UnFunChicken

Back a way long time ago when I was just a little girl, there was a grocery store across from the Lincoln Mall in Freeport. Is it where the Eagles Club is now? I can't remember, I was very small. I think it was a Logli's, maybe. Lee's? BRB, Googling.
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Google is not helping! Gah. My mom reads this blog, she'll know. Anyway, there are only two things I remember about that store. They had a big ol' Brach's candy display with the honor-system box where you could put in a nickel and take a piece. When I went shopping with my grandma, she'd give me a quarter and I would get five little pieces of candy and that was awesome. The other thing I remember was the Fun Chicken.

Now the Fun Chicken was a vending machine at the front of the store, right by the exit doors. It was a big box with clear walls, and inside was a plastic hen in a nest of plastic eggs. If you put your money in, the hen would move around and cluck, and one of the plastic eggs would pop out of the machine with a toy inside. Good times. Waiting in the endless checkout lines was not so bad if you had the promise of Fun Chicken waiting. I'm sure the 2010s version of the Fun Chicken awaits us soon, whenever Robert catches on to the fact that the machines whose levers and doors he loves to manipulate actually produce something if money is put in.

Anyway, I'm only thinking of that tonight because I had to deal with whatever the opposite of a Fun Chicken is tonight. It was too bad, too, because I was really excited about the recipe I had. I've been experimenting with my new cast-iron Dutch Oven, and tonight I tried roasting a whole chicken in it, French Style. I put it on the stove and put a little olive oil in, salted and peppered my chicken, and set it in the pot to brown. I added onions, celery, garlic and bay leaf, flipped the chicken to get a little brown on the other side, then put foil over the pot, put the lid on over that, and put it in the oven on 250 to let the magic happen. Since it was a small chicken, only about 3.5 pounds, it wasn't supposed to take more than an hour or so, so I gave it 70 minutes.

When I went to take it out, it leaked red juices everywhere! Gross! I put it back in, twice, and finally had to put it on the cast iron skillet and just let it sit in the oven for ages till it would come to temp. 250 is stupidly low for cooking a chicken. The jus that was supposed to happen was nasty and oily, lacking in flavor. And when the chicken was finally done, the skin was gross and flabby and undelicious. The chicken meat was okay, but I've done far better with a simple beer can. Bummer! Anyway, my lovely chicken meal was ruined, since Robert was in bed by then (he got an alternative supper) and we'd already eaten the side dish, which was fried corn and quite tasty.

What do you do with an entire mediocre cooked chicken? In our house, that's easy. Buffalo chicken wraps are one of M's favorites, and we have lots of whole wheat tortilla shells in the house lately. The problem I've always had is that it's a pain in the butt to shred all that chicken into the proper consistency, and after wrestling with the chicken for two hours already, I was in no mood. Then genius struck! I mentioned the other day that in my organizing, I found all the parts to the food processor and put them in one place, right? Now was the perfect time to break it out. I put on the basic blade and stripped the chicken, tossing white and dark meat in there alike, leaving out the nasty skin. When it was all in there, I buzzed it in the processor for about five seconds, and voila! Shredded chicken! It was almost chicken salad consistency, actually, but that's fine with me.

I dumped the chicken into a bowl and mixed in Frank's Red Hot Sauce and ranch dressing. (If I wasn't cooking for M, I'd have added celery or lettuce, but he's not a fan.) I spread the mix onto tortillas, rolled them up, and cut them into pieces about an inch thick. Delicious and fun, and a nice way to save a disappointing dinner. I guess nobody always has good luck with new recipes, and I've done really well lately, so I was due for a stinker. But I really do want to find a nice Dutch Oven chicken recipe. I'm sure there's one out there!

Since I'm already talking about kitchens, I should mention that Robert's birthday present of a wonderful play kitchen and accessories has arrived! We assembled it yesterday and stocked it today, and man is it a hit. He loves all the things he can do, and he'll love it even more when we get all the batteries, I'm sure. 12 batteries, sheesh. It's so entertaining to watch his little brain working, and to see him do things like put a piece of lettuce and an orange in a skillet on the burner, or shove all the utensils in the microwave at once. He's a funny guy!

