Rotisserie Chicken

Sunday I decided to make something I hadn't made pretty much all summer: a whole chicken. I am a huge fan of whole roasted chickens, so much so that I made one last Thanksgiving even when we all had colds. Summer is not, however, a great time to run the oven at 425°F. Enter the Ronco Compact Showtime Rotisserie. It's small enough to not take up a ton of space but large enough to make a fryer-sized whole chicken. I don't really use a recipe for this. Here's what I entered into Cozi as my "recipe".

Ingredients 

1 whole chicken, fryer-size (3-4 lbs)
Lawry's seasoned salt
Onion or lemon (optional)

Preparation

Remove giblets and neck and rinse bird inside and out. Sprinkle seasoned salt inside cavity and then rub over the entire outside of the bird. Place sliced onion or lemon inside the cavity, if desired. Stick it on the spit butt-end first and tie on with kitchen string or truss first. Cap the spit and place in the rotisserie. Cook using formula on side of rotisserie, at least one hour or until 165 degrees in thigh and breast, and juices run clear. Allow to rest 5-10 minutes before carving.

So. This time I happened to have one last onion from my farmer's market trip last Wednesday, so I sliced it up and jammed as much of it into the cavity of the bird as I could fit, about half. (It was a rather large onion and a rather small bird.) I trussed the chicken using one of the elastic strings that came with the rotisserie. Regular kitchen string works just as well. There is a neat little disc that you place the end of the spit on so that it stands up, which helps with loading the chicken on. I had a 3.5 lb bird and the formula said 15 minutes per pound, so technically it might have been done at about 52-53 minutes, but I always figure a whole hour for a whole bird. Here are some pictures I took!

Just started

Halfway point

Done!

Resting (digital probe thermometer in the background, love that thing!)

More resting, and my carving tools.

After it was done, I let it rest on the spit, and then on a cutting board I placed inside a cookie sheet. The cookie sheet provides a nice groove for the juices to flow into as I cut, so I don't get my counter ridiculously messy. Google has plenty of guides as to how to carve up a chicken, so I'll let you choose the one that makes sense to you. I couldn't find the one I originally learned from. I started taking pictures of the carving process, but it got too messy to keep going back and forth between the chicken and my phone, so I just took one of the finished product.

Popping out the hip joint

My favorite, the leg quarter!

The whole shebang

I served the meat with some frozen corn and bread and butter. If I'd thought about going to the grocery store again I'd probably have tried to serve some sort of salad/baguette combination, but to be honest, when I make a whole chicken, we tend to eat mostly the whole chicken.

This particular chicken was a Gold'n Plump fryer which I paid too much for ($6.99, about $2 per pound) but the only other less expensive per pound option I could find was a whole roaster which would have been 7 lbs, the same price or more, and wouldn't have fit in my rotisserie. When whole chickens go on sale this winter I will stock up and freeze them, so I'm not stuck paying those prices next time. I have been known to buy 4 or 5 chickens at once when they go to $0.99 per pound. They take a couple of days to thaw in the refrigerator, but if I've planned ahead with my meal plan calendar, I know in advance when to start thawing. The other thing that I could/should have done to make the whole meal more economical would have been to boil the carcass to make homemade chicken stock. One of these days I will actually do it, but Sunday was not that day. ;)

Anyhow. This meat-heavy meal cost about $7.66 for newly purchased ingredients, and the rest I had on hand (probably another dollar or so.) I'm looking forward to sharing my bargain-basement meatless meals soon! Tonight I am making my infamous Linguini with Mushrooms. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow!

Tangy Slow Cooker Pork Roast

Yesterday morning while Sam was at school I popped a roast in the crock pot and didn't have to think about what to make for dinner all day long. Those are my favorite sorts of days. The recipe is here, and the only major thing I changed is that I skip the hot sauce and double the amount of garlic powder. As I mentioned Thursday, this isn't exactly a healthy recipe. The marinade that the pork cooks in is full of ingredients that those on a strict diet might want to avoid: sugar, soy sauce, ketchup, salt, etc. Not sure how modifying it might work out...you'd probably still want some sort of tomato-based acid to break down the meat and a vinegar to add flavor. Plus, depending on the cut of meat, it can be loaded with saturated fat. In the past, I've tried making this recipe with a loin roast, trimming away the bulk of the fat from the top. This time, it was a bone-in shoulder roast, just because that was what was on sale (and I'd used up all the pork roasts we got when we bought on the hoof with my parents.) Anyhow. I heated up the water in the microwave for about a minute to get it nice and warm, but not boiling. I added it to just the sugar first and whisked until it was totally dissolved, added the other ingredients, and whisked again. Since the ketchup comes out of the fridge cold it can sometimes be difficult to blend in with the liquid ingredients, so the whisking helps.

