Crockpot Greek Chicken

I made a new recipe today! I was very excited to try it! Greek chicken!

Since my husband has been working, I have been cooking more and I have been trying to make healthier meals since we all could eat better and I could stand to lose...oh, about 70 pounds of baby weight (note my "baby" is 5 1/2).

I try to prep my crockpot meals the night before in a large freezer bag, so last night I got all of my ingredients together! I combined 3 pieces of chicken breast, 2 TBS of garlic, 3 TBS Greek seasoning, some lemon juice, 2 TBS of chicken bouillon (I use low sodium granules), and 1 1/2 c. water to help dissolve the bouillon. The link to the recipe I improvised on is below.

This morning at 6:30 am I put everything in the crockpot, set it to cook on low for 6 hours and got ready to leave to take kiddo to school and go to work. I asked my husband to please make some rice (I left the kind up to him, although I would have preferred wild rice with this dish, he made white) and some veggies (he chose peas).

The dinner turned out great! We absolutely loved it and although the chicken was done around lunch time, my new crockpot kept it warm without over cooking it and it was nice and moist and tasty at 5:30 when we sat down to dinner thanks to hubby putting the rice in the rice cooker when he got home and heating up the peas after kiddo and I got in the door. Overall, a nice successful dinner!

Tomorrow I think lemon and herb chicken!

http://www.chef-in-training.com/2013/07/slow-cooker-greek-chicken/

New Jobs and New Crockpots

With my husband starting a new job, that means I start a new job. Full time mom and cook and housekeeper. Not that I wasn't doing those things before, but before I had some help. Don't get me wrong, my husband does help put our daughter to bed and he isn't just letting his dishes stay all over the kitchen table after eating but he can't really help me much with anything.

Since my husband started the new job,  I have been cooking again and we felt that this was the perfect time to start eating healthier again.

Monday night I tried a great recipe for parmesan, spinach pasta that we absolutely loved! I made the below recipe and I used spaghetti instead, more spinach and more parmesan along with a TON more garlic!

http://twopeasandtheirpod.com/5-ingredient-spinach-parmesan-pasta/

Tuesday night I made a crockpot meal, which I was really excited about because we had been researching crockpots for weeks trying to find the perfect one. See, I have a crockpot and it still works well, and we just got a pressure cooker for Christmas, but I wanted a programmable crockpot, one that I could set the time to cook then it would switch to the warm setting automatically. I had to look hard because the ones that I found first in stores were all rated decently but the negative comments about them said that the warm setting was hot enough to continue cooking. I couldn't have a meal that takes 4 hours on low to cook in the crockpot for 11 hours and get overdone. So after much research I found two I wanted. One was the highest rated everywhere I looked, the Cuisineart 3-in-16 qt. The other one I found was the WeMo 6 qt wifi enabled crockpot. I ended up going with the Cuisineart because we don't have the WeMo device and I didn't want to purchase it because nothing else in the house uses it. (For those of you who don't know what WeMo is, basically it is a device that can connect your appliances to bluetooth and you can control them from your phones and stuff! Pretty cool...but pretty scary!) Below are the two links I really looked at for the advice on the crockpots.

http://bestreviews.com/best-slow-cookers
http://www.bestproducts.com/appliances/small/g382/best-programmable-slow-cookers/

Tuesday's crockpot meal went wonderfully, a bit dry but honestly I think it had more to do with the amount of liquid and not the warming function because the chicken was cooked perfectly.

Dinner has been a battle for me. I get home about 15 minutes before my husband and he is hungry when he gets home. I also have always battled my weight and since I am a picky eater, I don't always like the "healthy" foods. It will really take some getting used to to be making meals again, especially after working a full day and having to take kiddo to school and pick her up on top of all of that. But the new crockpot is helping me to make things a bit easier. My husband's new job will have a new schedule next week as well after his training period is over so he will be home at the time when I get home and be able to have a side or two made or at least started so it might simplify things even more.

As for my new "job"...not going so well. My daughter is....strong willed...I guess you could say. I have a hard time with her sometimes and find that it is most days a fight to get her to school in time for me to get to work on time. I leave her at morning drop off feeling defeated and frustrated. I sometimes leave with the workers probably thinking I have a screw loose or something too!

