Oh! You Cook!

I got several days of exercise today.  We purchases around 20 bushes (including one in a 5 gallon tub) a while back. But due to rainy weather, we had been unable to plant them until today.

So in between tearing around the neighborhood trying to wrangle the dog back home (my fault, I opened the front door unnecessarily wide to ask theHubby a question), we planted around 20 bushes (including one in a 5 gallon tub).

I am bushed!

So dinner had to be way easy.  Spaghetti with Very Fast Pasta Sauce, not quite as easy as dumping jarred sauce on the spaghetti though, because I felt a little guilty for not making  the "real sauce" I was originally planning.

While rooting through the fridge to find the chopped garlic in oil (why is it that what you want is always hiding behind something else?) I noticed a small bag of eggplants.  These weren't the standard large eggplants sold at the local Try-N-Save.  They weren't even those cute light purple eggplants I bought at last month&…

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This will bring you to a page where you have the option to print the entire post or selectively suppress segments, such as my wise pre-recipe commentary. Because you know that anything you want to print always moves the last line onto its own page.  Go green!

When you are ready, you can can then send it directly to the printer or create a PDF version to save and savor later (if you don't know what a PDF is then don't worry, it doesn't apply to you).

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... such as "Chestnut Sweet Potato Pudding," an intriguing-looking recipe found at Levana Cooks.   Here are the ingredients.  I'm not going to waste my time and yours by entering the quantities.  I'll 'spain why in a bit.

Chestnuts ... good.
Sweet potato ... yummy.
Coconut milk ... tasty.  AND healthy this week.
Red kidney beans ... healthy, anyway.
Cinnamon and maple syrup ... yummy sweet goodness.

Now dump everything into a food processor and let 'er rip.  Uh .... looks like refried beans.  And not in a good way.

Okay, let's try salvaging it by pouring the mess pudding into fluted glasses.  Before tasting, of course.
Which was rather dumb of me because ... let's just be polite and say it was not to my taste.  I am quite disappointed, because Levana usually has great recipes. 

Unfortunately, having filled the glasses meant that now I had 4 more things to wash.  Besides the food processor bowl.  And every square inch of the food processor base along …

Noticed yet another recipe for pasta and chicken on the internet last spring. Looked promising, so I bookmarked it to use in the very near future.

"Near future" is so relative.  Fast forward about 6 months.  I had a bag o'defrosted shredded soup chicken, and finally remembered that pasta and chicken recipe.  Except the original recipe starts out with skin-on chicken parts.  The skin-on chicken parts get massaged with herbs and spices, then lovingly roasted.  Temporarily separated from its drippings, the chicken gets skinned and shredded, retaining its yummy goodness from the previously mentioned herbs and spices as it gets newly acquainted with spaghetti before getting reacquainting with its drippings.

Remember that bag o'shredded chicken, barely familiar with semi-recognizable soup spices?  Not quite the same thing.  So to give it a flavor boost, I mixed the shreds with a small amount of minced rosemary and black pepper, along with equal amounts of smoked chipotle …

Top Chef Desserts is a popular "reality" show that pits chefs against each other in the dessert category (for the 3 people who couldn't tell from the name).  A recent episode featured a Bake Sale challenge.  Unlike earlier episodes, the winner was determined by the highest number of the items sold at a real high school bake sale.  While a few of the contestants made over-the-top gourmet items, because they are, after all, top chef wannabees, the winning dessert was that ol' comfort food, Rice Crispies Treats.  True, this particular Treat contained peanut butter, Nutella and chocolate frosting (extraneous ingredients which gilded the lily as far as I'm concerned).  But it was a Rice Crispies Treat!  Woo-hoo!  IMHO nature's most perfect dessert!


















Rice Crispies Treats are so awesome that youngerSon had me make a gigantic Treat as his bar mitzvah cake.  I decorated it with his rock-climbing theme (the climber on the right is worthy of Cake Wrecks, no?). 

The norm…