Surplus Fowl

I cooked these enormous Double D-sized chicken breasts on Monday. The kind where you think the chicken breasts are big then you open the package and realize you're only seeing half the picture because they are all folded in half! I never feel comfortable refreezing them so I just cook them all and we make different things with the leftovers. (After Monday, all the things use cooked, leftover chicken.)

Monday:
Put 4 TBSP of butter in a 9X13 pan and put it in the oven while it's warming. Then, dredged in flour mixed with a packet of onion soup mix and various seasonings of choice. Cook until done. (I actually had to break out the 8X8 pan halfway through cooking because they were way too crowded in the other pan!)

Tuesday:
Get some nice rolls and make chicken sandwiches for the boys. They LOVE these. It's just the cooked chicken, thinly sliced then put on the rolls with mustard and Miracle Whip. For Dave and I, we chop up some more of the chicken and mix it with our favorite hot wing sauce for Buffalo Chicken Sandwiches. I put the white horseradish cheddar cheese I love and some blue cheese dressing on mine. Dave skips the dressing but likes the fancy cheese.

For lunch, I also discovered that the thinly sliced chicken goes really well on a small toasted bagel with mustard, Miracle Whip and thinly sliced tart green apple! Next time, I'm going to add bacon to this and see if I can stop at 12 of 'em. (Yes, we prefer Miracle Whip, Dave and I can't stand mayonnaise - it's slimy and gross!)

Wednesday:
Go to a birthday party where they are serving pizza

Thursday:
Make chicken enchiladas. I love making these. It's one of the best things I make and Dave requests them every time we have too much chicken. Also, after Thanksgiving, it's great with turkey.

1. Chop 1/2 a white onion and saute until translucent, add a 1/2 (or whole depending on how many enchiladas you're making) chopped chicken breast and a small can of chopped green chilies. Mix until warm, transfer to bowl. (When I was single, I'd add chopped olives and finely chopped radish, but I'm the only one in this house that likes 'em that way.)
2. Open a 28 ounce can of green enchilada sauce (I use Las Palmas). Spread a thin layer on the bottom of a 9X13 pan. Spread a thicker layer in the skillet you just made the chicken mix in. Use tortillas of choice (I like corn and Dave prefers flour so I make some of each), put the tortilla in the warmed green sauce, count to 10, flip, count to 10 again (I use my fingers for this).
3. Transfer the tortilla to the 9X13 pan and down the center of the tortilla put a layer of cheese, a layer of the chicken mix and then roll and push to the side (seam side down).
4. Repeat until your pan is full or you run out of mix.
5. Cover the enchiladas with the remaining sauce (usually 1/3 to 1/2 of the can) and then some more cheese (don't be stingy with it!) and cook at 325 degrees for about 20 minutes.

It's messy to make and delicious to eat.

Still have 3 giant chicken breasts left, Ruth!

Good Food, Bad Food

I've been eating some really good food lately. As in, good for you. Tasty, too!

I've gone on a cookbook binge at the library. I've been checking out lots of low-fat cookbooks and so far it's been really good stuff! I've been writing the favorites into a notebook. There was a creamed chicken that was excellent - even our little guys loved it.

Also, I've been coming up with some stuff on my own. I got a huge thing of fresh spinach from Costco and almost made it all the way through before it went bad. I'm the only one in this house that'll eat spinach. The two favorite things I've made with that spinach:

Salad - with mandarin orange slices, dried cranberries, warm leftover rotisserie chicken and my favorite dressing (Newman's Own Sesame Ginger)

Concoction - saute some minced garlic (I get the jarred kind - lasts longer then the fresh in this house), add 2 or 3 BIG handfuls of spinach (it cooks down to nothing); meanwhile, make some Minute Rice brown rice (the 4 serving amount); once the rice is done, add a drained/rinsed can of beans (my current favorite - kidney beans, but it's also good with navy or cannelini), then mix in the garlic/spinach; Add a couple of spoonfuls of 505 Chile Verde sauce and warm through. This is a recipe that serves as my lunch for about a week. It's soooooo good!

