Time heals all wounds.  Unless the wounds kill you first.  This didn't kill me but it certainly made me stand in one place for up to ten seconds feeling severely helpless.

I'm excited to report that I'm continuing this blog because there are too many people out there with kids working on one income trying to get by.

Make some cheap, non-crap food on a budget with time constraints that include but are not limited to sick time away from work, quality time with kids, and sleep.

Picture this.  A large pot.  A colander which is a container with holes in the bottom for draining and straining foods.  An additional colander inside that colander.  The idea is to separate food into one colander so it's easily removed.  But I didn't use the colander.  I used the pot.  And I usually use another pot to place the colander in to strain out the chicken parts for my broth.  But I didn't this time.  I just poured the chicken soup broth into the colander.

Yes.  That means the broth ran down the drain.  And I stood there for ten seconds wondering how we'll ever get back to the moon if someone fairly educated did what I just did.  Chicken broth vs. moon landing.  The same...but different.

The good news is that making chicken soup is really cheap, it can be frozen in little plastic bags (I double bag them), and taken to work for lunch.  Three weeks worth of work lunches.

-4 quarts of water

-3 stalks of celery roughly chopped

-10 garlic cloves cut in half

-1 onion quartered

-1/2 lb carrots roughly chopped

-3/8 cup (or 6 TBS) kosher salt

-2 tsp pepper

-fresh basil

-1 raw chicken

1-Seperate the skin from the chicken but don't pull it off.  Seriously now...stuff any kind of herb you want along with salt and pepper BETWEEN the skin and the chicken.  Put the chicken in a pan.  Season with salt, pepper, and olive oil.  Cover with tin foil and shove the bird into your oven at 375 for an hour.  If you pour your broth down the drain then repeat this step.

2-Separate the meat from the bones and chop the chicken up until it's bite size.  Refrigerate until the end of this.  After you have the chicken meat placed safely in the refrigerator, go buy more chicken parts in case you dump your broth down the drain and have to repeat step 2 also.

3- Bring your water to a boil, dump everything in the pot, bring to a boil for 30 minutes and then set to simmer for.....hours.  Four maybe.  Eight if you have to repeat step three if you dump your chicken broth down the drain.

4-Separate the veggies from the chicken parts and skim off anything that doesn't look like it should be eaten.  Use a colander.  Colanders are very dangerous.  They can ruin your life (for up to 10 seconds).  So be careful that when you pour the broth into the colander, there is ANOTHER POT TO CATCH THE BROTH.  If you do this correctly then you should have chicken broth to put chicken in.  If you do this incorrectly then you have chicken without broth.  I hope this is making sense.  I can't even ask if you want me to spell it out because this is not a video blog so it, by it's very definition, has already been spelled out.

5-After you have collected the edible parts (including the broth), throw the chicken into the broth.  Bag it and freeze it.

Spicy chopped

Phrases we say too often show us that our kids are, in fact, our kids.  Most of those phrases are followed with either “Where’d they pick up that?!” or “He’s/she’s your kid, isn’t he/she?”  What’s odd is that kids seem to learn how to use the phrases before they know what those phrases mean.

The 1-year-old tries to repeat everything he can.  Mostly “ma,” which I heard this morning when he really really didn’t want “ma” to go to work.  Other phrases he uses are Eete’ (EE-d-e), which I think means eat (which is why this is a part of this blog in the first place) and Alu (A-l-uh)…which could either mean “Communism has been tried already.” or…something else.  I’ll let you know.

The four-year-old prefaces announcements with “Hey daddy,” or “Hey mommy,” and follows it with “I’z gonna say’s that…” and continues from there.

The five-year-old suggested that we could stay home from church on church day and finished with “Just throwin’ that out there.”  He doesn’t know what that means.  But he knows how to use it.

So with these things in mind my wife and I have both put the breaks on Chopped.  I’ve discovered that, at the beginning while each contestant is bragging himself/herself up, phrases like “Don’t get in my way.” and “I’m gonna run right over them” are used too frequently. 

