Lazy Girl Dinner

Yesterday I was sharing with some colleagues about how much I love my slow cooker. They confessed they only use theirs for the occasional soup and are afraid to cook anything else with theirs. As I shared the virtues of my slow cooker and promised to teach them how to cook a chicken dinner, it occurred to me this info might be helpful to others. So here's the dealy-o on why and how a lazy girl cooks dinner in a crock pot.

Every Wednesday night, Austin goes to Cub Scouts, and it's a mad dash from work to home to eat to drop him off and then turn around and pick him up later. Throw a toddler into the mix and cooking dinner in the midst of that equation is just not do-able. So, typically, on a Tuesday night I prep the food for the slow cooker and then all day Wednesday it cooks while we're at work and/or school.

Clean a whole chicken (rinse it out good!) and pat dry with paper towels. You can stick an onion or some garlic cloves or a cut up lemon inside it if you want. If you're feeling extra lazy, don't put anything inside. Put it in the crock pot. Cut up some potatoes, carrots, maybe some onions, and put them around the chicken in the pot. Pour barbecue sauce or any kind of marinade you like over the chicken. I like the maple-flavoured Diana's Sauce. Sprinkle herbs on your chick if you want. Splash some lemon juice around onto the vegetables and sprinkle them with herbs. My family likes Herbs de Provence on our veggies, so that's what I use. When you're ready to cook, just set the pot on low for 10 hours. That's it. That's the lazy girl dinner.

Here's a shot of what tonight's lazy girl dinner looked like before cooking:

Some other tips for using the slow cooker: I like to set it cooking near a window and just crack the window open a teeny tiny bit. As much as I love the smell of dinner when I arrive home, I don't necessarily want the whole house reeking of it. A great tip from my friend/neighbour Russ: If your crock pot doesn't have a timer, just plug it into one of those timers that turns your lights on and off. Set the heat level to what you want (High or Low) and then set the timer for when you want it to end cooking. You can also get fancy and set it to start cooking at a particular time, if you want. Me, personally, I'm not keen on leaving food out not cooking til later. But I'm a germaphobe who wears latex gloves while handling meat, so I'll leave that choice up to you.

Final tip: Don't forget that you cooked dinner! I've been known to arrive home with an armload of groceries, gearing up to cook a meal, having totally forgotten I've been cooking dinner while at work. There's nothing like arriving home to a home-cooked meal, even when your lousy memory surprises you with it. Enjoy!

Here's the 'after' pic.

Sunday Dinner

Yesterday, my good friend/neighbour Lori shared with me that her family eats Sunday dinner in their dining room. This is something we used to do, but had strayed away from once Lauren came along. In thinking it through, it's kind of strange how we have a perfectly good room in our house but we really don't use it as a family, other than for special occasions. In a way, the dining room has become my quiet space where I read, meditate, and write. And our cat, Coco, treats the dining room like every other room in the house - her personal lounge.

Really, it makes no sense to make the room unofficially off-limits. Who are we saving it for? Company? How often do they come - once a month? And while we're thinking about it, how about the 'good' dishes. And the 'good' towels. 'Special' clothes? All that stuff? I realized that by saving things for others and not making use of them myself or with my family, then the message I'm sending myself and to those nearest and dearest is not very nice. Undeserving? Not good enough? Perhaps too messy and likely to spill/wreck something?

All that went out the window a few weeks ago at Thanksgiving when we had a bit of a large-scale red-wine incident involving white dining room chairs and beige carpeting. But I managed to clean it up and although one chair is a tiny bit greyish now, it's become a funny story in both the fabric of our lives and that of our dining room. In the midst of blotting the wine, I found myself to be surprisingly calm about the whole thing. My mom remarked about it and I responded, "You know, in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't matter. Everyone's here, we're all healthy, and people are way more important than things." Perhaps I'd consumed too much wine to be concerned about the spillage but I suspect it was more likely that recent events in my life (including the sudden and unexpected death of a friend just days before) had wiped the bullshit out of my eyes to help me focus on what really mattered. At any rate, some sort of wisdom came from my mouth, be it wine wisdom or my own.

So here we are - the final waning days of Autumn, poised on the brink of that grey zone between Halloween and Christmas. Everyone who knows me knows how much I hate the next few upcoming weeks. Bare trees, grey skys, wind, and bleakness as we brace ourselves for Winter. I've taken Lori's reminder to heart and am getting set for Sunday dinner. A small ham and a new recipe  for cheesy scalloped potatoes & carrots (courtesy of the Kraft Canada "What's Cooking" magazine) are in the oven and the table is set. We're going to eat in the dining room and we're using good dishes. We'll use the set inherited from my Uncle Bill and Aunt Marion, which make me happy and a little bit sentimental, like memories of Summer this time of year.

When we gather around the table in the dining room, I know I'll be asked, "What's up? Why in here? And the good dishes?" And I'll say, "Just because." And I'll know it's because we're deserving and we're worth it. And if a little wine gets spilled, let's just hope more remains in the glass than on the carpet. Cheers!