Thursday. Ok. Thursday.

Back to my old tricks again. Jeno's frozen pizzas were on sale for $0.97 per, so I just had to stock up. Thursday's breakfast was a combination pizza and two cookies (oatmeal raisin and chocolate mint) saved from Wednesday's free lunch.

I also had this odd jittery feeling like my heart was just a bit too fast. Funny, when I had a little coffee it went away. Maybe the rest of me just caught up.

Lunch was leftovers from dinner Monday night. Chorizo and black beans over Spanish rice with ancho chili powder. The chili powder was a lot spicier than I thought, so the rice ended up being spicier than the beans. It was an odd defiance of your standard expectation in those kinds of situations.

That evening, when I got home, I just wasn't hungry. My mind felt too full to put anything into my stomach. I had an ice cream sandwich around 8PM because I felt I should have some kind of calories, but that's all it ended up being, calories.

I had set a chicken breast to thaw in the fridge the day before, and I was leaving town for the weekend, so I felt I had to do something with it, but I didn't know what. I realized that I had coffee left over in my French press from that morning, though. I decided to make a coffee marinade.

Going in, I was pretty sure this was one of my worst food ideas ever. The coffee had been sitting out all day and I'd never tried anything like it before. I did a combination of a dry rub and then marinade to make sure the spices got into contact with the chicken first and the coffee was a supporting character. I massaged Adobo, chipotle, brown sugar, and ancho chili powder into the chicken breast, then worked a tiny amount of sesame oil over the rub before letting it marinate in the coffee. It got to soak for about three hours while I debated if I really wanted to eat or not, and what I might want to eat in particular.

I ended up making a variation of a Korean salad I'd had at a yakiniku (Korean BBQ in Japan) bar that I would frequent in Mikuni Ga Oka, about twenty minutes south of downtown Osaka. The owner's wife made it and I loved it so much I eventually got her to teach me the ingredients:Lettuce, cayenne pepper, sesame seeds, soy sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar and sugar. She wouldn't divulge her ratios, though. I don't know if it was a matter of her not wanting to deal with translation, especially with ambiguous directions that she now does almost automatically without measuring, or if she really wanted to protect some secret of her recipe, but she left it up to me to refine my technique until I was happy with the end product.

I took some pretty drastic liberties with my salad here. It's not really fair to call it Korean. I don't really know what you would call it, but we're not going to use the "f-word" here so lets just skip classifying the cultural roots here and I'll tell you what it was made out of.

I started with a romaine heart and cut it into thin strips, about 1/2 inch wide. I then dusted the lettuce with crushed sesame seeds, chipotle powder, and a dash of ancho chili powder. The ancho chili powder had a fishy edge to it that didn't come out in the chicken later, but put an odd spin to the salad that I wasn't a big fan of, but my vegetarian roommate really enjoyed. I then hit the salad with the juice from 1 lime and a little less than a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt and mixed thoroughly.

That was the basic salad. To that I added diced avocado and grilled onions and red peppers that I'd grilled on a George Foreman grill without any doctoring beyond slicing. The salad was audacious and triumphant. My roommate and I both devoured it quickly as tang and spice collided with the subtle creaminess of the avocado and the rich sweetness of the grilled vegetables. I topped mine with slices of the chicken breast, also grilled on the Foreman. The coffee wasn't overbearing at all, and, combined with the chili powder, lent the chicken the most amazing rosy earth color.

The entire cooking process really helped me to get my head straight and I felt worlds better just for having cooked, let alone having eaten what was a very satisfying end result to the wanton indulgence of my creativity. I still had one more ice cream sandwich before bed, though.