Pollo al Chilindron (p. 408) and Feta Salad with Vegetables (p. 61)

Or, in English, Spanish Chicken with Sweet Peppers and well, still Feta Salad with Vegetables.

Yum. We just finished dinner and it was super good. The chicken was moist and tender and covered in delicious and flavorful sauce, and the salad was a great blend of sweet and salty. So good, and also really good together.

So, despite that this took me about an hour and a half to make, neither of these is a very difficult recipe, they're just chopping intensive. And, as evidenced by yesterday's grocery list, I needed to buy a bunch of stuff to make them.

I always have a problem buying peppers that aren't your average red/green/orange ones. This recipe calls for "8 flavorful red and green peppers, preferably both sweet and slightly hot," which means nothing to me. I know regular peppers and I know hot-hot peppers, but pretty much nothing in between. Luckily, they specified a little more in the actual recipe that Anaheim or New Mexico peppers would do the trick. So, of course, my grocery store had neither. But what it did have was a handy little chart that showed you how mild or hot each pepper was. I chose a few from the in-between areas of the chart, grabbed some tiny sweet peppers that I could also use in the salad, and threw in a Jalapeno for good measure. This might not have been exactly what the recipe was calling for, but the end result was delicious.

I ran into my first problem pitting the "12 fat green Italian or Greek olives." How does one pit an olive? Really, I need to know. I have a feeling I'm going to have to pit a lot more of these during this project. I own a pitter, but my olives were way too fat for it. I ended up just cutting the olive off from the pit and chopping them up, but there has to be an easier way.

Anyway, after  chopping a ridiculous amount of onions, peppers, and garlic, and simmering these in olive oil (my new best friend), I added my poorly pitted olives and dumped the whole mess on top of some lightly pan-fried chicken breasts. Add a little sherry/OJ/water mixture that was all boiled together, and pop the dish into the oven for half an hour.

A note about this strange boiled mixture that gets poured over everything else -- you might have noticed that my grocery list last night did not call for orange juice. That's because OJ is listed on the second page of the recipe, where I did not look for ingredients. Luckily, we're hosting supper club at our house this week (theme: brunch), and are responsible for the adult beverages, including mimosas. So I very luckily had juice. Another note, you can buy sherry at the grocery store, which made me incredibly happy.

So, with the main course in the oven (as well as another serving of Crash Hot Potatoes, just because I needed to get rid of the rest of them), it was time to turn to the salad. Again, this is basically just a lot of chopping; pepper, red onion, tomatoes (which I normally hate), cucumber, and parsley. Then you mix it all together with a lot of feta cheese, olive oil, red pepper, and sea salt.

Dinner was delicious. And we have a ton of leftovers. Luckily, I don't have plans to do another recipe until Friday, so by then we'll probably have gotten through all of this meal. Enjoy!