Crock Pots

Where would we be without these kitchen tools we’ve grown so accustomed to using? One of my favorites is the humble crock pot.

In our kitchen you can find all sorts of modern kitchen gadgets. For instance we have a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, Cuisinart food processor, Cuisinart griddle-grill-Panini press, Oster blender, Oster bread maker, VillaWare waffle iron, and of course, the Mr. Coffee coffee maker. I’m telling you, kitchen life would be hell without these modern day advances in technology, especially without the latter. Okay, so maybe it’ll be hell to everyone who has to deal with me. Anyway, this is about the works and wonders of the Rival crock pot we have, and which is currently under use making dinner as it has been since last night. I’m a believer in slow cooked meals, but don’t always want to, well, slave away in the kitchen all day while I should be at work, and so I employ the ease of a crock pot for those times.

So what’s for dinner? Pozole, a chicken and hominy stew of sorts. However, with my complete and utter lack of faith in most cookbooks, and the fact that my Mexican cookbook does not have a recipe for this, I decided to, in usual Cory-fashion, make one up. I chopped up a couple stalks of celery, a yellow onion, a few cloves of garlic and added a can of diced tomatoes (fresh taste like regurgitated mush here in the winter) jalapeños, a couple spoonfuls of garlic chili sauce (it’s Asian, but whatever) some cumin, oregano, smoked paprika, chili powder, salt and stirred it together with a couple cans of hominy before adding about a pound and a half of frozen chicken breasts and thighs. I poured a can of chicken stock on top, put the lid on it and set it on low. I’m sure I could have done it all this morning, but judging from the obvious equilibrium issues I’m having right now, there would have also been an emergency room visit, in which case, no dinner, and that would be sad.

And so, since my grocery shopping included finding stuff to add on top of the soup, including avocados and red cabbage, I seem to have forgotten the limes and cilantro and radishes. Oy. Looks like a quick trip to the grocery store before heading home tonight will be in order. At least I know exactly what I need this time. However, that is no guarantee I’ll actually remember to do so, even if I make a list on my phone and set a reminder. That reminds me, I better go shred the chicken now so it has plenty of time to soak in all those amazing flavors. And yes, the house smells amazing.

Crappy Plumbing

Seriously, we moved out of a house that had horrific issues with the kitchen sink and into a much newer house with silly plumbing issues. Grrr… AARGH!!!

Okay, so perhaps the two simply cannot be compared. However, it is quite tiring to find a puddle under the sink because whoever installed the pipes didn’t take into account things like, say, measurements, before cutting and putting them together. Of course, we still have most of our extra PVC pipes from the old house and I’m sure I could fix the problem myself, the quarter after six in-the-morning time I usually find this problem hinders my motivation to do so. Alas, I suppose that if I want something done I’ve got to do it myself… especially since we already got the problem taken off our rent when we moved in because I thought I had remedied it back then.

Leftovers

Leftovers are great. Assuming you can use them.

It seems that we always have leftovers from dinners or large lunches, but rarely enough for both of us to eat another meal out of them. What I’ve found is that by thinking outside the box, a small amount of leftovers can become a completely different meal by adding a few other ingredients. I’m sure you all have your own tricks to stretching your grocery bill, but here are a few of mine.

Spaghetti is a main staple in our house, not just because it is easy to make but because it is relatively inexpensive. Typically I only use half a box of noodles, which means when two adults eat a meal there is usually enough for a little more than one person to have leftovers. However, add a can of chili, a little sour cream and some shredded cheddar and parmesan cheese, bake until bubbly and you’ve got Chilighetti. It may seem odd to combine those particular flavors together, but the results are delicious.

Fajitas are another main dinner in our household for the same reasons as spaghetti. Now sometimes we are so hungry there aren’t any leftovers, but most of the time there are enough to turn into another meal. Fortunately the ingredients I use, chicken, red bell pepper, onions, garlic and jalapeños, work well in a variety of dishes in the Tex-Mex menu options. For this reason it is easy to work the filling into quesadillas or with the addition of either refried or black beans into a topping for nachos. However, one of my favorite uses is for Black Bean Soup. I cheat and buy a large box of black bean soup and heat it along with the leftover fajitas and a can of black beans for substance. Topped with sour cream and sliced green onions and you’ve got a delicious and filling soup.

