Pathétique

How can I think of a new blog post when I can't even think of a new Facebook status?

Shitshow Kitchen: The Best Roast Chicken EVAR (plus Bonus Garlic Mashed Potatoes)

I know what you are thinking. Roast chicken? Um, that seems like A.) alot of work, and 2.) impossible for me to make without screwing it over. Well, THINK AGAIN. This is so ridiculously easy that if it didn't involve chopping some stuff, handling raw chicken, and using an oven, a child could do it. OK, that was a really bad comparison. A child would cut off their hands, get salmonella, and light themselves on fire making this. But YOU will be fine. And it is SO EFFING DELICIOUS. It takes almost NO time to throw together, and the end result is perfect, every time. The chicken recipe is lifted wholesale from Ina Garten, who is my favorite.

You can tell this is healthy, because there are alot of veggies. And fruit.

INGERDIENTES! (How did that even happen right there. Well, you know what I mean.)

1 (5 to 6 pound) whole chicken
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 large bunch fresh thyme
1 lemon, halved
1 head garlic, cut in half crosswise
1/4 C butter (half a stick)
1 large yellow onion, thickly sliced
4 carrots cut into 2-inch chunks
1 bulb of fennel, tops removed, and cut into wedges
Olive oil
4 Yukon Gold potatoes
5 cloves garlic
1/4 C milk
3 T butter

If you are making this meal right away, then preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Usually, I get this chopped/buttered/together in the morning, then put foil over the whole thing, throw it in the fridge, and put it in the oven an hour and a half before I want to serve it. Make sure your oven racks are on the lowest levels, or you will not have room for the chicken and you'll have to finagle them while they're smoking hot and your chicken is ready and you will undoubtedly burn yourself.

This is how we core the fennel, core the fennel, core the fennel

I do the veggies first. Chop them very roughly, into big chunks. Make sure you remove the fronds and the root-y type area from the fennel bulb first. And if you have never had fennel, you are MISSING OUT, DUDE. It is the Best Roast Veggie Evar.

Mmm. huge ol' chunks of fennel. These are going to be my favorite part.

Anyway, chop 'em all up, throw 'em in a roasting pan.

This was super easy but did require a knife so a three-year-old technically can't do it. YOU ARE SO ADULT!

Drizzle a little olive oil over the whole thing, then sprinkle it with a teaspoon or so of kosher salt and some pepper. Scatter about a third of your thyme branches over the veggies. THE VEGETABLES ARE READY. I know, so easy! So easy I can do it!

We are also pretty. Very, very, pretty. But not smart.

The chicken is slightly more difficult, but just barely. Take the giblets out of the cavity, then rinse the whole chicken, inside and out. If there are random chunks of skin or whatever, remove them so it looks like a chicken is supposed to look, not like Frankenstein. Make sure you kind of give it a once-over for any big feather quills that might have been missed.

Naked chicken!! It's NAKED!

Salt and pepper the inside of the chicken, then stuff the garlic and lemon inside with the thyme. Truss the leg bones (tie them together with string or do what I do, poke holes in the skin by the legs and pop each drumstick into the opposite side's skin. It works just as well, and doesn't leave the minty tang that dental floss does). Flip the wing tips under the body, then put the chicken on top of the veggies. I like to put the chicken on a rack over the vegetables, but I don't think it is necessary. Melt half a stick of butter in the microwave and pour the melted butter over the chicken, trying to coat all of the skin. The excess will go on the veggies which is totally fine. Salt and pepper it, then either put foil over the whole thing and put it in the fridge for later, or throw it in the oven.

It already looks good.

After you put the chicken in the oven, peel a few potatoes and a few cloves of garlic.

Yukon Gold, baby

Chop the potato roughly and put them with the whole cloves into a pot.

Tasty makers

Cover the potatoes with water, cover the pot, and put it on medium heat when the chicken's been in the oven for about 30 minutes. In the meantime, throw a few tablespoons of butter, a little splash of milk, and some thyme (not the branches, just the leaves) into a mixing bowl.

Fat fatty fat fat

When the potatoes mush apart when you push on them with a fork, they are ready-- it should be right around the time you pull out the chicken, which has to rest 20 minutes anyway. Drain them and throw them in the bowl. I know you're not supposed to do mashed potatoes this way, but eff that. They come out absolutely gorgeous and it is way easier than doing it by hand. Mix them on low just until everything comes together. You might need a dash more milk to make them the right consistency.

These are parfait, and I did nothing fussy to them.

Roast the chicken for 75-90 minutes at 425, or until the juices run clear when you cut between a leg and thigh. It is possible that the chicken will be done after an hour-- this happened to me. Just take the chicken out, tent it with foil, and keep roasting the veggies for another 20 minutes or so. You should let the chicken sit for 20 minutes anyway, since it will do something sciency to help the meat retain its juices. Plus, you can drain off the juices from the veggies at this point and make gravy. Nom.

