I've got gas

Guess what I was doing at 12:35 am?  I was finishing my baking.  UGH!  We tried the oven one last time around 11:00 and it roared to life!  I quickly slid in my pans, not wanting to waste our good fortune of the oven getting hot.  The timer went off and I went to take my pans out and I am NOT amused!  Some of the items are a tad bit overdone, OK burnt in the corners and bottom.  I do not know if we had a surge last night as all the need for dinner cooking was over, or because our oven has been temperamental for the last 4 years.  All the work, all the tries to get the oven going and now this.  I decide to deal with it in the morning and let everything cool overnight.


I head to bed tired with my shirt covered in pumpkin and a very messy kitchen.  First thing hubby says is what's burning? NOTHING I say!  He insists that he smells something burning...where was that burned food sniffing nose of his 30 minutes ago?  I tell him that everything is fine and to go back to sleep.  Well he is not letting this go, as 20 minutes later he asks again if something is burning.  Good God man, GO TO SLEEP!  I sniff and can not detect the slightest whiff of anything burned.  This could be because my sniffer has been in the kitchen all day with onions, garlic, cloves, cayenne, and dish soap.  


I wake up to hubby trying to wrangle the dishes into a manageable pile to wash and load into the dishwasher.  I tell him I will do the dishes and start sudsing up.  He says what am I going to do with all this food.  I tell him that I am going to wrap some up and put it in the freezer.  He says what about the burnt stuff?  He says that he even got up in the middle of the night to come check things out in the kitchen because a burning smell kept waking him up.  I am so going to hurt this man (I kid)!  I get the dishwasher going and turn to the pile o' baked goods.  The applesauce cake is good as is, no burned anything!  I cut it up into squares for freezing and eating now.  I turn to the pumpkin cake that I made in round cake pans.  I am beginning to really dislike these pans, as it is a dark grey teflon that always seems to burn everything.  Everything else I made in the Pyrex type dishes was just fine.  I pop the cakes out and one has two burn marks and the other two I just had to cut a tiny piece or two off.  I wrap them up for the freezer and hubby says did you cut off the burned part?  Really buddy?  It is a small extra dark piece of cake you are getting all worked up about.     


I made a beautiful pan of juicy peach cobbler and HATE it!  The crust tastes too much like flour to me and is disappointing.  I do not know if this is because the nice dollops of topping became one large mass from sitting on the counter until the oven was working, or if it is a not good topping recipe.  I have tried many many topping recipes and even Paula Deen's recipe was not good to me.  If you have a tried and true crunchy flavorful cobbler topping recipe, I sure would appreciate it if you could share it with me.


I have decided to put the whole John Brooks shopping fiasco behind me and start on getting my stuffed peppers and chicken cacciatore (I am going to use this recipe instead)  assembled, so I can be done in the kitchen.  I open the fridge to get the chicken out and it is missing.  How does a vacuum packed bag of chicken legs and thighs disappear?  I look thru the fridge, I look on the counter and I even look in the trash.  They are nowhere to be found.  Hubby comes in from the back patio (where the grill is) and says, "Lunch is ready, who wants some chicken?"  It is going to be a long long month!  

Ice cream sandwich for dinner, Dove bar for dessert

Picture if you will....I am in the kitchen mixing and measuring and then IT happens!  Hubby comes walking in from the garage and he is not alone, nope he has company.  It is company that I know and they are not welcome, not at all!  I hear that familiar crinkle, the noise that this company makes.  Hubby has brought home, get ready for it, four grocery bags from John Brooks!  WHY I screeched....why did you do this?  We are FOUR days in and YOU have blown the no buy for February challenge.  Hubby says, but...I cut him off saying I have been working hard in the kitchen all day prepping and using what is on hand to make meals for the week, and four days in, you have groceries???!!!  Hubby says that he stopped to buy some BBQ sauce that his friend makes and is finally in the stores, a long 7 years later.  I can understand supporting your friend, and Hubby REALLY supported him with 8 bottles of the BBQ sauce.  Then like a kid at Christmas, proceeds to show me what else he bought:  


1. We have a box full of 20 individually wrapped Dallas Cowboy plastic silverware sets, napkin included and big blue Cowboy star on the plastic wrap of each set of silverware.  AND they are not even in the Superbowl this Sunday!


2. 2 plastic jars of Clamato juice.  


3. A six pack of hot and spicy V8.  Makes perfect sense, as the 42 cans of V8 that we have on hand are not the hot and spicy kind and the 8 jars of Hot Sauce could not remedy that situation....UGH


4. 2 packs of 100 count paper plates.  WHY?  Because you can't use the foam ones in the microwave.  I had these hidden in the back of a cabinet  from another foray to the store on his own.


5. A box of ice cream sandwiches.  We have no ice cream in the house says hubby.  I open freezer and point to a 1/2 gallon right there and in a voice a tad high pitched say we have the ice cream maker that I got for Christmas just waiting to be used.  Oh I forgot he says.  This is were my right eye starts to twitch.


6. A box of Dove bars.  We are apparently on the verge of an ice cream shortage and needed to stock up.  


7. A produce bag with 6 Roma tomatoes.


I am fuming, getting ready to put the last thing in the oven when Hubby says what's for Dinner, I'm starving?  I say that we are having baked potatoes with broccoli and cheese, a steak, and a salad.  For dessert there will be peach cobbler or the applesauce cake.  I open the oven door to slide my dishes in and to check on the potatoes that I have in there.  I stop mid slide!  The oven is not working, it is warm at best!  I can touch the racks in there and not have to move my hand.  This is NOT good!  My eye is twitching away.  I am close to tears, looking at all the contraband on the counter and my 4 dishes to go in the oven.  Hubby says he will take a look, so I gladly leave the kitchen and come sit at my laptop.