The not-so-good stuff I've been eating still hasn't been all that bad. Every year for my birthday, my inlaws give me a pretty big check (Dave gets one for his birthday, too). I know - it's like we're little kids or something but we love it! We're usually pretty good with these checks and pay bills with them or buy something we've had our eye on for awhile.

With my check, I also usually indulge in a bit of yarn and some foodstuffs that I love but my family maybe doesn't. This year I bought some tasty spreads. I have this thing about jam. I LOVE jam. Can't get enough. When I was single and I'd be home alone watching a movie, I wouldn't pop corn, I'd sit there with Saltines, a jar of jam and a spreading knife. mmmmmjammmmm.

I bought some Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter (which actually wasn't nearly as good as it sounded), some really good cherry jam and some Nutella.

You know how I just expounded on the virtues of jam? Nutella is even better. It's a chocolate hazelnut spread that makes me drool just thinking about it. I first had Nutella in high school when we hosted a German kid for a week one summer. He brought some of this deliciousness for a gift and I've been hooked ever since. Used to be, you couldn't get this stuff in the states. When I was stationed in Germany, I always had some on hand. And when I came back stateside, I brought back a case of it. You can usually find it in any grocery store nowadays. It's near the peanut butters.

One of new my favorite things is to make toast (another favorite food) and smear it with a thin layer of Nutella and then a thick layer of cherry jam. Holy Dog - it's so good.

I was futzing around on Etsy and found some really good jam makers. sigh. Gonna have to try to restrain myself but it won't be easy.

And now I bring you some really bad foods. This site, CakeWrecks, is a blog where people send her pic's of really bad cakes. And she only allows professionally done cakes. People are so strange! Click the links, you'll see....

Off to buy more jam, Ruth!

Meat Parade

Let's start this post with a reminder of my latest contest and the first entry I received....



The lovely and ever popular sophanne sent me this spectacular silvery stuff. That's 2 skeins of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk and one skein of Rowanspun 4 ply. It's roughly 400 yards of Fabulousness which gets her 2 entries in the contest (one entry per 200 yards). I was so excited when I opened the package but then I remembered it's for the Yarn Bouquet. sigh. It's for the children. (That was for you, Rachel!)

Last week we had a visitor. Our dear friend D'lynn came for a visit. D'lynn is the godmother to our kids. We love her and wish she could visit us all the time (as in, she should move here!). The last time she visited was 4 years ago!

She was able to visit to visit us on her way home to Arizona to visit her parents. When my husband was 12, his family moved to Wilcox, AZ. It's a tiny town with literally one stoplight. Still. He met D'lynn somewhere around high school and they've been friends forever.

So when she came to visit, it was a pretty big deal for us! We let the boys have a sleepover at their grandparents house (their first time doing this) and took D'lynn in to Denver for a night on the town.

First, we ate at this Brazilian Grill restaurant. Wow! What an experience! You have a small cylinder of wood that's painted into 3 sections - red, yellow, and green. The red is for when you want to go to the salad bar or when you "need a break" (as the waitress told us. Perplexed us initially but when flipped it, we understood). The green is for when you're ready for the meat and when you're finished with your meal and would like your check, you lay it on it's side which means yellow.

We hit the salad bar - 35 items! All your hot sides and all your salad stuff was over there. Along with the usual suspects you'd find in a salad bar, I had a tiny hard-boiled quail egg and some cooked yucca root. They had this really amazing paprika-colored mushroom gravy for the mashed potatoes, too.

Then when we were done with the salad bar, we flipped to green. Oh. Dear. God. The meat just kept coming! There were 16 different kinds and we tried them all! You have these little spork tongs at your plate and the meat guys cut off a thin slice of whatever they are carrying and you grab it with your tongs as they are slicing.