I know!! IT IS BEAUTIFUL.

And there you have it, folks. Mashed potatoes. Veggies. Beautiful brown chicken. Gravy if you made it (juice from the pan, fat skimmed off, little bit of flour and butter, some milk/water, whisk it over high heat, BAM). EASY PEASY LEMON SQUEEZY.

 I LOVE ME SO MUCH FOR MAKING THIS!

Enjoy.

Hyndman's Peak

Taken yesterday out East Fork

Look! There's a place for sale. We could be neighbors.

Autocorrect, DIAFGFA.

Since I am sans computer for the last few and the next few days, or at least until HP ships me my recovery disks, because God forbid they actually include them with the purchase of my laptop, I have been using my phone to keep from falling back into the pre-information age, or the preformed age, as I am wont to call it just now. Also, I have picked up an affinity for run-ons and a dangerous carelessness with verb tense and mood.

My point being, and do you know I hate it when people use that construction? Usually because they often follow it up with the word "is", and nothing bothers me more than a repeated being verb with the possible exception of never knowing on which side of the quotations punctuation should fall.

Anyway, my point is, is that I have been using my phone for ALL THE THINGS. And you know what this experience has taught me, even more than "Don't leave your computer laying around where the kid can manhandle it and delete important system files?"?

It has taught me that I hate autocorrect. HATE. ABHOR. WISH DEATH UPON. DESIRE THE DEMISE OF. It is basically the absolute worst thing, ever. I hate its smug attitude. Its predisposition to replace sense with nonsense. Its maniacal bent toward making me appear illiterate and undereducated. When I type "She lets us go over there if it's nice," I do not want autocorrect to hijack me and instead say, "Should let's go overall there's if its Nick." Not only does this not make sense, it also creates the necessity of deciding between deleting ALL THE THINGS or trying to wade through the whole morass, one errant screen swipe at a time, editing and deleting, because most of the letters are already there, and let's be honest, if you delete and fix it you'll be back at square one with "Show letter use to overnight The if itself Nicole."

Also? Using a phone increases my paranoia that I will lose any note of length by about a bajillionty fold. You know why? Becquerel (What the ever living fuck? I mean, for real. Under no circumstances is that a word.)-- BECAUSE, my phone just shuts down the web browser at indeterminate junctures, losing all information and sending my teeth into fits of gnashing and my robes into fits of rending.

So I'd better sign off, but not before telling autocorrect that I hope it Dies in a Freak Gasoline Fight Accident.

Shit Outta Luck

The kid broke my computer. He deleted some sort of essential file, so it won't even open.

So until I get the recovery disks and spend some time running installations, WE ARE S.O.L., LADIES AND GENTS. S.O.L.

Also, all of my pictures are GONE.

Posted from my POS Android

Shitshow Kitchen: Gingersnaps!

I love these cookies. LOVE. So does everyone else. Usually, I make a double or triple batch of them, and freeze some of the dough in balls so I can pop a few into the toaster oven at a time and make mini-batches of fresh cookies. Otherwise I eat ALL THE COOKIES immediately, the first day, and feel like I am going to die.

Ingredients:
1 C packed brown sugar
3/4 C shortening
1/4 C molasses
1 egg
2 1/4 C flour
2 t baking soda
1 t cinnamon, 1 t ginger, 1/2 t cloves, 1/4 t mace, 1/2 t nutmeg, 1/4 t salt
1/4 C Turbinado sugar

The molasses is Grandma's, so you know it's good.

That yellow stuff floating in the water? That's how I measure shortening. Fill a measuring cup with two cups of water or so, then put the shortening in until the water goes up 3/4 cup. Ta-da! You do not have a nasty shortening mess to clean up, scrape out, etc. Just pull it out of the water and throw it in the bowl. YOU ARE A GENIUS.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of molasses?

So cream together the first four ingredients.

Holy yum, Batman.

DO NOT EAT IT ALL YET. Add the flour, baking soda, and spices. I think you're supposed to mix this by hand, but eff that. I am mixing it in the mixer. That is what modern appliances are for, yo. So baking does not have to be work.

EAT ME NOW

Mix it just until it's all incorporated, but before it has filed its 1120 (HAHA TAX HUMOR). Then pour some of the turbinado sugar into a little bowl. If you don't have turbinado sugar, it is NOT THE END OF THE WORLD. You can use regular white sugar, it just won't look as cool or have that crunch. Heck, you can skip the sugar if you want. Roll the dough into balls.

Once again, so easy a child can do it. This one has cookie dough under his fingernails. Yum.

