It's a random compilation of stuff today.

I had a wonderful weekend visiting this baby girl:

And yes, her bib says "My aunt is hot and single." These are the two pictures I have of the whole weekend, I was too busy having aunt-time. I just loved getting her all to myself. I have a feeling I'm going to wear out that road from here to there, all 350-plus miles of it. She's changed so much in two months, and it is so fun to see her smile. She also showed off and rolled over for me.

I also forgot how great being away for the weekend is. When I'm in my house, I look around and see all that needs to get done. But at my sister's I was able to read a book without feeling guilty and watch TV without multi-tasking. It was very relaxing. I also didn't feel as behind as I thought I would when I got home. But I am very glad it is a short week of work.

I've already complained about this on Facebook, but the tease of spring might have been too much for me. Over the weekend, the temps were in the 70s, and farther south at my sister's, everyone had skipped straight to summer, i.e. bikinis and short shorts. But I walked to work during a snow shower on Tuesday. I think if I hadn't been tempted by the warm weather, I could have survived another few weeks of cold, dreary weather, but now I've tasted spring and that's all I want.

I made chicken salad in my food processor last night. I don't know why this has never occurred to me before. Usually I don't even chop the chicken, I just mix chunks with mayonnaise and celery by hand, and it suffices, but it's not my favorite chicken salad. But in the food processor it actually combines and is more restaurant-style. This is one sign I've been trying harder with food during the off-season. I also have a lot of chicken in my freezer I need to use. I made this roasted chicken for my sister and brother-in-law over the weekend, and I still have two chickens in the freezer plus some already cooked chicken.

On that note, it's time to sign up for the co-op again. There's no question that I'll be doing it again, but I'm thinking of dropping the chicken. Last year I thought I would want the meat, but it turns out that the produce was enough, hence the two chickens in my freezer. Anyway, I am now in countdown mode to the first pick-up.

That's all I've got!

Chicken failure

I had accumulated two chickens in my freezer, and I was at the end of most of my produce from last week, so it was time to cook some chicken. After cooking my last two chickens in the crock pot, I wanted to try roasting it.


Of course, where do I turn? Pioneer Woman, of course. She actually has a guest cook post a recipe for Herb Roasted Chicken, but my sister had tried it and said it was good. So I defrosted my chicken, and on Sunday night followed the recipe. It's really simple:

• 3-4lb Whole Chicken
• Something to stuff inside the chicken (Apple, Onion, Lemon, Garlic, Carrot, etc.)
• Canola Oil (1 tablespoon)
  Salt (1 tablespoon) and Pepper (1 teaspoon)
• Fresh Herbs (1-2 tablespoons)

Heat oven to 450 degrees. Stuff chicken with "aromatics."

Chop herbs and mix with canola oil, salt and pepper.  Rub chicken with herb mixture. Rub it on all sides.

Cook for an hour and 15 minutes. Let the chicken rest for 15 minutes and then serve.

Now that I read the directions again I see my mistakes. Because I definitely screwed this chicken up. First of all, I only had vegetable oil, not canola oil, (probably not a huge deal) and I forgot the salt and pepper. But that's nothing compared to the fact I read these recipe a few days before making it and thought I remembered everything, but I set my oven to 400 degrees. Yeah, the top of my chicken was cooked, but when I started to pull off the meat to store, I discovered the chicken was not cooked. It went back in the oven but of course that made it pretty dry.


So I have to say, this was a total fail for me. But at least I wasn't serving it to anyone else, and I've learned my lesson.


Of course, failure only makes me want to try and get it right, so hopefully I will be able to post my success at this recipe at some point.

I will note that it's been good to have chicken around again. I've been able to turn around dinner in 20 minutes or less this week, a good thing since I get home from work at 8 p.m.

Chicken goes the distance

My mom’s friends have a saying that “A ham goes the distance.” It’s something about trying to feed everyone when all their kids are home.

But this week I am saying that the chicken goes the distance.

I got my whole chicken two weeks ago but left town and didn’t actually cook until last week. I had plenty of tips on what to do with it, and I read a lot of Internet recipes to reassure myself. I seasoned it with salt and pepper and put some of my spring onions inside it. I put it in the crock-pot with more onions and some celery I had on hand.

