TheTravelingZipperhead.com

So I haven’t talked about it on here, yet, but I went back to school. I enrolled in culinary school and it’s haaaarrrrd. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun and I enjoy it, but it’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. All my life I’ve skated by on doing the minimum to get by. This didn’t work out that well in college, but it did to an extent. I can’t help it really, it’s genetic. It’s really not my fault. I remember a day in calculus my junior year of high school, my teacher came up and put her hand on my book during a lecture. After class she told me I would probably get an ‘A’ in the class if I would just take my book out of the trunk of the car at night. My book was cold, and I had Calc first thing in the morning so it didn’t have time to come to room temperature. Anyway, I told her I was ok with the ‘C’ I was making. At the time I thought I was awful funny. In fact I still kinda do, and that’s my problem. Then, it was ok to skate by without putting in effort, if putting in no effort will suffice, especially when it comes to academics. Now, the reading, the homework, and the actual lecture part is a small part of class, I have to DO it. They don’t care if I’m smart enough to regurgitate info in a book. I have to sear a pork chop and make sure the temp of the pan is right. I have to cook foods that I’m allergic to and I can’t taste them to check if they are done, I just have to know. I know it doesn’t sound that hard, I mean, everyone can cook right? It’s not hard to boil water and throw a book of Mac n cheese in, or ground some beef to make tacos, but there is a science to it, which I love. There is no doubt that there is a difference between what you cook at home, and what you get at a restaurant. That difference is science mixed with training. That being said: I love it. I’m learning so much, things I have been doing wrong, things that I was doing right by sheer dumb luck, and things my imaginary boyfriend Michael Symon hasn’t had a chance to teach me yet. The only thing I do not love is some of the people. I don’t like lazy people. If you know what needs to be done, then do it. I hate when people hijack my time, and if you are sitting around on your thumbs, that means its going to take longer to get out of there. Don’t pretend to be confused to get out of moping the floor. I INVENTED that. Along with the doing a bad job, just to get out of having to do it again thing. Other than that, I am loving school.
I’ve been to three classes and a lab now. I’ve learned knife skills and I didn’t even cut myself! We learned stocks the second class and I may or may not have stabbed myself,(I did) and today we learned major cooking techniques and I stabbed myself again. Not really stabbed, more like poked, whatever…. Anyway, then I had a lab. I have to do three of them this semester, I it is a lot of work. You get there at 7:00 am to do the prep, and this last time I waited tables which I had not done in a loooong time. It was really fun, and I ran my tail off. I came home beat down, wore out, and on a high from a job that thought I did pretty well at, only to have my mother point out that my fly had been undone. All day mind you.i didn’t even know these pants HAD a zipper. I don’t know why they would, they have an elastic waist, they confuse me.

So here is some chicken and rice soup I made the other day.

It was delicious if I do say so myself..

I practiced cutting up the mirepoix

Poached the chicken

After sweating the veggies, I added some chicken stock, cut up the chicken, added it along with some of the strained water I poached the chicken in and then added some rice in after that had come together for a while. It was pretty darn good.
I made a beef stew in a similar fashion a few nights before that

I used beef instead of chicken, beef stock instead of chicken, and diced potatoes instead of rice

This one was my favorite.
I wonder what I will make tomorrow?
Good night!

Man, what a day today. Every time I turned around there was something to clean up. The baby, the house, the messes the baby MADE of the house. At one point today I had a pantry destroyed by a toddler, a bunch of dinner dishes, dog food spilled on the floor by said toddler, and muddy paw prints on the carpet. Oh and the baby had puddin face spill into his lap, and all over the place too. The Captain at one point walked in and said “that’s ALL you” when he saw this.
It’s true, it was all me. See I let him make messes so I can get other things done. I gave him the pudding so I could clean up dinner. I let him trash the pantry so I could make dinner.
Dinner was good by the way.

Have you ever just looked at something and started thinking obscene thoughts?

