Finding Joy in Snarkville

I know many of you are a twitter to know what I made in so many hours of cooking.  Well, let’s start with last night we had oven fried chicken and roasted veggies.  Yes, I’m a little proud of myself.

Now, you have to know that problems in the kitchen aren’t a lack of real skills.  I can whip up a beef wellington rather impressively.  The dishes I cook, I’m rather good at; and when inspired (like cooking for company or a party) I try out new things with rather few bombs.  That said, my problem is a one of desire — more like the daily grind.  So, I tend to rely on the path of least resistance for dinner — thus shocking someone in my knitting group when I said, “I don’t buy fresh vegetables, I’d have no idea what to do with them.”  That’s only half true — I *KNOW* what to do with them, I just could bring myself to do it everyday of the week.  I have other things I desire more, like becoming one with my recliner and knitting.

Back to what did I cook.  It seems that the key to this plan is to make at least TWO dinners worth of each meal.  Thus I cooked 5 meals and have 10 dinners.  (We don’t need to cook for the family 2 nights per week, so this is how it works out to 2 weeks of food.)  Now there’s a school of thought of everytime you cook, you double the recipe and freeze the other one — which sounds good, but seems to take awhile to build up to the no cooking part.  I know that nothing will last in the freezer forever (3 months seems to be the limit), so I like the idea of challenging ourselves to eat through one cooking session before beginning the next.  Finally, I read a suggestion of not making too many servings of an untried dish — good idea, except I’m new and all the dishes are untried.  Thus, I made myself a promise, every new dish I make, I shall only make two.  If it horrible and no one will eat it, it doesn’t cost us that much to just throw out the second one (or find it a loving home amoungst my friends in less picky households).  If we love it, then we already have another waiting.

So on to what I made:

1. Chicken Cacciatore:  This is a wild card to me.  A tomato based baked chicken dish.  It could be good, but I fear it may be “Meh” and never to be made again.  I will note that the dish size recommended in the recipe was HALF the size it should have been.
2. Coq au Vin: Yup, chicken in wine.  I’ve made this (not this recipe) before and enjoyed my purple chicken.  This smelled amazing coming out of the oven and I can’t wait to eat it.  I do worry a touch over the fact it is a different shade of chicken — but I’m sure the flavor will be wonderful.
3. Chicken Burritos: The recipe says I could make 10, I made 12.  Not sure how that worked, but I kept going until I was out of chicken.  I’m no better at folding a burrito now than I was in the beginning, but it is on taste not pretty right?  Now this recipe is cool because all the burritos are indivdually wrapped allowing for making just a couple if needed.
4. Chicken-Vegetable Soup:  Yes, I made soup.  Now this is the first time I’ve made soup and I always thought it would be harder than it was.  In looking at the outcome, I’ve got to say this is more like chicken stew in that it is thick and rich and full of STUFF and less liquid.  I’m ok with that — it is getting cooler here, and I see soup with crusty bread in our future.
5. Chicken Potpie:  Now this is the only recipe that has prep the day of serving, but it isn’t much prep and the filling was SO yummy going together (and easy — seriously easy)
6. Finally there was the oven fried chicken for dinner last night.  The verdict on dinner one was “YUMMY”  It was good and I think having a success in the first meal looks good for this plan.

We are already starting to talk about the next time and what to make.  I need to add a few things along the way, but I’m really excited about it — especially now that I can move my arms again.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 9:30 am and is filed under The Queen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.