Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Well now. I spent all day and night yesterday worrying I had either wasted a whole chicken, was going to poison myself, or both, but instead it turned out perfect!

I used this recipe for a whole chicken in the crock pot. Basically just put an onion on the bottom, put the chicken in, put some spices on it, and cook!

The issue started with the supermarket. 1) They only had giant chickens. And only four whole ones! I got the smallest one, 5 and a quarter pounds. 2) It was not cheap. I really should have waited until they were on sale to try this recipe. I paid $10 for the bird. (I spent all last night kicking myself. I could have gotten two cooked birds for $10, and I would have been certain they were good! Instead I paid double the price of a cooked one and gambled that it would come out worth eating at all.)

Then it almost didn't fit in the crock pot. I wasn't about to try to cut it up into pieces. It was bad enough I had to reach inside it to get all the organs out (the stuff of nightmares, I tell you). The bird just fit in the pot and I could close the lid, but you're only supposed to fill the pots half to three-quarters full...

But anyway! Plugged it in, waited five hours, checked it. Falling off the bone! And wonder of wonders, I had a meat thermometer! I had thrown out the one I bought, since the temps were way off, but I happened to spot this one in my drawer. I guess it was a long-ago gift that I had forgotten about. The temp was plenty high enough, so I shut the crock pot off and took out as much of the meat as I could.

It was so good! Really really good. The best chicken I've ever had (not counting fried, covered in sweet and sour sauce, etc). I have no idea how the meat got so much flavor. I tossed most of the spices on the top (and most of them got on only one half, oops), I tossed some into the body cavity, and that's it. The meat was so moist and flavorful. Usually I over-salt things a lot, but I used only what the recipe listed and I didn't need to add any as I ate -- it was that good!

I was a little worried. While it was cooking, there was a lot of fat in the pot. I worried it would be greasy or heavy, but nope. Just moist, flavorful chicken.

If I did it again, I'd want to cut off all the extra skin/fat. The top of the bird (where it wasn't covered in fluids) actually did crisp up! Unfortunately I likely won't do this again. I don't like handling a whole bird. (So big and heavy, so much chance of getting salmonella everywhere!) Plus it's more than I can eat, I know a lot of the meat will go to waste.

But! That being said! I am going to try this same recipe with a turkey breast! And likely with cut up chicken parts. However, if you have a family or don't mind shoving your hand wrist-deep into a dead animal to fish out cold mushy internal organs, then I'd recommend making this as-is. You'd get plenty of meals out of all the yummy meat.

I went grocery shopping today and got some boneless country ribs. I had intended to just toss it in a crock pot with a bottle of BBQ sauce, but I decided to be more adventurous.

I'm following this recipe with slight changes. I have no lime juice, so using lemon. I have no fresh ginger, so using powder (Google tells me to use a quarter of the amount when using powder, it looked like an awful lot though). I totally left out the Sriracha, because any heat at all makes my tongue cry.

The issue is the sesame oil though. I bought some today (100% chance, I hadn't seen this recipe yet), I thought I could use it as a light drizzle in things like ramen and stuff. Reading the comments on the recipe, some people said the sesame was overpowering, so I cut it back a bit (replacing with more olive oil). Problem is, even after multiple rinsings, the measuring cup smells so strong! I can smell it from a room away. What in the world is it going to taste like in the dish if it's so strong with so little of it?

Guess we'll see tomorrow! Everything's going to marinate overnight and I'll cook it tomorrow. Makes me paranoid to let it run when I'm not at home, but it's meant to do that, so hopefully it'll be okay and not burn my apartment down.

I can't stop listening to this song. The rhythm? flow? bounce? of it makes it so easy to listen to, and the lyrics are just silly. NWS, but it's not graphic or anything.


Fiiiine booty.

In less booty news, cooking failure again. I did the same recipe as last week for the roasted tomatoes, this time with the right tomatoes, and it was actually worse. I made the same chicken with it, and it was only semi-okay. Blah! Oh well, will try something new!

Booty chicken, booty-roasted tomatoes, booty booty I like da booty. Boooooooooty.

Another cooking post! Two in a row! Wonder of wonders.

I have a heck of a lot of Laughing Cow cheese. I don't eat it much anymore, since I now use high fiber cereal for snacks, so I poked around the net to see if maybe I could use it in cooking.

Meet the Laughing Cow Chicken Cordon Bleu.

Alas, I have no breadcrumbs, nor anything to tie/close/stick the roll closed. Usually changing a recipe would mean certain doom, but in this case it still worked out.

I cut the breast thin (would have been butterflying it if I had done it right), and stuck the cheese and ham on top. I was worried it would just melt and be a big mess, but oddly the laughing cow stayed in a triangle shape. o.O The ham got very cooked/dry, balanced on top of the cheese wedge.

