Adventures in Cooking

So I am not sure what got into me one day, but I finally decided that I was tired of making the same thing for dinner every night, which usually ended up being not at all healthy and more often than not was some sort of fast food. Well I am on Facebook and one of my close friends posted that she made pesto chicken in her crockpot and said the recipe came from a woman who cooks gluten free and has published this wonderful cookbook with simple crockpot recipes. I went to the website and it all sounded really easy and delicious. That was my turning point or "Ah Ha" moment as Oprah says in regards to cooking. It was then and there while my 2 year old boy circled me telling me various things and I had once again no clue what to have for dinner, I realized I could put stuff together in a crockpot and we would actually have a meal to eat later! Amazing!!
I know many of my friends would probably just laugh and say "hello you are a mom and a housewife, you should know how to cook, right?" Well I think the reason why is I never really enjoyed all the work that went into it and lets face it, I was an only child and my family went out a lot, which I thoroughly enjoyed and still enjoy when I get the chance.
Anyways, I started by making the pesto chicken recipe which basically is just chicken pieces, mozzarella cheese on top then pesto sauce covering the whole thing. The recipe also called for cooking sweet potatoes with it and in order to do that, you needed to put a piece of aluminum foil over the chicken pesto, then put the sweet potatoes in the crockpot. My first attempt turned out ok, well actually it all over cooked and the pesto was burned and the chicken was a little dry. I guess cooking it for 7 hours will do that. So my second attempt turned out better because I only cooked it for 4 hours.
The next dish I tried from the cookbook was Orange Chicken, now this was reported to be like a Chinese dish, but I think I still need to work on this one, because the sauce didn't seem right and the chicken was really dry. Since this problem of drying out the chicken seemed to be continuous, I posted this on Facebook and received numerous responses. So I will try those suggestions next time. What I haven't mentioned yet is my husband loved both dishes immensely and actually likes dry chicken, so this was a bonus in his mind.
After three dinners at home, I was starting to feel more confident in myself and ready to tackle cooking another time. I decided to use my crockpot again and cook sort of a parmesean chicken dish, in case your wondering I have ALOT of frozen chicken in my freezer, anyways I put the chicken in and covered it with mozzarella cheese, marinara sauce, and grated parmesean cheese. Well in the end it tasted pretty good but the chicken pieces were too dry for my liking. I really have to figure out this dryness factor with the crockpot.
For my next dinner, I needed a break from the crockpot and made a chicken pasta cheese dish that I made up. I have issues with milk and my husband cannot eat macaroni and cheese because of a traumatic childhood experience. So I made up some rotini pasta, cooked some chicken in a pan then diced it up and seasoned with salt and pepper, then tossed all of it together with grated parm cheese, shredded mexican cheese blend and a little butter. This was super yummy and we both went back for seconds!
I actually didn't get a chance to cook for a few days because of Halloween and a dinner over at my cousin's house. My cousin and her brother both went to culinary school and are wonderful chefs, so when I went over to Annie's house, she was excited to hear I had started cooking and recommended I borrow her Quick Soups and Salads cookbook for more ideas. This got me excited and I decided that Sunday evening to try out one of the recipes for Potato Cheese soup. We ended up having our friends over for dinner that night, so I was excited to try it out on them, I figured someone else should get to be guinea pigs too besides just me and my husband. The recipe was pretty easy and I left out the onions because they give me horrible stomach aches and I substituted cheddar cheese for the blue cheese it called for. Wow, it tasted good! I guess you can't go wrong with potatoes and cheese. Which reminds me I forgot to mention I made twice baked potatoes before the soup experiment. Those were ok but Jacob, my husband, helped me and put in way too much butter because we didn't have any sour cream, need to make a note to try that again but with sour cream and less butter!
Ok so after the potato soup on Sunday night, Monday evening was just a repeat of my pasta chicken cheese dish because we had a sink clog from my potato peelings the night before and this required me to buy two sink plungers and help my poor husband unclog the drain. Totally disgusting by the way!
So that brings me to today, Tuesday evening in which I made another recipe from the soup cookbook because we were having Annie's brother (Dana) and his wife plus another couple from our Bible Study over for dinner. This recipe was called an Allspice Meatball Stew, which was basically Italian style meatballs (frozen in a 14oz package) 14 and half oz of beef broth, 3 cups of sliced green beans, 2 cups of carrots, 2 tsp of Worcestshire sauce, 1/2 tsp of Cinnamon, 3/4 tsp of Allspice, after cooking all of those ingredients in a Dutch oven for about 10 minutes (boil first then simmer for 10 minutes covered) you add 2 cans of stewed Tomatoes and bring back to a boil then simmer for 5 minutes or until the veggies are tender. Everyone loved it!! Except Jacob didn't like how sweet it was with all the spices and tomatoes. I think I might add pepper next time for a contrast. I still need to work on balancing out flavors but for right now I am just excited to put meals together!
I need to go to bed so I will end this blog post by saying, I think this is a turning point in my life and I can't wait to see what I come up with next. So watch out, more cooking adventures to come....