I’ve been using a recipe for a while now that I want to say is healthy but I’ll let you 5 be the judge of that.  It’s a hot wings recipe served with baked chicken instead of fried chicken wings served with rice.

Heat 2 Tbs butter and melt it in a medium sized pan.  Caramelize 2 cloves of garlic (pressed) and 1 large shallot.  Add the following – 1 cup chili sauce, 1/3 cup hot sauce, 1 cup BBQ sauce, ½ cup honey, ½  cup brown sugar (is this healthy yet?), and 1 Tbs chile powder.  Heat it up until it’s spitting (stirring so it doesn’t burn), then cover it on low heat and simmer for a while.

Salt and pepper your boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  Coat them in an unhealthy quantity of olive oil.  Put them in the oven for about 20 minutes.  When the tops look cooked, flip them and pour the sauce over them submerging them.  Bake for about another 20 minutes.  Serve with rice and blue cheese dressing on the side.

“Hey Daddy!   I’z gonna say’s that girls don’t like spicy things.  Except Kristy.”

“Sam do you like spicy things?”

“I think I’ve tried the spicy chicken at Panda Express and I think I’ve liked it I think.  This runs right over Panda Express.  Just throwin’ that out there.”

 “Eete’!”

mmmm....saaaaalad

Vinegar. Is there anything so tasty. Don’t drink it by itself. I love salad. It’s annoying to make though. What I’m about to tell you won’t look pretty but it will taste good. I’ve learned that green olives compliment cherry tomatoes extremely well. I love both but combined…well, let’s just say the rat in that pixar movie had it right. Combinations are key. That’s not what I was going to tell you.

A small bag of spinach.

A small bag of romaine and iceberg lettuce.

A bunch of cherry tomatoes.

Black olives.

Green olives.

Carrots.

The vinegar in the olives will coat the salad very nicely.

If you don’t finish the salad, then keep the following separate but add them for each serving.

A small handful of peperoncinis.

Extra sharp white cheddar cheese…you know that monster black block of cheese that’s $14 dollars? That one.  It'll last a while too.  You don't need much.  Apparently it's extra sharp.

1 cup oil
1/3+ fine red wine vinegar
1-2 pressed cloves of garlic
1 tsp salt
some ground black pepper
approximately 1 tsp of (ready?) "Penzey’s Spices Mural of Flavor"

Since almost no one actually has this on hand, the main ingredients are shallots, onion, garlic, lemon peel, citric acid, chives, orange peel and ummm…spices apparently.

I will be ordering this stuff by the truck load. It’s salt free which, of course, is great since the rest of the salad is probably sodium overloaded.

So this will be the most expensive salad you’ve ever made but it is SO tasty.

I don't know how to make food look good let alone make salad look good.  It there, mixed...I’d give myself a 1/5 on presentation on this. I only mention this because I know my kids have seen too many episodes of ‘Chopped’ (Food network cooking competition) when Sam runs into the kitchen excited to eat, realizes it’s not ready yet, his shoulders sag slightly, and then says, "Oh, it’s not even plated yet." Plated?!

My first potty

Ok you five…or you 2300 blog readers that haven’t had the courage to become a member. I’m very excited. This is it. I never had a "my first pony" but I certainly must have had my first potty. This is just like that but with food. It’s MY first recipe.

I have discovered that I use a highlighter and sometimes even rewrite a recipe because of the dynamics of cooking in MY kitchen versus cooking in, say, a food network kitchen the size of something very large. So I’ve rewritten this several times trying to make it more small-home-kitchen friendly.

So, read the list twice. The first time you’ll know what you need. The second time is how I prepped.

