Honey Glazed Chicken

Tuesday's dinner was another new recipe, honey glazed chicken.

(Yes, the pictures in the link are much prettier than mine, but we can't all be talented food photographers. Plus, I ate half my portion before I even remembered to take a picture...)

Overall verdict: it was good, but not as good as the sweet and sour chicken from Monday. The sauce was a little potent for my taste, so if you decide to make this, please note it is better to err on the side of too little sauce than too much on your rice... I did double the sauce as recommended and I think I still would because it covers the chicken better in the pan and makes it so the dish requires less basting. I used a smaller Pyrex glass dish (I think 7x11) and it held almost all the chicken I thawed (3 large chicken breasts - the kind you get at Costco in giant bags, thawed in the fridge overnight and cut into pieces) and made about 4-5 servings.

And now I have 5 bite-size pieces of leftover raw chicken in my fridge, waiting for some miracle to transform them into something else delicious (but not too delicious, because there's only going to be one serving).

Picture of the Alleged Cheesecake

I thought it turned out rather pretty, even if the top did crack (despite leaving it in the oven to cool exactly as directed.) AND I finally got an excuse to use the cake stand that we got for our wedding over 3 years ago!

Recipe found here.

Sweet&Sour Chicken and some treats

I took today off just in case my Thanksgiving break extended a little long (meaning if we were delayed due to weather problems), but then we got back from CA right on schedule... so today was just a lazy stay-at-home-and-get-things-done sort of day. As those sorts of days go, this one went quite well.

I decided to take advantage of the time at home and utilize one of my ultimate lazy dinner tools: the crockpot!  Dinner tonight was a sweet and sour chicken recipe. I made a few modifications: I didn't brown the chicken first (just threw it straight in from the freezer), and I used 1 c. water with 1 chicken bullion cube instead of 1 c. beef broth.  Overall it took about 5 min to prepare and 5-6 hours to cook. The verdict? It was quite tasty (I served it on white rice) but we both wished the sauce was a little thicker. I'm not sure how to remedy that; maybe I'll try adding some flour next time, or cornstarch at the end to thicken it. But taste-wise it was pretty delicious.

The only problem I find with crockpot recipes is they all take about 5-6 hours to cook. This makes it ideal if you are home around noon: a tiny amount of prep and dinner is taken care of. However, I am nearly always at work and can't come home for lunch, so it's trickier to get things going at the proper time. I may find a way around that someday, but for right now I try to take advantage of these days when I can.

I also whipped up a cheesecake today, but it is currently cooling in the oven and will be for another 4 hours, so no pictures just yet. A pie or two may be in order soon as well, since I did not get nearly enough at Thanksgiving. So many treats, so little time to eat them all!

A New Beginning

I've officially decided to abandon livejournal. I've never been very good at posting on my old blog over there, but ever since they introduced video ads that pop up every time I go view my own blog, I've become a little disenchanted with their site. So we have a new beginning, also known as a last ditch effort to be better about recording important life events.

The purpose of this blog is mainly to post pictures of my latest crochet projects, describe in delectable detail my latest culinary creations, recommend/review books that I deem worthy, and discuss any particularly addicting video games I have encountered. Oh, and also to let my family know I'm still alive.

I hope to post at least every week, but I suppose that depends on how much I crochet/bake/read/play, now doesn't it? :)

I draw my inspirations from ravelry.com, allrecipes.com, goodreads.com, and my husband. You probably won't get many one of a kind crochet patterns here (yet), but you will get lots of links to awesome free patterns I have found. I'm probably not going to make up my own recipes, but if I find a good one and modify it to make it fantastic, I may post that (with the link to the original, of course). And I don't write books of my own... but my fabulously talented husband does! You can see his blog here. He writes mainly young adult and epic fantasy.

So there you have it. If any of that piques your interest, feel free to stick around.