Not to beat a dead horse, (or a dead chicken in this case) but roasting that chicken on Monday was the best idea ever. It served as dinner for jparks and myself on Monday and Tuesday. Then on Wednesday I ate it again, while jparks had a fancy dinner at Google. After I was done eating, I was going to dump the body, but then I took a good look at the poorly carved remains and realized that there was meat left. Like a lot of it. Because my carving skillz are not mad.

What happened next is not for the faint of heart or vegetarian. I thought about taking pictures, because it was so entertaining to me, but then I decided against it. I mean, do you really need to see a torn apart chicken body? Probably not, and I will openly admit right here and now, that this will probably not entertain anyone but me. Sorry

I didn’t grow up in a roasted chicken kind of house. We lived with my grandmother from when I was four until I was in second grade and she cooked dinner every night. I seriously don’t think we ever went out to eat, including McDonald’s (there is no good reason for why I like McDonald’s as an adult. It does not remind me of being a kid, it was not served to me as a “stop your crying now” comfort food. I like it now because I am a freak with an unrefined palate). But we never had anything like roasted chicken. Sure we had fried chicken, but never anything that actually had the shape of a real bird. (We also had fried cauliflower, fried salmon croquettes, fried eggplant, and fried okra. Were we a southern stereotype or what?)

After leaving my grandparents’ house, I survived on a steady diet of tv dinners. Kid Cuisine was my drug of choice and I swear I had one every single night. My mom worked a lot and there wasn’t time for home cooked meals, and I don’t blame her, but this is probably why it’s so hard for me to understand how to fit cooking into my daily life. I didn’t envy friends that had dinners cooked by their mom’s nightly. I felt sorry for them, they never had a say in what they ate, where as once a week, I got to go to the store and pick out my own dinners! That was so very exciting to 8 year-old me.

So, when faced with my very first roasted chicken not only did I not know how to crave it, but I also didn’t know that there is meat hidden all over that thing. Tasty little bits of meat ripe for the picking. Not knowing how to get at it, I first grabbed a fork. Jabbing at it yielded really poor results; I pulled out a little meat, but could see that I was missing quite a bit. My next step was to roll up my sleeves and attack the chicken with my hands.

Dude! SOME. MUCH. MEAT. It was extremely satisfying to watch my pyrex bowl fill up with little shards of chicken. I did a once over on the carcass and realized that if I popped off the wings then I could get to more meat. After a moment’s hesitation (I am an ex-vegetarian after all) the body was wingless and I had a whole new bounty of meat.

I honestly had to make myself stop hunting for more meat. When I stepped back my hands were covers in meat and chicken juices and the bird was just a heap of bones. At this point I considered boiling the remains for chicken stock, but I am not that Martha Stewart-y so I just pitched it into the trash. Tangi then circled the trash can for the next hour plotting how to topple it.

Thursday I ate my chicken shards on a gordita shell with some refried beans and it was the best meal ever because it was sprinkled with my success over the chicken carcass. Take that you dead chicken! Your tasty, tasty meat was pulled from your bones with my bare hands and I consumed it with some beans. nom nom nom.

I’m digging my place at the top of the food chain and my new found chicken picking apart skillz.

I’ve always said I can bake a mean cookie, but if you want a real meal before it you’ll have to go someplace else. I like baking because it’s an exact science; you learn the rules and your cupcakes will be awesome every time. If you mess with the amount of baking powder in a recipe, the cake won’t come out right. Aren’t precise when measuring the flour and you’ll end up with a dense brick of a cake.

Cooking, however, is a beast that I can’t quite tame. There’s no science involved, no rules for me to learn. You’re working on a recipe and find that you don’t have an ingredient? No problem, just substitute something else for it! Cooking is a process that’s much more fluid and free form than baking and I just suck at that. sucksucksuck.

Not only do I lack the ability to know how to substitute ingredients, but I also lack the ability to be able to read a recipe and see that the end product will be inedible. Which is why, last night jparks and I ended up with stuffed bell peppers that resembled vomit on a plate. (trust me, I know vomit). A normal person would recognize that bell peppers cooked in a crock pot would be horrible, but not me, I soldiered ahead wasting ground beef, rice, bell peppers, and my sanity.