Pulled pork is another dish that is relatively easy to make in a crock pot, but can be utilized for a plethora of other dishes. I cook mine for thirty-two hours in a special blend of spices I create and rub the pork with before cooking. But aside from pulled pork sandwiches with coleslaw, the meat can be used for enchiladas when combined with black beans and my homemade enchilada sauce, wrapped in tortillas, covered in cheese and baked until bubbly. Other uses are tacos, burritos, pretty much any dish that you’d use shredded beef or chicken you can use pulled pork for. It also works eaten cold in salads.

Of course there are plenty of other ways to make a small main course work again, either by adding an extra vegetable dish or two and some bread. We typically eat a lot of salad with our meals, especially in the summer, but canned or frozen veggies will work in a pinch, and we always have those on hand. We almost always have bread of some sort in the house, but English muffins make great cheesy garlic bread.

Alas, the best way to utilize leftovers in new ways is to plan ahead. I typically plan three meals a week when grocery shopping and use the leftovers for the remaining days. While this doesn’t always work out as planned, I make sure I’ve got substitute meals on hand just in case… like a box of macaroni and cheese with half a pound of chopped broccoli.

Operation Kitchen: Complete

Yesterday my plan to finish the kitchen and the boys’s room was a success. Well, mostly.

After getting a rather late start, running by the house to load up the shelving unit in the kitchen we used as a baker’s rack, some yard tools, and a few little things, I went to the hardware store to exchange the much-too-small hose I got for the refrigerator ice maker installation. Fortunately it was only a couple bucks more for a connector five feet longer. Like I said, grossly underestimated the size I’d need. Now we have ice!

Anyway, so I got home and started doing what I could to tackle the mess otherwise known as the kitchen, filled with boxes of pots, pans, bowls and stemware, bags and reusable shopping bags I’d loaded with groceries, and started trying to figure out where to rehome them. The once useless space under the corner cabinet section? I found that if I got all the way down on the floor I can just barely reach the very back. So I put least used items in the farthest reaches of its confines and used one shelf for baking goods and the bottom for extra storage bags and plastic wrap. I’m sure more stuff will make it in.

After the kitchen was mostly tackled, I began work on the boys’s room. I had an idea of how it would turn out, but after putting the bedding on the futon and books and a few toys on the bookcases and their clothes in the dresser, it still looks empty. Perhaps we need to get a few posters for the walls and definitely bring over the stuffed animals from the house.

We then started putting boxes in the closets of stuff we either weren’t unpacking or unpacking yet, and brought in the baker’s rack from the garage to put all of our bins of food, the microwave and cookbooks. I have to say that with the addition of the pantry, the baker’s rack does look quite empty. However, I’m thinking that open storage for all the cake pans will make good use of those bottom two shelves. We’ll see how well this plan works. In the mean time, I’m excited to see how well working in this kitchen will be. With a cake order and a cupcake order for tomorrow, I guess I’ll find out tonight.

Assembling

Yesterday while the cable guy, gas guy and carpet cleaner guy were all doing their thing, I was busy assembling a wardrobe and transforming it into a pantry. Actually, transform isn’t the right word since we’re just using it as such.

When a functional piece of furniture can be purposed for something else, that is great. Take, for instance the Dombas Wardrobe from IKEA. Yes, there are mostly shelves on one side, but that one side can hold a lot of stuff that an otherwise cabinet-lacking kitchen couldn’t hold. And the other side, while meant for hanging clothes, will be perfect to store brooms, mops and Lucy’s food container. I tempted to see if the ironing board will also fit inside.

As for assembling the piece, IKEA has great no-word instructions that are easy to follow and I was able to pick up the flat-packed boxes and put it together myself. Oh, I’m sure it would’ve gone by faster had there been another person helping, but I had to be there while the cable guy and gas guy were doing their thing anyway. By the time the carpet guy showed up I was cleaning off small appliances and putting them on the shelves.

We’ve been using an open air wire storage rack for the small appliances, but I’m thinking that having them inside the cabinet will dramatically cut down on the cleaning and dust they accumulated on the rack. Besides, it looks cleaner. Of course, after I finally assembled the piece and put it where I thought we should put it, another question arose; do we even need the wire rack in the kitchen anymore? Alas, the answer will probably be no, in which case, I’m going to move the pantry onto another wall to make more space for the dining table.