I prefer to make my cookies super tiny, because then I can eat more of them. I don't know, it is psychological. Dunk one side into the sugar and then put it on the cookie sheet, sugar side up.

Crunchy sugar makes me happy

You can put them fairly close together, but they will spread. This is also how I freeze them-- on the cookie sheet. Just throw the whole thing into the freezer, let them freeze up for a couple hours, then throw them all in a ziplock. That way they don't stick together.

WE ARE SO CLOSE!

Bake them for 10 minutes or so. It's kind of hard to tell if they are done, because they're already brownish, so they don't really brown. If you're looking at the color of the cookies to judge doneness, you will WAY overbake them. So just trust me: 10 minutes, 12 at the most.

Puffy and slightly blurry because I was quivering with antici



pation

Let them sit on the cookie sheet for TWO MINUTES. If you try to take them off right away, you will have a mess on your hands, because they are super soft. I speak from experience. You need to let them fall, like this:

We have collapsed like a house of cards

Take them off after two minutes, or they will stick to the pan and you will have to chip them off with a carpentry tool. Again, I speak from experience. Let them cool on the rack for at least one more minute before you eat them, or you will burn the shit out of your mouth.

Someone is not so good with the following directions thing...where on earth did he learn that.

If you make them tiny like mine, which is between the size of a quarter and a half-dollar, this recipe makes about 80 cookies. I think. Give or take the few that we ate before I got my count finished. These are best with milk.

Who am I kidding, they are best with anything.

A Flood of Happiness. OR SOMETHING ELSE.

Sorry there wasn't anything here yesterday, and I kind of dropped the ball on proclaiming a winner of the Name That Tune (CONGRATS ANDY!)-- but I HAD A FUCKER OF A DAY, ladies and gents. A fucker of a day.

First, all heck broke loose at work. Then, I overdid my exercise and could barely move. THEN I got into a... well, hubby and I don't really fight, or argue, but we have disagreements. Which, I think, is harder to deal with than screaming. So we had a disagreement and I ended up walking home in the rain. And THEN, instead of being Mopey McMoperson I decided to clean out my entire closet. And mop the floors. And clean the bathrooms. And pick up the kid's room, which is when I noticed that the carpet in his room (located in the basement) was wet.

Yep. Flooded.

THANK YOU, UNIVERSE, FOR SHITTING ON MY HEART.

So I had to rip up the carpet and pad, try to wring out as much water as I could, and set the fans in there. I think we have to get a new pad, but we can save the carpet. Unfortunately, though, the water is still seeping up from the concrete and in through the walls-- and it's supposed to rain again today.

Accidentally taken while trying to call the landscape company this morning

All this because we had the gutters replaced SO THE BASEMENT WOULDN'T FLOOD, and they didn't finish them yesterday so we didn't call the landscape company to dig out the drainage plumbing since they WEREN'T EVEN FUCKING DONE YET.

DAMN IT. So now we have $1700 for new gutters, $1000 for the plumbed pipes, and $300 for a new pad downstairs ANYWAY, even though we spent $2700 to AVOID THAT FUCKING THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS. Well, and the undermining of the foundation of our house and black mold. BUT STILL.

Yesterday can go FUCK ITSELF WITH A RUSTY SNOW SHOVEL, which is the only implement I had to dig the pipe area up yesterday in a vain attempt to divert the water further from the house.

Today, you are preemptively ON NOTICE.

Name That Tune #10

So, I Heard...

You know what I just don't do anymore?

Keep up with current pop culture.

I used to read all the gossip blogs, and look through the magazines... I wanted to know all the things about all the things, and pop culture is actually a large part of urban life. It is what everyone is talking about, all the time.

Out here in Idaho, though? Not so much. Here, the big talk is about Cord taking some 38-year-old woman from Eurasia who spoke NO ENGLISH to the film festival, where they both got so wasted that while crossing the street, one of them barfed and the other peed her pants. Or that Karl is having an affair with a girl who's not even old enough to drink legally, and they aren't even trying to hide it. Or that Luke got into a fistfight at a pastry store over a tiling job. Or that Justin's girlfriend is totally coked out and he is in denial.

It's kind of the same shit as everything you see in the gossip rags, just involving people who aren't as rich, beautiful, or famous. But there is kind of a clear divide between the two, which seems really contrived to me.

I mean, the lives of the rich and famous are generally seen as fodder for public consumption, whereas local gossip is-- well, just that. Gossip. In the derogatory sense. You could argue that celebrity gossip is public domain because these people are public figures, but aren't we all figures in public, in our own domains? What's done in public can be spoken of publicly.

