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!
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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: