Chicken in Pumpkin Seed Sauce (Page 360)

• Date: Wednesday, January 3, 2007 -- 8:30pm
• Location: Somerville, MA
• Kitchen: My Apartment
• Fellow Chefs: Vero and Ronen
• Dining Companions: Marco, Mike, and Tim
• Recipe Rating: A-

Mike picked this dish for dinner last Wednesday. The sauce was a bit labor-intensive, but excellent! The chicken was beautifully cooked -- very moist and delicious (there were a couple people in attendance who don't like their chicken moist, but I do). The dish had two serious flaws however. One, the skin on the chicken just shouldn't have been there. I say it over and over again, but I will say it again: if the skin isn't crispy, why keep it? I suggested that this dish would have been much better if the chicken had been removed from the bones and shredded. Mike then pointed out that The Book has that listed as an alternate preparation. We should have done that! The other flaw was that this dish was fairly visually unappealing. Marco took a really nice picture of it, so you may not appreciate how ugly it was, but it was ugly. I think shredding the chicken would have improved it slightly on that count too. These things aside, this dish had a wonderful flavor and was really a pleasure to eat!

I got a wonderful night of sleep last night, and today I felt very awake. The upside of being awake was that I got a ton of work done. The downside of being awake was that I had a lot of energy with which to fuel my worries about job stuff. Here's the thing: I am not a patient person. Anyone who has ever spent time with me when I am waiting for important news, or medical test results can confirm that. I would like to be more patient -- I really would. Unimportant waiting (waiting in line, waiting in traffic, etc...) doesn't really bother me at all. But I find waiting nearly intolerable when it comes to important things. After almost 10 hours of sleep last night, I was wide awake today. Maybe it was that extra energy, but for whatever reason, today, nearly 3 months after I submitted my job applications, I ran out of patience and started to stress. It's not as though I have my heart set on any particular outcome. In all honesty, any of the possible outcomes would be fine. I just want to know. I am going to take a few deep breaths and try to put it out of my mind again. I managed to do that with reasonable success for three months. A few more weeks can't be that hard... right?