If you go to the restaurant link, you can see that they bring the meat to your table on these giant sword skewers with little plates underneath (to catch the juice). And they just. keep coming. We had rattlesnake sausage (which tasted like... sausage), buffalo meat, wild boar ribs (kinda dry), chunks of turkey wrapped in bacon, marinated chicken chunks, spicy chicken chunks (one of my favorites), some other kielbasa-type sausage, whole sirloin, garlic beef (D'lynn's favorite), some other steak tenderloin (Dave's favorite), ham with pineapple, whole tomatoes with parmesan (on a stick!).

Sheesh! At one point we had a meat guy on either side of the table cutting stuff and one waiting to have at us! There was one guy walking around with two really long skinny skewers. One had little tiny round somethings and the other skewer had equally small triangles of lime. We were on red at that point, trying to eat the meat on our plate and catch up for round 2! We flipped, just to see what the guy had - chicken hearts! (ew) We passed.

D'lynn and I couldn't get enough of the pineapple. It was rotisserie cooked like everything else and if you've never had grilled pineapple - it's so warm and juicy. We were absolutely stuffed and at the end of our meal. We'd turned the cylinder on its side to signal surrender, er, I mean for the check. But the ham/pineapple guy came around again and I told Dave, "Go green! Go green!" D'lynn and I found enough room for one more slice of pineapple each. YUM!

It was expensive as hell and overall very tasty. Dave and I had seen this type of thing on TV during a BBQ around the world type show. It looked so delicious and juicy! In real life, it was all just a bit dry. The steak stuff was rare and tender and juicy but everything else seemed kind of dried out! Especially the buffalo. It was like jerky! D'lynn said buffalo is really lean and cooking it like that probably isn't the best idea. And so much meat! I actually had a dream that night of meat swirling around on swords!

We went to Sweet Tomatoes (a salad buffet restaurant) the next day for some greens - to try and counteract all that meat. Whew!

After the meat fest, we went to Impulse Theater. An improv show - it was hysterical! We love those things. Last year, for Dave's b'day, he surprised me with going downtown to eat and then going to Bovine Metropolis (another improv show). Between the two, I liked Bovine better, it was a much more intimate venue. They had one Jeopardy-like game where the MC would give a category, someone in the audience would shout out the "answer" and the players would give their question. The MC said, "Small, dark and handsome." I shouted, "Colin Farrell" and the player, without missing a beat said, "What is a Colin in the wild." Love it!

We went to walk along the 16th Street Mall after that but it was dead so we went home. We were home by 10:30p. We're old.

I told D'lynn to pick something from my knitting books for me to make her and she picked this (Ravelry link). It's the Pimlico Shrug from Knit 2 Together. Good taste, right! And she bought the yarn from Purls of Wisdom for me to make it! It was about $120 and I asked if that was going to be OK. She said, "Are you kidding me? A beautiful sweater hand knit just for me? That's cheap!" You gotta love when they totally get it. I told her I'd have it done by Christmas. She also mentioned how cold it was in her office and her hands were always freezing, so I'll probably be making her some Fetchings, too.

Such a great time! Such a great visit! Such a dumb bunny I am as I took NO pictures. sigh. The visit was entirely too short. She came in Thursday night and had to fly off to AZ Saturday afternoon. She lives in Kansas and we hope she comes back really soon.

Missing her already, Ruth!

Balls

Is anyone else childish enough to giggle whenever they hear that word?

In this post, there will be many balls. [snigger]

I hung out at the new yarn store yesterday. I helped Jen rearrange some balls of yarn. [tee hee] And, yes, of course I bought a skein. It's this lovely alpaca. Nachaele hit it right when she had some in her hand and said, "This feels like it will melt if I touch it too long." I also worked on one of the skull-n-crossbones hats for the boys. (As of last night, all I have left to do with those is seam up the second one. I'll take pic's, on xmas day, with them wearing the hats.) I also got to hang out with Sam and Nachaele. Lovely women all!

