Closing Out June With Cooking and Cleaning!

Posted on by Jordan

For the last weekend in June, Heather and I spend Saturday with her parents at a family friend’s house on a sandpit lake. It was amazingly relaxing, but owing to the fact that we are both “fair skinned” we spent the entire time setting in the shade and reading. That kind of activity didn’t produce much in the way of photo opportunities.

On Sunday we had a lazy morning, went to church, and then decided we should restock our freezer. We had completely depleted our stock of easy lunches to grab to take to work.

I started off making meatballs:

JordanMeatballs_tmb

The meatballs are the only thing I even attempted to figure out the cost per serving on. I had planned to do it for each item, but I forgot about it and threw away the receipt. The meatballs produced six servings of five meatballs each, and each serving comes out to be roughly $0.90. Drop the frozen meatballs in with some cooked pasta or rice, and some sauce and they make a great lunch.

After the meatballs I made some Italian sausage pasta and bean casserole stuff…

( An in-progress shot)

sausageInThePot_thmb

it probably has a better name than that I can’t think of right now. At any rate, it was very good. We had some for a rather late lunch, and then ended up with five servings to freeze.

After the late lunch, I started trimming chicken.

Twelve pounds later:

trimmed_chicken_tmb

once the chicken was trimmed, I made chicken noodle soup with some, grilled quite a bit, and Heather loaded a crockpot to make chicken and rice.

I kind of messed up the soup… I haven’t quite figured out how to avoid having really bland chunks of chicken in the soup. I guess the Campbell’s answer is to grind the chicken up into small pieces. My plan next time, if I remember, is to saute the chicken with some garlic and olive oil before I add the chicken stock. I could try looking at a recipes or something too I suppose.

The soup made seven servings and, the two types of seasonings I used on the grilled chicken made seven and eight servings respectively.

We didn’t start the chicken and rice meal until the next morning. Unfortunately we didn’t anticipate how much water the rice would soak up over night, or the fact that our work day is two – three hours longer than the recipe said to cook it for. The end result was eatable, but not great. I have the remains in the fridge, but Heather informs me she will not be taking any of it for lunches.

I should also point out, Heather was cleaning most of the afternoon. If it sounds like I am taking too much credit, it’s because Heather was doing other things. I could have taken pictures of her, but I don’t think she felt it necessary to document vacuuming. 🙂

-Jordan

The website, and eight pounds of chicken.

Posted on by Jordan

First off, lets see how I did on that list yesterday:

  1. Update the groomsmen pictures.
  2. Try defaulting the directions page “from” box to null.
  3. Fix the formatting problem on the directions page.
  4. Split the directions page into 2 pages so we have directions to the reception in KC.
  5. Add text to the front page talking about the KC reception.
  6. Add a “home” link to the gallery.
  7. Fix the width of the text boxes on the RSVP page for FireFox.
  8. Add a “special thanks” page?
  9. Replace the default 404 page.
  10. Setup the accommodations page, assuming that information is available.
  11. Captions instead of file names showing in the gallery.
  12. Look at adding extra text to the black space in the gallery.

Gallery is kind of a maze to figure out how its building pages, I think I have found where it constructs the main page you see when you click the “gallery” link from the front page, I just have to find a way to inject a link back to the main page from there. I am not optimistic about adding text in the unused space, but maybe I will change my mind once I understand its page creation code a little better.

the other things on that list I simply ran out of time for, perhaps because I was being lazy and didn’t get started right away 🙂

I also tackled the frozen chicken I had piling up, for over a month now I had been buying a bag or so each time the store had a sale on frozen chicken breasts. Ever since Heather and I started our workout plan I have been using the approach Heather used, where you cook a bunch of chicken, and freeze it in proper meal sized portions. Buying lots of it raw, and then procrastinating before cooking it meant I had four bags, or eight pounds of chicken to deal with. I normally use a vinegar and pepper marinade, but I didn’t have a big enough container to soak that much chicken, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that much in the same style. So after trimming it all, I settled on four different kinds:

starting at the top, and going left-to-right, we have: BBQ, lemon pepper, plain, vinegar-pepper. I was pretty happy with the results. the BBQ didn’t come out as well as it has in the past, but I think I did something differently then, I just cant remember what. After cubing and bagging all of that I ended up with 22 bags of chicken, enough to keep me in quick lunches for quite a while 🙂

Hopefully today I can knock out the rest of the website stuff, and maybe even get my room cleaned a little bit before I completely loose this productive streak I am on 🙂

-Jordan