Don't Try This At Home

Well.

Another crappy dinner served up the other night.

I go to the Goodwill bookstore down the road once a week or so, cause I don't want to miss out on any bargain books. They did just raise their prices recently and now a hardback book costs an outrageous $1.29! Anyway, I like to look through all the little cookbooklets like you find at the grocery store checkouts, with the mouth watering pictures of delicious dinners on the front to lure you in, the little cookbooklets that cost like $4.95 and never fail in suckering me in and buying them. But, at the Goodwill, they are only 29c (recently raised from 25c, the nerve!) and then I take them all home and look through them to pull out recipes that I might someday try. Not that I like to cook, I think we all know how much I really dislike cooking, but I do enjoy looking at cookbooks, as long as they have pictures, I don't like cookbooks with no pictures of how your food is supposed to look but never does. Kind of like the picture menu at your local fast food restaurant, your hamburger never looks quite as appealing when you unwrap it.

Anyway, I found this little cookbook compiled by home economics teachers, which I thought they got rid of a long time ago, but apparently somewhere in America they are still teaching cooking in 7th grade. The book promised recipes that use only 5 ingredients. So, I tried one.

If anyone ever tells you to take some boneless chicken breasts, roll them in flour and seasoning salt, fry them a little on each side, put them in a baking pan and put a mixture of sour cream and cream of chicken soup on top, bake, and then top with cheddar cheese and bake a bit longer, DON'T BELIEVE THEM THAT THIS RECIPE IS SO GOOD IT WAS SERVED AT A BRIDAL SHOWER AND EVERYONE LOVED IT. Because it is just not true.

But, I did try a make it your way soup recipe last night and it was actually edible and something I might make again. I do like soup sometimes but do not like canned soup, way too high in sodium and the meats in canned soup are always weird and I wonder what part of the cow or chicken it actually comes from. Homemade soup is not hard but it does mean cooking, but this recipe was fairly easy and kind of foolproof because you can use whatever you happen to have hiding away in the backs of cupboards and refrigerators.

So, you choose a meat, like chicken, pork, beef, ground meats, whatever, and you cut it up if necessary and cook it in a little oil in your soup pot until done, remove it, and then you:

Put in whatever vegetables you want, carrots, potato, zucchini, chopped up of course, and cook that for 5 minutes or so in a little oil until crisp/tender or whatever.

Then you put the meat back in and add either a 32 oz carton of beef or chicken broth, depending on the meat used, half of a 6 oz can of tomato paste, a packet of onion soup mix, and 1/2 tsp of your choice of dried herb, the suggestions in the recipe being rosemary, oregano, basil, italian seasoning, or crushed red pepper.

Bring all that to boiling over high heat and then reduce heat and simmer covered, for 15 minutes or so, or until any stubborn vegetables are done. Then add your choice of some canned beans, like kidney, black, navy, whatever, rinsed and drained, or some cooked barley, rice, or pasta.

Keep simmering a little longer until your beans or whatever are warmed up, add some salt and pepper if you want, and the soup is ready.

Here is the actual ingredient list and amounts in case I forgot something:
2 tbsp veg oil
8 oz meat
3 cups chopped veg
32 oz carton broth
1/2 6 oz can tomato paste
1 packet onion soup mix- packet size is 1 oz, you know the Lipton soup mix.
1/2 tsp dried herb
1 cup beans, pasta, or rice.

Another Fail

I've been trying some new recipes lately with most of them coming out, well...crappy, inedible, flavorless, just plain old yucky. Maybe it's because the books that I'm using are the cheap how to save money on groceries books? I don't know, but I tried one out of the new book I got last week, the 5.00 dinner book, and it sounded good in print, but was definitely not good on our forks.

The recipe was for baked chicken with acorn squash, very easy to fix, just put bone in chicken breasts in a baking pan with some orange juice, rosemary, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Then you peel and chop up an acorn squash, put it in the pan, sprinkle with a little brown sugar, and bake it alongside the chicken for an hour or so. The chicken tasted like chicken, nothing special, but the acorn squash was absolutely inedible. Something about putting it in orange juice made it taste really bitter and tart. So that recipe was a total bust.