To you, this is a dirty pan. To me, it’s flavoring! It’s a food group, heck, it could even be moisturizer. I don’t judge.

I was making a pot roast tonight. A delicious roast with mashed potatoes.
It started out innocent enough,

All the usual suspects there. I put carrots in for the rest of the family. I hate cooked carrots. Sweet and mushy. Blech!
Even my roast was lean and healthy

Then things got downright dirty. I poured the bacon grease over the roast.

It looks like its been glazed. Smokey bacony glaze. I’m not sure which came first, my love of pork fat, or my crush on Michael Symon. Anyway, back to dinner.
After adding some seasoning that my parents make. I roasted it all day in a 250 degree oven, and when it came out, it looked like this:

Awwww, it’s heart shaped!
So while my toddler was destroying my kitchen, I peeled and cooked 5lbs of potatoes. I love mashed potatoes and will eat them any time.
I always struggle with gravy. And now that I make gluten free gravy, it’s a bigger struggle. Once I get it right, I’ll tell you about it. I did come close today. The flavor was there. Just off on the texture a little. It did taste bacony. I loved that part, but the Captain, not so much.
This was the finished product.

Pretty good if I do say so myself. And I do.

Hope you are all having a great year so far. If you are trying to eat healthier and you write off my bacon fat pot roast, remember…. All my ingredients are whole ingredients. I do not use processed foods, and I buy organic and or local whenever I can. So yes, it may not be diet, but it’s still better for you than most of what we eat. I also use small salad plates as dinner plates. That’s how I practice portion control. The plate is full, you feel like you’re getting a lot of food.

Have a great day!

This is the sad time of year for those of us Christmas junkies. The family has all gone home, (which isn’t really ALL bad depending on how much time they were there I suppose) the gifts have all been unwrapped, (side note: I hate when people ask what I got for Christmas. It makes me really uncomfortable. Am I alone? Here I am, coming off a food and family high and someone wants to know what I got? I love Christmas, I love everything about Christas, but please don’t ask me to list off what I got. It makes me feel dirty) and lastly, the decorations come down. This may be the worst part. This is the signal that the holidays are over, the house looks bare, and we have to return to normal. We have an entire year to wait until next Christmas. UGH!

To make me feel better, we went to the mall today to check out the after Christmas sales. You may or may not know, but I have very recently lost nearly 50lbs and am now a respectable size found in most stores. This occurred to me today as I tried on a coat that looked really cute and was 70% off. So I bought it. That still didn’t replace the hole in my heart left by garland and twinkly lights, so I made something for dinner I’ve missed very much:

Chicken. Fried. Steak.
It’s been a long time. Way to long and I’ve missed it so. See its not easy to get comfort food when you can’t have gluten. I had to chop up the gluten free bread crumbs from parts of gluten free breads I’ve attempted and frozen over the last year. In fact, any bread heal, leftover biscuit, or just plain failure, I stick in the freezer to wait for a day like tonight.

I set out my three trays. One with gf flour, one with eggs, and one with bread crumbs, then I dipped and pan fried. I don’t deep fry, but I fried these in a pan in some olive oil and they turned out PERFECT. Then I made cream gravy. I’m still working on getting the gravy thing down, but not because I have to use gf flour, mostly because, I’ve always struggled with gravy. Still, it was good. Delicious. I would show you the finished product, but I ate it before I could take a pic. Here is the gravy

If anyone out there can do a gluten free gravy well, let me know. I’m all ears.

Heck, even a regular gravy. I can adapt it.

No not really, I just wanted to post pics of our Thanksgiving dinner. It was pretty and delicious.
See I’m not a fan of all the turkey crap and really the only thing I like about the TG dinner itself is the sides, but dressing is a challenge and I’m still working on the right way to make it gluten free.
So here’s what I made.
Prime Rib
Gasp! The horror!

Ain’t she pretty?

We also had cheese grits, sweet potatoes, and a salad.