March 16-18, going off the plan

Plans, especially food plans, are a great thing to have. Ours has worked out really well so far. But if there's one thing that's true about them, is that they "gang aft aglae," as the man said. Since we're going to be gone or with my folks for most of the last week of March, my plan was to simply do a one-week food plan instead of the typical two weeks, shop for it on Monday (Monday is when both Kroger and Meijer have their new sales posted), and go from there. I made up the plan and everything. 

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, stuff happened, Bella got sick, we took her to the vet first thing Monday morning, and the vet bill came to a heartstopping three hundred dollars. That's a lot of money at any time, and when you're only pulling down 1100 a month, well, you get the idea. We had just a little emergency money socked away, which is gone now, and we're not looking good for this month's budget. So the shopping trip was scotched, and the plan was necessarily scotched as well. Can't make spaghetti without tomato sauce, etc. 

That's not to say that we're going hungry, though. We have enough food, I just have to be a bit more creative. On Monday  for lunch, we had a boxed mix of cheesy broccoli rice, to which I added the remains of the ham chunk I used the night before in the soup. When fried up and stirred in, it added protein, a lot of flavor, and enough bulk to turn the side dish into a satisfying lunch. Monday afternoon brought another unpleasant shock when M realized he had lost all the work he'd done the day before on his paper. Forget Friday the 13th, we got all our bad luck three days late. He spent the afternoon and evening and much of the night at school to rewrite what was lost, and by the time he was ready to come home, we were both ravenous. I made tangy tomato soup chicken again, once again with roasted potatoes. Our potatoes are getting soft, so it's important to use them while the using's good. I didn't have the onion soup mix, so I used garlic salt, onion powder, pepper, and a little bit of the pork fat I rendered off the ham. That stuff is versatile and flavorful, if not exactly healthy. It turned out just fine, especially once I poured the sauce from the chicken over top my portion. As usual, I made two extra chicken breasts for lunch the next day. We ate and watched four episodes of Star Trek all in a row, M's reward for hard work. Thanks, public library! 

The next day I went back to the yarn shop and knitted again while M fooled around in the house. He's got one more paper to write and an exam to proctor, but other than that he's  done for the term. And I didn't think I could take any more Star Trek for a little while. Lunch was tangy chicken sandwiches, where we cubed up the chicken breasts and put the pieces in a bowl, grated mozzarella cheese on top, and then microwaved it and put the hot mess on toast. It's very good. Supper was a very simple Tuna Helper that I dressed up with a bit of shredded cheese and the last of the sour cream. It was okay, but I've been cooking such nice stuff lately, it was anticlimactic. All food is good, though! 

Today was a busy day for me. We're hoping to leave Saturday for M's parents, which means a week-plus of not having to cook, but also the house needing to be cleaned for the petsitter. I spent much of the day doing laundry, because there was a ton. It's been well over a month since we last went to the laundromat, and even with my handwashing, it's hard to keep up. I finally gave in and went to the laundry room in our building. I've discovered an interesting property of our dryers. To start a dryer and do its default 45 minute cycle is 1.25. Ouch. But if the dryer is going, you can add time to it, and fifteen extra minutes only costs one quarter. I realized I could save a lot of money by A) not drying all the way, and B) gaming the dryer. When I finished loads in the washer, I tossed the wet clothes into a plastic bin next to the dryer, and every twenty minutes, put a new quarter and a new batch of clothes into the dryer. The damp clothes got hung up to dry. Between the spin cycle and the dryer, there was far less water in the clothes than if I'd handwashed, and each load cost 1.50 instead of 2.50 or more. What full load of clothes dries fully in 45 minutes, after all? There are clean clothes hanging everywhere in my house, from the doorway to the bathtub, but it was worth it. 

