The Trials and Tribulations of Changing Seasons and Imports (or Lack Thereof)

Brian's Chicken with Plum Salsa and Tomato-Mozzarella Salad

Brian and I were racking our brains for a healthy recipe a few weeks ago when Alyson suggested that we make a turkey and mango salsa for last weekend's cooking date. She gave us two options, and we decided to go with the Boston Globe's take on the relatively easy recipe (if you were curious, the other recipe can be found here).

Similar to our past experiences, this recipe posed its own set of challenges, the biggest of which was that neither Brian nor I could find turkey or cherries, both of which were kind of important. ;-) Brian had it especially worse because his local grocery store didn't even carry mangoes of all things! With that said, we decided to make a series of substitutions over the course of the morning: we chose chicken, blueberries, and "papaya" (for Brian) as substitutes for the turkey, cherries, and mangoes that were surprisingly very elusive.

Blueberry Mango Salsa

Blueberry Plum Salsa

We followed the recipe step-by-step and made the salsa first. I didn't realize that it had some spicy ingredients in it (eg, the crushed red peppers and chili powder), but I gave it a taste, and they didn't seem to make much of a difference to the dressing. The real kickers were actually the lime and lemon, which added a citrusy (and borderline acidic) taste to the salsa.

When it came time to cut the fruit, Brian showed me his "papaya", which actually turned out to be "pataya" or dragonfruit! LOL. We laughed for a long time. It definitely would have made for an interesting salsa, but it had too many seeds and too little fruit inside. Therefore, Brian moved to his plan B, which was plums. This was a very good choice, considering the closeness in taste of plums to mangoes. My cherry to blueberry leap was a bit stranger and gave me a wee bit of the nerves when we were putting the salsa together.

It tastes better than it looks, I guarantee you!

While the salsa was chilling in the fridge, we began assembling an avocado salad using a recipe from our go-to Web site, Allrecipes. I used my leftover pizza mozzarella to make this dish as you can see in the photo above.

At some point in the assembly, Brian realized that he had actually thrown out his avocados by mistake! Thankfully, Brian had some olives in the fridge, which gave the salad more of a Mediterranean flair. :)

Chicken on the pan!

Chicken on the plate!

Finally, we worked on our chicken, the easiest step of all. The recipe called for a simple pan fry using some butter. 

Saturday Lunch

Once all of the food was ready, we put them all together on one dish.

Even in its cobbled up state, our chicken, fruit salsa, and salad turned out fine. Our only suggestion would be to spruce up the chicken: A little bit of parmesan cheese and/or bread crumbs could go a long way in this healthy recipe.