The only good thing to come out of this string of cooking failures is that I’ve learned that jparks is willing to eat whatever I put in front of him, without complaining, and will only say something negative if I say something negative first. Who in the hell knew he was capable of this?!?

This is the boy that sometimes can’t help but blurt something, anything out right as I’m falling asleep for no reason other than he couldn’t stop himself. This is the boy that makes ‘your mom’ jokes to his brother, while his mother is standing next to him, because he doesn’t realize they might hurt her feelings. This is the boy that doesn’t understand that telling a girl she might not want to eat dessert could seem like he’s hinting that she might want to watch her weight. Yeah, he can be a bit blunt. And dumb.

I may not be able to make a decent meal, but my crappy meals are making jparks into a thinking-before-he-speaks adult, so maybe it’s a fair trade. And really, who wants to be known for her meatloaf and mashed potatoes? Not me, I’ll take cupcake fame over that any day.

Internet sucks. MacBook keeps dropping the connection. Keep typing blog posts and then losing them. Am debating throwing the computer out the window or cramming the router down the toilet. Either would make me feel better. Both would end up being expensive stress relievers. Dammit.

Until I can be online and feel less irrational anger, enjoy this picture of my brilliance.

I bought more meat than could fit into my crock pot. I guess I didn’t realize the stupid thing isn’t the size of my bathtub. This was the only way to keep the lid tight so the meat would cook and not poison all of my guests. My other option was to cook the pot roast in two batches but, seeing as how there are only so many hours in a day, the over turned water jug method was employed. Desperation is the mother of all invention. Or something like that.

I am so smart. S-M-R-T.

Serious Eats (a fun food blog. Go check it out, I’ll wait. Hi, welcome back) has a running set of posts called Paula Deen Is Trying To Kill Us. Today they featured The Lady’s Brunch Burger. I shit you not, when I saw this burger I freaked out. I started checking my list of online friends, desperate to share the link to the recipe because I felt God whispering in my ear “Spread the word about this burger.” And who am I not to follow God’s orders?

So what would have to go on a burger to make it so majestic that I’m dedicating a whole post to it? Two words: doughnut burger. Topped with a fried egg. And bacon. Have you fainted from the joy of knowing that such a burger exists on this earth?

Now let me state that this is not a burger I would want to eat on a regular basis. And that I would be fine leaving off the fried egg. But it is something that I really really want to try at least once. And it is something that jparks can live his whole life without eating. I know what you’re thinking and the answer is yes, he is really a man and not a little girl.

His reaction to The Lady’s Brunch Burger was one of total disgust. “You would eat that!?!” might have been uttered a couple of times when I confessed to salivating over it. His final judgment on the burger was “That’s a white trash burger!” To which I say “Sign me up for a double wide trailer because I’m going to eat that burger someday!”

After much arguing back and forth I finally told him “I’m putting it to the blog council!” So what say you, blog council, is the doughnut burger disgusting or tasty looking? If I were going to host a Doughnut Burger Party, would you want to come? Are you on Team Doughnut or Team Girly Man?

And for the record, my ideal white trash burger would be doughnut, meat, cheese, bacon, doughnut in that order.

It is 11:48pm and this is the first time I’ve sat down since 3pm. Thus far I’ve made:

Why did that short list take me that long? I haven’t a clue. These people coming tomorrow better recognize my mad skillz.

sigh, so tired. tiiiiiirrrreeed.

Have you ever wanted something so totally stupid that you just couldn’t bring yourself to actually buy it? Like if you shelled out money for it you would automatically be branded an idiot and all the world would mock you? That’s how I feel about this avocado slicer. I have no idea why I need it, but I do. Yes, I could slice an avocado with a knife but why would I when such a fine tool is made specifically for the job?

