then finish in the oven.) Place the chicken on top of the onions and cover it with the garlic and lemon slices. Olive oil and salt and pepper at will. Cook in oven at 300 degrees F, for however long it takes.

For the yogurt sauce: Dice up some dill, peel and chop up the cucumber. Mix together. Salt as you desire.

For the rice: Cook the brown rice as directed and once it’s done, mix in chopped up sun-dried toms and crumbled up goat feta.

Take a big plate and a lovely piece of chicken and cover it in the yogurt sauce, then add a giant scoop of hot yummy rice, and be very happy.