Sickness sucks

Even though I'm pretty sure no one actually reads this, I figured I had better make an appearance and say I have not given up on this blog yet. Last week David and Rosalyn were both sick, which left me exhausted. I did cook a few things, so hopefully I will get the pictures of those up in the next week or so as I get over being sick this week. I have pretty much done no cooking this week aside from scrambled eggs for my daughter, because she does not understand why I don't feel like cooking.

For the time being I am going to go back to drinking my orange juice and hope this passes quickly. Today had to be the worst day ever!

Problem solved. Onto the next one.

David made it easy for me to figure out what to do with the chicken once it was cooked. He just ate it. Problem solved. No more leftover chicken legs to worry about. I made sandwiches out of the chicken breasts, like I said I would, and I was amazed to discover that my favorite flavors at Subway are even better at home, on my own bread. Cucumbers and feta are the most perfect combination in the world to me right now, closely followed by caramel pretzel ice cream over warm apple pie.

So far today I’ve just snacked on leftover shredded beef, and Rosalyn hasn’t even asked for food yet, despite it being almost 2 in the afternoon. Considering how much she was eating a couple weeks ago, I’m dreading another growth spurt. I know it’s coming. Either that or she has given her appetite to me, because I cannot seem to come close to feeling satisfied.

I can’t make up my mind if I want a big glass of milk or if I should once again take advantage of my new blender and make a smoothie. Right now my favorite smoothie concoction is an orange, a banana, several pieces of sliced cucumber, and a scoop of Omega-3 seed mix (chia, flax, and hemp seeds). I wish I had an apple. An apple, carrot, ginger smoothie sounds just about perfect right now.

Some random thoughts on raw chicken...

I have leftover raw chicken. I need to cook it today, or throw it out. I have no choice in this matter. But I also have leftover cooked chicken legs from Saturday night and leftover shredded beef from last night, so I’m not sure what the best course of action is for today. I figure the best idea is to just get the darn chicken cooked and go from there.

So in the biggest baking dish David has (since all my cooking stuff is still in my old apartment 4 hours away), I put the little rack (which I normally use to elevate cups on the dishtowel after I do dishes, but is really intended for the oven), and I arrange the 3 large boneless/skinless chicken breasts and the 4 drumsticks I need to cook, cover them with a little seasoning salt, garlic, and pepper, drizzle with olive oil, and hope for the best.

Once cooked I can pick the meat off the bones of the drumsticks and make chicken soup. I don’t have egg noodles, and David says I can't use farfelle (bow ties) to make chicken noodle soup, but I do have plenty of brown rice, plus plenty of carrots, celery, and onions. I do wish I had some herbs. I really need to work on that, but herbs are kind of expensive. I’m thinking every payday just picking up a small bottle of a single herb I know I can use. Eventually my spice cabinet will fill up, right?

But that doesn’t yet help me decide what to do with this chicken. I think the breasts I’ll slice and then store to make sandwiches. David bought me some really nice Italian bread, and we have cucumbers and feta cheese. That would make a good sandwich.

And sandwiches make me think of quesadillas, which are a perfect way to use up leftovers! Here it is Monday, and I really don’t have to cook for at least the next 3 nights, because we have that many leftovers. I think my kitchen sink will thank me later.

Back to my cooking roots (or the books that made me think)

After dinner last night I started reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything, and this morning my Kindle says I am 11 percent in. I just finished reading his chapter on the French Paradox, how the French eat so much more saturated fat that we do but still have less heart disease (and obesity, though that doesn’t seem to be mentioned). I almost kept on reading into the chapter about mashed potatoes, except the phone rang, so I had to go back and reread the last paragraph to get into my reading groove again, and then I realized that this fits right into my thoughts/quest for eating better.

We live in an age where raw vegan, gluten free, paleo, and numerous other diets are the supposed answers to weight loss and feeling better and having more energy. But we weren’t always fat and tired, and we didn’t used to have to go on diets in order to lose weight and feel better. We just ate what was available to us, taking cues from the seasons and from the culture we live in. In the last book I read, Robin Mather’s The Feast Nearby, she wrote about eating in season. She also briefly mentioned that during the time she lived in Arizona, she ate mostly the foods indigenous to the area, noting that when guests came from out of state and continued to eat the way they were used to (instead of the light meals of chips and salsa and taquitos we love so much in the Southwest), they were miserable in the Arizona heat, their bodies unable to digest such heavy foods. In the first book I read this year, Almost Amish by Nancy Sleeth, even though it ended up not being about food so much, she noted that the Amish don’t eat fast food, and they only eat what they can provide for themselves, which again means eating with the seasons and within their own culture.

