Tag: Food

Recipes, food pictures, food adventures

Wednesday Wonders

Wednesday Wonders

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So, here’s something for you. I started writing this post a few days ago, and it didn’t get saved somehow. Not one lick of the spectacularness was saved, though you know it’s supposed to save every few minutes. It’s just gone from the list.

It was pretty funny too, considering it was about food. I usually try to save those for the Sunday Dinner post, but I made it Sunday night and I was pretty tired.

Anyway…

I have a love/hate relationship with brown rice. The hate part is that I’ve cooked it correctly maybe 3 times since I learned if its existence.

One of those times was on Sunday. Sunday was a weird day. We went and got some stuff to finish the chicken coop run. Then I went outside to pull weeds. See, the Mister said he felt like having a bonfire, but the backyard looks like the jungle from Tarzan or the Jungle Book. All these damn bushes, some as tall as I am, and 98% of them are part of a family of trees that I am known to be allergic to, so if I go out bare armed or start pulling weeds without gloves on, I get itchy. Not a good itchy that can be helped by a couple of scratches across it. No, it’s a burning itch. Like that has me in the bathroom washing up to my elbows. Its unpleasant.

You can imagine then how I felt when I had been outside pulling weeds for a while, and the person who wanted to start a fire in the yard and needed the weeds cleared out was in the house sitting on his ass.

I made sure he knew what was up and I went out and pulled weeds in the garden bed. Which by the way is growing vegetables, people! And melons! It’s crazy how I haven’t managed to make it look like the earth had been salted back there.

By the end of the day, his hands have blisters and I can barely stand up my back hurts so much. But, I had a plan. See, my friend, Sharon posted the other day about having empanadas, and that of course made me want some.

I went back into the house and started cooking. Everything was going good, until I realized I hadn’t bought any cilantro. Thankfully, I had some growing in front, so I basically decimated my entire crop for dinner.

Like, I said I was barely able to stand, so I said screw it, I’ll just not make empanadas, we’ll have the meat and tortillas and voila!

Except that my daughter has eaten us out of tortillas. Like there were two left. During the summer, it was easy, she’d hang out in her room and forget to eat lunch. Now, she’s out here every morning like she’s Julia Child cooking up some kind of something. And she has deemed that lunchtime is now anytime between noon and whatever time it is when mom starts yelling at your for getting something to eat because it’s almost time for dinner.

I wasn’t a loss. The only thing I could think of was arroz con gandules, but I dont have all the stuff for that and over an hour round trip to the store was not happening. So, I improvised. And it turned out pretty well.

Here’s what you need:

2 cups uncooked brown rice

3.5 cups water or chicken broth

1 can Goya gandules

2 packets Goya Sazon

1 can Rotel Mexican style tomatoes

2 tbsp cumin

Put everything in the electric pressure cooker/instant pot. Cook at normal rice setting.

I let the pressure go down without venting. I find that most times this is best with rice.

This was some of the best brown rice I’ve ever made.

I had zero hope that it would turn out good at all, so I dont have pictures and there was hardly anything left, so I guess it must have been liked by everyone.

Of course after this gets posted the other one I was working on before that disappeared, is now showing up on the list.

Wednesday Wonders

Wednesday Wonders

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Its Wednesday again!

It’s been absolutely crazy at home!

My garden is flourishing and before long, we’ll be eating home grown fresh vegetables!

I’m very excited. My bell peppers finally got planted and they’re already sprouting.

My daughter was amazed at my corn.

Since she has a lot of extracurriculars, or at least a lot of stuff going on for them, I decided that since I was already going to be outside watering and tending the vegetables, I’d just go ahead and take over feeding the animals. Right now its just the three goats, but we have a chicken coop that only needs a run and then we’ll also have chickens.

As far as the ‘side hustle’, I made my first sale in the Etsy shop! So I’m hopeful that’ll pick up soon. I went a little crazy when I got to go to a Joann’s, but I found some really great charms for stitch markers.

The shop in town where I sell finished items is going pretty well. Last time I was in there, the two blankets were gone, so that’s hopeful. I finished a baby blanket this morning that I’ll bring to the shop today or tomorrow. It’s in school colors, whichbare blue and white. A lot of the logos I see also have grey, so I added that in there too.

