Carping

So I decided to try it again…


What, you ask?

It’s a seven letter word that begins with a ‘C’ and ends with a ‘G’.

Let’s narrow it down.

Camping, no - Cabbing, no - Cadging, no - Calking, no - Canting, no - Carding, - no Carving, no- Cashing no- … Carping, YES!

Lost you yet? I am carping again (tending to make petty complaints… ) about cooking.

I have been telling people at work (with that big mouth of mine) that I was going to cook more things that didn’t have to be microwaved. Last week I made tacos. This week I would be making chicken and rice.

I am going to be honest. I truly thought I was going to get out of it. I asked the hubby to remove the chicken from the freezer while I was at work one evening and he had forgotten. *oops* We had an awesome Buffalo Wild Wings dinner that night. Whelp, I didn’t mention anything else about it and was happy as a clam until this afternoon when I found two completely thawed chicken patty things in the fridge.

“I thought you could make the chicken and rice that you had been talking about,” he said sweetly over the phone. (I had called him to see if he had any plans for dinner.) Dang it. “Ok…” I replied and smiled a sweet, but pained smile. I had been discovered! After hanging up I removed about 4 of the 10 cook books I own to find a simple chicken baking recipe. (I have had problems with cooking chicken in a frying pan.)

Well I went through two of the four cook books. I learned that for some of the chicken recipes I encountered one needed to have in possession a mallet. I had to look twice as normally I don’t see the word “mallet” in a cookbook. (Okay, when I happen to look through a cookbook. Maybe it is a more common occurrence then I thought.) Anyway, I didn’t have a mallet nor the 50 other spices it called for – so I moved on. I moved on to EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN .. except how to bake a chicken fillet. I am pretty sure I came across a recipe to bring the chicken back to life… maybe that wasn’t a cookbook. Anyways…

Did you know that most of the cookbooks (or the two that I was looking through) didn’t have a simple chicken baking recipe? I had asked coworkers previously about how to bake chicken, but the only thing I remember was olive oil, oven, but no temperature or bake time. (Probably the two most important things in baking with the exception of what I was baking.)

I will let you know that I didn’t back down. The chicken fillet patty things went right to the frying pan – with some olive oil. How come after staring at cooking chicken, everything starts looking pink? I was pretty sure the outside was cooked, but after about 8 minutes maybe that was looking a little pinkish too. I mean what exactly constitutes as “pink”? Chicken when cooked kind of looks like it has an element of beige – some pink influences – so when do you start saying that it is pink raw versus pink cooked? By the end of my cooking expedition, the chicken no longer looked chickenish and more an unidentifiable shredded mystery. (I had to cut it to make sure it was “cooked” by the color standard.) I am now quite impressed whenever I see full chicken fillets that have not already been sliced and diced and are complete cooked inside and out.

Needless to say, dinner turned out edible and hopefully cooked. I must remember two things next time when cooking chicken and rice – one, make sure to spend some more time looking for a recipe; two, cook two bags of rice instead of one when cooking for more than one person.

Oh the adventures of cooking… and thinking way too much.