We all have to do some adjusting and this last week has been hard. But I have my new crockpot and a new outlook to help me. I am trying to remain positive that this was the right decision for us to have my husband take on another job that is full time and so far from home with me still working full time and our daughter in kindergarten. I guess only time will tell if our new "jobs," will work out as well as the new crockpot.

Life Changes and Cheese Tortellini

My husband starts a new job tomorrow. As it is now, I work full time at a non-profit Monday thru Friday a normal office schedule. I get up early and after I shower and eat and have a little bit of time to myself, I get my daughter up, feed her and get her dressed then my husband takes our daughter either to the bus stop or to school each day. He either picks her up after school at the bus stop or we have her in an after school program. He makes dinner and it is ready when I get home from work because he works from home teaching classes online, being a graduate assistant and taking PhD classes (most of them online but a few on evenings and weekends).

With the new job, my husband will work full time a normal office schedule an hour away and until the end of the college semester he will be taking a PhD class, teaching online and doing his graduate assistant work. I also am committed to my job at this time. This means that in order to make the home run properly, we will have to all get up at about the same time and I have to get the kiddo ready for school while my husband leaves for work, I will have to drive her to before school daycare, go to work, pick her up at after school daycare, make dinner (thankfully we will be getting a programmable crockpot any day now in the mail from Amazon!) and clean the house. On weekends, I will have to do the groceries and any extra cleaning in the morning so we can try to have a bit of family time if my husband's homework load allows.

Knowing this would be a big change for us and a big burden on me, I planned ahead. My husband doesn't like to drive and we both hate it when we get into one of the vehicles and the other person left it without gas. I have been driving the car (that I hate) because it is better on gas mileage unless weather has been poor and my husband has been driving the new truck we just bought to replace my old vehicle but we will be switching out our to his driving further, so I made sure he had a full tank of gas, washed the car, vacuumed it out, and cleaned the inside. I made sure all the laundry in the house was done, we bought him some new clothes that I ironed tonight before making dinner. I got some healthier food at the grocery store so we can eat more wholesome meals and so he had enough food to bring on lunches, made him some Copycat Olive Garden Chicken Gnocchi soup, and decided to be adventurous for dinner tonight and do a cheese tortellini that I could make into soup later with the leftovers.

The tortellini turned out horrible! I made a huge mess in the kitchen and it was just awful!

Now, normally, my husband would get upset if dinner was really bad (I am not a bad cook but sometimes recipes go terribly wrong). Normally, he would pout and huff and puff. But lately we have been really working on our relationship and when the tortellini turned out awful, he not only tried everything to make it work, but he just heated up something else for himself instead of even asking me to. He hugged me and thanked me for my hard work, and even offered to help me clean up the disaster I made in the kitchen.

Although the food was bad and I felt awful, I really felt a connection with my husband. In the past, I would have felt awful about it turning out bad, he would have acted like a child, I would have been angry at this and it would have soured our night. But because he just thanked me for trying and hugged me offering to help me, I felt like all I had done for him to help prepare us for this new life change was appreciated.

A month ago we were on the verge of divorce. For almost nine years, I have felt unappreciated, like my love was taken for granted, like I was just a warm body. I spent hours upon hours arguing with him over the years about how I felt and I never felt any resolve. But when we had a large blow out one night recently, he was quiet, I said my piece and he simply replied "you're right." To which I told him that I felt like this was the first time in nine years he had ever really heard me, and he replied that it probably was.

To many people, the above plate is just a plate full of really awful looking cheese tortellini, too big, over stuffed, folded incorrectly, made with whole wheat flour instead of white flour, too thick (no thanks to the pasta maker my husband got me for Christmas). But to me, it's a life change. It's a symbol that even though we are going through rough times, even though we are going to have to face some challenges in our family to make things better for us, to get ahead; we are going to be okay and in fact, we will be stronger because of it.

