Time to end the blog hiatus and 'thyme' to make some soup

I have been neglecting my blog. I sort of have a halfway real excuse, but not really. I hurt one of my knees in March, and the other in  August. I've been doing lots of physical therapy and then I had surgery and now I'm doing physical therapy again. I am making huge progress but I still have a ways to go.

I've just been so tired.

And I've been struggling with the idea of not actually being invincible.

And did I mention I've been tired? This healing business is tough work. My energy is sapped some days. Not exactly ideal conditions for the creative juices to be flowing, but I think I am over feeling sorry for myself. It's time to reset and regroup. Sometimes things happen that knock you off your course for a bit, and it can be tough to get it back on track. I guess what I am trying to say in a really long roundabout way is that I may have been off my game but I am ready to get off the bench.

So today we are making chicken and rice soup. I feel a cold coming on and it is frigid outside and rainy. Soup is just the thing today. My trusty sous chef John jumped right in to help, and he chopped the celery and carrots. I chopped the onion and chicken. I cooked the chicken a little in a skillet first, because I really wanted it to have good flavor. I used a little olive oil and salt and pepper. Just before I took it off the heat, I added dried rosemary, mostly because we were out of thyme. But rosemary goes great with poultry too. We sweated the veggies in some butter and seasoned with salt and pepper. We added low-sodium chicken stock (you won't miss the salt, trust me) and it is happily bubbling away on low heat. We're going to let it cook for a little while before we check for seasoning. We're not going to eat until I get home from cantata practice and Jeff is home from the theatre, so we're going to cook the rice but add it to the soup later. We also got some Pillsbury crescent rolls just because they're good.

We don't have a recipe for this one, but here's what we used: one bag of baby carrots (cut into halves or thirds) one bunch of celery diced to match the carrots in size, half a large onion (diced), three chicken breasts and three boxes of stock. I won't know until later if this turns out ok, but I can say that it smells amazing in out kitchen right now.

I'm glad I am writing again and I hope you are too.

Missing My Kitchen

It has been a really busy summer. Somehow it just got away from us and before we knew it, it was back to school time and the summer was over. I have also been nursing one and then the other knee with injuries, and will actually have surgery soon. I haven't been able to stand for long period of times and walking around a lot is also difficult. Long story short, I haven't been cooking, really cooking, much. Oh we've had dinner at home a lot. But nothing that sticks out. No new recipes. No complicated dishes and no hanging out in the kitchen to cook elaborate meals.

I didn't realize how much I would miss it.

I really do enjoy trying new things in the kitchen or even making some of our tried and true favorites. I am cooking tonight, though dinner will be late. Jeffrey had a long day after a long week and is asleep on the couch. John is watching YouTube videos and I am blogging while the meat is cooking. We're having lemon garlic chicken thighs (with thyme, olive oil and salt and pepper). Next I'll get started on the mashed potatoes and cook some carrots. Nothing super fancy, just a good old-fashioned home cooked dinner. I am still hurting, and I'll get John to help me if I need it, but I just wanted to cook since we are all actually home tonight.

Can't wait until it's time to eat!

Date Night Part 2 - Cooking with My Sweet Baboo

Boy have we been busy. The three of us have been working as backstage help for Brunswick Little Theatre's production of "Into the Woods" and I haven't had much time to write. But I do want to share our other recent date night story.

You may have already read about our fabulous dinner out at Mr. P's Bistro while John was visiting his grandparents in PA. Another night we had a date night of sorts at home. We love to cook together, and risotto is the perfect couples dish to cook.

Risotto takes time to cook. Not a long time, but enough that we can have a glass of wine and take turns stirring (that's Jeffrey's thumb in the picture). This night, I tried a new chicken dish with garlic and lemons. Check out the recipe here. As usual, I used it as sort of a guide and made some tweaks. I didn't use a whole bulb of garlic because that seemed a bit much. And I used dried thyme because that's what I had. I also used just chicken thighs. So I got the chicken going and then Jeff and I cooked risotto. We made Parmesan risotto that night. We have made risotto enough times that I don't look at a recipe anymore. And I don't really measure anything besides the stock and the rice. When we first started cooking risotto, we used this Rachael Ray recipe. Now when we make it, we usually start by cooking some diced Pancetta. (Look for a future blog post on why Pancetta makes everything better). We take the cooked Pancetta out and cook the shallots in the pan (we add a little butter to the Pancetta grease). I also put in a little salt and pepper at this stage. Then we pour in the rice and get it nice and toasty. Then we add wine. Risotto is traditionally made with white wine, but sometimes we like to be rebels and use red instead. We also do the "add wine and reduce it down" step twice. If once is good, then twice is better, right? Then we add the stock (chicken with white wine and beef with red wine) little by little until it is all gone and the risotto is creamy. And then it's time to eat.

