Hey, guess what? We have another yummy slow cooker recipe today … along with an update on my current life situation.

You may recall the story from three years and eight months ago when I told you all about a knee injury I sustained while driving with my dad from Phoenix to Austin. Well, over the last 3+ years, the injury has only gotten worst. To the point where I need a knee replacement. In early October, I was nearly unable to walk, a cortisone shot helped a bit, but not enough for the long haul, so surgery is scheduled for January 31st. I am to the point that I Can Not Wait! The end of January cannot come soon enough. So that is what’s happening with me.

Caring for Max is honestly a great distraction. Creating Harmony Boards requires a large amount of time standing in one spot and standing for an extended time causes more pain than walking. Luckily, babysitting does not require much standing, so we’re all good here in Chicago. I look forward to watching him again in the spring when I’m able to get down on the floor and play with him without pain!

Slow Cooker Lo Mein

• Sauce
• 1/3 cup soy sauce
• 3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar, packed
• 1 tablespoon chile paste, or more, to taste
• 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
• 1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• Lo Mein
• 2 pounds boneless pork shoulder
• 3 cups broccoli florets
• 2 carrots, julienned
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 1 cup sugar snap peas
• 5-ounce can sliced water chestnuts, drained and rinsed
• 1 pound spaghetti
• Toasted sesame seeds, garnish

Whisk together soy sauce, garlic, brown sugar, chile paste, oyster sauce, ginger, and sesame oil in the slow cooker. Add pork shoulder, then cover and cook on low heat for 7-8 hours or high for 3-4 hours.

Remove pork shoulder from the slow cooker and shred the meat before returning it to the pot with the juices.

I have been using the slow cooker much more on this trip to Chicago than on my month-long visit when Max was born in June. Mostly because I am his primary caregiver on weekdays while Marissa and Jeff are working. His longest nap is the first one in the morning, so I get everything prepped and into the cooker during that nap so that I don’t need to think about cooking for the rest of the day. The following recipe could easily be done in the oven, but then it would need more attention and I’d rather give all my attention to Max! *I made a half recipe, using only four chicken thighs. I found a Brussels spout sauté pack at Trader Joe’s that I served as the side dish.

Soup is always a good idea, especially on a windy, chilly, Chicago day. Typically, Zuppa Toscana has bacon, but Marissa and I decided that the Italian sausage was enough meat for one soup. I’ve added it as an option in the recipe below, so you do you. Another change to the classic soup is my addition of diced tomatoes. I felt as though the soup needed a bit more color and tomatoes are always a win for me.

Zuppa Toscana

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 pound mild Italian sausage
• 1 medium onion, peeled and diced
• 3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
• 3 russet potatoes, peeled and chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• Pinch of crushed red pepper flakes
• 6 cups chicken broth
• 15-ounce can diced tomatoes with their juices
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• 1/2 bunch kale, tough center stems removed and leaves chopped
• 1 cup half and half
• Cooked and crumbled bacon and/or freshly grated Parmesan, optional

Squeeze the sausage out of their casings. Discard casings.

Heat a large soup pot over medium heat, when hot, add olive oil, swill around the pot and then add the sausage. Cook, stirring frequently until sausage is lightly browned, about 5 minutes, making sure to crumble the sausage as it cooks.

Use a slotted spoon to transfer the sausage to a plate.

I saw this “recipe” on the stories of one of my favorite accounts to follow on Instagram, Cottonstem. If you’re on Instagram, I highly recommend you follow Erin. She is adorable, down-to-earth, extremely talented and creative.

Recipe writers and developers never include the simple small pantry items in recipes when they say things like “2 ingredient recipe,” so I’m not going to. You will need cornstarch, but I’m not counting that. Ditto with the tap water. And since you can eat this with a fork instead of in sandwich form, I’m not including the bread in the ingredient count either. All’s fair in love and cooking!

Connor came over to make me dinner on Mother’s Day. I pulled a bowl of this chicken mixture out for him to sample while he was chopping and dicing. He loved it and said, “Dang it, this is better than what I’m making for you!” As I type this, while he cooks, I can’t say if he is right or not. All I know is that I will love what he makes for me no matter what it is! Just having him here is all I need. Marissa and I connected on Facetime. All a mama wants is to see or be with her babes on Mother’s Day. The best gift is their love and presence.

As I type this, it is 7:00 PM on Thursday, April 25, 2019, and it is 94 degrees outside. I am sitting outside because I have my AC on today and I can’t turn it back down until 8:00 PM. I’m back to living in a cave and it is dark as night inside. How is it possible that my last post was titled “The Definition of Spring” and now it’s nearly 100 degrees. Oh yeah, I live in Arizona, that’s how!

There is a slight breeze out here, so I decided to come out of the dark and deal with the heat. It’s not all that bad, honestly. I’d have to say that 100+ degrees is where my tolerance is kaput, the denial sets in and my non-acceptance is in full force. That’s when the real crabbiness and bitching seriously kick in. That could be as early as Friday, which, as you read this … is TODAY!

So, the way to live through the summer is to use a slow cooker. I have gotten mine out of the garage and it is ready for action.

For this recipe, which I made last week, I decided to use the frozen ginger cubes from Trader Joe’s. Super convenient and they worked great!