So while it doesn’t seem like a lot was accomplished yesterday, we now have heat and hot water, internet (our biggest priority!), and clean (but still slightly stained) carpets. All in all the house is finally ready to be moved into. Except for the bathrooms and the office ceiling, all of which still require painting. Ugh.

The Cupboard Less Opened

Six cupboards diverged in a small kitchen
     And sorry I could not open all…
Especially that one above the refrigerator

Robert Frost would be so proud. Okay, so, here’s the deal. I decided to replace the hinge on the broken cupboard above the stove that gets used multiple times a day with the one above the refrigerator which I thought hadn’t been opened in about a year. Turns out not only was that estimate off, but also the contents of the cupboard itself too. Apparently we did get rid of the two sets of extra dishes we had stored in there, probably a garage sale or something, and it’s been years since we had one of those. What is currently residing is a lot of old serving plates and our plastic picnic plates, as well as a margarita set of glasses and a pitcher. But more frightening than anything is the half bottle of rum lying in there along with three unopened drink mixes. This made me realize that it has been many years since this cupboard was opened because since we got our shelving unit in the kitchen four years ago our alcohol has been stored on the top in a cocktail tray.

I laughed a hearty laugh, mostly at the bottle of Monarch Rum, a brand I have never even drank which means that it was from before I started drinking, which furthermore means is over five years old. I nearly vomited at the crustified particles that had sunk to the bottom of the drink mixes, but was too horrified to touch them and so I left them lying there on their sides next to the margarita glasses.

But, I had a job to do and I needed to do it. The mission was to take one of the hinges off the right door of the cupboard where nobody would notice it missing and put it onto the one above the stove so that it could be hung back up. This was fairly simple, although I did notice that the left cupboard door above the stove was a little bent out of shape and I’m not exactly sure how to go about fixing that short of taking it off and rebending the hinge to make it square again, which of course I haven’t done yet but will need to do in the near future.

Now a logical person after hanging the door back up and knowing full well that there was stuff that needed to be thrown away in the other cupboard would have taken out said stuff and tossed it. I am not that person. Instead I closed the door, put the canvas storage bins back in front of the cabinet and focused instead on being able to open and close the door above the stove without it trying to impale me to death or take out an eye. However, after writing this now I have guilt for not cleaning it out and will probably end up doing so after I post this. Stupid conscience.

Honey-Do Lists

Do you ever wake up and open the cupboard door where the coffee is stored and have the door fly off the hinges and nearly impale you? If not… lucky.

So our kitchen cabinets are old, I mean as old as the house anyway which was built in 1956. Furthermore the hinges are all the original brass hinges with the exception of the ones under the sink which have been replaced at least four times since we moved in. I don’t know, I guess they get a lot of use, or perhaps my kicking them shut and using my foot to open them isn’t the most gentle of things to do.

Well, let’s see, Sunday morning I wake up, shower, get dressed, feed the animals and open the cabinet to get the coffee canister and filters and the top hinge had apparently been compromised because the door almost took out an eye. I like my eyes and would hate for anything to happen to them. So what would the next logical step be? Remove the cabinet before it takes out someone else’s eye? You’d think, but instead I made my coffee, put it back into the cabinet and carefully propped the door back up and made sure the little magnet (also over fifty years old) secured it into place. Monday morning was a repeat of nearly taking out an eye, but this time I grabbed a screw driver and took the door off and placed it next to the stove. This made me realize two things: I really do like not being able to see what is behind the cabinet door; I really have to clean out this cabinet yet again.

Then upon further inspection, I believe I do not necessarily have to get a new hinge, but merely take one of the hinges off of one of the cabinet doors above the refrigerator which haven’t been opened in over a year. There isn’t much in there we use anyway, since we don’t entertain nearly enough to need more than four martini glasses, four margarita glasses (both of which work interchangeably), eight cocktail glasses (which also work for both margaritas and martinis), six pub glasses and who knows how many wine and champagne glasses we have in the cupboard we store our glasses and mugs in. The one over the fridge is more of the same, along with two sets of dishes we really should just get rid of. I figure they are short enough that one hinge should in theory be all that is required to keep it in place. If not, I’ll find another at a local hardware store and pray that it will fit in the same place, which has been the main issue with the sink cabinet as is evident in the multitude of holes next to, above and below the current hinges.

