A Few Chicken Meals
The teens are getting more adventurous.
This week, T and Q planned most of the lunches and dinners. They had an Entire Plan on our giant whiteboard.
A few months ago, my husband (G) came to me saying that we should get a giant whiteboard. Like the type that a corporate office might have at the front of the boardroom. My first reaction was why and my second reaction was, “But where on earth would we put it?”
G was pretty insistent that it would be well-used. He’s a software engineer, and T has an interest in coding, so he told me that they could “plan out” various software designs. He found a whiteboard on Facebook Marketplace, basically brand new in box, and brought it home. I begrudgingly moved some stuff around to make room for it (it’s taller than me).
But I have to admit, it’s nearly constantly in use. When G and I went to San Francisco last week, the kids wrote down the week’s activities for my parents, who stayed with them. Sometimes, the kids play games on the whiteboard. Or, like this week, they wrote out their menu plan.
We went grocery shopping last weekend. T and Q mostly navigated Trader Joe’s by themselves, while I walked around with a separate cart getting the rest of the food we need on a weekly basis. They came within $1 of their budget, so that was a win.
Mid-week, T made orange chicken. At this time, I’d like to point out that I am a vegetarian and have been my entire life. I don’t know how to cook chicken... at all. G eats and cooks chicken, and the kids have grown up eating it. But G was working, so T was on their own with the cookbook and the chicken.
It turned out well! I assume. At least, it looks like orange chicken.
T’s response to the orange chicken cooking process was “never again.”
One of the other meals for the week was Sloppy Joe’s, with a plan to familiarize the kids with the slow cooker. Except we have a perpetual problem in this house that food gets eaten “ahead of schedule.” It’s planned for one meal, and someone else eats it with a different meal. Dad had eaten the ground beef for one of his lunches. So we were getting ready for Sloppy Joe’s and... no beef.
We had some leftover chicken, so we quickly pulled out the slow cooker cookbook and went to the “chicken” section. Q selected chicken parmesan. I quickly scanned the list of ingredients, noting that we did not have tomato paste, but had tomato sauce. We did not have Parmesan cheese (probably important for chicken Parmesan...), but had a Mexican blend. So it was more like “chicken with sauce and cheese in a slow cooker” than chicken Parmesan.
We also did not have the requisite 3-4 hours on “low” for the chicken to cook. But I told the kids that 2 hours on high would probably be the same.
We assembled the chicken and sauce. The verdict was that the chicken was a bit dry (which I attribute to cooking it on high) and the sauce was a bit liquid-y. But otherwise good!
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