I dunno. I mean, gossip in general is not a savory enterprise. I'm not sure that picking apart every outfit Kim Kardashian wears on the nightly comedy shows is any different than sniping about Lucy and her nip slip at the Mini Mart.

Thoughts?

Shitshow Kitchen: Meatloafballs

So, the reason I call these meatloafballs? They are basically my meatloaf, pared down to bite-sized. You could totally make these into loaves (that word sounds so wrong paired with meat) or even brush them with ketchup five minutes before they're done to make mini-meatloaves that will get you laid. Or you can do what I did, and make the oldest of the old school sauces, using totally prepared ingredients.

I know. First boxed cake mix, now this. WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO, IT IS LIKE I AM SANDRA LEE. 

But seriously. The meatballs take a minute, not much more, since all you do is dump everything together and then throw it in the oven. The sauce takes less than a minute since it is just all about opening jars and cans. You can do this. Your friends will be amazed. Your romantic interests will become lovers. Your mother will APPROVE OF YOU!!! OK, maybe not that last one. But it was worth a shot.

MOVING ON!

You'll note soy sauce is not in the recipe. DUN DUN DUN DUNNNNNN Spoiler alert...

Ingredients:
3lbs. extra lean ground beef
4 slices bread, crumbed
3/4 C milk
3 eggs
2 mushrooms, chopped tiny
1 small or 1/2 large yellow onion, chopped tiny
2 cloves garlic, pressed
2 T Worcestershire sauce
2 T dry mustard
Optional: 1 t tarragon, 1/4 t cumin, 1/2 t sage

OK! Here we go. Set your oven to 400. Throw everything in a bowl. Mix it together. Make balls. Cook them 20 minutes. VOILA!!

What, you want MORE steps? *Dramatic sigh* FINE. So meat in bowl first. Then make your bread slices into crumbs. I did not feel like taking out the food processor, so I just chopped it with a knife. It's better if the crumbs are smaller, but whatever. This is a shitshow anyway.

In no way small or uniform or crumbs

Throw the bread into the bowl with the meat and pour the milk over the crumbs. The goal is to get them to soak up the milk. Chop up your onion pretty small (you can grate or use a food processor if you want), and the mushrooms, too. The mushrooms, in case you were wondering, enhance the beef flavor. I didn't really cut mine that small because I was being lazy. But the smaller the better with this stuff. You can press the garlic (vastly preferable because it's vastly easier) or mince it.

All the things, pre-mix

Put everything in the bowl, all of it. I didn't have Worcestershire sauce, which is ESSENTIAL to get the best flavor, so I subbed in like half the amount in soy sauce. We shall see if that ruins all the things (This turned out OK, but it may have been missing that special something. Who am I kidding, they were still fabulous).

Meat mix, AKA Adult Play-doh

Ok, so I also was thinking, hey, I wonder how many meatballs this will make. Because mostly I just threw this stuff together. trying to approximate measurements as it went into the bowl. The spices were literally the first three jars I grabbed that sounded good. Other than the mustard, which is essential.

Various sizes. Charlie kept trying to make tiny ones "for the cat."

In the end? I had to jerry-rig my meatball pans because I had ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY SEVEN of them.

You will be glad you made 137 when you are down to the last 3

This is good, though, because the mickey mousing led me to realize that you really want to bake these things on racks if at all possible.

We were baked on racks. We are perfect and brown.

Otherwise they kind of stew in their own juices and get all soft and not really like the brown you want.

We are anemic and nasty-looking, and need some makeup badly

So I had to throw the ones from the bottom of the pan back in on the racks for a few minutes to get them nice.

HOLY GOD THESE ARE SO GOOD. So like I said, you can do the ketchup-brushing in the last five minutes, or just douse them in ketchup out of the oven, because they taste exactly like meatloaf-- OR. OR you can make a sauce for them.

Sauce: One from each side, or a mix of all of them.

WE ARE SO DISJUNCTIVE

I used all of them, mixed together. Whole bottle chili sauce, whole cranberry sauce, whole jelly, about 1/2 a bottle of BBQ sauce. Just throw 'em in a bowl, mix 'em up, and toss into a crock pot.

This looks so nasty. But it melds into a beautiful sauce that everyone at your Superbowl Party will love.

Put the meatballs in, then mix it all up, kinda carefully, with a spatula. Turn it to high for about an hour, maybe two. Or low for three hours. Stir it a couple times if you're around. Otherwise, stir it up a few times before serving. The various sauces will melt into eachother and soak into the meatballs a little and NOM.

Eff. Yes.

Everyone loves you AGAIN!! Didn't you just make that awesome WIIINES Cake? And those tasty little tomatoes? Man. You are on a ROLL.

Check it. I wanted to take more pictures but I forgot because I was busy eating and then they were GONE.