Meatless Chicken MOM!? WHAT THE BLAZES!?

My boys and their first day back to school.
2012

 

It was a great day, and I was in the mood to do some serious cooking. The weather outside was hinting that cooler temperatures were on the horizon that would one day lead to my favorite season - autumn. I had done some grocery shopping and had decided that a roasted chicken with baked potatoes, peas, homemade rolls and a chocolate banana cream pie for dessert would be the perfect first day of school dinner.

My very own Chocolate Banana Pie.
Vanilla Pudding with Cut up bananas as the bottom layer
in a graham cracker crust.
then sprinkly crushed up vanilla wafers
then add the chocolate pudding layer.
Serve with a big scoop of cool whip.
Delicious!

Now normally when roasting a chicken, one would put it in a shallow pan, season it with your favorite taste bud teasing pleasures. Heck, some people may go as far as tenting it with tin foil to help keep the meat tender and juicy while only letting small amounts of that delicious sent, that floats through the air, escape and has your family constantly asking - "Mom...when's dinner, the smell is making me super hungry".

Yes, I'll be honest, I am one of those tenter people, but on this day I got a little daring and decided to use my chicken roaster stand on our grill. I've used it before and the outcome was delicious, so why not use it again and make baked potatoes on the grill as well.  I had timed it just right that by the time my husband got home from work, you could smell the delicious aroma throughout the community - Just want I wanted. What’s better than the smell of a great comfort food aroma dancing along a cool late afternoon breeze? Knowing it's coming from your house and it's your dinner. Yeah baby!



I got this a Bass Pro Shop - LOVE IT!
You literally cook the chicken or turkey standing up.

It comes apart so that you can filled the center with
beer, chicken broth, and/or water and spices, and then you rub the
chicken with spices too and cover it with a tent of tin foil
and put it on the grill. The head comes throught the vents and
acts like a roaster/steamer.

 

As I prepared the serving plates and side dishes, I took the chicken off its cooking stand and placed it onto a platter. It was a beautiful golden color and the scent of the spices was wonderful, however the chicken looked very strange to me. Kind of like a chicken on big time steroids. Its shape was very strange.

"That's odd?" I thought for only a moment, and then went on with getting the food to the table. My oldest son, who lately has been on a see food diet, meaning everything he sees he eats, took it upon himself to carve the bird. There was nothing holding this guy back, he'd been smelling this cook all afternoon and he was done waiting.

As I finally sat down with my family to delve into our dinner, I was once again drawn into the shape of our roaster chicken. "There is something wrong with the chicken. Don't you think so or is it just me?" I said to my husband and boys "It looks weird."

My husband then took a longer look as well. "Hua? Yeah, it does, like it's been working out at the gym or something. An Arnold Schwarzenegger look." He remarked with a chuckle followed with a puzzled expression. As my son tried to carve the meat off the bone, he was met with a growing frustration that he was not getting the food on his plate fast enough.

 "What's wrong?" I asked, worried that my special dinner was overcooked.

"Ah dry!, It won't carve!" He replied in a sarcastic and agitated tone voice.

"No way it's dry, I saw the juices bubbling under the skin on the grill."  I thought, hoping that he was wrong.

 "Let me try," boasted my husband thinking that it took a big man to crave a bird. "What the &^^*&^#%!!!!"

"What's wrong?" I questioned, worried that now my husband was just as frustrated as my son, I must have really turned our supper into a Griswold Christmas dinner moment.

"Stace, there isn't any meat on this chicken! look it's all bone when I cut into it." He was very serious - this bird was meatless!

 I got up from my chair and walked over to the other side of the table where both my husband and older son were working feverishly as if they were trying to revive an inner tube that had gone flat, just before it was time to tie it to a speed boat and zoom across the water for an afternoon of water adventures.