So here's the roast in the crock pot on top of the sliced onion (second recipe in a row with a farmer's market ingredient, WOOT.)

And then the sauce/marinade/whatever you want to call it:

And pour it over, and we're good!

I set the crock pot on low for 8 hours. When it was finally done, it looked like this:

It falls right off the bone, so if you were serving it as a roast, you'd need to be very careful getting it out of the crock pot. Rather than serving it with noodles, I decided to make sandwiches with some buns we had on hand already, barbecue sauce optional. Dan had the brilliant idea to add shredded cheese, which was also delicious. Of course I totally forgot to take a picture of the actual sandwiches, but here's a picture of some of the meat and onions I pulled from the crock pot.

Altogether the meal cost $8.21 for the roast and the onion, the rest I had on hand already (maybe amounted to another $2-3, depending on what kind of sale price I got on the buns and frozen veggies), and we had plenty of leftover meat to make another couple sandwiches this weekend. It's a pretty rich recipe so I try not to make it all that often.

Tonight Dan is going to grill hamburgers from his own recipe, so I may blog about what I make during the weekend for Monday's post.

Jumping back in...and a new short-term project

Since the last time I posted a new blog entry, I've quit my job, spent Sam's summer break going on endless field trips, slowly but surely worked toward getting my homemaking back on track, and gotten him back to school. It's been a little nuts, and I've started and abandoned several posts that just never got finished before they were irrelevant. But now Sam's back in school roughly 3 hours every day. So I've got time to take on a project each day, cook every night, and pretty much get my "poop in a group", as my mom says. Yesterday, the first day of school, I cleaned out our minivan from a summer's worth of straw wrappers, toys, abandoned hoodies and shoes, and whatever else was back there. Before I stopped watching Maggie, I had flipped the third row bench under so that I had a huge flat surface to put both strollers in, but it wound up full of other stuff eventually. No more. The third row is back up where it belongs and the cargo space is now limited to what will fit behind it. Whew.

Last night I plotted out a menu plan for the entire month of September in this nifty software called Cozi. I have the app for my phone but the menu planning is only available on their desktop website, so I was using that on my pitiful little netbook. It's pretty neat, though: you can enter all the recipes you use regularly (including links if the recipe is online) and then drag and drop them onto dates. There's even an option to add the recipe's ingredients to your grocery list (which is available on the mobile app, natch.) The only thing it seems to be missing is a social networking piece. It would be cool to have the option to share links to my recipes with notes either here, on Twitter or on Facebook. A lot of my friends on Facebook have been posting about wanting healthy dinner recipes and whole food cooking ideas, so I figured an easy thing for me to do over the course of the month would be to blog each recipe as I cook it. Days which are repeats will be posts that I write a little more about what's on my mind or what's going on in our lives, but days which are new recipes will be mostly devoted to the menu.

Last night was my Zucchini Pasta, which I have already written about here, therefore I'm not going to rehash the whole recipe. Wednesday was the final day of the MN Zoo Farmer's Market for the summer, but I was still able to get a few onions and a pound of yellow squash. Many of the other local markets go through Halloween so I may have to get a new favorite. :) One thing I tried with the squash was to slice it using the slicey side of a cheese grater. It did NOT go well. Those things are not sharp enough to slice produce neatly. So I dragged out the mandolin slicer after all, and got two kitchen implements dirty. Sigh.

Tonight, pork roast! Will post about it tomorrow. (Note: not a particularly healthy recipe. Potentially high in fat. Contains refined sugar, ketchup, and soy sauce.)

Writer's block

So I've had a lot on my mind lately, but not a lot of it is publicly shareable right now. (No, I am not pregnant, as far as I know.) A lot of what's "on my heart", to borrow the evangelical expression, is related to something that is not my story to tell, even though it's taking up a lot of my time, energy, and worry. I will write what I can, when I can, and backlog those posts as drafts until I and able to talk more openly about it.

I realized a few days ago that I'm filling up Facebook with my cute pictures and anecdotes about Sam. Part of why I started this blog was to move my content off of Facebook as much as possible. So you can expect more "fluff" kid-related posts from me in the near future. Here is one:

Sam has taken to pronouncing the word "tortilla" the way an old southern woman would say "oh dear": oh, DEE-ah. Cracks me up.

And another: Wednesday was unofficial "hug day" at my house. Both kids would walk up to each other and me and say, "Hug?" Hugs would follow, often group hugs. It was the best.