Thank you, cheese tortellini! Here's the recipe if anyone is interested!  http://culinaryginger.com/cheese-tortellini/

Oh, and by the way, the soup turned out great though!
http://www.food.com/recipe/olive-garden-style-chicken-and-gnocchi-soup-348802

Death of a Beloved Pet

Our cat was put down recently. It was a sad time for our family. I have had my cats almost all of their lives and although we don’t feel like our animals are like kids to us, we still love them very much.

Billy Bob was born in December of 2003. I was living in an apartment in my hometown and preparing to move to a trailer one February morning when my ex and I drove past a sign that said “free kittens.” We thought that we would stop by and check to see if they still had one and if they would possibly hold one for a month or so until we moved into the trailer. We stopped in and it turned out to be the house of a woman that I had gone to school with. She had a couple kittens left and we chose a white one with a gray spot on his head that was snuggly. She said she would hold him until we moved!

In April of 2004, Billy Bob moved into our new home. He brought so much joy into my life. A few months later, a coworker of mine called me while I was out shopping. She said her neighbor’s kids were outside with signs for free kittens and that they told her that if they were not gone by the time her mom got home from work, she would take them to the pound. She said that there was an adorable black and white one and that the kids swore the kittens were 6 weeks old. She had convinced me that cats were like potato chips, “you can’t have just one.” Since she was allergic to cats, her boyfriend picked the cat up and kept him in the backyard until I could come get him. He was adorable. I named him Presley at first but a few weeks after getting him changed my mind and called him Elvis.

Elvis was so small that Billy Bob would wrestle him to the ground and cover Elvis’ entire body with his. Two weeks later when we took Elvis to the vet, we found out that he was just 6 weeks old (meaning we got him at about 4 weeks). The two were an inseparable pair.

Both cats have been in my life since then. I moved out of my trailer and left my ex and they moved with me an hour and a half away to start a new life. I moved to a few different apartments and they came with me. I moved in with my now husband and they moved with me. At times they were pains, the throwing up, the peeing outside of the litter box, but they were my cats and I had been with them for so long.

Just recently, Billy Bob had a drastic change in weight. He started vomiting daily and the vomit turned to just clear bile. He stopped eating and drinking and got very thin. My husband was feeding him water by the spoonful and making sure he had some wet food all his own. He started looking better and started eating on his own and drinking more frequently. I had planned to take him to the vet but since he was “my cat,” my husband didn’t want to pay for it originally since he didn’t think anything serious was wrong. But suddenly, he stopped eating again and his eyes started getting “sleep” in them. My husband couldn’t see him like that anymore so we set a vet appointment hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

On February 28^th this year, we had an appointment and that would be the last time that we would see my beautiful cat friend. Although there were no fleas in sight on any of the animals (the 2 cats and our dog who had just gotten her shots and got groomed), the vet thought he might have a disease from fleas. We decided to put him down since the cost of testing and hospitalization would run over $1,000. My husband gave me the choice and said he would pay for whatever (a true act of love since he rarely felt this way about animals and spending money on things of such nature) but I chose to put the poor thing down. I stood there petting his sweet head as the vet shaved his leg finding blood blisters and sores that are uncommon in cats. I kissed his head as she felt for his liver and found a shriveled one that meant he had probably had liver disease for a long time and was fighting. Before I knew it, he was gone, he had taken his last breath.

I ordered a wooden box with cat paws on it for his ashes (again my husband told me whatever I wanted I could have). I ordered a clay paw print stone to commemorate him as well. I cried and my husband offered to take our family for ice cream.

Two days ago, when I took Elvis to the vet to make sure he was okay and checked out. While I was there, I received Billy Bob’s remains (as they called them on the phone). It was a bittersweet moment for me. It was closure, but it was his ashes I was picking up. Thankfully, Elvis is healthy and happy, they saw no reason to worry about him.

As my family and I looked back on Billy Bob’s life, my husband made me a memorial video and said that he too was upset about the loss. He never thought he would be but having spent nine years with the cat as a part of his life, he really had to miss him. We will all remember the loving side (and the not so loving side) of Billy Bob; head kisses, snuggles with our daughter, sleeping in the bathtub, licking plastic bags, climbing in bed with us, the chicken costume that he hated at Halloween. I will not be too sad for his death, but I will rejoice in the time I spent with him and the hole he filled in my heart.