I bought 4 pounds of beef chuck roast at Costco with the knowledge that after I cut out a bunch of the fat, there would be about 3 pounds of meat remaining. I was right, of course.

I don’t say that to brag. As all of my friends and family know, my Superpower is Spatial Recognition. Give me a pan or a pot or a bowl full of stuff that needs to fit in a container to go in the refrigerator, I will give you THE PERFECT container. It’s a gift. Not a superpower useful in The Avengers sort of way, but a superpower nonetheless. Anyhow, keep that in mind when purchasing the beef, there will be waste, and there ain’t nobody who wants all that fat!

On Sunday morning, I pulled a package of pork tenderloin from the freezer to thaw for dinner. A few hours later I heard from Connor and he decided to stay home instead of coming over as he usually does for Sunday dinner and to do his laundry. I think he’d had enough of me after our trip to Austin.

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The first of my two main-course dishes for the 4^th of July Pot-Luck Pool Party is a pulled pork recipe that came from Williams-Sonoma. I altered the recipe to fit my needs.

Need #1 – I did not want to buy a jar of the Williams-Sonoma pulled pork starter. It cost too much and after going online and looking at the list of ingredients, I had all of it on hand anyhow, so I made my own.

Need #2 – I buy my pork shoulder at Costco and a 2.5 pound piece (which is what the Williams-Sonoma recipe called for) would be a joke at Costco. Mine weighed in at a whopping 15 pounds. This meant I needed to quadruple the original recipe, which was more than fine because the original served only 4 to 6 and I had more than 24 mouths to feed. I realize that 15 pounds is 6x as much, but the remaining ingredients only needed to be 4x more.

The big trick to the thing was cooking it in a slow cooker in two batches. It wasn’t difficult and took less time and effort than I expected it would. I thought about calling a neighbor to borrow a second slow cooker, but I was too lazy. That is a good option though.

Another issue was that it never even crossed my mind to take a photo of even one sandwich. I have photos of the pork in the chafing dish and of the slaw on the platter. But no individual sandwiches pics or of the cute setup I had for the little sandwich baskets and paper liners that I worked super hard to get all fixed up. Darn it! As you can see, I had to improvise with those “close-up” images. Sad, but it’s all I got.

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Tram’s birthday was three weeks ago and we had not yet had time to get together and celebrate. Not until this past Saturday, after the twins were down for the night and Steve was at a Diamondbacks game.

She had texted me the night before to see if Saturday would work and if it was OK if we stayed in and had take-out. The staying-in part was perfect but the take-out … not so much.

I decided to make my slow cooker version of Chicken Tinga. Chicken breasts and slow cookers aren’t something that always goes together. We are so accustomed to cooking with boneless skinless chicken breasts that we sometimes forget how wonderful bone-in and skin-on chicken can be. For this recipe, the bones and the skin are a must – don’t worry – they are both removed and discarded before being served.

The bones and the skin keep the white meat from turning to shoe rubber and being dry and tasteless. They are essential for this long and slow cooking process.

The most important part of this recipe is to take extra time and precautions to find any and all bones and bone fragments that may be left on the meat or in the sauce. See those tiny bones and bone bits on the bottom edge of the plate in the photo above? That’s what I’m talking about. Since the chicken cooks a long time, the bones get very brittle and break easily, so follow the recipe on how and when to search them out and discard them. How terrible it would be if someone choked or cracked a tooth!

Also, be sure to drain the canned tomatoes well. Plenty of juices are given off by the meat and the vegetables during the cooking process. The liquid that remains already needs to be reduced, so having all that extra tomato liquid will make the process take twice as long. Plus I’ll be posting a fabulous recipe later this week where you can put the tomato juice to good use, so save it. Or freeze it and add it to your next batch of soup or pitcher of Bloody Marys.

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Here is the last of the week’s worth of slow cooker recipes. This was the perfect thing to get me back into a blogging routine and a great way to feed visiting family while we were on the run.

We are finishing as we began, with a yummy soup. I’m pretty proud of myself for limiting the soup recipes to only half of those put forward.

To recap – A week’s worth of slow cooker recipes:

Wild Rice and Shredded Chicken Soup

Balsamic-Dijon Glazed Baby Back Ribs with Great Northern Beans

Lemony Turkey Meatball and Orzo Soup

Ropa Vieja

Mississippi Pot Roast

And here is todays…

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My dear friend and colleague, Kim Howard, sent me this recipe from the NY Times for my week’s worth of slow cooker recipes. I was very grateful for the recipe since it was for a pot roast. I had a serious need for a new pot roast recipe because my dad loves pot roast and had already requested it for our Sunday supper.

My “go-to” slow cooker roast recipe for my dad is This One, I was beyond excited to try something new. A huge plus was that it is by far simpler and even tastier than the old standby.

I minimally changed the original recipe, but the change I made was a major health change. How I did that was to remove a majority of the fat after cooking.

Kim, I thank you!

My dad thanks you.

Basically, we all (Dad, Dave, Connor, my visiting brother-in-law, Roger, and I) thank you for the great recipe! xoxo

By the way, the recipe for the lovely asparagus you see on the plate above will be posted later this week. It is A. MAZ. ING!

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