Dinner was easy, and I didn’t spend forever in the kitchen cooking. Clean up on the other hand. Well I didn’t do that either really. My mother in law did that. I felt a little bad for it, but I got over that. Haha

When I started this site, the plan was simple. The hubs and I love to travel, we love to take pictures, and I wanted to prove to the world and myself that even though I have chiari, I am not going to let it take over my life.. You will not see me complaining on here (about that), and I will post about all the adventures the Captain and I have. Well. Then reality hit and I realized when we travel, the last thing I’m thinking about is blogging, even if I can find wifi. Which is not that often. So I thought I’d post when I get back. Then I remembered I’m lazy.
The Captain and I then had a little baby friend who surprisingly takes up a LOT of my time. I know- go figure. So my adventure gage changed and even though we don’t visit Germany and Switzerland like we did (I PROMISE I’ll get some pics up one day) we have a lot of adventure right here at home.
I didn’t want this to be another food blog. There are about a billion and a half food blogs out there. I counted. I am however, starting culinary school in January, so I will probably post more about food, and my gluten free quest for comfort food.

All that being said… Who the heck knows what I will post.

I have a love/hate relationship with this time of year. The fall makes me a tad melancholy but, it’s also a big family time because my family has about a million birthdays in the first part of November. Including mine – but that’s another post for another day, making Halloween the unofficial start of the holiday season. I don’t like the days getting shorter, and I have mixed feelings about the cooler weather, but the one thing I look forward to all year is the fall SOUPS!! Yep. I love fall cooking. My mother is still having me tested to see where this cooking gene came from, but I give my iron cookware a workout this time of year. So far I’ve made butternut squash soup, cream of chicken, beef stew, and some other mixed vegetable soup. With he exception of the last, they were all pretty good. You will have to take my word for it. I don’t have pics, there is no recipe to follow along with at home, nothing. Sorry, I’ll try next time I promise. Everything I make is gluten free and homemade. I don’t do fast food, I don’t do processed foods, and I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything but the 42 lbs (and counting) I’ve lost.

I DO, however, have pics of the tamales I made last week. See I’m not just a good cook, I’m also a bad one. A really bad one at times.

It all started innocent enough:

Make a little masa dough, soak some corn husks, I had leftover pork I wanted to do something new with. So I made them according to how I’d seen on a few tv shows.

Things were going well, or so I thought. They were almost coming together TOO easily. I don’t know if you’ve ever made tamales yourself, but they are a lot of work. Funny thing, I had no idea what a tamale was (other than the Mike & Ike variety) until I was 27. Now I can’t live without them.

So I get them all together, even used some leftover pork juice that I had frozen, to make the masa and to steam them in.

They were beautiful and I couldn’t wait to wrap my teeth around them. And I took pics of the process to remember how I did it, because I knew they were going to be epic. And they were…

About 20 mins before they were done, I smell something. Something not pleasant. Then the captain asks “What’s burning?” words that will get just about any man slapped, but this time it was true. What WAS burning? Then I remembered. I was not keeping track of how much water was in the bottom of the pot.

All that pork juice I had cooked the meat in? Had the fat, the Pepsi, the brown sugar and other spices in it was now concrete on the bottom of one of my good pans.
So to recap, the meat itself was leftover, but it took eight hours to cook when I did it. The tamales took forever to make and then an hour to cook. I hand rolled them all. So when they are done, I figure, well they better be good! They were not. We had to drown them in salsa.

The moral of the story is, I am not afraid to fail obviously. When it’s bad, the worst that could happen is I have to wash extra dishes. ……. Or, boil them with vinegar and really scrub to get two inches of burned pork juice off the bottom of my good pan. That works too.
I’m glad the Capt will try almost anything I feed him. It’s not always good, but I do try new things just to see if they work.

Enjoy the fall! Happy Cooking!