While that is washed and dried, I picked up my raised waffled square blanket. I haven’t touched it in quite a while and I need to get it done sooner rather than later.

My wonder for today is my husband. Yesterday, the first day he was going to be getting home before dark had set in, he had to pull over and call the police. He called me and told me that, then he told me that there were 2 little girls playing on the highway with a dog. These were very young girls and who knows how many people drove past without stopping before my hubby got there. The girls were apparently at their grandma’s house and wanted to go home. The town they live in is 30 minutes from my house in the car.

So, kudos to my husband for being the person who was kind enough to stop and help get those kids somewhere safe.

Sunday Dinner, Uncategorized

Sunday Dinner

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Here we are again and it’s time for dinner!Tonight, we took it easy and I had everyone make their own sandwiches.Because I don’t want to spend a month buying or making bread, I got some sub rolls, and decided to make some pasta salad.Since the husband and I are both overweight, we are trying to be careful with what we eat, I wanted it to be delicious and tasty.We spoke today about cutting out things like white bread and rice, etc.I have really been thinking about pasta salad, though, so I decided I’d make it with whole wheat pasta.Here’s what you’ll need:

1 package whole wheat rotini pasta

1/2 bunch asparagus chopped

3-4 green onions, chopped

Cherry tomatoes, halved

2 carrots chopped

3-4 cloves garlic, diced

6 leaves basil, chopped

1/2 C dressing

Here’s what I did:

Boil pasta according to package directions, drain and rinse with cool water. Set aside.

While pasta is cooking, heat up a little olive oil in a skillet, saute vegetables and garlic for a few minutes, season to your liking. I used fresh ground pepper, dried basil. Mix vegetables with pasta and add your dressing.

In addition, I really wanted some peaches and mangoes. So I grabbed a bunch of peaches and a mango. My daughter and I are the only ones that’ll eat the mangoes, so I just got one. I cut up the mango, 1 peach and a bunch of strawberries. Just mixed them up. I didn’t add any sugar or sauce.

Uncategorized

Sunday Dinner

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I was going to start by saying, “I like to cook”, but honestly sometimes cooking is a pain.There are days when I take a specific thing out for dinner with the hope that my husband will grill it.There are days when the kids request something and I would rather repeat third grade with Miss Lacey than cook what they ask for. Heck, there are days I don’t even want to cook what I’ve been wanting to eat for dinner all day long.Then there are days like today. We have chicken breasts and chicken thighs. So we just had to decide how we wanted it cooked.All day long, I was thinking my husband would grill it. That totally would have happened if not for the fact that the wind was pretty bad.The fact that we spent the better part of the day digging holes (and falling in one), and dropping posts to replace the gate on the goat pen didn’t help matters any.I bought a box of Corn Flakes yesterday. We are talking Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The almost $4 size box.I joked with my daughter that it was for cooking, as normally, whichever child is with me gets to choose the cereal. We get two bags, the Malt O Meal bags, and one has to be something that isnt rainbow fruit cereal. Yesterday there were two with me. My only stipulation was that we could not get the peanut butter cereal.When I got the cereal, I thought I’d use it to make fried chicken.Well… that’s what I made. Oven Fried Chicken. It was gooood!

Here’s what I used: (keep in mind I’m feeding 3 grown men, my 17.5 year old daughter and myself)

1 pack chicken drumsticks (there were 16 in the pack I made)

2.5-3 c Corn Flakes

1 c Flavored bread crumbs

Garlic Powder

Dried minced onion

Salt and pepper

A gallon sized freezer bag that you can close really well.

Heat oven to 400°

Prepare a 9×13″ pan by spraying with the cooking spray of your choice. Alternatively, you could also use butter, just melt it a little in the pan.

Place the Corn Flakes in the plastic bag. Crush the flakes. I used a rolling pin.

Add bread crumbs and seasonings. I don’t really measure, but I probably used about a tbsp of the onion and garlic and maybe a tsp of salt and pepper. Mix it all together

Crack the eggs into a bowl and mix them up. Dredge the chicken in the egg mix and then place in the bag with corn flakes mixture. I put about half in the bag then shook it up to coat the chicken pieces. Arrange chicken pieces in the pan. Repeat for remaining pieces. Cook chicken at 400° for 40 minutes, turn chicken and continue to cook for approximately 20-30 minutes.