Bowl

So I pulled out my crock pot this week and made the potato soup from one of my crock pot experiments.  Best potato soup ever!  

And what could be make my potato soup even better?  My potato soup in a bread bowl! 

However…  I am too lazy to make my own bread bowls. 

I had a couple of Kaiser rolls leftover from the bag I got off the day-old rack at Tops and had an idea:  What if I made a mini bread bowl from one of those?

 

 

It worked!  But it was really small and didn’t hold much soup.  I thought I would be OK with it because I don’t eat a lot to begin with, but this wasn’t enough of a meal even for me   

But… it was really good!

This would be a really nice idea for an appetizer, and I think I would serve it as such the next time I have company over for dinner.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained!

Not Complaining

I've noticed that I've been kind of whiny in my last few postings, so I am not going to complain in this entry.

I am not going to mention that I've spent over $800 on my truck and it still hasn't passed inspection. I am not going to ask why my phone books are always delivered on rainy days. And I'm not going to grumble over the fact that it's supposed to rain all day Saturday and I have so many things outside that I need/want to do.

Instead, I'm going to talk about other stuff. Happier stuff.

I took a half day off from work Friday, which is very unlike me - but so needed. It was great to get home and have time to make a bunch of phone calls I've been needing to make. It was nice to call while the businesses were still open and be able to call in the privacy of my own house. It was also great to be able to take care of business visits I haven't been able to do that really needed to be done. It was such a great feeling to come home and have a ton of time to work on projects. I got a lot of stuff done and it feels great. I should take half days more often - they are good for the soul :)

Tops had baby potatoes on sale this week, so I bought a bag. I wanted to try and make baby salt potatoes. I *love* baby salt potatoes, but never tried making them. It was easier than I thought it would be - the 'recipe' I found said to boil the potatoes in water and a pound of salt. A pound of salt is a*lot* of salt in my opinion, so I only used about a cup. It was kind of interesting how the salt got all over the stove as the potatoes boiled - there was a salt powder all over. I have to report that a cup of salt is also too much - they turned out *really* salty. I saved some for tomorrow, so I'll see if some of the saltiness goes away after a day.

Today I used an orbital sander for the first time. That thing got five out of five stars. I've always used a sheet palm sander, which was OK. I learned today that orbital sanders are a million times better. The orbital sander was a lot faster, did a nicer job and the one I have sucks up all the dust into a little compartment, so the mess is very minimal. Yay for orbital sanders!

I ran into the son of a friend of mine - wow has Josh grown up! It's amazing what a difference two years make.

Sunday is going to be my first Father's Day without my Dad. We are going to be passing the Father's Day torch to my brother-in-law as he is now the dad in the family. We are going to have a cookout and celebrate him being a dad of *two* this year. And I know my Dad will be there in spirit :)

Bravery?

As I've mentioned before, I pretty much can't cook. I must have either been feeling brave or I just wasn't thinking... I attempted *two* recipes that were new to me. On the same day :0

Well, it turns out that I can make a kick-ass macaroni salad. Who would have ever guessed that there is *mustard* in macaroni salad???? Definitely not me.

I also tried a new crock pot recipe, tweaked to be vegetarian and to my taste naturally. It turned out OK - I think that the fact I used too many noodles didn't help matters any. The macaroni salad needed four cups and the Cavatini only needed two cups. So of course I put four cups of noodles in the crock pot. I think the recipe should have been *really* good if I put in the right amount of noodles, but for now, I'm just adding some extra spaghetti sauce to balance it out and it's still pretty good.

I also made some of my most awesome coleslaw - yum!

I can't believe how many dishes I used. That's probably a big reason why I don't like to cook - I hate cleaning up the mess all the creating creates. Ugh.

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I can't wait to see if Time Warner is going to credit us for the half day that we didn't have internet service today. Even tho' the Rigases were ripping off Adelphia, I was a much happier customer with them. Adelphia was cheaper and the customer service was sooooo much better. If there was an outage, I was able to reach a representative quickly and I had answers. Today's outtage aside, I haven't had great experiences with RoadRunner customer service. Today Time Warner's solution seemed to be to just take the phone off the hook so they wouldn't have to talk to customers. (I realize that their phone service was out too, but come on - they don't have back up systems for their customer service??? They couldn't even put out a pre-recorded message that let the customers know what was going on when they called???)

I also hate that if you want to use the web space they 'give' you, you have to use their pre-formatted web pages. I hate them. They are ugly and there aren't many options to personalize them. I also have to close out all of my tool bars to even use the page because their stupid upload and management tools don't even fit on the screen. I also hate that you can't upload using FTP. I can't direct link to anything I upload. It's a real pain to store anything in 'my space' - which I think is absolutely not very customer/user friendly. I can't do a lot of things that I used to when I had my free-for-all space that Adelphia gave us.

I wish we had another cable company in the area to compete against. In Ohio they have WOW! cable competing against Time Warner. You can get digital cable and internet for $60 there. For $65, they offer the same package I have. I pay over $105 a month for my cable bill. Verizon isn't much better than Time Warner. I would love to see WOW! here.

I'm not holding my breath in hopes of any kind of credit on my next cable bill.

Chilly Chili

So my first crockpot meal was chili.




The whole process was pretty quick and painless. I pretty much just dumped all the ingredients in the pot (using veggie meat crumbles, I didn't have to worry about browning any beef) and turned the thing on. Kind of hard for anyone - even me - to mess up! Seven-and-a-half hours later I turned it off. Cleaning the crock was easy - nothing stuck inside. And the chili turned out not half-bad... Considering I made it and it's not a dessert :)

It is a bit on the salty side, but I think that is because I used the veggie beef instead real beef. Next time, I would just not add the extra salt called for in the recipe.


I had my first bowl with cheese on the top - yum!

I am going to freeze some and see how long it lasts - there was a *lot* of chili there for one person :)

Overall, I will call my first crockpot experience a success. I will not be afraid to try something else. I kind of have my eye on a cheese-potato soup concoction...

Crock

Let me start by saying that I am not a cook by any stretch of the imagination. I can make good cookies and good brownies, but when it comes to 'real' food, the microwave is my best friend. Whenever I've tried to cook a real meal using a cook book and the oven, the thing I try to make just never turns out right. One can only take so many failures before totally giving up :)

That being said, I received an email this past week with this link to a bazillion crock pot recipes. As I quickly perused them out of curiosity, I became more and more intrigued. A lot of them looked *really* good!

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to try some crock pot recipes. Most of them look easy enough that even I can't mess them up. If I like them, they could be an easy way for me to make my dinners and lunches. They might even be healthier than the add-water-milk-and-butter stuff out of the box.

So this week I bought myself a crockpot.

This weekend I am going to try a recipe. I'm not sure which one yet - I have it narrowed down to a couple, tho'.

We'll see how it goes.

Wish me luck :)

On a side note, I'm watching They Wait right now, which I taped off the Sci-fi channel a while ago. I like scary ghost stories, and this one is really good so far. I think it's the best one I've seen since The Grudge 2 - which was really good.