Even with those issues, it tasted oddly good. I used the garlic flavor cheese, which had been too harsh for me to eat on a cracker, but it was great on the chicken. Only odd thing was the texture -- it was like eating boneless skinless chicken breast slathered with cream cheese. While that is strange, it's an improvement on plain boneless skinless chicken, to be honest.

My oven roasted tomatoes (this recipe) were a fail, but I think it was the recipe's fault. I think 450 might have been too high? The oil that got on the tray burned and filled my apartment with smoke, and after 25 minutes I gave up on the effort instead of risking burning my apartment down. (Likely not a real risk, I didn't use much oil, but it was smoking badly.) The one little caramelized bite I got was outstanding (SO SWEET), but the rest of them were a wet, soppy mess.

Also, next time I'd scoop out the seeds and insides, that might help it cook better.

There will be a next time. Tomatoes are good for you. If I can find a way to eat them, I will!

Almost a year ago, I bought this pasta maker on Amazon. I had read about it on my friends list, and it sounded perfect: No need to boil water or wash pots, just toss some pasta in, add water, and microwave. I was eating pasta on a regular basis, so this seemed fast and easy.

Before the package arrived, my lifestyle had a change and I could no longer eat pasta. Boo. So the Amazon box sat in my living room, unopened, for a year. Today, while shopping at Target, I saw pasta on the shelf and had a WANT WANT WANT reaction. But I resisted. "No pasta! Carbs are bad*! Move on!" and so I did.

Then I saw Giada de Laurentiis pasta sauce. I stood there long enough, trying to remember where I knew her name from (hi Food Network) that the bottle ended up in my cart. And so I needed pasta!

So, long story not-quite-short, I unpacked the pasta cooker and tried it tonight. It was just as simple and easy as I had hoped! Measure pasta and water, stick it in the microwave for 14 minutes, perfect pasta. Amazing! And the sauce was SO GOOD. Best pasta sauce since I lived in New York. Unfortunately the sauce is only sold at Target, but you can get the pasta cooker from Amazon. Keep your kitchen cool this summer, cook your pasta in your microwave!

PS: Having pasta for dinner was SO GOOD. Great sauce on perfectly cooked pasta, put some cheese on top and then broil until it was nice and melty. Mmmmm.

*I know carbs aren't bad, but lots of carbs at once are bad for me. I have major trouble with portion control, so I do better with having no pasta at all than I do with having a reasonable amount of it.

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In WoW news, I'm out of space again. Sigh. On Horde-side I already had two guilds, His Doxy and Boxy Doxy. (Her Doxy is Alliance-side.) His Doxy has all the tabs a level 1 guild could have. Boxy was one short. So the question became: Pay 5K gold for the new tab, or get a third guild and get four tabs for a fraction of the cost?

Hello Doxy Moxy! (I know Moxie is actually spelled with an -ie and not a -y, and usually I'm strongly anti-incorrect spellings, but Doxy Moxy is cute enough that I was willing to go with it.)



So, I had 4 new tabs for about 1K gold! ...and three of them filled up off the bat. Sigh. So much stuff to sell come MoP! Mounts and pets and a crapton of mats and other assorted things.

The downside of this is, come MoP, I had wanted to get my alts into high level guilds for easier leveling, now they're going to be stuck with no guild perks at all. :/ Though I could rotate guild leadership around as alts hit max level...

Icon because today is National Pancake Day!

And because it's cute.

In the space of a week or so, I've doubled the ways I can make chicken!

For those just joining us, I eat boneless skinless chicken for dinner as often as I can. It should be every night, but five times a week is closer to my success rate. I eat it because it's low calories, low fat, and generally doesn't make me sick (I have lots of stomach issues). Up until lately, I've only been able to make it two ways, so for going on a year now, I've been eating it the same two ways. VERY boring.

My two previous ways were: with cream of chicken soup, and marinated in soy/honey/garlic/woschest-however you spell it. Both are yummy, but after eating it the same way for so long, it was hard to stick with it.

New way #1: Garam Masala sprinkled on it. That's pretty darned amazing stuff. Just plain, skinless chicken, sprinkle a little of the spice mix on, salt it, and that's it. Bake it and eat it! You'd think that would be plain with nothing but spices on it, but it's good.

New way #2: I made this recipe this weekend. "Oven-Fried Chicken". While it would fool no one into thinking it was fried, it was still really good. Really really good. Without an egg/milk dipping stage, there was very little coating and next to no crunch, but it was still mighty good. I assume just about anything cooked in butter would be. (I won't be making this one often as-is, alas. Though I might try switching it up with Pam and such.)

