What we ate

I spend a lot of my time planning, making, eating, cleaning up and shopping for food.  A LOT.  I make three meals a day nearly every day of the year, and we are now re-entering the stage of baby food, so ... yeah.  Lots of food.

(Random aside - Patrick found an article somewhere that talked about the differences between cooks and bakers, and I found that I am neither, apparently, just a person who spends tons of time making food for other people to eat.)

I often find myself feeling uninspired and burned out when I sit down to plan our meals for the week, and sometimes we get into ruts of eating the same meals (especially at lunch!) over and over.  Lately, I've been glad for Pinterest and new recipes to try out and add to my giant recipe binder.  Some of the recipes have been great (we LOVE these chicken taquitos), and many have been pretty good, once we've tweaked them to suit us.  Once in a while we have a total bomb, but you'll have that with new recipes.  I hate it when dinner fails, but I guess the risk of trying new things is worth a few fails.

Anyway, last night we had a Pinterest dinner.  I made Rotisserie-style chicken in the crock-pot, and this broccoli.  The chicken was really good, and it was an easy way to make a whole chicken.  Now that I know that it makes good juices, I will make it with rice and use the juices to make gravy.   We have plenty of leftover meat and I am making stock today - I love making whole chickens because it provides so much good food!  The broccoli ... was not the best broccoli of my life.   I like broccoli - it is one of my favorite vegetables - but this was way too lemony and sour.  The kids and I really struggled to eat it.  {Three of us were eating with our faces all twisted up in a super-sour squinty-face, and Patrick just calmly ate the whole pan.}  We'll try it once more with half the lemon juice and see if it is any better.  It seems like it might be great just straight out of the oven without the additions afterward.  We'll see.  Now I've gotta go start on tonight's dinner.  Anyone have any new recipes that they love?