Here's my ingredients and prep work:
-2 bay leaves placed in bottom of pans with tin foil
-4 chicken breasts bone-in divided into 2s in each 10x13 pan
-5 medium cloves of garlic pressed in a bowlet
-4 tbs olive oil in a medium sauce pan
-1/4 cup balsamic vinegar (the no-name brand is fine…not sure I have the palate to know the difference between the 100 year-old kind and…the other kind)
-1/4 red onion finely chopped in a bowl with the red or yellow bell pepper
-1 red or yellow bell pepper (in with the onion) chopped into square centimeters
-2tsp garlic salt, 2tsp onion powder, 1tbs kosher salt, 1tsp fresh ground pepper mixed in a bowlet
-1tsp thyme, 1tsp oregano, 1tsp basil, 1tsp parsley (all dried herbs) mixed and placed in a bowlet
-1/2 cup half/half-a "handful" (I don’t know what that means either) of mint finely chopped and placed in a separate bowlet

Line things up the way they’re in the list. If you have a small kitchen, run hot water and rinse each bowl as you go.  This saves clean-up time and frustration with washing dishes later.

OLIVE OIL-Heat the pan to medium high with the olive oil.

GARLIC-The garlic goes in first. Don't burn it and at medium high this will only take a minute
to burn. Stir until slightly brown.

BALSAMIC-Within that first minute stir in the balsamic vinegar. It will spit at you. Hold your breath. It's
like taking a big breath of hot vinegar (because it’s vinegar and it’s hot). Maybe make sure your overhead fan is on...or the oxygen mask that deployed above you is securely over your head. The bag may not inflate
all the way. Put yours on first, then your pet.

ONION/PEPPER-Add this. It will take down the urgency to not burn the garlic. Stir.

GARLIC SALT MIX-Add this almost right after the previous. Keep stirring.

HERBS-Add these while you’re stirring. How's that O2 mask?

HALF/HALF-Add this now and turn down the heat to low. Keep stirring until it quits threatening
to burn. Let it simmer. Relax. It's over.

MINT-Add the mint about a minute before taking it off the burner completely and stir.

Divide the mix into two containers (or just pour the mixture over each piece of chicken making sure the
amounts are even). Coat the sides of the chicken.

Cover the chicken with another piece of tin foil.

Bake @ 400 for 110 minutes or for a shorter period of time if you’re spouse tells you it’s slightly overcooked.
Serve with cotton candy. Or not. Maybe rice and salad.

Different every time.

I once had a recipe for cream cheese potatoes.  Or cheesy potatoes.  Some kind of cheese with potatoes.  The point is I remember never being able to find the recipe in the book I was CERTAIN I’d cooked out of because I was in the section of potatoes and cheese.  So I must have started with one recipe and moved to another recipe in the middle of cooking.  That’s back when I didn’t have three carnival escapees running around to distract me.  I still don’t follow the recipe (any recipe?) below to the letter.

4 lb cooked potatoes

8 oz cream cheese – the fatty kind…the atherosclerosis kind (google it)

8 oz cheddar cheese – we can never have enough protein

1 cup sour cream – why is sour cream ok but bad milk not ok…I like the reflective question more than actually having an answer…

2 tsp onion salt – so uh…1 giant onion pureed does NOT equal 2 tablespoons of onion salt

1 tbs garlic salt – I thought about substituting 10 pressed garlic cloves for this

½ tsp pepper

4 tbs butter – I love butter…….I really love butter.

After I’d finished I remembered that we were going to have a whole bunch of college students over.  Apparently college students like big bowls of onion with some potato and cheese flavor.

Oh…ummm…mix all the ingredients together after peeling and boiling the potatoes.  It works best to mix everything when the potatoes are of lethal temperature.  Use a mixer.

I hate peeling potatoes.  I can’t even imagine not having a cutco peeler 200 years ago.  What kind of barbarism did they partake in to peel their potatoes?  Probably ate the skin and all…all those nutrients.

On death and...

One thing about cooking in a small space with most of the amenities of a big kitchen is that if something breaks, adjusting can be challenging.