So it seems that even before all my reading, even before all the undocumented research that I have done in the past (when I never thought I would find the courage to start a blog and might actually need to find those articles again), I was on the right path. I need to listen to my body, and I need to eat mindfully. This does not mean I need to count every calorie or beat myself up for wanting a cheeseburger, but if I’m going to give into my cookie craving, maybe I would be better off making those cooking from scratch, rather than buying them from the store, and maybe that burger can be made at home with better quality ingredients.

We had a night several weeks ago where we ate only bread and butter for dinner. I didn’t have my normal, over full feeling I get when I eat bread, but normally I’m eat bread with other things. And reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s chapter on baking bread last night made me suddenly crave bread. Not just bread and butter, but the smell of it in the house, the feel of the dough in my hands, the beer like smell as the bread is rising. I used to make bread all the time when I was in high school. I think my mom liked me cooking because it meant I did the cleaning too, but the bread always turned out good. The last time I attempted bread, when Rosalyn was 2, the bread did not turn out so good. It was dense and flavorless, and it scared me away from making bread again. Maybe it’s time to get over that fear, and get back to what I used to know instinctively. Fresh food is better, real food is better, and I need to stop being scared of food just for the sake of being scared.

My kind of comfort food: all day tacos!!!!

I finished reading The Feast Nearby by Robin Mather, and I have to say I was really impressed with it. All the things I’ve dreamed about doing, but (1) didn’t know how and (2) people told me were pointless in the day and age we live in, I suddenly feel encouraged inspired to do! Granted I still don’t know what I’m going to be able to find at the local farmer’s market (if I can find the local farmer’s market), and I don’t know what grows out here in the middle of the desert, but I’m inspired none the less.

One of the later passages from her book, she discussed comfort foods. She mentioned that the foods we grew up eating are typically the foods we considered comforts when we are adults, and then she asks if our kids today are going to grow up thinking chicken mcNuggets are comfort foods. I had to laugh. For as much as Rosalyn loves chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese, and pizza, her all time favorite food is refried black beans and rice.

For the last couple years it has been Rosarita’s canned refried black beans and Zattaran’s boxed Spanish rice that she has loved so much, but then I learned how to cook beans. It took quite a few trial and errors to figure out what flavors to add to get her to eat my homemade beans (and I admit a few of my first attempts I didn’t like either), but I got it.

I start with 2 pounds of black beans. I used to buy them in bulk at WinCo, but now I have to buy 2 bags at Safeway instead.  I soak them overnight,  completely covering them with water, bringing it to a boil, and then turning the heat off and covering it to sit over night.

In the morning I drain the beans, add fresh water, a medium white onion chopped, a packet of McCormick taco seasoning (I know, I really need to be making my own! I’ll get there!) and a jar of Herdez salsa verde. I bring it back up to a boil, and then let it simmer until the beans are super soft and most of the water is gone. At this point I used to just mash the beans with a potato masher, but that just didn’t work for me, so I borrowed a neighbor’s fancy schmancy immersion blender, and that was awesome, and now I have a brand new Ninja blender that I got for Christmas, and that was even better than awesome. I let the beans cool a bit so I didn’t burn myself pouring them into the blender, and then a couple pulses later they were perfectly mashed, with some still looking like beans, and some not so much, and then when I poured them back into the pan and simmered them a bit longer, they thickened up beautifully, and Rosalyn asked for a burrito. She declared them perfect.

Us adults like more than just beans for dinner, so I pulled out my friend Danielle’s shredded beef recipe for us. This means that last night in the crock pot I put a 3 pound roast in with the same seasonings for the beans (this recipe actually came first and is how I came up with the seasoning for the beans!). Recap for you: 1 packet of taco seasoning and a jar of salsa verde. Hold onto the onion until later. I added enough water to cover the meat and set the crop pot on low and went to bed. This morning, with the house smelling so good my mouth was watering, I turned the crock pot off and just let it sit for a bit while I dealt with the beans, and made a pot of coffee, and made breakfast for David and Rosalyn, and a smoothie for myself. Then finally after I did all the dishes, I pulled out a big pot and started shredding the meat from the crock pot by hand. I know some people think they can just use 2 forks to shred their meat, but it really doesn’t work here. The best kind of roast to use for shredded beef has ribbons of fat  and maybe a bone in it, so I shred it by hand so that I can pull out and set aside those things I don’t want in my final product. The bones gets saved for later use, and the fat gets put into a bowl for Koda (David’s dog). The beef gets put into the big pot, along with the juices from the crock put, and a sliced onion. It continues to cook on lower than a simmer (if your stove goes that low, my old one didn’t), until most of the juices are gone, the onions are soft, and the meat is just about perfect.