Of course, the biggest issue is when I will decide to go ahead and take care of this. Something tells me it’ll be sooner than later as I really hate looking at the nutritional information on the sides of our cereal boxes, especially the one for Cap’n Crunch.

Cutting Boards

Almost every kitchen has a cutting board, whether it is the built-in one in the cabinetry where we instinctively put our most used utensils in the drawer below making it nearly impossible to get to them while the board is out, or countertop varieties. Either of these can be made of wood or a composite plastic material of unknown origin, and they are both perfectly acceptable for cutting on. But for all the work they do for us, how often do we care for them?

Our kitchen is equipped with four cutting boards of various materials. We have an old white plastic cutting board that has been stained over the years, but is still quite useful for slicing raw beef and pork, a black anti-microbial plastic cutting board for raw chicken, a built-in wooden plywood cutting board that was on it’s last limb a quarter-century ago, and a newer wooden butcher-block board that sits directly above the built-in on the countertop at all times. While it certainly isn’t necessary to have this many, you should at least have two, and use one for raw meat, and the other for everything else. Why? Contamination. The only exception to this rule is if you have stainless steel countertops which can easily be wiped with a bleach-water solution between cutting on them, but using this countertop is hell on your knives, and you’ll be needing to have them sharpened quite often.

Now, most of us who do have the plastic ones think they are pretty easy to care for. You wash them either by hand or toss them in the dishwasher and they are clean, right? Well, sorry to say, but the dishwasher can get so hot that before long your cutting board can warp and become brittle and then it is useless and unsafe to cut on. Hand washing in hot soapy water and storing upright will prolong the life of the board. However, most of the time you will need to replace the board before this happens anyway, so if you don’t mind getting a new cutting board every couple years, go ahead and use the dishwasher as that same hot water will sanitize the board between uses. It is also a good idea if you do wash by hand to use a diluted bleach water solution to clean the surface, maybe every few months or so, especially if you see knife marks in your board.

Wooden boards require just a little more than their plastic counterparts. For starters, they should be oiled. While it is tempting to just use vegetable oil since you probably already have it on hand, mineral oil is best to use because it will not go rancid. What I do is pour a small amount on top of the board and use my fingers to spread it all over the board, allowing it to soak in thoroughly. I check on it every half-hour or so, and if any spots have soaked in all the way, I redistribute the oil back to those areas, or pour a little more on the board. This process does take a few hours, but usually only needs to be done every few months. The oil causes the board to visibly darken, and when I see it lighten and look dry, it is time to reapply. You can find mineral oil at any kitchen supply store, sometimes big chain stores next to the cutting boards, or at your local pharmacy in the laxative aisle. And no, I am not kidding. To clean them, simply use hot soapy water, wiping off any excess water with a dry towel to prevent staining and warping. Do not submerge a wood cutting board in water, as this will cause it to soak up too much moisture and will begin cracking as it dries out. And while some people claim a good bleach solution is a good measure to keep any contamination in check, bleach + wood = bad. If you are worried about a contaminated board, a vinegar solution of 3 tablespoons per cup of water will do the trick… especially if your board gives off an odor of onions and garlic.

Both wood and plastic cutting boards will need to be replaced over time, so what signs should you be on the lookout for? For one, deep cuts. If the board has very visible cuts from the knife, which you will also notice while cutting when your knife gives you a little resistance, it is time to replace. Those knife marks are breeding grounds for bacteria, and the deeper they are the harder it is to keep clean. The nice thing about most cutting boards is that you can simply turn them over and use the opposite side. However ones with “feet” probably won’t be salvageable. If your wood cutting board has those same deep cuts and is thick enough, it can simply be sanded down.

I have absolutely no idea what to do with the built-in plywood cutting board, as it is so chipped and peeling, so I usually use it as extra counter space rather than a cutting surface. If you have one of these cutting boards and have figured out a way to salvage it, please leave a comment for others to utilize.

While rigid plastic and wood are the most common, they are not the only options. We also have glass cutting boards available, which are about as non-porous as you can get and by far the easiest to clean and care for. And there are also flexible plastic cutting boards on the market which are perfect for transferring cut foods, as you can simply fold the edges, lift and pour. The flexible plastic boards will not last as long, but they are the cheapest, so depending on your cutting uses you could get between a few months to a year out of them before they need to be replaced.

Remember, your cutting boards take a lot of beatings from you. Care for them. Keep them safe. And in return they will keep you safe.