In Praise of the Punt!

As some of you know, I went a little crock pot crazy last year. I got a crock pot cook book called Make it Fast Cook it Slow (and subsequently several other crock pot cookbooks) and I just went a little bananas using this amazing little contraption to make dinner out of bits and pieces. What crock pot cooking reminded me (because I have always considered a recipe a template rather than precise instructions) is the it's okay to punt. It's okay to use chocolate chips instead of raisins (they're both brown after all). It's okay to use mustard, soy sauce and any flavor of jelly to make a sauce for chicken or chops. It's okay to use rotini instead of linguini or rice instead of potatoes. It's okay to leave out stuff you don't like. And above all, it's okay if it doesn't turn out amazing. Sometimes it will.

Take my dinner tonight: I have four little pork chops that need to get cooked today. I have some salad dressing that we got for free at a food show and I have some fresh pears. I'm gonna cook those things together. If the flavor works once the meat is done then I'm good and if it doesn't I'll take the juice out and add some soy sauce or some mustard or some cinnamon to give it a little more umph! I'm not afraid because as far as I know this isn't anyone's last meal. It's just dinner and it might be really delicious dinner or it might be "let's not do that again"dinner and either way, it's going to be okay. So take a few chances. Get out your crock pot and start with some easy recipes (chicken, salsa, corn, black beans--cook, shred chicken with two forks and mix in cream cheese. Eat in tortillas. So. Flippin. Good.) and after you've tried a few of those, have an adventure! Go off the grid! Mix it up a little and feel free to punt! You've got my permission.

I'll be back with the results. Happy creative cooking!

The Mac Daddy of Mac-n-Cheese

I have discovered the most AMAZING trick for making killer mac-n-cheese EVER! No seriously. Trust me, I'm a fat girl, I know comfort food. First off I have to give credit where credit is due and the original idea came from here. So on with our cheesy epiphany. I must admit that I found the idea of cooking pasta in milk suspect and when I told Big Daddy about this, he thought I was crazy as well but my curiosity was piqued so I decided to try it out.

I didn't have macaroni on hand, but I did have some spirals so that's what I used. I filled a sauce pan about half full of 1% milk. I slowly brought it to a simmer and then added my box of spirals. I  simmered the milk for seven minutes to cook the pasta and that's when the magic happened. You see as pasta cooks, it releases starch into the pasta water. When you cook the pasta in milk, the starch is released into the milk thickening just like it would if you were adding corn starch or flour. So basically in the process of cooking the pasta, you're 2/3 of the way home on a bechamel sauce (a basic white sauce) which is the base sauce for mac-n-cheese. So after simmering for 7 minutes I had a nice thick milky sauce to which I added a couple of fists full of grated cheddar cheese and a three or so tablespoons of butter. Voila! Add a little salt and pepper and you've got some super creamy mac-n-cheese. But wait! you're thinking, I really love the crunchewiness of baked mac-n-cheese! Have no fear my possums, I do too. So then I take the whole delicious, creamy mess and put it in an oiled baking dish, throw a few breadcrumbs on it and bake at 375 until bubbly. Duuuuuuude, it turned out super delish! (If I do say so myself.)

Tuesday's Creation

These are some birthday cards I made. The colors are more vivid than it appears by my photo and there are also some sugary sparkles on the cupcakes that aren't very visible. I used my Cricut to cut the diecuts and then outlined them with a thin black marker to give it a more handmade look. The background of each card is a page from one of the books we use in my recovery program that I watercolored. (I'm making the cards to share with friends when they celebrate their recovery date anniversary.)

I love making cards and having some stockpiled because it's often challenging enough to get ourselves together without adding a run to buy cards, gift bags and tissue paper on celebration days. I also like to give handmade mostly because I can. It's a win/win, I get to enjoy my time making cute stuff and people really seem to appreciate the effort (and well, it's cheap too! The card blanks cost pennies and the rest of the stuff I already have!)

Today is Saint Patricks Day and as it is my first with this fine Irish sirname, I am going to boldly go where I've never gone before: I'm cooking corned beef and cabbage. My husband is delighted and I am not nearly so sure, but I'm using a recipe from Taste of Home. If you don't know about ToH and you like good food, you need to check it out. I fell in love with the magazine years ago because it had recipes from real people to make real food like the stuff at a church potluck. All the other magazines had recipes that required pans I didn't have, and spices I didn't have and ingredients I'd never used to make stuff that I wasn't sure I'd really like. So I'm off to fire up the crockpot and figure out what kind of yummy fun I can get into before Big Daddy gets home!

Yam-tastic!

Okay before I start any other blather, I really have to tell you about the sweet potatoes I made last night because they were killer. All I did was take two sweet potatoes and scrub them well. Then I took some butter and gave the sweet potatoes a massage. Then I mixed together 1 teaspoon of chili powder, 1 teaspoon of cumin and 1 teaspoon of sea salt (or kosher salt or what ever kind of cheffy kind of salt we have) and then I cover the sweet potatoes in the spicy stuff. Then I wrap them in waxed paper and nuked them for about eight or nine minutes (until I could squeeze them and feel the give). I cut those bad boys open and broke up the insides a bit with a fork and then I put lime juice inside. No butter, no fat grams, just lime juice. I really expected Big Daddy to give me a pat on the head for busting out the spices and getting an inch or two out of my comfort zone, but what I didn't expect was how freaking good it was going to be. Chef ate it skin and all while I just sort dragged each fork-ful through the chili seasoning. The lime juice just gave it this extra zing but you really don't notice that it's lime juice. It made the sweet potato sweet potato-ier. I busted out a little pork loin action and the daily tossed salad and doooood, when Big Daddy looked at me and said that was deeeeelish, I looked right back at him and said "I know."

For anyone who may not know, Big Daddy is a chef and while he will sputter and hem and haw about what he does right now and where he does it, make no mistake--from the tippy top of his big old mellon head to his tore up from the floor up feet, that man is a chef. Now a lot of people think that makes him a prissy eater or a kitchen snob--he is neither. He likes whatever he doesn't have to cook and we've got the same folgers coffee and uncle ben's rice mix that everyone else does. We shop at Kroger and Sprouts and occasionally very occasionally we go to Whole Foods and Market Street for something special because it's just too painful to spend two weeks in grocery bills on one meal. I can't remember anything I've made that he has not been kind about but cooking every day is a lot of pressure! I have trouble getting everything done at the same time or I get a little too ambitious and I wind up multitasking and over cooking a thing or two. There are LOTS of times when I'm completely uninspired and if I don't pay attention we'll eat pork four nights in a row or I'll do something mexican flavored for days and days and days. Then there's the battle with left-overs, I say it's a bonus if you eat stuff more than once, but Chef has a really hard time watching food go in the disposal. It causes him physical pain. All this to say that I feel inadequate in the kitchen often and I face that inadequacy five days a week. That is what I choose to do because I want to be a killer cook and the only way to become a killer cook is to practice practice practice.

I was never the house wifey type. I never made beds or stayed on top of the laundry. I cleaned when I felt like I had to and any request by a potential house guest was met with a very hesitant, "Well, I guess so." So this married thing and this stay at home thing is a completely new planet for me. For the first year and a half we were together, Big Daddy and I played show and tell as we got to know each other, but I already knew the things I was showing and telling. These days, I'm finding there are things I didn't know about myself that are being reveled through our relationship. It's a little alarming at times to realize that I am completely exposed with him and while I've always been a fairly open book, I've never been this open. I was talking to a girlfriend about it today and she said, "Oh yeah, you'll be learning tons of things you didn't know about yourself and each other for years (and years and years and years)." All I could think was, God I hope so.