Chicken with cauliflower and parsley

The first recipe of the new year and the first use of my new Le Creuset! This dish was pretty simple and pretty delicious! I only wish I had made more cauliflower! The recipe came from the magazine Everyday Food. The recipe says that it serves 4. Total prep and cooking time was about 35 minutes, just as stated in the magazine and the prep work was extremely minimal - my kind of cooking!


Ingredients as modified by me:
5 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
1 head of cauliflower (1lb)
1/2 cup fresh parsley
2 T cider vinegar
1 T capers, rinsed.

Directions:
Preheat oven 450'

• In the Le Creuset over a medium heat (or in a ovenproof skillet over a medium-high heat) season chicken with coarse salt and pepper and cook chicken* skin side down for 5-7 minutes or until brown. Flip chicken and cook until brown on the other side.
  
  
• Place cauliflower around the chicken and coat in the pan juices, season with salt and pepper. Put in a pinch of the fresh parsley and transfer the Le Creuset (or skillet) uncovered into the oven. Cook until chicken is cooked through and the cauliflower is tender (about 20-25 minutes)



• Remove from oven and stir in remaining parsley, vinegar and capers.
  *No oil is required for this dish

After making this recipe I would add more cauliflower - with the capers, vinegar and the juice from the chicken it was an amazing array of flavors - yum! I ate umm... almost all of the cauliflower :-D Sorry husband (and child!) I would certainly make this dish again and highly recommend it for a relatively easy meal.

A Christmas Present & A Goal

Every year I have a goal for the new year. I don't in particular resolve to do anything or set a goal to change something per se, but I do like to have a year long goal. This year I have decided to cook 150 different recipes. I won't blog every day, I won't necessarily blog in detail about every recipe, however I will keep track of the recipes that I have cooked and how many I have left to cook.

In light of my new endeavor my husband made Christmas an exciting time with that theme, after first clearing up the issue that getting cooking supplies isn't a 'Sleeping on the Couch' recipe in the making, hehe! I received several fun cooking things in my stocking and my main present was an excellent most fabulous Le Creuset 9.5 Quart 'French' Oven :) Oh I was like a little kid on Christmas! So excited!

My stocking was also filled with helpful kitchen gadgets to make my cooking adventure easier, including this gem - which I think is my new favorite tool. If you recall I love cooking gadgets and so getting new ones is always exciting - but to date this one is by far my favorite. It took NO time, less than a minute in fact to chop up this parsley. Score!


With all my new cooking tools I am ready to cook, bake, and slice and dice! So stay tuned for a lot of cooking over this next year. Enjoy following me this coming year and seeing the progress I am making on my 2010 goal of 150 different recipes in 365 days!

One Year Ago

Time files by! One year ago, this was my blog post. One year ago to the day, this was my boy playing with his toys...

And today this is Ace playing with his toys. An hour before after he had already 'reorganized' the toy shelf he stepped on it (I assume) and I turned around and I found him butt stuck in the blue tub (pictured behind him) with the shelving rack on top of him. Not injured but a bit worried. Also the mess pictured is only half of the disaster zone. The other half of the room is also ankle deep in toddler toys ... mostly dinosaurs. :)

Keys

These two little keys look awfully familiar don't they? Don't they look like they belong somewhere else other than my table? Perhaps that they should be locked into something? My son the ever-advanced typist found these keys to be obsolete, beneath him, superfluous... and thus he had them removed...

You see when Ace is very quiet (like with any child) you begin to worry. What has he gotten into now? Well, it was this time: my computer. He quietly had been typing away... and apparently stripping away my keys. Yikes! Now they aren't permanently detached. However, Loving Husband will have to take a fair amount of tedious attention to reattach these precarious suckers. So at the moment it's a tad obnoxious to type that very word.

He was having such an exciting time though. Very into the typing thing. He can open windows, go to websites that are in my favorite drop down menu. He was having a blast. I don't think he bought anything on Amazon - but I suppose we'll find out in a few weeks. Ha! One thing is for sure - while he doesn't have the exact understanding or the dexterity to do it - he completely comprehends how computers work.

His Own Bed

Ace is just a little over sixteen months old and is such a big boy in many ways - we decided it was time to transition him into his own 'big boy' bed. Yes, for most of the last sixteen months Ace has slept exclusively in our bed. Yes, we are co-sleepers. Gasp! Yes, Ace since he was born has slept between Loving Husband and I. Gasp! There had been a few attempts to transition him to his crib, and before I went to California in October he had been sleeping the first stint in his crib. However, in California it was so much easier for him to sleep in the same bed I was in - and thus the habit of crib first, bed second was lost upon our return to the NW. We had gotten past the point of worrying of him falling out of bed because he was now tall enough to just climb out of it. Which is why we decided that transforming his crib into a bed wouldn't be that a) traumatic and b) dangerous for someone his age.

And so yesterday was the day! He helped do the construction and after the framing was all in place he and his dad left the room and I brought out his new sheet set and made his bed look all nice.


He was very excited about his new sheet set. He also received a new alien stuffed toy to slumber with him that he enjoyed hugging and chewing on the antenna. Then it was time to get down to business and go to sleep. For the most part he went to sleep with about the same amount of sweat and tears as usual - which I suppose for a new sleeping arrangement is not a bad thing.

The book I have read: The No-Cry Sleep Solution suggests that we a) make it exciting with new sheets, etc.. and b) that it be a transitional thing - and while I didn't need a book to tell me that - it was nice that this book reinforced my original instincts on how to transition him. So that's what we did! We obtained the Toy Story sheets (a current favorite and goes well with his preexisting bright green walls) and we put him to sleep in his new bed. He awoke almost every hour until 1am when we finally brought him to our bed. So although he awoke often and joined us in our bed after only a few hours - I feel we are on the road to success.

Books of 2009

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
If You Could See Me Now
The Things That Heaven Bears
The Thirteenth Tale
Twilight
Armageddon
The Labrador Pact
New Moon
Eclipse
Breaking Dawn
A Homemade Life
The Girl Who Played with Fire
The Middle Place
The Time Traveler's Wife
Remember Me?
The Lovely Bones

It was a light year for me with a total of 16 books read.
Considering in 2006 I read 24, 2007 I read 30, and 2008 I read 35.

Looking forward to a few books in 2010: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest being the number one book I'm most excited about!

I also plan to do a little completing series in 2010. I need to read the final book (of the original series) of Left Behind - I started those in 2008 and read all but 2, I only read one in 2009. Also I'd like to finish up the Series of Unfortunate Events - I read through book 11 of that series leaving me the final 2 back in 2005 and 2006 :) No I do not plan to reread the first 11 in order to catch up - I'm pretty sure my brain still has that information soaking uselessly in a pocket of my brain just waiting for me to get around to completing the series. Also there are 2 books that I only got half way through in 2009 so they'll be counted upon completion in my 2010 count.

Happy reading, everyone!

Happy New Year!

Welcome to a new year, a new decade! I look forward to what this new year has to offer. Our New Year's Eve was much quieter than previous years (and last year) we had immediate family here and we had an excellent steak dinner, Ace went to sleep at 8, but don't worry before he went to sleep he had some excellent fun with the party hats!

This year we rang in New York's new year. While waiting we enjoyed several tasty fruiting drinks, and then broke out the champagne to toast in 2010 at 9pm. By 10pm half the 'party' left around 10pm.





Afterwards we all broke out our computers and rang in the NW's new year while enjoying the decade prior's technology advancements.

Here's to another year! Happy New Year, everyone!