Orange-Pecan Cooking Efforts

The theme of my cooking efforts lately is oranges and pecans. It's a particularly appropriate theme for me since I have both a pecan tree and an orange tree in my yard. I didn't go looking for orange-pecan recipes, though; I went looking for pecan recipes, and they turned out to frequently feature oranges. I used homegrown pecans but not homegrown oranges, because none of the ten oranges on my orange tree are ripe yet. Well, and neither of the recipes I tried used actual oranges anyway.

Yesterday I made chicken with orange-pecan rice. This is only a little advanced beyond Rice-a-Roni; it comes from a boxed mix, but rather than following the recipe on the box, I followed a recipe in a cookbook that said to add orange juice, chicken, and pecans, and then bake the result in the oven. It tastes fantastic. (And while you're looking at it, you can admire my new china. I love that it has insects on it.)




I also started some orange-pecan buns yesterday, and finished them today. I've owned my breadmaker for about eight or nine years now, but this was the first time I've ever used it just on the "dough" cycle and shaped the dough by hand and finished the cooking in the oven. They're filled with a mixture of toasted pecans and orange marmalade; I cut one open to try to show the filling, but you can't actually see much. They're okay, but I was more thrilled by the orange-pecan rice. The marmalade is a bit more sugary than I would have preferred.