The real desire for this kitchen tool came about when Ms. Martha Stewart added it to her Macy’s line of products. Before she had it, the avocado slicer was just another gimmicky “As Seen On Tv” item and I could rational not buying it. “It’s got it’s own infomercial, and nothing on an infomercial is good.” But damn that Martha, she has it in her line and now I neeeed it.

I was at Macy’s today buying some Thanksgiving supplies and I saw the avocado slicer. I picked it up, walked around with it for a few minutes, and then put it back. As I put it back I thought “I can’t buy this, Alton Brown would be so disappointed. It’s a uni-tasker.” At some point in time I’ll decide that wanting perfectly sliced avocados is more important to me than Alton’s approval.

Some day dear avocado slicer, some day you will be mine. Until then, I’ll see you in my dreams.

I might have been lying when I said I was going to post me saying my own name to clarify. Jason can’t make the recording work and get it to link onto my blog. This is very sad because I was planning on saying “milk” too, which apparently I say really funny and weird-like. But I don’t hear the difference between my milk and the rest of the world’s milk.

This morning I was very grown up and I made oatmeal and coffee for breakfast. Then I sat down to eat my hearty breakfast. Not only did I eat my hearty breakfast but I did it at the table! Like a true human! It was incredible. I think I’m going to try this routine again because I wasn’t hungry thanks to the oatmeal and I was caffinated before I got to the office. Sweet. I think I might even try to do one of my 15 minute work out dvds as well tomorrow morning. Wow, I can’t believe I might become a morning person. That makes me want to vomit.

Lauren’s birthday was Wednesday and to celebrate we decided to boil lobsters as if they were crawfish. The thought process was: Lobster= crawfish on steroids. Crawfish on steroids= flavor x 1,000,000= delicious. How could we possibly be wrong with those calculations?!?

The first thing we didn’t consider was that Jason wasn’t going to be around and we would have to handle live, angry lobsters. After trying to pick them up with tongs and failing at it, Lauren suited up in what she felt was appropriate Lobster protective gear:

We managed to get them into their pots, but just barely. This guy wasn’t going to die without a fight:

When we were done boiling them we set them up for a romantic photo op complete with roses. Look it’s true love, they’re holding claws.

Getting the meat out was hard work. It took a meat mallet, hammer, and brute force to just break through the shells or exo-skeletons or whatever the correct word is. At one point lobster juice was flying everywhere, like a bad Gallagher show. I’m pretty sure this is why they give you bibs in fancy restaurants.

In the end, I hate to admit it, but the lobster was a bit of a let down. They are way more work then crawfish to peel and they didn’t absorb any of the crab boil flavor. Plus I think we boiled them too long and the meat was a little rubbery. But the biggest disappoint is that since lobsters are huge and mean you can’t race them like you can with crawfish before you cook them.

There are a few more pictures from our boiling adventure posted here if you’re interested.

Who knew faux fried chicken could be so damn good?!? That’s what the secret chicken dish was for dinner tonight and it got thumbs up.

My mashed potatoes, however, got thumbs down. I think they only got thumbs down because I wouldn’t let Jason put curry powder or lemon pepper in them and so no matter how they came out he was going to be disappointed. I thought they were pretty good for never making mashed potatoes before and making up the recipe as I went.

I would once again like to say, damn I’ve got mad cooking skillz.

I’m just so proud of my new cooking skillz (that skills with a z folks because I’m that damn good) I’m going to brag about them on here.

I never used to think I could cook anything more than a 2-step box of mac and cheese, but lately I’ve been a cooking fool. I made white turkey chili for dinner the other night and last night I made gingersnap pot roast. yuuuum gingersnap pot roast. So easy and very good, I highly recommend it.

Tonight I’m making chicken. I can’t reveal the kind of chicken yet because Jason will read it and it won’t be a surprise. (Really I don’t like him to know what the meal is supposed to be in case I screw it up. If he’s not sure what the original meal destination was then I can lie and tell him “yup, it was supposed to be blacken chicken with crunchy mashed potatoes.”) I’ll let ya’ll know how it turns out.