Not by choice, and don’t be quick to judge. Imagine this: it’s 3am, the baby is crying and you are exhausted. I know I know, no one in the history of having children has ever experienced this, but it’s either be up with a kid for three hours who does NOT want to go back to his own bed, or let him sleep with you, you don’t get the best sleep, but you are horizontal and you get SOME sleep.

I blame myself. So does the Captain. See, when I had to go back to work after the little one was born, I freaked out. I knew it was only for a few months, but I HATED the idea of strangers raising him while I went to work. In fact, it made me sick to my stomach – daily. Anyway, when I finally WAS able to stay home with him, I became a bit of an attached parent. I was always holding him or wearing him, even when he napped. I have the arm muscles to prove this. I won’t say I’ve spoiled him bc I refuse to consider bonding and strengthening your relationship with your child spoiling. He just now sleeps better with my arm under his back.

When am I ever going to get this again? When he’s 10 and thinks bodily functions are hilarious and has stinky feet? When he’s 12 and would rather go pay with his friends? How about when he’s 15 and notices girls or 17 and wants nothing to do with me? I don’t get to snuggle him forever and hell, I may not make it to see him turn 10, it’s not exactly unheard of. I’m going to take advantage of this time now. Maybe when he’s hanging out with his friends in 15 years and they want to do something stupid and dangerous, he will be secure enough to make good decisions.

So when he wakes up in the middle of the night deciding that he is too good for his crib and wants to be with his mommy, I will happily comfort him and still try to get a little shut eye at the same time.

The only problem is this is the position he sleeps in

Ok ok I’ll try and get some new pics on this thing tomorrow.
Good night all!

I’m curious to see how his will work. I don’t know when I can post from the laptop again, and to be honest, I’m not a fan of how it uploads pictures. So I will try this and see.

Here are just a couple pictures, to test. I will upload pics here in the morning and start blogging from here maybe.

I have long standing history of not getting involved in other people’s lives.  It’s part ‘not wanting to get involved’, and part ‘just really don’t care’.  Once in a while, however, I feel the need to speak my mind.  Not that I expect anyone else to care, but I feel I need to speak up.

This country was founded on the idea of freedom of religion.  That’s why we came over here.  No one wanted to be told how to worship.  The beautiful thing is we also have freedom of speech, and freedom of expression.  That means you and I can believe two totally different things and talk about it openly.  We can get into a knock-down drag-out fight over it, but what we cannot do, is inflict our beliefs on others.  We cannot threaten, bully, or get a mob mentality to pass laws, or pass judgment and force others to live by our own moral compass.  Yet we do.  All the time.  Your North and my North are not the same, and yet you tell me I’m doing the wrong thing?  You tell me that gay marriage is against your religion so we should pass a law and make it unconstitutional.  OK well then can atheists get married?  Can they marry a man or a woman?  Or neither?  What if an atheist and a Mormon want to marry? Is that legal?

My brother and his wife are vegetarians, yet they don’t tell others not to eat meat.  In fact, not only do we eat meat in front of them, they even let their children eat meat.  Mass hysteria almost never ensues.

My point is this.  Chick Fil A has a constitutional right to be bigots and support hate groups.  The Muppets have a Constitutional right to no longer associate with them.  The best part is this: you can do whatever you’d like.  Is eating there just like eating Chinese food?  You don’t share the same beliefs, but you like the food and you don’t care how they spend the money you’ve given them?  Or do you care what your money supports?  Are you bothered by the fact that supporting their business means you support their causes?  It’s like buying American.  Do you buy whatever you can find cheap and not know who you are making richer?  Or not care?  Do you try to buy American whenever possible, maybe from companies who treat their employees well?  Maybe you even buy local so you know your money is going to a local farmer and not a large corporation who may or may not care about what they are feeding you.

I gave up Chick Fil A a while ago, and even if I could eat gluten, I would not be giving them my business.  Too many companies out there hide behind being a “Christian Organization” to do very nasty things.

I don’t care really what side you are on.  I will respect that you are entitled to your opinion, but I expect you to respect mine.