Hopefully Perfect Roast Chicken

Good Evening!

It’s 7:50 pm right now. It’s Aaron’s third to last class for the Summer! He picked me up after work so that I could have the car today so I have to pick him up a little later.

In the meantime, here is what I wore today. Exciting!

- green cow neck shirt (Target)

- grey, wool pants (J.Crew)

- pink shoes which I’m pointing at in the picture (Gap from a few years ago)

Here’s another picture with the ever present paint samples in the background.

My big Nikon DSLR battery died yesterday so we took these pictures with my Canon Powershot. When I uploaded the pictures today, I realized Aaron had taken a bunch of pictures of me while I was painting the dining room, in all my sweaty, adidas short glory.

Painting the trim here:

Not sure what’s going on in this one… but I have paint all over my legs.

After dropping off Aaron in Oakland today after work, I headed out to Trader Joe’s, grocery shopped for the week and then made Ina Garten’s Perfect Roast Chicken. Here’s the recipe that I followed. The only thing I changed was I used potatoes instead of carrots and fennel in the roasting pan. Otherwise, I followed the recipe to a T.

Here it is prior to going in the oven. I have two tiny issues with this recipe. (1) Not everyone has kitchen string which can be off putting for people and (2) Ina never says which way the chicken is supposed to go in the pan. She says tie the legs together and tuck the wings under the body, but that’s it.

I flipped it over a few times trying to figure out which way made more sense when tucking the wings under… It ended up like this picture below so we’ll see what happens…

Alright time for me to relax a bit before I have to go get Aaron. Chicken has about 30 minutes to go!

Banking Attire & Pizza for Dinner

Jun8

Hello!

It’s a million degrees in my house right now. MILLION! I have the laptop sitting on a pillow on my lap because the bottom of the laptop is too hot for me. I had the excellent idea of making pizza for dinner in this heat. 450 degree oven. Bad plan.

Anyway, I thought I would jump on the blog bandwagon and post a few pictures of myself in what I wear to work. I work the investment department of a bank so it’s a pretty conservative environment.

Here I am, pushing the envelope, with blue shoes.

I handed Aaron the camera this morning and asked him to take a picture of me. He didn’t even question it.

- black and white dress (Marshalls about 3 years ago I think)

(I’m also wearing it backwards because there is a small stain on the other side)

- black cardigan that couldn’t be taken off all day because of the stain (Gap, this year)

- blue shoes (Gap 2ish years ago)

I’m not sure if you’ll find these pictures interesting at all but it’s kind of fun for me so there you go.

I bussed home from work today because it was too ridiculously hot to walk and then made pizza for Aaron’s dinner later.

I had frozen dough that I made last week that I defrosted in the microwave Recipe Here from Eating well. I double the 1 pound recipe and freeze half. All we had for cheese was cheddar so I decided on barbecue turkey meatball pizza…

I mixed up some barbecue sauce using this recipe then took a few Trader Joe’s turkey meatballs out of the freezer and mixed it with the sauce. I stretched out the dough, spread the sauce, added pineapple chunks, onion and cheese and baked for about 17 minutes.

This recipe is pretty quick and it’ll be easy to package up for Aaron to reheat when he gets home from class and for lunch tomorrow.

Alright I’m going to go put clothes in the dryer and then hang out in the air conditioned bedroom. Can’t take it out here anymore!

This weekend/maybe tomorrow, I’m going to sew curtains for the dining room! I have 5 yards of linen fabric! YAY!

Chicken, Chicken, Pork, Turkey

Jan25

I told my sister-in-law about two weeks ago that I was going to start posting easy recipes with step by step instructions on here for her.

The first one was supposed to be a chicken recipe. Well..I’ve tried two different ones and I wasn’t happy with either. Boooo.

First I tried slow cooker chicken noodle soup. I thought it ended up kind of bland tasting. Poor Aaron was stuck eating it all last week. I used low sodium chicken broth and I think that was the problem.

Next I tried to make goat cheese and sun-dried tomato stuffed chicken breasts. Hmm. I think I used too much garlic (apparently there is such a thing!) and too many sun-dried tomatoes. I’m going to give this one another try with different ratios and see how it goes. i.e. more cheese less everything else.

Aaron ate it happily though!

Last night I had a little more success with dinner with pork instead of chicken though. I bought a pre-marinated pork tenderloin from Trader Joe’s over the weekend and cooked it while waiting for Aaron to get home from work. It was SO EASY!

I just browned the tenderloin in a pan over medium-high heat with an onion and some olive oil then added a little beef broth, covered the pan with aluminum foil and baked for about 30 minutes until my thermometer read 160 degrees.

With kale and sweet potatoes on the side. Aaron LOVES sweet potatoes and so do I. We were big on the aluminum foil yesterday. No dishwasher in our little house.

Straight from the stove to the oven to the table in the same pan:

Where’s the kale Aaron???

I ate it all.

This evening, I decided to make some chili. Originally I was going to make turkey burgers because we had ground turkey breast that I needed to use.

I got home and didn’t feel like standing in front of a pan trying to guess when the burgers were cooked all the way through without cutting them in half… so I went with turkey chili instead.

The recipe that I used called for chili seasoning which I didn’t have so I looked up a recipe for that too.

I pulled out a million spices, propped up the iPad next to me with the recipe and mixed my own chili seasoning.

I used this recipe except didn’t have dried onion so I added a bit of onion salt.

Then I put it back in the chili powder container:

Now my chili is in the crockpot and will be done at about …ohhh….11 pm.

boooo

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Hopefully Perfect Roast Chicken

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Chicken, Chicken, Pork, Turkey

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