Chicken-Hunter's Stew for Orzo

 

It took me a long time to find a name for this recipe.  I can trace its ancenstry back to this recipe, but about the only remaining bit is the orzo and the neglect.  I honestly can't remember exactly how it evolved.


I'm afraid that this recipe cannot be rushed, I tried once and the result was not fantastic.  I have yet to see if throwing this recipe into a crock pot is a good substitute for turning the frying pan to low and ignoring it for two hours.

This is also the ultimate in flexible ingredients.  You can use any spice that you want, or adjust the vegetables to suit seasonal availability.  It can be made with just the thighs, or a whole chicken cut into chunks.  I've also made this with different types of pasta, though some pastas like egg noodles should be cooked seperately.

Cooking ahead

Cooking from scratch is fun and healthy, but it often creates a time-consuming mess.  I decided to cook a few meals for the freezer so that I could occasionally start my day without having to clean up the previous night's mess.  The meals I chose were lasagna and un-stuffed pepper casserole.

Cherry-creamcheese Filled Rolls

Several weeks ago, my darling husband made something called Powidl.  Proportions without instructions follow, but the important quote is "It is an old saying that buns have to swim in butter so you will be able to tear them apart easily."  The book, and I'm not sure how faithfully he followed the recipe, was "The Viennese Pastry Cookbook by Lilly Joss Reich,"  ISBN 0-02-010110-4 and published before I, nevermind him, was born.

The fallout from his recipe was that I eagerly ate more than I usually do.  It was sweet and had a grease-flour component, but didn't cause me to double over from pain.  (I have negative feedback from most desserts, probably an ulcer-bacteria thing.)  I accused my husband of trying to kill me simply because I could eat them while they were probably bad for my overall health.

Watermelon jello shots

DH told me at the beginning of a week that he wanted to invite friends over for that Friday. There was some discussion about menu, what food was available verses my intentions for it. The conversation drifted towards the watermelon that I had picked up on a whim.

I suggested watermelon jello as a justification for having a mold collection. He suggested feeding a bottle of vodka to the watermelon. The next thing I knew, I was researching how much alcohol a jello shot could hold and possible recipes for alcoholic watermelon jello. I settled on something called "The Greyhound" for our starting point.

Local produce

I'm a lazy localvore. I can conceptually get behind supporting local farmers and making sure my food hasn't consumed huge amounts of fossil fuels in reaching me, but the truth is that I like things to be easy and cheap. I was trained to go to farmer's markets while growing up, but that was as easy as taking the road past the strawberry fields on the way home from church or girl scouts. Going to a farm stand here takes a bit of planning to not get stuck in a huge traffic jam, but it's worth doing once or twice a year.

I'm an amateur in the kitchen, and a bit tempermental about cooking.

Some days, I'm all gung-ho about spending the entire day in the kitchen. It's thoughtlessly easy to drop by the local farmer's market and get a whole bushel of tomatoes to skin for the freezer. I can take a bag of dry beans and make them into chili. At times, I'll even try some strange and fussy recipe that I found on someone else's blog.

Other days may find me using the easiest recipes available, breaking into my canned goods, and turning the burner to low so that I can spend two hours ignoring dinner without actually burning it.

The cool-weather goal of this blog is to post once per week. Sometimes it will be a double-post about two nights of actually cooking dinner with notes about leftovers, sometimes it will be a single day of dinner set-up for the entire week with the occasional "fussy but unsatisfying" attempt at making pretty food.

Since my specialties are stews and casseroles, and judging by how hard it was for me to come up with summer-appropriate foods, I plan to spend next June-July-August with only monthly posts.

At times, I'll also be posting about my husband's kitchen exploits. He's the better cook, but he also has a lot less time to spend in the kitchen.