More Cooking

I spent most of the day cooking and washing dishes. I washed dishes four separate times. I refuse to let the dishes pile up so that I have a mountain of them to deal with at the end of the day so I wash whatever I use to make each recipe. So I get dishpan hands but it's worth it not to have the dirty dish mountain at the end of the day when I'm tired. First up today was getting the Chicken, Mushroom, and Brown Rice Casserole into the slow cooker set on Low and simmering for seven hours to make this yummy looking stuff. And there's eight servings!

Then I squished together BBQ-glazed Mini-Turkey Meatloaves. The recipe makes six but I had twice the meat so I made twelve. Twelve! That meant I had to find twelve little containers for twelve 1/3 cup scoops of brown rice to freeze alongside the meatloaf pucks. I only have seven of the perfect containers for the rice so I had to dig out others that are acceptable but I went online and ordered more of the perfect ones from Amazon. They'll be here on Wednesday which is too late for today's version but will be here for next time. Every time I have to portion out the rice I am so grateful that I discovered that the green-handled scoop is 1/3 cup. It's so much easier than using a measuring cup. A lot less spillage. Also I chopped up a bunch of scallions and kept the tops that I didn't need for the meatloaves and put them in a Tupperware in the freezer to see if they'll survive well enough to be garnish for the Sesame Chicken I made yesterday.

By then it was lunchtime so I had my usual chicken and chopped salad wrap with grapes and a clementine before dragging out my sketchbook and drawing the last six figures in 20 Ways to Draw a Jellyfish. The book calls the underwater guy a scuba diver but we all know that he's a snorkeler because he has no tank.

Next came One Pot Mexican Rice Skillet. It's one of the quickest and easiest recipes I make. It's another one from thepounddropper.com. I love how colorful it is with Rotel tomatoes, black beans, corn, onions, Minute Rice, and ground beef.

By then I was pretty tired so I came back here to see if I couldn't make heads or tails out of that new writing program I bought the other day. Nope. I've gotten emails from one of the support guys with very clear instructions and I've managed to load the little fixit program he wrote for me but looking at the program makes my shoulders tighten and my teeth clench. Not the way I want to feel when I'm writing so I emailed asking him to refund my money which he immediately did. Tomorrow I'll figure out how to take the program off my computer.

Just before I came back here I washed the slow cooker insert which I had to do because I forgot to put a liner in before putting the ingredients in. There was no way I was going to let rice and stuff crust onto the pan overnight. Then I drew a gratitude journal page. Today I'm mostly grateful for my cooking.

Look what came the other day! I ordered one copy of The Seaview retail so that I could put my hands on a book with the new cover. I think I like it. I got all excited when a sale showed up on my Amazon report until I realized that I'd been the one buying the book. Sheesh. The figure of the woman is the same one that's on Open For Business. I'm sensing a theme. I've seen book series on Amazon where every book in the series has the same cover, just the title is different and maybe the color of the font is different. Not sure I like that.

 

Today I made twenty-six servings of three different recipes. Yesterday I made twenty servings of three recipes. There are two more recipes left to be cooked tomorrow. Each of them makes six servings. I won't have to cook for a very long time. Hooray! The microwave is my friend.

--Barbara