Just so you don't think my life is perfect: we recently came to the conclusion that all of Sam's toys have to be locked away in his closet, or he will dump everything all over the floor and then not even play with it. It was exhausting to try to keep up with and frequently I would just mutter "oh f*** it, whatever" under my breath and just give up. We're almost to the point where everything's put away, and he's taken to writing on the walls (how the heck does he keep finding crayons?) And ripping his books apart. And bringing sticks in the house from outside. Can. Not. Win.

Also as I was typing this? With my thumbs, on my phone, because that's apparently the only way I am allowed to computer lately (side note: do anyone else's kids climb up and lay themselves across your forearms whenever you're using a handheld device? Just mine? OK.) And he jumped up on me and headbutted me, right on the mouth. I am going to have a fat lip. Lucky it wasn't harder or my front teeth would be gone.

So. I am going to try to post more of that sort of stuff, in the mean time. Because honestly, my kid does weird stuff on the daily.

Sam and Autism

I wrote the following the week of April 8. Beyond the general description of what was going on, I was unable to finish because I am still in the process of processing everything. Additional information added "now" is in brackets. So here is what I had to say then:

Sam began special ed preschool last week on Tuesday. The last round of testing with the school district's early intervention programs indicated that he qualified for the educational category of autism, [with varying severity of delays in the areas of language, fine motor, gross motor, cognitive, and social/behavioral.] We kind of knew this was coming, and frankly I'm relieved, as it means he will continue to receive speech therapy which he still desperately needs. [I believe that the main reason he tested so poorly in the other areas is that he does not follow directions well. To be clear, he hasn't backslid on specific skills since his last set of tests, but he hasn't made adequate progress for his age.]
So far it is just Sam and two other little boys in his class. They have a teacher, a teacher's aide, and a variety of specialists that work with them in specific areas. Rather than seeing a speech therapist twice a month, he'll be seeing one twice per week. I am elated, especially considering how much progress he's made with even that amount of help.
We also made it into the ECFE class "Parenting the Child with Special Needs" on Wednesday nights. This is the one where the beginning and end of class are with both the parents and kids, and in the middle we separate for an hour of playtime and a snack (for them), and an hour of group therapy aka parenting class, for us.

So now (in June) our ECFE class is over, and Sam finished spring term at school. This week is the gap between the end of the school year and the beginning of summer school, which will begin mid-June and end toward the end of July. The ECFE class was hugely helpful in terms of hearing what other parents are also going through, and finding some role models in terms of advocating for one's child. About two thirds (maybe more) of the class was parents whose children have autism, and the rest were parents of children who have Down Syndrome or other chromosomal conditions. It ended a few weeks ago and I am finding myself missing having that support on a weekly basis. In the fall that will start up again and Sam will start going to school for four or five days per week for a total of 12.5 hours a week rather than the 3.75 he's doing over three days now.

I'm working through the Autism Speaks 100 day kit, slowly getting myself educated about things a mom needs to know to cope with the diagnosis. Today Sam had his 3-year-old checkup and I talked with his doctor about starting the process of evaluating him for an official medical diagnosis.

Sam is talking more, listening more, and doing more things by himself than he did before he started going to school three days a week. He is excited to get on the bus, and the aides tell me that he climbs right up into his seat and starts trying to harness himself. He puts on his backpack all by himself. I have hope that he'll be ready to start potty training soon, but am aware of the reality that it will take at least twice as long, probably even longer, than it would take to train a kid who didn't have autism.

Anyhow. I am still having lots of feelings about this and I'm not sure how much of that I want to put out on the internet for the world to read. Know that there are a lot of frustrating days, with a lot of good moments in them. For every time Sam does something ridiculously disobedient or destructive there is a time when he is full of snuggles and smiles or just bursts into song for no reason. So many of the things he does that annoy me are completely typical of any toddler. He's still my beautiful, joyful, problem-solving boy.

Spring cleaning: The pantry

[I wrote this post back in early April. Totally forgot to finish it. As well as many of the projects I'd planned. It was going to be a once-a-week month-long series. Hah. Did you know it kept snowing until early May?! It totally did. I just about lost my s*&^. I did start menu planning, though, after the snow melted!]