My big debate was whether to add water. I read everything from no water to four cups of water. The online recipes said if you want broth to add water. I went with the middle and added a cup of water.

When I got home from work, the chicken was falling off the bone. It was moist and tasted pretty good. After I took off all the meat, I simmered the broth with the bones and vegetables on the stove for a couple of hours. I did end up adding more water at this point to get more broth. I strained the broth and then let it sit in the refrigerator to allow the fat to collect on top. I took off all the fat and poured the broth in a freezer bag and let it freeze flat.

So then I had a plenty of meat and chicken broth, which I used to believe only came in a can. I used part of the chicken for tacos when I had friends over, and then I used the chicken and the broth in a chicken tortilla soup I made in the crock-pot to take to a friend that recently had a baby.

I was pretty surprised at how easy it was to cook the chicken and then how convenient it is to have cooked chicken ready to go anytime. Of course I have another two weeks until I get another chicken, but at least it hasn't gone bad. 

And I have to say that I think I did pretty well with my first pick-up. I’ve eaten all the lettuce, used the watercress in pesto and just have two spring onions left. The only thing I didn’t do very well with was the spinach. I added it to my salads most of the time, but sautéing it didn’t work out and I lost all motivation after that. Any suggestions for what to do with fresh spinach?

I’m leaving you with the chicken tortilla soup recipe, which my mom passed on to me. I made this knowing I was giving it to someone else and looking at the recipe I assumed it would fall into my dislike category so I had not intention of eating it. But I felt it was unfair to post the recipe to the blog without trying it, and I got home at 9:30 p.m. and had to eat something. So I ate a bowl of it, and it was actually much better than I thought. I might even save enough to get one more meal out of it for myself. 

Slow-Cooker Chicken Tortilla Soup

• 1 pound shredded, cooked chicken (I have no idea how much I used.)
• 1 (15 ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes, mashed
• 1 (10 ounce) can enchilada sauce (I went with the mild sauce.)
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 (4 ounce) can chopped green chile peppers (I left this out to avoid the extra spiciness.)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 cups water
• 1 (14.5 ounce) can chicken broth
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• 1 teaspoon chili powder (I also left this out because I didn’t have it.)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 (10 ounce) package frozen corn
• 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro

Place chicken, tomatoes, enchilada sauce, onion, green chiles, and garlic into a slow cooker. Pour in water and chicken broth, and season with cumin, chili powder, salt, pepper, and bay leaf. Stir in corn and cilantro. Cover, and cook on Low setting for 6 to 8 hours or on High setting for 3 to 4 hours.

I get a whole new collection of stuff on Saturday, hopefully with some strawberries!

What happens when I don't have a recipe

I wrote before about my cooking personality. And while I can deviate from a recipe, mainly because it calls for something I don’t consider a staple, I do actually need a recipe to get started. Some people can look in the fridge and make a fantastic meal in 30 minutes without ever following a recipe. My older sister is an expert at this. But me, I need somewhere to start.

I have a collection of cookbooks on my shelf, with my current favorite being Pioneer Woman’s cookbook. And I rely on AllRecipes and basic Google in a moment of desperation. But my favorite and most successful recipes are from my mom. She put several in a cookbook for me when I was first starting out on my own, and I also have a collection of printed emails that serve me very well.

But sometimes I get cocky and start to think that since I basically created a new recipe from one that already existed, I can surely make something without a recipe. But for me, this is a recipe for disaster (sorry I just had to go with the pun).

A few weeks ago, when I had not done very well planning for food that week, I decided to make up a recipe: Crock-pot spaghetti chicken. You might imagine what this entailed. I had chicken and had just opened a can of spaghetti sauce that I wanted to actually eat before it went bad (in case you didn’t know, it does). I work some long days, so when I use my Crock-pot I usually walk home at lunch and throw everything in, which is what I did on that particular day. But work dragged on and I was determined to make it to the gym. When I walked in the door at 8 p.m., I had a sense my experiment had failed. I opened the top of the Crock-pot to find this:

I’m not sure if it was the fact that I used thinly sliced chicken or I cooked it too long or maybe I needed some more liquid in there, but this was not the meal I walked home from the gym looking forward to. I did salvage what I could, threw it over pasta and had a decent dinner, but I was still disappointed.

So I have to ask, what are your tips for cooking without a recipe?