There is banging, and moving and cussing, and banging , and metal scraping metal.  I am taking comfort in the tap tap tap of my nails on the keys of my laptop, while trying to block out the fiasco in the kitchen. Hubby asks me if I spilled anything on the stove top that would prevent the gas from coming thru and being lit. Really?  He then turns down the heat in the house thinking that it wont light due to the temp in the house.  For real?  He then tells me that it is the pot of water I have on the stove top, it has to cool.  OK, it should be cool, that was 7 hours ago.  Oh really he says.  We have both tried to warm up the oven for the past hour and we are not achieving our goal.  I am sitting here remembering when we were dating and he told me that there was nothing that he couldn't fix. Well for tonight his name is liar liar, pants on fire, tomorrow he will go back to being Rick.


Long story short...Hubby and son are having steak, on paper plates, and using the plastic silverware, and a plain nuked potato.  They had better use that @#$%^& BBQ sauce!  I, my friends am having an ice cream sandwich for dinner and a Dove bar for dessert!  Screw it!  If you can't beat em, join em!


I am going to wrap up my ooey gooey not cooked yummies and put them in the working fridge and troll on line looking for a new oven with one hand, and an ice cream sandwich in the other! Stay tuned for edge of your seat details...


Tomorrow is another day. AMEN to that!

Cook it once, eat it many times

Well here I am, second day in a row... a new record for me!  I have been taking stock of what I have in the pantry and seeing how I can cook once, use multiple times.  I have pureed tomatoes, diced tomatoes and tomato paste (all organic) and all the spices needed to make a spaghetti sauce that I can use for spaghetti and meatballs, chicken cacciatore and two lasagna's, one veggie and one meat and stuffed green peppers (to use up the cup of brown rice in the fridge).   I plan to at least double this as I am making a few meals based on this sauce. I just found frozen ricotta and mozzarella cheese in the garage freezer and while there, I pulled out some chicken thighs and legs.  I am going to make the "spaghetti" sauce in the crockpot so I do not have to watch it all day.  I have some meatballs in the freezer, so no need to make new and I will just chop up some of them to add to the meat lasagna along with a small piece of sausage I also found in the freezer.  I also saved the pasta water I used at lunch to use again for the lasagna noodles

Meals for Today:

Breakfast: 

There was no breakfast, we slept right thru it!  We got the call yesterday that there was no school again today, so we stayed up really really late and slept really really late!

Lunch:

We were ready for lunch!  I chopped up some carrots, bell peppers, onion, chopped garlic and  threw in some frozen TJ's corn and broccoli.  I sauteed all the veggies in about a T. of olive oil and added some paprika, mustard powder, kosher salt, and balsamic vinegar when it was hot.  I added a little bit of heavy cream and parmesan cheese and let it get thick and then added the pasta along with a little pasta water and it makes a very creamy and yummy sauce.  I always make a bunch of this as I will eat it for a few days.

Dinner:

We have not had dinner yet, my lunch dishes are still all over the counter,  and I am still chewing as I type this.  I have a steak thawed in the fridge and this will be cooked on the grill* outside. I have about 20 lbs of potatoes, so broccoli cheese potatoes seem like a good and yummy choice to add.  I will also use the last of the apple sauce tonight for dinner.  I will eat my pasta made for lunch, a salad with my champagne dijon dressing.

Baked yummies:

Last night I made the Applesauce Cake and this morning there is the equivalent of an applesauce muffin left!  I am going to make another applesauce cake in addition to a Pumpkin one.  I have cans of pumpkin from December that I had planned to use to make pumpkin pies and never got around to it.  I will also make a peach cobbler out of some canned peaches we have since I want to make the best use of the oven while it is baking away.  Hopefully some of this will make it to the freezer before Hoover and Son find them.  Hubby says if food disappears, it was very good and I should take it as a compliment, so I did.

*We grill all year long and have 2 grills, one is Hubby's for all the meat items and the 2nd is mine for fruits, veggies, and veggie burgers.  Yes this may seem a bit odd, however I do not eat anything with a face or a family and cooking my veggies next to a sizzling cow loses its appeal to me. 

Eating from the Pantry

I belong to this fantastic on line group called thecompact . There are over 10,000 members from all over the world, with most of us residing all across the United states.  The Compact has really helped me take a look at my consumerism and see where changes can be made AND how to implement them.  I have made a lot of changes and have many more to go, this is a lifetime commitment!  This group is great with coming up with challenges and throwing them out there for anyone of us to try our hand at.  I decided to do my own challenge for the month of February. Hubby decluttered the garage and now we are able to get to the fridge and freezer.  We opened them up and boy oh boy do we ever have some food!  There is no need to go shopping (the exception will be fresh fruits and vegetables) this month and possibly into the next month.  I am going to spend some time making things from what we have on hand, forgoing running to the store for over processed unhealthy chemically enhanced "food".  The food we buy will be as local and organic as possible and a wide variety of colors.  I will be posting my meals and recipes and towards the end of the month, especially, there could be some very interesting meals being made and eaten.


 I had not thought to keep track of what I made and thanks to Julia for suggesting we post what we make, so we can share ideas. I am not remembering everything that I made (and only 3 days in), so I will start tonight with the Applesauce Cake from things we had on hand in the pantry.  It took a few minutes and was a welcome treat on a cold night.  I try to stick to the original recipe the first time I make something, however Hubby is allergic to nuts, so I omitted the nuts and the nutmeg and added a bit more ground cloves.  When I make this again I might make a "sauce" for the top and/or add some apple pieces to the batter.