It’s an all day process to make tacos around here, but it is so worth it! Now if only I could make Spanish rice Rosalyn would eat, I could stop buying boxed foods!

The only chicken sandwhich my daughter will eat...

Ok, so I know I said I was going to try and make French onion soup again this weekend, so I can write about it and maybe share some pictures, but David kind of nixed those plans at the grocery store. See he shops at the meat department first (because he is very much a meat eater), and then I have to figure out what to make around that.

So last night for dinner, I made chicken sandwiches, somewhat reminiscent of Chick-fil-a. It certainly isn’t up there on any healthy meals list (and might explain why I don’t feel so hot today), but it sure was tasty. Even my notoriously picky daughter ate one. 

I pretty much use the same recipe no matter what type of chicken I’m frying. If I’m frying chicken for a potluck, I cut boneless/skinless chicken breasts into strips; if I’m cooking for David’s parents I do bone-in chicken thighs, and for chicken sandwiches I just cut the chicken so that it fits on a bun when I’m done.

The boneless/skinless breasts that we bought last night were HUGE, so I only used 2. I cut one into 3 decent sized pieces, and the second one I cut into 4 decent size pieces.  In a medium size bowl, I cracked 2 eggs and added about a cup and a half of whole milk, and mixed that together. Then I put all the chicken in that to just chill out a bit while I heated up the oil and seasoned some flour. Now I am horrible with measuring, so my flour mixture usually goes something like this: dump a bunch of flour into a bowl, add a whole bunch of seasoning salt, a good amount of garlic powder, onion powder, white pepper, and black pepper, and depending on who I’m cooking for maybe a dash of cayenne pepper (or if I don’t care who I’m cooking for and I just want to season it to MY tastes, I add 2 or more dashes of cayenne pepper).

When the oil is hot enough (usually tested by dipping something into it to see if it started bubbling immediately, last night it was a French fry, leftover from when I made burgers a couple nights ago) I take a piece of chicken out of the milk and egg, let it drip for a moment, and then drop it into the flour, make sure it gets covered completely, then into the hot oil it goes. I repeat this with 2 more pieces of chicken. Then I run over and wash my hands, because the sticky milk and flour goop grosses me out. When it looks like the bottom of the chicken is turning golden, I flip the chicken over with some tongs. I think this is usually somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, though I rarely look at the clock, so I don’t know. I do know the only time I ever served undercooked chicken, I was following someone else’s recipe, and I used their timing method, and it was gross. After that I went back to trusting my instincts and thanking my lucky stars that I haven’t’ screwed up chicken that bad on my own.

So when the chicken looks about done (probably another 5 minutes or so, maybe more if it is a really thick chicken piece, and definitely more if you are cooking with the bone in), I take it out and set it on a plate with a paper towel while I make the next batch. When all is finished, I serve on potato rolls with lettuce and cheese. Well, cheese for Rosalyn and David, just lettuce for me. 

I want chickens. And French onion soup.

One thing I have struggled with when keeping a blog, is actually keeping it. I think this is the 5^th or 6^th blog I’ve attempted, mostly because I am too busy avoiding my life to sit down and write about it. I’m hoping that being in a better place (on SO many levels) will help with this issue.

I finished reading Almost Amish by Nancy Sleeth yesterday, and though it wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be, it was certainly an inspiring book. I was looking for something that discussed a little more in depth the ways of living simply, a sort of how-to guide I supposed, and this was more a of a spiritual, “don’t they have a lovely way of living” kind of book. I really enjoyed, as a matter of fact I loved it, but it wasn’t what I was originally looking for.

I started reading The Feast Nearby by Robin Mather this morning, and so far am really enjoying this one too. Its seriously reinforcing my dream of wanting to raise chickens.

I really haven’t cooked much over the last few days, at least nothing special. I’ve been extremely tired, which of course is normal after I haven’t been eating right. The only thing noteworthy I’ve had to eat is the eggnog ice cream David’s dad made for us last night (but won’t share the recipe) and I found a roll of Butter Rum Lifesavers in the bottom of one my daughter’s presents when I was cleaning up the Christmas stuff this afternoon.

I think this weekend I’m going to attempt to make French Onion Soup again, this time taking pictures so there is something worth sharing. I was a little worried when I made it last weekend, because it seemed like maybe I was missing ingredients. All the “modern” recipes call for wine and herbs, and the recipe I had on hand really only called for onions and beef stock, and a small amount of butter, flour, and garlic. David (who wants to know why I insisted on calling him D, as if he didn’t have a full name) thought it took too long to make and kept telling me to turn the heat up so the onions would brown faster, but I think the end result was pretty outstanding.