This might turn into a bit of a rant

I came home late this evening and found a new magazine in the mail. Even though my work is online now, I am still a print person at heart. I’ve been getting Time magazine since I was 14, and right now I’m struggling to make a decision about my newspaper subscription. My mom has also found some great magazine deals and sent Southern Living my way as well as this new magazine, Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food.

First of all, let me say in a quick skim through the magazine I’ve already marked pages and even torn out some recipes. I mean this issue gives me step-by-step instructions on how to spatchcock a chicken, which I had never heard of until reading this.

But the first page I turned to had a heading: Cooking for One, which of course excited me (and I knew it might give me a blog topic). Then the name of the recipe is “10-Minute Shrimp and Tortilla Soup.” But as I read the recipe, I counted 10 ingredients, six of which had to either be diced, peeled, minced or chopped. Now the cooking time all adds up to 10 minutes, but what about the chopping and dicing time? There’s no way I could finish this recipe start to finish in 10 minutes. But why do they tease me like that? I would like to see the person that could make this recipe in 10 minutes and maybe have them become my resident chef.

I’m not saying this is a bad recipe or that I’m not willing to try it, if only because I’m on a shrimp kick. Granted it requires 10 ingredients and my cut-off, excluding spices I already own, is usually five when cooking for myself, but I might be willing to move past that on this one. The amounts required are clearly designed to make a soup with just one or two servings (1/4 of an onion, 1 ear of corn, 4 ounces of shrimp), and I appreciate that they have already done the math for me.

I have a similar issue with a famous cooking personality who markets “30-Minute Meals.” I strongly believe if every ingredient was already chopped and measured, I could make those meals in 30 minutes the same way she does on TV. But I don’t have a prep person in my kitchen, and I only find myself frustrated watching these shows.

The thing is I am willing to invest time in a recipe. The advantage of cooking for one is not having some hungry person lingering in the kitchen waiting for you. But I don’t like having an expectation of how much time it is going to take and then realizing halfway through that it is much more time consuming than I planned for.




How do you judge how long a recipe will take?

(Note: I was searching for the recipe online but can’t find a link. If I do actually try it, I’ll post the recipe and give you my review.)

The dreaded Crock-Pot

My mom owned a toy store for 10 years. She opened it when I was in the third grade and sold it my senior year of high school. Needless to say, a lot of my childhood memories are connected to the toy store. 

Now that I look back on it, I am amazed by my mom’s ability to balance owning a small business while raising four children — ages 5 (times two), 8 and 11 when it opened. But she designed it that way, working while we were at school and often going back after we went to bed to do some of the administrative work.

She was so good at it that we didn’t consider her to be a “working mom.” When teachers needed parents to help in the classroom and would ask whose mom didn’t work, my siblings and I all raised our hands. When asked about the toy store, we would just say, “Oh, that’s not really work.”

But there was one time of year that it often hit home that mom worked — Christmas. From Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve, things were more hectic than usual, and as another child of a retail storeowner described it, it was crock-pot season.

I have already established that I am a picky eater, and there was little that I hated more than the crock-pot. I think my hatred lies in the fact that I didn’t particularly like pot roast, which was what came out of the crock-pot more often than not. And beef stew wasn’t high on my list either. In fact, the only thing I remember coming out of the crock-pot that I liked was baked beans, but that was usually a summer cookout thing, not a December dinner solution.

So as an adult, I have accumulated a number of kitchen gadgets and small appliances, but a crock-pot has never been on the list of things I would like. But as I started planning this experiment with the co-op, I started to realize a crock-pot might just be a necessary evil. 

When one was put up for sale on what I call my company’s inner-office Craigslist, I actually purchased it.

Let’s just say that the first night I came home to a meal completely ready to eat as soon as I walked in the door from work, I called my mom to apologize for refusing to eat crock-pot dinners as a child.

Now I am actually excited about using my crock-pot. I have discovered an entire section in one of my cookbooks dedicated to slow cooker recipes and even downloaded the Crock-Pot iPhone application.

So yes, the appliance that I once dreaded has changed my cooking and made it possible to eat when I walk in the door at 7 p.m., rather than coming home and searching for something to eat.

And I am hopeful that between my crock-pot and my iPhone I will find a way to deal with this whole chicken I’ll be getting. Now if only I liked leftovers…