The GAIA Health Blog

Some Healthy Food Fun:    Dinner and a Movie
American Gangster

On the Menu:  Simple Oregano Lemon Chicken
Video:   Scenes from the American Gangster Movie       

"Nobody owns me"   
 --Denzel Washington

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Violence in movies is not my thing, but I will find myself getting pulled to a movie with a thick plot, if the characters compel me to do so.

If you can get past the first 10 second scene (kinda graphic and totally unnecessary), and the obligatory gun scenes (all unnecessary as well), this movie is a great game of "Urban Espionage"

Set in the 70's and based on a real life character, played by Denzel Washington, named Frank Lucas, he goes toe to toe with his "heavyweight opponent", Ritchie Roberts, a police officer and lawyer played by Russel Crowe.

The story was not only intriguing because it was based on a real life character, but it dived deep into this grey area, where bad guys have a good side and good guys have a bad side.

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This Frank Lucas character in real life was a bizarrely extraordinarily character that few ever heard of. He figured out a way to cut out the Mafia to buy his drugs wholesale straight from the source, and thus control the entire New Your drug game. He supposedly accumulated an unbelievably huge sum of wealth, with offshore bank accounts, shadow companies and all the rest.

Now one will ever know for sure, but it has been reported that his financial empire could have been around $500,000,000 in today's money.

The meal I will be preparing for this "Dinner and a Movie", is the actual meal I spontaneously prepared when I was watching this movie. I guess opposites attract, because with the integrate complexities of this movie, I wanted to make something simple and straight forward, because I was totally focused on the plot while cooking, and didn't lose track of what was going on in the movie with a complicated recipe.

I grabbed a pasture raised chicken from Whole Foods, and made a simple Oregano Lemon Chicken dish from a simple recipe I ran across

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Simple Oregano-Lemon Chicken

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Simple Oregano-Lemon Chicken

** 1 pasture raised chicken (you can find pasture raised at Whole Foods, but they are small almost like a Cornish hen)

** 2 Tbsp fresh squeezed lemon juice from and organic lemon

** 3 tsp or to taste quality Wild Raw Honey

** 3 teaspoon of virgin olive oil
** 2 clove garlic minced
** 2 tsp dried oregano
** 1 organic lemon thinly sliced
** Pink Himalayan Salt and Coarse Ground Black pepper

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Put a little Coconut Oil or Olive Oil in a baking dish. Place chicken pieces in the baking dish. Whisk lemon juice, honey, olive oil, garlic, and oregano together in a bowl and pour the mixture over chicken breasts.

I love to use a salt grinder to add Pink Himalayan Salt, and some pepper also, Bake Chicken using food thermometer, basting chicken with pan juices every 10 minutes or so. I like to squeeze additional lemon juice on chicken while baking. I add the lemon slices perhaps about 15 minutes before done.