Cooking without a net!

(By which I mean recipe.)
Today I was headed to campus to get some books, and I decided to stop off at the store and see what kind of produce was on sale. (The good way to do this, for people who need lists to handle grocery stores: Go look with no intention of buying, leave, make a plan, go back later.) I picked up some zucchini and yellow squash, as well as some vine-ripened tomatoes, a lime, and some fresh basil. All these things were on sale except the lime, which was 33 cents anyway. I also picked up some fresh-baked French bread and a wedge of parmesan cheese. I smushed together some recipes from the internet, and the result is that I'm now slow-roasting some tomatoes in olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic, on 250. Not sure when I'm going to take it out - I'll check on it in a couple of hours. After that, I'm going to put the tomatoes with some parmesan and fresh basil on the French bread. I think that'll be nice. The smells are already pretty good - I don't know how I'm going to wait!

Cleaning and rice

Well, yesterday, along with all the cooking, I finished unpacking from my trip, did some laundry, swept the floor, dusted my desk, and did all my dishes save the one pan I used to brown up some lightly seasoned ground beef for freezing. I also finished a book and read a really fascinating article, and took down summaries of them for easy access later. Oh, and I dealt with a suitcase and box full of assorted junk that was left over from my last move, and put my pills for the week in my counter, and found an important document I was looking for, and contacted the post office to notify them that my mail seems not to be coming. (Whew!) This morning, so far, I've taken out the garbage, fixed my calendar, and swept the floor again. My apartment is pretty tidy now, although I still have some dusting to do.

Today's cooking adventure is rice in the new rice cooker! Gramma and Papa bought me a rice cooker to replace the one from my mom that I accidentally left at my old landlady's house, and that I didn't want to get back because she freaks me out. So I opened it, washed everything as I was supposed to, and started some white rice with chicken broth, pepper, garlic, and half a jalapeño pepper. I'm waiting for that. I think it'll be nice. It smells good, anyway. I plan on draining a can of black beans and mixing that in, then adding some sharp cheddar and putting it in a burrito. The original plan was to make a stuffed bell pepper, but since all the instructions for that want me to use a glass baking dish, I decided to just roast up this bell pepper (later today!) and work on the stuffed ones later once I have money and can buy myself a nice dish to use.

I'll tell you how it goes!
******
Oh. My. God. The rice is perfect. I just remembered I'd left out that I also added a splash of olive oil - which I think really improves the taste and texture.  I had a rice, bean, and cheese burrito, and froze the rest in tiny ziploc bags smushed flat so that they would freeze quickly (according to the internet, there is some danger of Bacillus cereus in reheating leftover rice, but it is ameliorated by rapid cooling).

Wow, that was a long hiatus!

Sorry about that - I guess I wasn't up to adulting for the last 8 months(!!!!?!). I've moved house again and am now comfortably settled. Today, my first day back in my apartment in a long while, I've been working on making some tasty foods for freezing and using later. The first freezer food: Shredded spicy crockpot chicken. Here's the recipe:

Long weekend cooking

Well, knowing that I don't have to go to class on Monday and can use that for work time, I went to bed yesterday as soon as I got tired and slept as many hours as my body wanted to. This morning I inexplicably woke up at 8 and was just ready to go, so I went and started washing dishes and cutting up potatoes...

Ingredients:

1 cup dry navy beans, soaked overnight
2 smoked ham hocks
4 chopped up potatoes
around 2 cups of frozen ham and bean broth from when I made navy beans and ham last time
a bit of minced garlic (minced with my garlic twist, actually! thanks, Tyler!)
pepper

So, I was really excited about going to my very first neighborhood butcher shop ever. But I was also anxious about it, because I've never been in one before. It seemed very advanced, cooking-wise, and also potentially very loud. Because ham bones are sort of waste, and probably a lot of them get thrown away, I thought I was being helpful and resourceful to want to buy them and use them up.

So I made this whole plan about how when I got home from classes I was going to stop at the butcher shop and then go home and soak the beans and so on and then I could start the soup in the morning. I got off the bus, walked to the butcher shop... which, it turns out, is closed. Sadface. Being a little disappointed, I walked over to the grocery store, and they turned out to have smoked ham hocks, so that's okay too.
 
So I put those in the crockpot, along with the leftover ham and bean broth, the navy beans, and a lot of water. Then I cut up some of my potatoes, which I'm hoping will thicken the broth even further and maybe have some delicious potato chunks still in there. I got everything all in the crockpot, turned it to high, and it's been in there since then. I'm very excited. It smells yummy. I want to eat it now! (Well, until I go look at it and realize it's not even close to done. But still.)

Now, time for eating lunch and then actually doing work!

Soup addendum: At the suggestion of some of my friends, I've also crumbled up some leftover stale bread into the soup, which apparently will result in thickening the soup further, as well as reducing waste. Hurray!

Back to blogging

So, I'm back!

In big important adulting news, I recently discovered that the house I'm living in is being sold. It's pretty crushing for me, because I have finally managed to settle in here in such a way that I feel comfortable and can be productive and can use the kitchen, and I am worried that I won't be able to find another place to live alone that I can afford. I've emailed the current owners of the house asking whether it might be possible for me to rent from the buyers, but they are at a very early stage of the process and probably will not know for a while yet. I'm trying to emotionally prepare, but I haven't started looking for a new place yet. I'm trying to get my little house in order at least, because people will be coming in, but I lost a few days of work due to the stress of finding that out, so I'm very pressed for time.

I finished grad school applications, although there was a really large, embarrassing mistake in my very last one that makes me feel less triumphant about being done.

I've discovered that entirely by accident, I'm mostly eating vegetarian now. I do still eat chicken nuggets, because of course I do, and pretty soon I'm going to be making soup with a ham bone in it, but my primary food items are brown rice, legumes (navy beans, black beans, chickpeas, and regular peas), potatoes, salad, fruit (bananas and applesauce), and cheese; so, lots of plant matter. It's really a lot less expensive this way. (Oh, and if anybody reading who's informed about, particularly, vegetarian diets sees any nutritional red flags, please let me know because I would really like to avoid getting sick for some silly, avoidable reason.) A few days ago I managed to successfully make brown rice that was an appropriate consistency - turns out the trick was actually not opening it, as multiple people told me, rather than trying not to open it and failing. Who knew? (Everybody, actually.) Then I mixed in some black beans, which were perfect and cost like 90 cents for a whole can. If I'd thought about it more, I would have also added onions, but I forgot. Good in tortillas, with cheese and sour cream, or just by itself.

And finally, I've added "reading things that aren't for school" to my list of priorities. So far I've just read some fiction (Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, currently reading Hogfather by Terry Pratchett), but I'm hoping to start on the list of recommendations I was given last year sometime soon.