Peter's Cooking Diary #26

Well it has been a little while since I have written about my cooking, I honestly haven't been doing that much cooking, or at least not that much of cooking new things. This week I cooked 2 new things, or at least variations of things that I had never done before.

The first recipe that I will be making this week is slow cooker chicken meatloaf. I have made chicken and turkey meatloaf in the oven previously but I have never made either of them in the slow cooker before. I took a recipe for a tex mex meatloaf in the slow cooker with beef and changed it over to chicken. I had forgotten to get the beef I had originally planned to use out of the freezer the night before, so I made a dash to the store where they actually had ground chicken on sale for an amazing price, so I went with that.

One of the things that I love about my favorite slow cooker cookbook does is that it includes different methods for using the slow cooker. In this case the foil collar will help to diffuse the heat a little bit from the heating element and move it all around the insert.

After the collar, you add strips of aluminum foil going perpendicular to each other to help with removing the meatloaf from the crock pot intact and it also helps prevent the meatloaf from burning to the insert, and it even helps with the cleanup afterwards.

This is the selections of produce that I am using for this recipe, I want to start doing more before shots of things. Those are poblano pepper for people that are not familiar with them, they are a little spicy with what I consider to be better flavor than green bell peppers. The recipe called for a red bell pepper but of course I don't stick to a recipe perfectly. The garlic cloves are the last of what I got from my mom about a month ago.

Chopped up onion and peppers in the big container and the garlic in the other.

The recipe called for vegetable oil, but what better fat is there to use for this than bacon grease? I cooked the pepper and onions in a pan for about 10 minutes on medium high heat before adding the garlic.

Stirred the garlic in with everything else, and cooked for about 5 more minutes.

Added the seasoning of salt, chile powder, and dried oregano as well as some tomato paste, stirred all of the ingredients together.

This is what the veggies looked like all together after cooking. I let them all cool and worked on the other elements of the meatloaf.

This bowl contains one soft kaiser roll torn into little bits, one cup of milk, and one can's worth of beans that I rinsed and drained. I mashed them all together in this bowl until the mixture almost looked like blue milk.

The bowl of mashed up milk, beans, and bread, alongside the ground chicken in its own bowl, I let it get a little bit warmer than fridge temp so my hands wouldn't freeze when I mixed it all together.

The chicken bowl to which I added the milk/bean mixture, cheese, corn, eggs, and the veggie mixture.

Mixing the whole thing together, it is a messy job, but I don't mind it at all.

I added the meatloaf to the slow cooker and evened it out. After this picture I added a layer of barbecue sauce to the top of this, I put the lid on and cooked it for about 5 hours on low.

This is what it looks like once the meatloaf was done, then you take the pieces of foil sticking out and pull them all together and you can lift the meatloaf out. I actually let it cool down a bit before removing it from the pot.

The other recipe I made this week, is something that I had never made this way. I have made roasted cauliflower in many different ways, but this one was actually brown butter roasted cauliflower. To start I preheated the oven to 425. I removed the stems and leaves from the heads. I then rubbed them with vegetable oil and stuck them into the oven to bake for 45 minutes.

After the 45 minutes in the oven, the recipe called for butter to be smeared all over both of the heads, I did this as best I could as they were hot. I then popped the cauliflower back into the oven.

During the last stage of cooking I took the cauliflower out and basted it with the browned butter that was in the pan. This made the cauliflower taste amazing overall, my favorite preparation yet!

Life update: 9/20/2014

It has been quite a while since I have written anything on here, and even longer since I have written about my life. I have honestly been trying to get out there and live life, I do miss writing though so maybe I will get back to doing it on a more regular basis. Honestly, this post is more about me venting about some things to try to get them out of my head.

I have been doing quite well for the most part, there have been a few hiccups with my depression, but they only lasted for a few days at a time. I have been getting out there and dating, and meeting new people some, which is something I really would like to do more of in my life. I need to find ways to get a little bit out of my comfort zone to meet people.

On the dating front I have dated a few people over the past few months, nothing really developed in a long term way for different reasons along the way. I have actually deleted all of my dating site accounts because someone  was accessing them and messaging people and blocking other people who I had messaged. I changed my password on every account a few times and even on my email address a few times. I just decided it wasn't worth the hassle to deal with. I will likely go back to them in the future, but we will see, I am honestly very tired of dating.

For those of you reading this who might not know me personally, I am a very logical person. I think my downfall will be wanting to understand things that I don't need to. Its the things that I don't control that I have the hardest times with. Back in April I was dating someone, honestly it was only for a few weeks, things could not have gone better, fluid conversation, chemistry on any level, I felt like we actually got each other, then one day she stops talking to me, a few days later she tells me she isn't over her ex and didn't want to be my friend or anything. I understand it, it just blindsided me. She didn't want to talk to me or try to be my friend or anything. I have honestly still not moved on emotionally. I really thought that I had, but I randomly ran into her, and the hurt and pain flared up completely, I have just been down the last few days since that. I just never learned how to let things go, and I really, really want to.

I need to learn how to let things go, and I need to learn how to cut myself a break. I need to learn to accept things as they are when I have no control over these things, especially in the case described above. I need to not beat myself up for things that are out of my control as well. I swear when my emotions get in the way I always wish there was an easy logical way to deal with them, but that isn't how emotions work is it?

I have not had much alone time in the last few months because I have been letting a friend of mine sleep on my couch pretty regularly, because she doesn't really have anywhere else to go, but I really miss my alone time. I really like alone time, it was once my worst nightmare, but I have learned to really enjoy my alone time, it can be very therapeutic.

I have been wanting to get some kind of pet in my apartment, I need to look into exactly how much extra it would cost to do that, because I think that will help me better deal with my loneliness, I would like to get a cat, but I am not sure if they are allowed in my building or not. If I get a pet, I will be sure to post about him/her on here on occasion and post some pictures.

I honestly just needed to vent about some things, I don't really expect to accomplish anything by writing about all of this, but I know for me it does help to get it out of my head at the very least.