We do like a good risotto. But that's just part of the reason to cook it. We also like having some wine and good conversation. Our attention is focused only on the task at hand and each other. We don't mind that it takes a while to get dinner on the table. The journey to the dinner table (or TV trays in the living room so we can watch a good Disney movie while eating) is easily half the fun.

Date night dinner....Part 1

This past week the boy was on vacation, visiting with his grandparents, aunt and uncle and cousins. We took the opportunity to have a dinner date.

We went to Mr. P.'s Bistro in Southport. Local friends, if you have never been...what are you waiting for? It is still my favorite place to eat a fancy dinner out with my honey.

It was a Monday night,

so it was not that busy. We decided to go on a whim. That turned out to be a really good decision, because I am not sure we could have had a night out that week otherwise between long work hours for Jeff, rehearsals for Into the Woods and just a busy schedule in general.

I was really in the mood for a steak, so I chose the Filet Mignon. It is served with a caramelized onion and bourbon butter. (You're salivating now, aren't you? Go ahead, admit it). It came served with roasted potatoes and a vegetable. I picked the fried green tomatoes. Don't judge. It counts as a vegetable. Sort of. Jeff wanted seafood so he ordered the fresh red snapper stuffed with crab meat. He also got the potatoes and the fried green tomatoes.

Our dinners were cooked perfectly. I could have cut the steak, which I ordered medium-rare, with a fork

because it was so tender. The potatoes had just a hint of salt and pepper and the fried green tomatoes were crispy and not the least bit greasy. To go along with the date night theme, we ordered fancy cocktails. Mine was a flavored cosmo-type drink and Jeff had the Southport Streetcar -- Maker's Mark, Cointreau and lemon juice in a martini glass rimmed with sugar. It was so good in fact, that he had two. Which made him a little giggly and I had to drive home. After we sat on a bench at the waterfront for a while. It was not hot, the breeze felt wonderful and the company was even better. All in all, a great success.

Yes, this was an expensive dinner. It's not something we can do every day, or every month for that matter. But we have to treat ourselves sometimes. We like good food, so a nice dinner out is a good date for us. We all get busy, and it is important to set time aside to remind ourselves and each other that we matter - that we are important to each other and together.

We did manage to squeeze in one more date night that week when we cooked together at home. Look for more on that one coming soon in Date night dinner....Part 2.

The Cutest Cookbook Ever

We recently bought a new shelf for the room off our kitchen (I never know what to call that room - it has a closet, so it's not really a pantry). We just didn't have enough storage room, and the bigger shelf holds more than the baker's rack we had there. We also got some S hooks to hang our stainless steel pots from the side. All in all, it worked out well and we think we're pretty cool.

I rearranged a lot of stuff, including the cookbooks and loose recipes I always mean to organize completely but never quite finish doing.

While sorting through some of these, I came across something called "First Grade Cafe," a cookbook of sorts John did in school. Oh my gosh, how cute. It was made up of coloring book pages with spaces for the young chefs to fill out the recipe name, list the ingredients used and draw a picture of what the finished product looked like. Mostly what they "cooked" were things like trail mix and cookies. There was also a page at the end for a recipe the students were asked to supply (with help from parents, of course). John's was Peanut Butter Scotties. They're like Rice Krispie Treats except with peanut butter and butterscotch chips instead of marshmallows.

What a precious find.

John has come a long way since then. He can make a roux, and he knows how to chop or dice veggies at different sizes depending on how we're going to cook them. He has made homemade macaroni and cheese, Ohana wings,  and corn pudding on his own (with just some supervision) and is an excellent sous chef in training. To his future wife, Jeffrey and I say "you're welcome."

We have probably outgrown this cookbook, except for the Peanut Butter Scotties - they sound really good. But it will still have a place of honor on the shelf with the others.

Peanut Butter Scotties
6 cups Rice Krispies
1 12-ounce package butterscotch chips
1 cup peanut butter

Melt butterscotch chips and peanut butter together in a double boiler. Mic well. Stir in Rice Krispies and mix gently until the cereal is coated. Press into a buttered 9x13 pan and refrigerate.

Sometimes it's ok to admit you had a crappy day, or why sometimes drive-thrus are the only hope of the family eating dinner

It was such a Monday. Epic, really. You know how sometimes Jupiter aligns with Mars and peace guides the planets? Well the opposite happened this Monday. Jupiter apparently cut Mars off and there was only bickering among the planets.

That might be a little dramatic, but I'm Italian, so...