We’ve had a microwave convection oven in our home (that is a very cozy basement for a family of five).  I say ‘had’ because it is no longer with us.  We’ll probably get another one but the one we have was made in Korea (North maybe?) and the one we want (now at least) is made in Japan.

The first time it broke was 1 week before the warranty ran out.  “Usually” the repair isn’t that bad but our gastro-pod (I’ve wanted to use that word for a while now) of a microwave made the repair man’s eyebrows raise (second worst sentence ever written).  The second time I called the repair man, he looked into the anatomy and physiology of the last time he repaired it and, after saying it was probably only going to cost $100 (for probably “just a burned out wire or something”), was quiet on the phone while he was reading…I don’t think he wanted to promise us anything after reviewing the first repair (first worse sentence ever written).

We paid the repair man $70 to tell us that, not only would he not recommend paying $300 to fix it, but it was a fire hazard to even have it be plugged in.  What a wonderful thing to hear living in a basement.  Our three giant egress windows are easy to climb out of and have an up-to-code-inspected ladder to climb out of too.  Two smoke detectors round out our safe living environment.

When you cook bacon without air ventilation the house smells like bacon.  I did NOT go to school to figure that out…I know by experience.  So I plugged our gastro-pod back in and turned on the fan.  After using it for about an hour I heard something.  I wish I could say it was a ‘pop’ or a ‘zzzipsh’ or a…well maybe not a ka-BOOM…but something I could describe.  I just heard a noise though.  And the digital numbers on the microwave went out.  It died I think.  If it didn’t die then it most certainly did after I unplugged, unscrewed it from the wall, carried it outside, and video-taped my kids hitting it with two-by-fours.

(This is not the forum to mention the brand but it starts with a G and ends with an E and all the reviews are 5/5 stars mentioning that it works great as a not-used-a-lot-second-oven-for-thanksgiving)

                                (The expression shows all of our sentiments.)

Not so pesto...

I printed out 5 recipes and bought food for all of them.

The potatoes are ready to be replanted with things growing on them.

The tomatoes, I hope, are not like bread – part of it is bad so the whole thing is.

The Shallot, hopefully, are like tomatoes…for all the same reasons.

And the onions.

I was surprised at how much attention I could put into cooking with another adult around to corral the children.  Rest assured that ropes were not used.  My wife was more of a sheep dog lightly nipping our children’s heels to move them in their appropriate directions.

Apparently in April 2, 2010, gold was worth $16310.37 per pound.  The internet told me that.  Pine nuts, currently, are $36 per pound.  I don’t know why I’m comparing them.  Maybe pine nuts just strike me as expensive so it helps to think of something more expensive.  So the internet also told me I can substitute slivered almonds…except when making pesto sauce.  Apparently I’m not supposed to make pesto sauce with dried herbs either.  I was told I can’t make it that way.  So I’m calling it something else.  Let me think about it.  In any case:

1 clove of garlic

2.5 TBS basil

some grated parmesan (I can’t remember)

olive oil (some?)

salt and pepper

lemon juice (from 1 lemon)

I actually used my mortar and pestle to grind the clove and the basil together.  The only other time I use this device is when I’m grinding pills for patients who can’t swallow whole ones.  They’re yummy.

Then, I made the pork chops. 

1 TBS thyme – it actually calls for a handful ground up…

salt and pepper

1 clove of garlic

lemon juice

1 TBS olive oil

4 pork chops

1 pesto recipe

I brushed the pork chops with the combination of ingredients above, then cooked them 4 minutes on each side.  Serve with pesto sauce that’s not actually pesto sauce.

So it was a party in my mouth but my wife said it was more like a dried up party where dry liquor means that there’s no liquor.  She asked me what the crunch was (the almonds) and then remembered the astronomical expense for buying gold…pine nuts…whatever.  She also said that that’s why you don’t use dried herbs.  I didn’t learn the lesson because of the party in my mouth.