"Let me try." Just as the words left my mouth a pivotal moment passed over me and I caught the look on my younger sons face. I could see in his eyes a sense of worry that he would not get his favorite chicken and gravy dinner, because mom had dried the bird to the bone. "Let's check to see if there is meat underneath, and with that, I flipped it over. (I think a heaven of angels burst into song and no joke the song I added came to mind - Enjoy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE

Light had dawned at the Bolin table that night.  Clearly it had been a long day as not one person noticed or even realized what was wrong until after flipping the chicken over. A True OMG I AM SUCH A DUMBASS MOMENT! I had place it on the platter breast side down, but because I had cooked the chicken standing up on the grill, it made the legs fall backwards giving the appearance that the bottom of the chicken was the breast side. To Funny - Not one of us noticed that the chicken was upside down. Even after cutting it, they believed it was dry; again not even realizing it was upside down. We all looked at each other dumbfounded and then burst into a fit of laughter that lasted all through dinner.

So the moral of this funny tale, be sure your breasts are always in the upright position. Have a great day and enjoy the weekend! Until next time - Blog ya later.

"3 Men and a Lady - What's the Odds?"

H

ey everyone – It’s Friday. With the exception of a slight headache that I get periodically, I have still managed to accomplish the usual Friday morning tasks. Laundry is all done and I am proud to know that I had even took it upon myself, a month ago, to stop the never ending saga of "WHERE'S ALL THE JEANS?" What? You mean you have never heard of this saga? Well, well, my dear readers pull up a chair and sit down as I tell you this glorious tale of how 3 Men and a Lady - fit into one pair Jeans.

Now I will say, that yes,  I was getting rather tired of constantly washing , in a king size washer, two loads of laundry that consisted of 15 pairs of jeans, each, that would suddenly disappear before I even get them out of the dryer.  Even if I had washed them during the day, and had them folded and in three equal piles, I found that when one of my three men in this house went to get his pile, he would skim off the other two that always left the others in the house scrounging for their pair. Now this has been going on for the last two years. It is a blessing and a curse. What do I mean by that you ask? You see, my husband, my two boys, and now myself, all wear the same size jeans...what's the odds of that? However being a good thing on the wallet, it's a bad thing when they are all fighting for their favorite pair. My husband prefers dark boot cut jeans; my oldest son prefers any jeans and will acquire them from the others, when his are dirty and have not made it to the laundry basket. I have caught him in the act, with his extreme quickness, going into their closets or dressers to retrieve them from my husband or younger son, lurking in the shadows, walking swiftly and quietly, and peering around so not to get caught. My youngest son, he likes medium blue in color, but prefers a more standard cut vs. the boot cut dark blue jeans that I buy for my husband and oldest son.

But after a few washing and wearing, something bad happens in this house, all the jeans begin to look alike and soon a bigger issue develops - whose jeans are whose? Another problem we face and I know you will relate to this – We all have that favorite pair that we wear over and over, you know the ones, nicely faded, soft but not to broken in, and the zipper still works. But what happens when those favorite jeans are found on someone else? MADNESS! CHAOS! DRAMA! It starts a war, a big war, and believe you me; there is nothing worse than three men bitching about who has who’s jeans, first thing in the morning. Now I don’t have a clue why my brain had not thought of a solution earlier, maybe I thought it would somehow work itself out, maybe one of them would gain more weight and another would lose weight, but unfortunately that hasn’t happened yet and suddenly I was thinking. If my clue had to be broadcasted on the news this is probably what you'd hear - In the news today, local house wife finally gets a flippin’ clue and stops the jean drama, but the question still remains - Does her blonde hair color really come from a box? More news at 11.  My superbulous idea - Why not put an end to this saga once and for all and put names on the tags inside…BINGO! This Mama got a clue!

 I began with a strategic maneuver that I would like to call the "sniffing them out" approach which involved going into the rooms of my two teen age boys. My younger son, his room is very tidy and he is very good about getting his dirty items into the basket just outside of the bathroom. So I will say I was rather disappointed when I discovered that there were no jeans, clean or dirty, in his room. It was obvious to me that someone else was harboring an excessive amount and I was going to find every pair if it took me an hour. Once I rounded up any pair that didn’t have a man’s body in them, Yes, I know this may sound more on the extra extreme side of things, but a mama has to do, what a mama has to do. I even went as far as not only labeling all jeans in the house, including mine, I did socks and underwear too – That my friends was a feat far too graphic to write about and trust me, a man’s underwear should stay a mystery and be colored not tighty whites. Something about the white cotton briefs, all I can think of is the quote from Forest Gump when we used to have men’s white underwear in the house - "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get" - unless it is boxers with humorous prints on them. Hey I kept it clean - Wink.  All I can say is that if you happen to stumble onto a pair of underwear or socks on your seventeen year old floor, assume they are dirty and leave it at that. I learned the hard way on a pair of sock. OMG! I should have been wearing an instant alert medical device to save me from the toxic exposure. I can still hear it in my head, robot from the old television show “Lost in Space” - “DANGER WILL ROBINSON! DANGER! DANGER!”