So I decided to start some "spring cleaning" projects to help get things organized around the house. The first one I tackled was cleaning out my pantry, which is basically just a big wooden closet in my kitchen. Six shelves, the tallest one too high for me to reach without a stool. I forgot to take a "before" picture, but here are the "after" shots. Just imagine that before, I was afraid things would fall out on me when I opened the doors. Not so, now:

The only two shelves that are remotely full now are the top shelf (spices, seasonings, oils, and general baking and grilling supplies) and the bottom shelf (pastas, rice, condiments, and some overflow for sugar and flour. I threw out two huge black bags of stale or expired food. My knee-jerk reaction seeing the semi-empty shelves was "I need to refill this pantry!" After hauling the trash downstairs, though, I am feeling that if I do that, I'll just be back doing this same thing six months or a year from now, because if I can't see the food because there is too much in there, I don't use it up in time. I have a bad habit of buying too much staple food when it's on a good sale because "it keeps for such a long time." No, it actually doesn't, if you never use it! So. My new goal is to not buy any staples unless we've run out of them. No new soups, no new barbecue sauces, no more pastas, unless we're all out. And I'm hoping to get back into dinner menu planning, because I always do much better with cooking at home when I have a written plan.

Zucchini or yellow summer squash pasta

I finally got "on it" and made a two-week menu plan. The plan is to alternate weeks but have basically the same meal once every other week. For Mondays, I planned to do a Meatless Monday theme, alternating my linguini with mushrooms with my zucchini pasta. Anyone who's asked for dinner recipes from me in the last decade has probably gotten this recipe. I love it, Dan loves it, and Sam will eat parts of it, so that's a win in my book.

Part of how I can manage to chase two kids all day and still get dinner on the table (confession: since I started watching Maggie, I mostly haven't,) is that I prep as much as possible during nap time or while the kids are eating. Monday morning I baked two loaves of deli rye while Maggie ate and played, before Sam was really up. Then in the afternoon, after our walk to the park and lunch, I put Maggie down for a nap, sat Sam in front of Super Why, and got to prepping veggies.

My beautiful loaf of deli rye with caraway

A tool I find to be indispensable for this recipe, or for any recipe that calls for thinly sliced vegetables, is the mandolin slicer. I kept the box to store mine in--the blades are pretty sharp. Plus, it has enough extra pieces to keep track of that it's just easier to keep in the box. So. First I washed my yellow squashes and sliced off any blemishes. Then I got to work slicing.

Top view, irresponsibly not using the blade guard thingy

Under the slicer

Finished slicing all three squashes!

It is good to use small-ish squashes, since they have better flavor. Same applies to the zucchini if you are using that. If they'd been a little larger I might have only needed two. Anyhow, I like to use a reusable plastic container for these, so I can just toss them in the fridge until I'm ready to cook.

Next, I peeled and cut off the stem end of my onion. Then I sliced it in half from the stem end through the middle of the root end, so I had this:

Then I made narrow slices down the length of one of the onion halves, not quite to the root. I spread it out a little this time just so you can see where the cuts are.

Then I chopped the other direction, like this.

This is what you end up with on your knife. 

By the way, this is one of my favorite knives for chopping small-ish vegetables. It's sort of half paring knife, half santoku, so the company that makes it calls it a partoku. (My other favorite knife is my larger santoku.)

Here's my finished cup of chopped onion.

Confession time again: I used to buy fresh garlic to mince. Really, I did. But over the years I have thrown out so many half-heads of dried out garlic that I figured there had to be another way. There totally is. Half a teaspoon of this stuff is equivalent to one clove minced garlic. I do still buy fresh heads of garlic for roasting, but I am so done mincing the stuff. Done. No more stinky fingernails.

Lazy, lazy Mel

Anyhow, then everything went back in the fridge for a few hours. After Dan came home, I started some water for the linguini and when it was close to boiling, I heated up my large skillet and stir-fried a teaspoon of the garlic and the cup of onion. When they were soft, I added the sliced yellow squash. Unfortunately my camera was in another room until I was mostly finished cooking. Here is what it looked like when the squash had cooked down most of the way:

The thinness of the slices meant that it cooked fast, and started to break down a bit. That's how I like it, but if you prefer firmer veggies you might use thicker slices so that they hold their shape. When the pasta was finished cooking, I drained it and tossed it with the squash mixture:

And that's about it. I added a little salt and pepper, and topped it with shredded Parmesan cheese. Add a slice of the bread and that's it. Yum.

So that's the plan for every-other-Monday. Dan says this is his favorite of all the pastas I make, and he is a reasonably picky eater. So, yay! Also, I swore I'd already written a post about the linguini with mushrooms, but it doesn't look like I did. Just took a few pictures and promptly forgot about it. So another week I'll write that one. I'll also write about my rotisserie chicken that I plan to make on Sunday, because that is yummy and fun to watch cooking. There may be video. You've been warned. I may get to the other meals we're making for the rest of the week, too. You know, eventually.