So! A whole post about chicken! Exciting times, huh? :P A bonus for anyone who read this far: You can watch all sorts of Walking Dead videos here! I spent the afternoon watching the bonus segments that are shown after The Talking Dead, since I'm fast asleep at that time of night and always miss them.

Cream of (something) soup is generally a winner to top a chicken breast with. Cream of chicken has the right number of carbs to have with a meal, so that's been my go-to soup. While picking up more, I eyed the other options.

Cream of Potato soup. Hmmm. Chicken + potato = Sunday night dinner, right? Maybe so, but the soup was a poor match. On its own, the soup was surprisingly good. (I worried it might be god awful.) I ate the chunks of potato out of it. But the soup with the chicken was just wrong. Somehow the texture was horribly terribly scary awful.

Have I mentioned how tired I am of chicken breasts? I've lost track of how many months I've been eating them now, with only two ways I know how to make them. lokyst suggested I try garam masala spices, so that's the next thing I'm attempting, likely Monday night.

In Ellie news, I can't believe I've had her her almost a year now. She came home with me on February 26th 2011. It's even more surprising that she's still making progress (or maybe I should word that 'it's even more surprising that a year later there's still progress to be made').

Over the last couple days she's turned a really big corner. I've been thinking about how to describe it, but I haven't come up with a better way than this: She's finally seeing me. She looks at me and sees me. She meets my eyes and sees me, not just sees a horrible cat-eating monster.

While she still doesn't like being picked up, she likes being held. When I hold her to my shoulder, she puts her head against mine and purrs. It's such a wonderful thing.

I know this will sound awful, but I still don't feel love for her. I'm not blaming her, but it's hard to feel a connection with something that doesn't look at you and expects you to hurt it. It's only now with her starting to see me that I'm starting to feel more, feel a connection. I'm really, really happy I do. I'd like her to become more than just "a nice cat I happen to live with because no one else wanted".

Saturday started off with making chicken stock/soup/broth whatever you want to call it. I kind of forgot to do the first step (brown garlic in olive oil) so I threw the garlic in two hours into the simmering, but it still worked out fine. Also, I read that throwing just a little (1-2 tablespoons for a big pot) of soy sauce would help the flavor a lot without tasting the soy sauce, so I tried that. I have no idea if the soy made a difference, but it still came out well. Most of it is packed away in the freezer for later use.

Today's cooking was yummy yummy yummy. Mostly I eat boring chicken all the time, but now and then I make something else. Today it was Crock pot baby back ribs. They were simple as heck, even for me. I followed that recipe exactly, other than I didn't have a spice rub (so instead I just used salt and pepper). I'm not sure what the point of baking them in the oven first was, as you can see from the picture they don't brown at all and almost no grease comes off them. But I did that, then put them into the crock pot with the sauce in the fridge overnight (so I wouldn't have to deal with cooking them in the morning). Five hours later (one hour on high, four on low), they were amazing. Sweet Baby Ray is the yummiest sauce I've ever had (which I knew before today, but is worth repeating).

I wish I had bought more ribs. Sprouts sells meat in tiny little packages (as well as normal or large sizes), so I can buy single serving sizes. Which, unfortunately, I did. One day I shall make these again!

On RP, I can never decide if RPing over Twitter counts as RP. Last night I kept saying that I should go RP, but Twitter was so busy that I couldn't even walk away to get a drink. I don't know why I balk at calling Twitter stuff RP, because what else would it be?

I decided Reed needs the "of Silvermoon" title (though it will kill me using it when he has Professor as well), so I've been doing SMC quests on him. SO BORING. And worse than boring, even with the +10% guild bonus, I don't think there are enough quests. D: I still need 18K rep and I've done all the big zones (Eversong, Ghostwood, Falcon Watch in Hellfire, and Blasted Lands), the rest of the quests are one or two scattered in various zones. Oh how I wish we could still turn in cloth for rep...

My computer kept shutting itself down today, which worried me greatly. On the last time, I decided to stop being a slacker and open it up and blow the dust out. It was so hot, eek! There didn't seem to be much dust in there though. I left the side open for now, but I'm not sure about keeping it open -- it'd get more air, but it'd get more dust and cat hair, too.

I hate signs that I'm getting old. I'm not sure what else this could be. RP kept me up hours later than usual last night, and while I slept late enough (8 AM) to make me no more short on sleep than I usually am, the whole entire day my head has been in a fog. Headache the whole day, unable to focus, tons of typos, and my writing was just... challenged. Usually when I write a RP post the words come flying out, brain to screen, but today I was stumbling in my typing and my wording of everything was so rough.