We have a few Xmas balls [ha ha ha] that don't have ornament hooks. The boys keep insisting they can fit them on the tree without them. They stick the tiny circle meant for said hooks (or, as in our house, bent paper clips) onto the tiniest ends of pine tree branches. So every morning, I come downstairs to a shiny floor filled with red or silver balls [hee hee].

My inlaws come over on Friday evenings for pizza and movie night. Last Friday, they came over with a big plate of Sausage Balls [AHAHAHAHAHA]. Here's the recipe for this delightful appetizer:

Sausage Balls
1 lb. chub of Jimmy Dean sausage
2 cups of biscuit mix (a la Bisquick)
4 cups of shredded cheese - cheese must be taken out of fridge and let rest to room temperature

Mix all together thoroughly in a bowl. Make meatballs [snicker] and put in 350 degree oven on cookie sheet until cooked through. Serve and smile!

My MIL was saying how they cook up so nice and there's not even any grease in the pan. In her mind, this makes them healthy. In my mind, it's just all that Bisquick soaking it in!

Happy Holiday everyone!

I said BALLS, Ruth!

Old MacDonald

Had a farm. And then he took his wares to the Parker Farmer's Market. The market is every Sunday from May through October. If you're lucky, you go on the day when a woman has also brought some of the bounty from her garden. Unlike the professional farmers, she's got no tent, no scales, no chair to sit in, no big table. Just a little card table and her sunhat.

I scored this enormous zucchini for 50 cents!! I wanted to make some zucchini bread and was eyeing the smaller ones (at 3 for a dollar). I asked the seller which she thought and of course she directed me to the biggest one. I thought what the hell, it's only 50 cents. When I got home to my cookbook, I found I only need 1 cup of shredded zucchini for a loaf! So I'll likely be making a LOT of zucchini bread and freezing it. Anybody want some?

Here's my little guy snuggling the zucchini...

Here his is showing how strong he's becoming...

I scored some multi-colored carrots (purple ones, white ones, and your basic orange) at another booth and bought them so the boys could see some variety. Here they are displayed by the lovely Trevor...

My skinny little man. He's wearing his swim trunks because he was playing in the sprinklers but came in just to model carrots for my blog. What a trooper.

I ended with a huge bag of fresh peaches. Love peaches. Can't get enough of really good peaches. I made a peach cobbler - wasn't too happy with the recipe, it was kinda blah. Anyone have a favorite cobbler recipe? I like a biscuity and/or cake-ish top, not a crumbly top. If you do, email it to me (Ruth AT 5elementknitr DOT com). Other then the cobbler, I've been eating one or two of these enormous peaches a day. By next Sunday, I'm going to need another bag!

Cleaning up the juice, Ruth!

One Man's EWWW Is....

Another man's YUM!

I was just reading JenLa and she had a link to this. It got me thinking of disgusting food combo's and what I like.

The worst food combo I've ever heard occurred at the grocery store:

Lady in Line in Front of Me Buying Peanut Butter and Bananas: I love mixing peanut butter and bananas.

Cashier: Me too. It's also good with apples.

Me: Remember Ants on a Log? Peanut butter on celery with raisins on top.

general murmuring of other peanut butter combo's

Cashier: When my daughter was in high school, she went through this phase where she loved to make tuna salad sandwiches. Instead of mixing in mayo, she'd use peanut butter.

Silence...

Lady in Front of Me Saying What I Was Thinking: Was she pregnant?

Cashier: NO! (laughing)

Me: High? (to myself)

That is so gross, I can't even think about it without gagging.

Gross things (according to those around me) I love:

1. Dipping my chicken tenders/nuggets/fried weird shapes into mustard instead of ketchup.
2. Putting a slice of cheese on my tuna or BBQ pork sandwich.
3. Dipping my fries in my Frosty at Wendy's (salt and sweet can't be beat!).

Looking at that small list, no wonder I'm overweight!

My husband dips potato chips in ketchup. Ew.

What's your favorite weird food combo?

Off to Wendy's, Ruth!