I had great plans for dinner. I really did. I'd had a stressful day and planned on cooking to make it better. But first, I had to leave from work a little early, pick up John and his baritone, pick up another teenager and her flag for marching band guard, and deliver them to the high school. We also took along two mosquitoes for part of the ride. We lost them somewhere along the way. I think I did manage to smash one, but the other one must have escaped somehow. It must have known what was coming. I delivered my charges and their equipment without issues. Then I headed back down toward Southport so I could go to WalMart. I don't usually like to grocery shop at WalMart, but I needed a plain white t-shirt for the boy, so I figured I might as well go to just one store. I'm not being snobby about not wanting to buy groceries there. I am just short and the signs saying what is in each aisle are really high in the air at WalMart (and no, I am not linking to WalMart from this blog - if you can't find that on your own, you probably shouldn't even be on the internet).

Unfortunately, there was a jack-knifed trailer across the road miles away from WalMart. Miles away from anything actually. The only way to "get around" it would have been about a 45-minute drive. Of course, I waited in traffic for more than an hour. Still not sure I shouldn't have bailed. But no, I stayed the course. Finally we could go. Well, sort of. We had to get around the disabled pickup that was also dead in our lane. I really felt for that guy. One time our van died on the way back to Penn State the first day the PA Turnpike was open to traffic after a major snowstorm. Been there done that. No one wants to be that guy. Traffic was still slow, but I finally did make it to the store.

I did pretty well at the store, even considering the tourists are here and the shelves needed attention. Then I was off to get gas across the street. The short version of my time there is I very politely explained to the little girl in the Mustang that she was not actually going to cut me off and take my turn at the pump. I then ignored the guy who thought I should pull out into traffic and get crushed instead of waiting for a clear spot (maybe he was friends of Mustang girl?).

At this point, it was 7:10. I was going to have no interest in cooking dinner, or in waiting for food to be prepared. Enter KFC 8-piece box. We don't really get fast food very often, but tonight it was just the thing. Naturally, when I pulled up to the order box, it beeped a really loud high-pitched noise at me. When it stopped, I was able to give my order. When I got to the window, the employee asked me how I was doing. I replied with the expected "fine." Then I told her that actually, I had a pretty crappy day. She said she had too. I told her I was sorry to hear that and pointed out that at least I hadn't taken out my bad day on her, and she agreed that I had not. We ended with her passing me the food and each of us wishing the other a "great night" and resolving to make it so.

I always try to find the positive, even if some days it's harder to do that. Tonight it was dinner for the family that Jeffrey or I didn't have to cook, I made it home safely, and I made someone smile. Not too bad, I guess.

We now have a Ninja in the house

When Mother's Day rolls around, a lot of women expect flowers, perfume, jewelry, something feminine and pretty. Me? I ask for appliances and gadgets. I remember the first year Jeff and I lived in North Carolina. Jeff got me a fishing pole for my birthday. It was a great gift, because he and I enjoyed going to the beach together and fishing, but I didn't have my own pole. I remember talking to my Dad, and he asked me what Jeff had given me (making sure his baby girl was being taken care of I guess). When I told him, he was quiet for a minute before asking me if I had wanted one. He must have thought Jeff was in big trouble. But Jeffrey has a great track record in the gift department. He knows me very well.

Sometimes I am super specific though. This was one of those years. I pointed out a few times that I really wanted a Ninja master prep system. It slices and dices and...you get the idea. Jeff ordered one off Amazon and hauled it out to the mountains with us since we went away for Mother's Day Weekend. Yay! Just what I wanted!

Things have been crazy busy around here since then. I was to the point that if we all had a clean outfit to wear the next day and we all ate dinner I felt like I was ahead of the game. So we haven't had the time to properly christen our new kitchen toy. We finally did tonight, by making hummus.

I became a big fan of hummus a couple of years ago. Sometimes I make a quick trip to the grocery store on my lunch break, and hummus and pita chips with a banana or yogurt on the side makes for a great lunch.

To make it tonight, first we roasted a head of garlic (super easy - cut the top off, put it in an oven-proof dish on top of some olive oil, drizzle olive oil on the exposed cloves, sprinkle with salt and pepper, cover the dish with aluminum foil and cook for 45 minutes 375 degrees). This makes the house smell delicious!

Here's the recipe we used for hummus. We did have to add more olive oil. It was creamy and garlicky and so yummy. I say we...actually I gave the boy directions and he made it. That's been happening a lot lately, which is fine by me. It took us a while to find
tahini paste in the grocery store. Was it with the Asian food? The peanut butter? Nope. With the vinegar. It's a sesame paste that is actually pretty tasty. Now I have to figure out how else I can use it.

As for the Ninja, next I'll be looking at a new smoothie recipe. I really want to try one that combines vegetables and fruits and supposedly tastes like the fruit so you forget you're drinking spinach. If you have any good recipes, please feel free to share!