Couldn't Be Easier - Asian Chicken & Veg

No informal chit chat with this one, we're all hungry. Let's eat.

Ingredients:
Two breasts free range chicken
Sesame oil
Shoyu (reduced salt soy sauce)
Sesame seeds
1/2 a head of brocolli
Bunch of silverbeet
2 carrots
6 mushrooms
3 cloves garlic
Sprinkle of chili powder
Umeboshi paste, if feeling flash, not essential. See below.

Method:
Cut your chicken into chunks and fry in the sesame oil.
When the chicken is about half cooked, wash, chop and add your silverbeet. 
Splash in some shoyu.
In a seperate pan dry fry the sesame seeds, which means fry them with  no oil, stirring constantly until brown.
Wash, dice and add mushrooms.  Might need a bit more shoyu.
Cut and add brocolli.
Peel, crush, dice and add garlic.  Adding garlic further along in the meal, instead of first thing, preserves it's volatile oils, which is what gives garlic it's smell, flavour and medicinal properties. Much tastier, much healthier.
Sprinkle in your chili.
Peel, slice and add carrots.
Add about 3 big Tablespoons of the roasted sesame seeds.
Drizzle a little more sesame oil on at the end if it needs it.
Voila.
Damn that sh*t's tasty.

This is an umeboshi plum.
Try not to judge it on it's slightly
nutsack-like appearance.

You can serve this with umeboshi.  Umeboshi is a japanese paste, made out of pickled plums. It's a light pink colour. It is very sour and salty and has another flavour that is impossible to describe.  But it goes really nicely with Asian flavoured meals. You can find it in health stores and Japanese sections of the supermarket. It is really worth a try, if you like Japanese flavours.

How high maintenance is it: 2/10
And only 2 because of experimenting with umeboshi.

Is it worth it:
Definitely, if you're hungry and you need to eat in 15 minutes.

Nutritional/Health Tip:
Did you know that the tongue has different area's to taste different tastes, like a map?  And each of those tastes stimulates a different aspect of digestion, or digestive secretion.  Tasting food is really important and informs your body and brain what food is about to come in. 


This is a bit rudimentary, but it sort of works like that.
This picture also gets weirder the longer you look at it.

To fully satisfy your taste buds, and to feel satisfied by a meal, all meals should contain all five/six of the flavours, they are: salty, sour, sweet, bitter and pungent.  Astringent is kind of the sixth flavour, the way ESP is the sixth sense. You find it all over the place, but it isn't talked about much.
In japanese cuisine they have another flavour called umami.  It means 'a pleasant savoury taste'.

There doesn't have to be alot of each flavour in a meal, for example a carrot is sweet, it doesn't need to be sugar.  In fact, the less sugar you eat, the sweeter food tastes, like avocado's, they are very sweet.

Green foods have the bitter taste.  Garlic is pungent and astringent. Sesame oil is sweet and salty. Shoyu is salty.  Sesame seeds are salty and sweet.  You can get really good at this game, think about your foods as you eat them.

So the Umeboshi is to add sour taste.  Sour stimulates digestive juices in your tummy, just the way it makes your mouth water.  You will notice a meal feeling rounded and complete when it has all the tastes.  The one we overlook the most is sour, if a meal is lacking something, try adding a splash of vinegar or lemon juice and KAPOW: Yummyness.

Happy tummy happy life :)