Saturday, January 30, 2016

You can't believe everything you read!

You know that belief that it takes 21 days to create a new habit?  Well, let me just say that it's not true. I've been working on exercising daily for 22 days now, and it is most definitely not a habit!  it still feels like an unwelcome task.  Wonder what that says about me?


Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Last Minute Chicken Pot Pie

This evening we had planned to go to a dinner at church, hosted by the youth group as a fund raiser.  The dinner was cancelled because of the snowy weather, but not until after 4. I hadn't planned anything for dinner. Hubby suggested going out, but it was cold, snowy and just generally nasty out there, so I whipped this up instead, from stuff I had in my pantry.  I happened to have a jar of turkey gravy that I had purchased for Thanksgiving, "just in case" that I wanted to use up, and I usually have canned chicken in the pantry.


Last Minute Chicken Pot Pie

Ingredients:
Filling:
2 or 3 medium potatoes, peeled, and cut into 1/2 inch cubes
2 large carrots, peeled, cut in half lengthwise and cut into 1/4 inch slices
1 stalk celery, diced
1 small onion, coarsely chopped
1 chicken bouillon cube
12 oz jar chicken gravy
12 oz can of chicken breast, diced or 1 and 1/2 cups leftover cooked chicken, diced
Pinch of thyme
Sprinkle of dried chives
Black pepper to taste

Biscuit Topper:
1 and 1/8 cups biscuit baking mix ( like Bisquick or Jiffy)
1/3 cup milk
Sprinkle of dried parsley, optional

Method:
Place potatoes, carrots, onions, celery and bouillon cube in saucepan. Cover vegetables with water and cook until tender.  (I'd add some frozen peas to this if my hubby would eat them.). Drain the vegetables and stir in the gravy and the chicken.  Add thyme, pepper and chives.   Pour into a two quart casserole dish.

Combine biscuit mix and milk.  Mix in a little dried parsley for color if desired.  Knead the resulting dough a few times and flatten it into a large biscuit that is the size and shape of your casserole dish.  Place this over the chicken mixture and slash it with a sharp knife in a few places to let the steam out.

Bake at 375 for about 25 minutes, until the biscuit top is done, and lightly browned.

Serves 4.

I love Pinterest......but..........

First of all, I have exercised more than 150 minutes a week for each of the last two weeks.  They say it takes 21 days to build a new habit. We'll see.  Right now it's more like a job than a habit.



Recently I saw a Pinterest pin that informed me that a packet of Koolaid powder would clean the hard water rings out of my toilet with hardly any effort on my part.  Well, the "no effort" part got my attention right away.  It just so happens that I have a lot of little packets of Koolaid. (My grocery store used to give them away free with a sugar purchase a couple of times each summer.  We don't drink Koolaid, but hey!  It was free!). Anyhow, the picture with the pin showed yellow Koolaid and the blurb said that it was actually the citric acid in the stuff that did the cleaning.  I only had red Koolaid, but citric acid was the first thing on the ingredient list.  So, following the directions from the pin, I sprinkled my red Koolaid all over two of the toilets in my house.  It said to let it sit for an hour or longer, so off I went to the grocery store.  When I got back to those bathrooms a couple of hours later, the Koolaid had solidified and I had to scrub for quite a while to get it all off.  At this point the toilet looked like someone had bled to death in it.  It took several flushes to get the water clear enough to enjoy the sight of my toilet bowl without the hard water ring.  (After all, that's what the after picture on Pinterest promised.)  Uh oh!  The very pale tan ring was gone, and in its place there was a pink ring.  Pink is prettier, right?  Wrong!  It looked much dirtier than it did before.so I ended up scrubbing toilets in the usual way.  The kicker?  I did this in two bathrooms.  The moral of the story?  If it sounds too good to be true, it  probably is.  If I had thought before I leaped, I would have tried it out in one bathroom first.  The bonus?  The bathrooms now smell fruity..., with just the slightest essence of artificial flavoring.

Oh well, I still love Pinterest........