Food!

So, as we are still living in bachelor's quarters with no kitchen, cooking has been a thing of excitement in our household. Okay, perhaps 'excitement' is too strong of a word, but certainly a thing of creativity.

I had become so enamored with our Pasta Boat and stoneware microwaveable covered casserole dish that I had still kept steering away from the crock pot. I can't tell you why I am afraid of the crock pot, but sadly, it is not something I have desired to cook with in the past. However, recent events have changed this drastically. I managed to short out our previous microwave (I didn't even know that was possible - it's not like I was pouring gallons of water over it while hitting it with a baseball bat or anything), and the replacement unit is too small for either my beloved pasta boat or covered casserole. So, now lacking any other cooking options, we have been almost completely limited to cooking our main dishes on the grill or in the crock pot.

At first, I tried to rebel against the whole crock pot idea. Instead, I made sushi. Yes, I have become a sushi aficionado. Okay, that's stretching it. I can (sort of) make sushi rolls. The first adventure here was going to the Aeon, the Japanese grocery store, to pick up the seaweed wrappers, salmon, and sushi rice. To be completely frank, I was unaware that there was even such a thing as 'sushi rice'. In case you were wondering, you use short-grain rice for sushi, unlike for what you use with normal Asian food (long grain - I prefer jasmine rice) or middle eastern food (basmati rice). Not only do you use different rice, but you prepare it slightly differently. You add rice vinegar, salt, oil and rice vinegar after it's all cooked. You also have to rinse the rice until the water is clear before cooking it. Normally I only rinse rice three times before sticking it in the rice cooker and pushing the 'on' button. It takes -forever- to rinse until the water's clean, but apparently it's necessary. After my adventure in the Aeon, where I tried to use my 3 words of Japanese to make sure I was buying good enough salmon for sushi and pay the correct amount for my goods, I made the sushi rice and let it cool off some. I decided to make my sushi rolls with varying combinations of the following ingredients:

- Salmon
- Chives
- Cucumber
- Cream cheese
- Avocado
- Carrot

A helpful piece of advice I was given when I first learned how to make sushi was this: always add a crunchy ingredient. So, in every roll I made sure to put chives, cucumber or carrot, in addition to the other ingredients.

After cutting up all the ingredients to appropriate thicknesses and lengths, I got out my handy-dandy sushi roller (it's a little bamboo mat), laid out a piece of seaweed paper, covered it with a layer of rice, added the ingredients for that roll, and rolled it right on up! I ended up using all 10 sheets of seaweed paper in one night o_O. That's a lot of sushi. Important hint on sushi making: Make sure you have a VERY sharp knife (my brand new cutco knives were perfect, but even my cutco knives that are a year old weren't sharp enough) and COLD water to clean off the knife in between cuts in order to cut your sushi rolls in to pieces. Otherwise the rice gets stuck on the knife as you cut and you end up tearing apart your beautifully made sushi roll.

Overall, a very successful venture into sushi.

Eventually, however, I had to get over my fear of crock pots and start the real challenge. Over the last few weeks of solely crock pot cooking, I have gathered a couple favorite crock-pot recipes. Some of them are favorites because they're incredibly easy, others are favorites because they are -delicious-.

The award for easiest goes to the McCormick Seasoning Slow Cooker Italian Herb Chicken recipe. Grab one of the McCormick Seasoning packets for Slow Cooker Italian Herb Chicken for this one. The recipe is on the back. All you need is the seasoning packet, 2 1/2 lbs of chicken, 1 package of mushrooms, 2 cans of stewed tomatoes, and a can of tomato paste. Throw it all into the crock pot and cook for 8 hours on low or 4 hours on high. You're technically supposed to put the chicken in first, then the mushrooms, then mix all the other ingredients together and pour them on top. I suspect you could probably pour everything in, mix it up, and it'd work just fine. We also added some grape tomatoes to our recipe because we had them lying around. I particularly like this recipe because it doesn't call for any cans of condensed soup. I swear, I've never used so much condensed soup before in my life, and it's starting to scare me a little. I hope to find more recipes like this one where I'm not pouring globs of salty paste into my dinner.

That being said...

Our favorite recipe totally has condensed soup in it. You'll have to wait for the bottom of the post to hear about that one.

I also made pineapple pork chops, probably from this recipe. No guarantee there since I didn't actually -save- the recipe, but it looks familiar. I didn't marinate the pork chops overnight, which I'm sure would have been delicious. However, they were definitely a hit, served (of course) with rice and a salad. I believe I thickened the sauce a little using flour, as I didn't have cornstarch at the time, which is my preferred thickening agent.


I also made a delicious Chicken Masala (ish) using this recipe. Now, I often refuse to buy specific spice mixtures (with the excpetion of the McCormick seasoning, although, that makes me cringe because I ought to be able to come up with my own 'slow cooker Italian spice' mix). This particular recipe calls fro garam masala, an Indian spice mixture that is lovely. However, I was either unable, unwilling, or unable AND unwilling to buy said mixture, so looked up a recipe on my own. Most of the ingredients in it you should already have in your pantry. It was a fantastic recipe - thick and flavorful. I believe I didn't measure the pepper, and probably put in altogether too much, making it inedible for anyone shy of spiciness. Top things I learned from this recipe:
1. Don't use chicken with bones in a crock pot recipe. You spend your whole meal trying to pick them out instead of enjoying your food.
2. Be careful with cayenne pepper. It's spicy. No, really. Be careful. Rice can only absorb so much of the spiciness.
3. When adding yogurt or sour cream (or other such ingredients like coconut milk) to a crock pot recipe, wait until the very end, allowing it to be in the crock pot only until heated. Otherwise, it will curdle and ruin your whole recipe. Thankfully, I learned that from the recipe and not from trial and error.

One of our favorite recipes is a family recipe for Italian sausage and tortellini soup. I liked this recipe because it included spinach. I find it difficult to get anything healthy out of the crock pot, and to be able to add in a vegetable other than potatoes, onions or tomatoes was a relief.

I have made Paula Deen's Crock Pot Macaroni and Cheese several times to bring as a side dish. It is delicious and fairly simple, but laden with Paula Deen calories. I've used the low-fat sour cream and skim milk instead of the normal versions when I've made it and it tastes just fine.

And last, but not least, our favorite crock pot recipe to date:

Beef Stroganoff.

Now, people have made 8,000 changes to this recipe in the comments section. I... don't know that that's really necessary. The first time I made it I followed the recipe fairly well. I used a whole onion instead of half an onion and I didn't use wine at all. Oh... And I used fresh chives instead of dried chives and soy sauce instead of Worcester sauce (that's what was in my kitchen). The second time I made the recipe I used stew beef instead of top round, red wine, and a whole onion. I also used cream cheese in addition to sour cream (half low-fat sour cream, half low-fat cream cheese). I also forgot the parsley (oops) and again used fresh chives. I found that my first recipe was better. I definitely liked the top round steak better than the stew beef, though.

I hope your cooking adventures are as exciting and colorful as mine!