Kotopoulo (Final)

For the past five month or so now, by best friend (Chloe) and I have been making dinner at one another’s house every Sunday night. The idea of us doing this actually came to us months before we ever started doing it and for awhile each one of us would randomly find a recipe somewhere and either one of us would it think it was a good one and would want to try it. The only problem was coming up with a good time to make it. After a while recipes were piling up, and neither one of us were finding a good time that worked for both of us to make them. One night we just decided that every Sunday we would make dinner. Why Sunday? I’m really not sure, but it just seemed to work. We usually would make whatever recipe we thought both would be the best, go out buy the stuff we needed for it and make it at my house.

The things we made varied week to week and generally there was no relation week to week with what we made. The first week I remember we made this macaroni and cheese recipe I found online that was made with eggs, I hated it which was odd considering macaroni and cheese is my all time favorite food, but everyone else loved it. Another week Chloe found a recipe for mango salmon, two of my favorite things both of us loved that one, but I remember that one being a pain in the butt to make and a real big mess to clean up after we were done. Chloe and I have no real name for this weekly dinner making thing and we have no real rules or restrictions on what we can make and eat, other then we can’t have coconut in the food, I’m allergic and don’t want to ruin our weekly meals by a trip to the emergency room.

Usually Chloe and I get stuck in this pattern of what kind of foods we will make on Sunday, one month we were making a lot of Italian and another week we found ourselves making Cajun food and then Greek food the next month. There was a good reason for this three month kick. The month we made only Italian food was because for the most part it was pretty easy, the month we did a lot of Cajun was because Chloe family has a lot of Cajun recipes saved from her grandmother and the Greek month was because I’m Greek and Chloe thought that one factor made me a master chef of Greek food, which sadly I am no wear close to a master chef at anything. Each one of those months had their good and bad meals, more good than bad. There was one recipe that I remember no one liked, this one I knew would be bad from the get go but we still made it anyway.

Chicken(Kotopoulo)with pasta and walnuts with garlic hummus and pita chips, sounds like it would be tasty, sounds like it would be easy to make right? The hummus and pita chips were great (not brag, but I do have those two things down I have made them several time before), but the pasta… not so much. The recipe called for as eight item total. We altered just one thing, rather than buy one “big chicken” we bought a few breast, other than that we kept to the recipe and what it told us to do.

So Chloe and I had gone to the store to get all the stuff to make our dinner. We stopped at King Soopers; we tend to always go there when we buy our food-eating-stuff. We found everything rather easy, other than the Walnuts. They were a pain to find and rather than just add a different nut like I suggested Chloe insisted we find Walnuts which meant going to two other stores to find them. After we had finally found our walnuts at a Wholefoods (which for this one bag of nuts was almost $10) we made our way back to my house to make dinner. At this point I really didn’t think this would turn out well, to tell you the truth why I had this feeling is beyond me, but I did. It could have been this wild adventure for the walnuts.


We made the pita chips and hummus first, which if I had a recipe for it I would give it to you, but whenever I make it I kind of just eyeball everything and put it whatever I feel will work. That night I’m pretty sure I just put in a few things in, I roasted fresh garlic, and blended them with the chickpeas, a little lemon juice, salt pepper, extra virgin olive oil and some red peppers I had left over from my lunch the day before. The chips I sort of cheated on that night, we had bought pre made pitas and all I did was cut them into small little triangle and broiled them with a little feta cheese on top of them till they were golden brown. Hummus is different from person to person how they are made and what they put in it. Everyone thinks of it differently, for instance Brena thinks the word itself is weird and might not ever try it because of that and other will eat it with everything. I find that the recipes for hummus vary as much as people do, but generally have the same basis to it.

We brought some water to a boil for the pasta, which was angel hair in case you were wondering, not my favorite, but the recipe called for thin, small pasta. Chloe cut the chicken into small cubes, I was on onions and tomatoes duty, I cut the two of them up which then went into a sauce pan with the salt, pepper, butter, olive oil spearmint mix. Everything is cooking, Chloe and I are trying to clean up the mess we have going from everything we just cut up. The chick juices manages to leak off the cutting board onto the table, and I had made a rather big mess cutting the tomatoes, I came to the conclusion the knife I was using for the tomatoes was just a little too dull to cut something like a tomato, I ended up squishing most of the tomatoes as I cut them. Things are getting close to being done. We drained the pasta and put the walnuts in right away just like the directions said to. Then came what they called the sauce, we mixed it all in one big bowl and served it to everyone in the house that night, which was Chloe, myself, my mom and sister. The directions for the “sauce” didn’t have much of an explanation to it, for the most part put everything in a pan and let it all cook together. It didn’t say for how long, or what the heat should be set at for the pan. But we just went with it, hoping for the best.

We all were pretty excited to try it. I remember serving my bowl last and sitting down and taking a bite and it having no flavor. Not to be gross, but I couldn’t even swallow it, if there was a word to describe it I would just call it blah. It was so bland; I maybe got through two bites after the first one and was done. Why I kept eating after the first bite, maybe I thought the taste would be different. Chloe and my mom tried adding more salt and pepper, which according to them didn’t help much, who knows how much salt or pepper they added my guess would be a handful. After everyone had finished eating, which only about ten minutes after we served, each one of us had only taken about three- five bites and then threw in the towel.

Why was the pasta so bad? I have no clue, it just was. I personally don’t want to take another crack at this recipe, every now and then when we make something pasta related I try to think of things we could have added to make it better and nothing ever comes to mind. I like to cook, but I’m not all that great at it. Who knows maybe one day I’ll become a master chef and will perfect the Chicken with pasta and walnuts, but until that day comes the night we made Chicken with pasta and walnuts will be a semi bad food memory.