I think it was about two weeks before I was able to smell again. Ok, I may have over exaggerated – Smile. It has now been about a month and laundry detail is exceptionally easy. You don’t even have to think, but still it is either my husband or I, that folds the laundry. Even through everything is labeled, once in a great while, someone forgets to get their jeans into the laundry bin. When this happens you know that the jean bandit will strike again and this house is thrown back into the jean drama plague.

So my words of wisdom today – Don’t be a jean thief, always keep your laundry done, and be sure to label all your clothes. Nothing worse than fearing you’re going to have to go to work in shorts, sweats or naked if you’re that behind in your laundry or the jean thief has made his way into your home. Have a FANTASTIC FRIDAY! Blog ya’ll later. 

NUCLEAR ENERGY - Friend and Foe

t

here I was enjoying my thirty minutes of solitude by playing my daily 5 games of Bubble Witch on Facebook. House was quiet, husband and the boys were already out the door to begin another work/school day. I had gotten the laundry in the wash, the dishes in the dishwasher, our bed made, and all the trash out. Ok, so you get the gist, I had accomplished quite a bit in the course of two hours on a Tuesday morning. Now normally, I don't scroll anything past an hour on my Facebook wall, but yesterday my quick failure to get through the Bubble Witch game gave me a few minutes to see what everyone was posting and how another new week in the year 2012 was treating them. 

It was a post about a very serious situation in the world, (I have put the link below) that in all honestly, put a scare in me like none I've ever felt before. I read the title and told myself, if I don't read it, it's not true. How many of you have done that? You've seen or heard something, say for example a noise outside in your yard in the dark. I know that some would quickly get up to investigate; others would sink deeper in their chair or under the covers and tell themselves it's just the wind, it's nothing, and it will go away. Something about this article tells me that the problems they are facing with the Fukushima Reactor are not going to go away any time soon. I hope for the worlds sake, it doesn't get any worse, but at the same time it doesn’t appear that it will be getting any better in the near future either.

As I read this article, and mind you, I try to stay away from anything sad, upsetting or negative these days, but in all honesty this time I kept reading rather than tell myself the problem will go away. Deep down, I was worried. Over the course of the day I pondered what I had read.  Would it? Could it? Will it ever affect my friends and loved ones?  Look out heavenly father, my payers are and will continue to be going into over load.

Lately I have found that I love to share my stories that I have read or heard about, within my day, with my family at the dinner table, it makes for very interesting conversation. Yet somehow I held back on this to give myself time to find a way to talk about it as a way to educate my family, not fill them with a sense of fear. I personally have never been in a natural disaster, I've never been to war, (with the exception of battling a school due to their lack of implementing rules against bullying) and I have never been told that my family and I had to leave our home because of an invisible danger. However I have been exposed to radiation and nuclear treatments for cancer. With my treatments I found that just being exposed in minuet quantities, still made me feel very sick, tired, lethargic, and nauseated. I just can't image what the people that were living in the area, when the initial damage occurred, are dealing with now.  I pray that with our advanced technology and the ingenious minds of the people on our great planet, they will find a solution to end this and any posing fear of world devastation.

This article also makes me realize how precious life is and how sometimes it is so easy to take it for granted. As you read the attached article, each person will take a piece of it in their own way. For myself – I wish for a speedy solution and I thank God for each day that I wake and before me are my husband and my boys, my family, and my friends. Life is a blessing and I’m choosing to live each day as fully and as positive as I can without be phony. To quote Joe Dirt, “Life is a Garden – Dig it.”

 http://www.naturalnews.com/035789_Fukushima_Cesium-137_Plume-Gate.html