I did make some really good cookies, though. I got a bag of whole wheat flour and there was a recipe on the bag for whole wheat chocolate chip cookies. I didn't have any chocolate chips but did have a bag of white 'chocolate' chips so used those instead, and used splenda instead of the sugar, and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter sticks instead of real butter, the calories in the fake butter is the same as real butter but the fat content is about half. So with whole wheat flour and splenda we can pretend that these cookies are really healthy!

Here's the recipe:

3/4 cup granulated sugar (or splenda)
3/4 cup packed brown sugar ( or splenda brown sugar blend)
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 bag (12 oz) chocolate chips (2 cups)- I think I only used 1 cup of the white chips and the cookies are plenty chippy, just put in however many of whatever you want. M&M's would probably taste good, too. Or butterscotch chips. Or whatever.

1/ Heat oven to 375. In large bowl, stir sugars, butter, vanilla, and egg until well blended. Stir in flour, baking soda and salt (dough will be stiff). Stir in chocolate chips.
2/ On ungreased cookie sheets, drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls about 2" apart.
3/ Bake 8-10 minutes or until light brown (centers will be soft). Cool slightly, remove from cookie sheets to cooling racks.
Makes 3 dozen.

I don't know what got into me to actually make cookies yesterday, but I was in a kitchen kind of mood and had been in there cleaning after I had gone to the grocery store. And cookies sounded good. And they were.

Cheaper?

Is it about the same price for the two of us to go out to eat or fix something at home? I really don't like to cook anymore, it's boring and makes a big mess that you have to clean up, and I really don't like to shop for the food to cook with anymore, its boring and makes a big mess that you have to clean up when you bring all those grocery bags in.

So, yesterday I went to Vons for the ingredients for southwestern chicken salad, and yes, I know it would be cheaper if I cooked my own chicken and shredded my own cheese, and chopped up my own lettuce, and cooked my own beans from dried, and grew my own corn-BUT I don't WANT to!

So, by the time I bought packaged southwestern chicken strips, canned corn and black beans, shredded cheese, bagged salad, grape tomatoes, tortilla chips, some coffee creamer and a People magazine-my weekly addiction-it came out to $35.00.

And, instead of fixing the salad for last night's dinner, we went down the road to Spencers Restaurant and each had a big salad, Keith had 2 beers, I had iced tea, and Keith also had an appetizer of a cheese quesadilla, and it came to-you guessed it-$35.00. (plus a $5.00 tip)

So, for about the same price and no work, you get dinner for two complete with a free homemade cookie for dessert (or ice cream), and since this is a locally owned restaurant we are helping the local economy by patronizing them.
See, I can justify eating out EVERY DAY NOW!!

Tonight we will have the southwestern chicken salad, though. Even though I will not enjoy fixing it or cleaning up after it.

I Really Hate Grocery Shopping...and cooking

Today we absolutely had to go to the grocery store since I was almost out of my french vanilla flavored creamer and can't have my coffee or tea without it. I know the fake creamers are not good for you but I just don't care, nothing makes my tea and coffee taste as good. So, off to Vons even though they are a little more expensive, they have a Starbucks inside and some Starbucks can help make grocery shopping a little more endurable.
Since I really hate to cook and our kitchen is still torn up waiting for a new floor and I really don't want to spend any more time than absolutely necessary in it, of course we end up buying a lot of ready to cook frozen stuff.
Here is the absolute in hate to cook, want to eat now, want it as easy as possible food:
Fully cooked microwaveable hamburgers and 4 minute microwave french fries!!! This is about as easy as it gets, folks!
Okay, well, going to McDonalds may be easier, but you have to actually leave the house for that. These frozen burgers are right there in your freezer ready to pop in the microwave and eat in about 2 minutes! And they actually taste pretty good! Now, the french fries leave a little to be desired, they kind of taste like the ones at McDonalds that have been sitting under the heat lamp for a few hours. Those I won't buy again.

After about 150.00 and an hour or so, we got back home and put all the food away. Then my husband opens the refrigerator looking for something to eat and of course says 'there's nothing to eat!'

We both want to live in the future like the Jetsons where you just push a few buttons and a fully cooked meal of your choice pops out of the wall. The ultimate in laziness. And we need the robot too!