That aside, tons of interesting RP! Know what one of the coolest thing about RP is? When you have no idea what your own character would do, but you learn it as it happens. (Rrr, I'm probably wording that badly.) Thistle got taken hostage last night, tossed in a jail cell by the (supposed) good guys. Tiny cell, not room for much more than a bed, so when the paladin entered it as well and demanded his weapons and gear? What could he do but hand them over? (Even in the best of situations, Thistle couldn't win against a paladin. He's a hunter with no animal and no melee skills. Maybe if they started off at max shooting range...) Anyway, it was seriously interesting to learn as it happened what Thistle would do in that situation. You're weaponless, locked up by the enemy. How do you fight back? How do you resist? Turns out his "flowerchild" nickname was fitting -- passive resistance. They asked him questions, he said nothing. They gave him food/drink, he ignored it. They wanted to heal his wounds, and the only reason he agreed was because he got something in return (his horse taken care of). It was so interesting to see how much that frustrated them! What an effective tool doing nothing is.

Between last night's late scene and this morning's early RP, I made chicken soup stock. Unfortunately I made a mistake and didn't realize the solution until it was too late. I started out with less water than last time, so by the three hour point, there wasn't enough left. I should have put the lid on it much much sooner. So, for hours of cooking, I got only four single-serving sized containers of broth.

So tired, brain so fuzzy. 5:30 PM and my dailies aren't even done yet (usually I finish them before the sun comes up!).

See? I totally fail at posting only once a day, especially when I post early. But everyone likes reading about food, right? Mmmm.

When I cook, it's rare for it to come out good enough that I'm willing to eat it, let alone mmm mmmm good. Today I successfully cooked not once but twice!

It all started with these:

Pretzel crisps. I love pretzels (the big, soft kind), but when I saw these in Sprouts, I really, really wanted to try them. Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) the carb count was really high. I could have half a serving (5 little 'chips') at a time. Thinking I wouldn't be able to stick to that, I passed them up. Then kicked myself for WEEKS after. (Not being permitted to have food is an issue from childhood. My father used to use food to control us... when he wasn't giving and taking away love and attention. This makes dieting oh so much fun.) Anyway, while shopping today, I gave in and got some. I figured I could use them to make a couple small 'sandwiches'. So I got sandwich meat and cheese as well.

The supermarket had munster cheese on sale, which I don't think I've ever eaten before. But hey, chance to try something new! It was okay to eat plain, though not great. (And not only did the pretzel crisp sandwiches not work out, the crisps themselves are pretty sucky. After all that stress and depression over not getting them, ha!) So I decided to make a grilled cheese sandwich. It's been ages since I last had one.

Best Sandwich Ever. It was so good that, even though I was full, I wanted to turn around and make another one right away. The cheese (which had been nearly melting at room temperature, was so melty and gooey and good! /Homer drool

I'm surprised dinner came out as well as it did. Tomorrow I'm making pork chops in the crock pot, so usually I wouldn't want pork today, but it was thawed so I wanted to use it up. I realized this at 5 PM. Since I wouldn't have long to marinade, I cut the pork into thin strips. Into a ziplock with my becoming-usual marinade: soy sauce, worcestershire, a heaping spoonful of garlic, and what little bit of honey I could squeeze out of the bear (I have no idea how old that honey is, but it really doesn't want to move). An hour in the fridge, then I cooked it in a pan. SO GOOD.

Both meals were better than anything I'd usually get eating out, which is a really nice change.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to make the pork in this recipe (not the potatoes alas, as good as they sound). I like everything that goes into the recipe (all, um, three things, pork being one of them), though I'm starting to worry how it'll taste together. Someone reposted this on LJ and I asked her how it came out, she said really good, so... hopefully.

And it's strange. While googling for a picture of the pretzel crisps, I found a blog post about them:

Anyway, I give these the Token Fat Girl seal of approval. At 110 calories per serving of 11 crips I find them to be a satisfying and delightful snack that I don't want to over eat.

It's interesting how carbs and calories don't always seem to match up. Yes, 110 calories for a serving of 11 of them is darned good, but that's 23 carbs. (A snack should be 15 carbs, a meal 30.)

In other news, since I've been so darned bored lately, I decided to start a game of FFX. Then I noticed my PS2 was no longer near my TV. I looked in all the boxes I have, I found a Nintendo 64, a Nintendo cube something or other, but no PS2. Blah. I have no idea how I would have hooked it up to the new TV anyway, but I would have like to have tried.

And in related news, since Monday is another vacation day for me and I'm so bored, I thought about leaving the house tomorrow (gasp!). I was thinking about going to the mall, though as I need nothing and don't really like shopping and hate crowds of people, that might be a silly plan. There's lots of interesting things to see there though, so... maybe.

And lastly, I have a movie (Princess Bride, nope I've never seen it before) and an anime series (gasp again!) to maybe watch this weekend. My friendsfriends list is busy with posts about some series called Tiger & Bunny, so I thought I'd check that out. Unfortunately I had to download the whole thing, so hopefully I'll like it.