Culinary matters

Feast or famine around here. I'd a couple packages of chicken breast and one of bone-in thighs in the refrigerator for several days, when in a moment of idiocy, I also took out a fairly large pork shoulder to thaw.

I needed the freezer room.

Anyway, what to do...this afternoon, all the breasts were oven poached (in a large pot with water to cover, bring to a boil stovetop then cover, toss in a 350 degree oven for fifteen minutes or so, depending on how big they are), then chopped up and frozen (yeah, taking out the pork made a lot of room). The idea is to have it on hand for those casseroles that use cooked chicken, or soups that use the same.

The thighs were cooked via my favorite method, courtesy of Jacques Pepin. It's a wonderfully lazy method, too, after some prep work on the chicken, as you pretty much put them skin side down in the pan and let them go. One for lunch today, the rest for work lunches.

Not quite done...the pork was thawed, so it was time to deal with the dry rub. It's meant for barbeque, and needs to dry marinate for at least a day. The last time I made this, I had two, and doubling the rub quantity barely covered the two pieces of meat. This time, I've a huge quantity of the rub left over. I knew it was too much about halfway through measuring everything out; when I dealt with the meat, I was very, very careful to avoid contaminating the bowl of spices. So now I've a premixed rub the next time the urge to have southern style pork comes upon me.

In between I've been cleaning up after myself, washing the pots and pans from lunch, doing some additional cleaning. Except for the fact I'm not hungry, I could see ordering out for dinner. Plumb tired.

In between all the kitchen stuff (and because the kitchen has no natural light source and the day, while nasty windy-cold, was at least sunny), I hung out in the studio. The sweatshirt jacket I was working on, the sunflowers shown here, will be finished either tonight or tomorrow. I'm hand sewing the binding down (there's a lot of it), with only the buttons to put on after that. The plan is to give it to Pam this Saturday at our craft day, and I'd like the time to wash and fluff it before then.

So went the day. Time for stupid videos, then Once Upon a Time. Not so thrilled with the Wicked Witch of the West showing up there...actually,I just plain don't like the actress, Rebecca Mader from Lost.

I think I've earned a restful night.