While I was doing all this laundry, I was also cooking, through the magic of crock-pot! It took two days to thaw my turkey breast in the fridge, and it still had an ice cube in the middle today. But a turkey breast has enough meat on it to see us all the way through the weekend, so it's perfect for our needs. I put it in with a stick of butter in the cavity, poured two cups of white wine over the top, and sprinkled the whole thing with minced onion. I was supposed to use a real onion, but I didn't have any. The lid also wouldn't go down all the way with the turkey breast in there, so I piked a couple towels on top. It did the trick. Because it needed seven hours to cook, we had a late lunch/lupper of chicken-bacon-artichoke pizza, a family favorite. A packaged pizza crust, ranch dressing sauce, dressed with one cooked and cubed chicken breast, chopped artichoke quarters, bacon bits, and mozzarella cheese. It was very satisfying and I was totally going to take a picture but I forgot. 

The turkey ended up being  finished around 8pm, after making the house smell extraordinary all afternoon. I'm sure the neighbors were envious. It was so tender that the breastbone slid right out when I tried to use it to remove the turkey from the pot. We had simple sandwiches of turkey and buttered bread, and it was great. Tomorrow I'm going to have to bake some bread, because we are all out. But I have big plans for this turkey. The overall plan may have failed, but that doesn't mean I'm going to give up. Now, more than ever, I need to get creative! 

March 9, the food and the failures

There is no growth without failure, and today was a very growing sort of day. Last night I found that our old half-gallon of milk had spoiled. I accidentally bought two gallons two weeks ago in a moment of forgetfulness, and two gallons in two weeks for two people is just too much. I didn't want to waste it though, so I went online to see what I could do with it. Someone suggested paneer, a soft Indian cheese that's usually pan fried and put into curry-type dishes. I figured why not try it? I wasn't sure it would work at all because my milk is skim and the recipe called for full fat, but the curds did separate when I boiled it and added vinegar, so I thought maybe it would work after all. I poured the whole boiled mess into a cotton napkin and tied it to the sink to hang, then squeezed and pressed it. It took quite awhile! At the end, though, I had a few ounces of something that looked like a cross between firm tofu and soggy styrofoam. It had no taste, and a very meaty texture, like something that hadn't cooked in the crockpot long enough. 

I refrigerated it overnight and tried to fry it up for lunch with soy and teriyaki sauce. It was very dry and chewy, not like cheese at all. I got about halfway through it before the epiphany hit: this is gross. I tossed the remaining paneer into the trash. Next time the milk goes bad, I will take the other suggestion I found and use it to water the outdoor plants. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? 

Half a paneer was not a good enough lunch, so I decided to try another experiment. My sister K told me that she likes to eat peanut butter and jelly faux-quesadillas from the quesadilla maker. I thought that sounded just weird enough to work. I had two tortilla shells aging in the fridge and figured I could use them up. I spread peanut butter and jelly on a shell, put another on top, and cooked them in the quesadilla maker (five dollars from Craigslist last summer). It smelled pretty good, but the shells were big and unwieldy, and I was silly enough to set the plate on the stove to try and cut it. My hand slipped, the plate slipped, the PBJdilla went flying, and I was out both a lunch and a plate from my wedding present set. Not happy. At this point, I decided I was no longer hungry, so I just cleaned up the mess and deserted the kitchen. 

I did another load of bathtub laundry, make an unreturned phonecall about a job, and gathered my nerve for supper. Once back in the kitchen, things started looking up again. I made penne and hotdog casserole, a variant on penne pasta casserole  where instead of browning ground beef and putting it in the sauce, I diced four hot dogs and tossed them in with the onions and garlic, then made the sauce. It's actually really good. I used up my half-boxes of rotini and penne for the noodles, and have plenty left for lunch tomorrow. 

Flush with success, I also made another batch of granola, this time subbing in the pine nuts M's mom sent me instead of sunflower seeds. Wicked expensive, but very tasty. It's the sort of thing I don't buy, but use with the utmost gratefulness when I can. My granola hasn't been clumping too well lately and I'm not sure why. Maybe not enough honey? It makes a great cereal that way, but is tougher to snack on. Honestly, that is probably better, since I am already pretty much addicted to the stuff. Anything that slows down my consumption is good.

Later on, while I was fiddling with the camera in the kitchen, Pookah came in to bother me. She knows where the food comes from around here, and is often underfoot when I'm trying to cook. Her assiduous efforts to eat everything on the floor have led me to increase my vacuuming and actually scrub the kitchen floor. She needs a home with clean people. Anyway, while she was begging, I took her picture. It surprised her.