So I convinced Josh to get a fryer basket instead of a whole frying unit. Sadly, it wasn't much less expensive than a little tiny fryer. But...I don't have to worry about parts breaking or finding a place to plug it in or anything like that. And the basket does seem to be quite sturdy. So, we fried stuff...
Josh saw before he left for work Friday (I think it was?) that we had received the basket and so called me near the end of his shift to ask me to let him know what ingredients we didn't have for making a bunch of crab rangoons. So I did a little research online and text messaged him a short list - crab, cream cheese, and won ton wrappers. We added a little mayo, some pepper, garlic, ginger, lime juice (which would have been better to be lemon juice, but I didn't have any), soy sauce, and Worcestershire sauce. Josh bundled the filling up beautifully in the won ton wrappers and fried them. This time he used a candy thermometer and kept tabs on the oil. They didn't taste quite like the ones at the restaurant...I think they must use canned crab that flakes better and also more cream cheese. But they were good. We made about fifty of them. :-P
Saturday, I figured he would want to fry stuff again, but instead he brought a couple of kids to our house while their mom was working (to sub for some people who asked off at the last minute) and they were interested in cheese and chicken quesadillas. So I made some of those. For any of you who are wondering how to make really awesome quesadillas really easily and with lots and lots of calories (because the low-cal option just isn't something that registers here, apparently), this is how you do it:
Cook a chicken breast. I sauteed it in a bit of oil with garlic, salt, pepper, and ... yeah, that's it. I chopped it up first to cook it faster. Then I put it in my little chopper to get it chopped up a little finer (after cooking). Then I threw it in with a ton of cheddar (maybe two cups, freshly grated), chopped up green onions (two of them), a few red pepper flakes, and enough sour cream to hold it all together. I loaded it into tortillas and folded them over and baked them on cookie sheets till the tortillas were crispy and the filling was nice and melty, pouring out and a tiny bit browned on the edges. Now, sadly, the cheddar cheese was mild...and I had no pepperjack cheese. These are far better with sharp cheddar and pepperjack (at least in my opinion). And you can actually vary it quite a bit more than that, of course, but this is quick and easy. I make a nice thick white sauce sometimes, but the sharpness of the sour cream is nice and I pretty much always have sour cream on hand.
Then on Sunday, we went frying crazy. Like, crazy. A few Wal-Mart trips ago, we got some Panko bread crumbs in a box. I'd tried following directions to make them before, but apparently there's a very special way to grind them up without turning them into tiny bread crumbs like what I got, because these were tender and very flaky, big pieces. I sliced three chicken breasts into smaller pieces (larger than chicken nuggets but smaller than what you'd get at a restaurant) and then coated them in some seasoned flour (we like to use salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and chili powder, with a little red pepper), dipped them in an egg/water mixture, and then covered them with the Panko. Then Josh fried them. They were amazing! The coating stuck so nicely to them and they crisped up beautifully. I put some non-meat spaghetti sauce (from last week :-P) on them and some Provolone over that and baked it today for Josh's lunch - chicken parmigiana. He said it was restaurant quality. So yeah...now I know how that's supposed to look/be. The last time we tried to make chicken parm, I did the bread crumbs myself and it was good, but...not this good by a long shot. ;-)
In addition to the chicken, we made hush puppies, French fries, and French fried onions. The onions got forgotten and so they weren't especially appetizing looking, but now they're residing in the freezer till I'm in the mood to use them for something like green bean casserole (which I am planning to make again sometime, but I'm also planning to make my own cream sauce and use frozen green beans, so it'll be a mostly from-scratch deal - which incidentally tends to be a bit less expensive than buying French fried onions and canned soup and all). We used a whole bottle of oil and then some...
So I asked my mom to get me some oil from Sam's, because they have frying oil for a much better price than Aldi. I don't know if I'm saving tons and tons of money, but it seems like it...and it should at least be better than keeping a ton of tiny bottles of oil. Now I want to try to make doughnuts and other yummy fried things that just seemed impractical. Every time we try something new, I feel like restaurants get lower and lower in my esteem. I don't know whether to be happy or sad...but I guess if we like what we cook, that's probably a good thing.
Anyway, so now I need to get my house cleaned up and start cooking things for this week. The church Fellowship Dinner is this coming Sunday, so I need to make some rolls for that. And we're doing a family birthday celebration for a couple of my siblings and my grandmother on Saturday, so I need to figure out something to make for that. And for this Thursday, I'm planning on making bean soup with diced ham and cornbread (maybe salad, too). And I'm going to try the black bean brownies Tammy has on her web site. I'm not sure if I'll make any other kind of dessert or not. :-P
I filed our tax return yesterday and of course the reason I did so early is because we're getting a refund. You can be sure if we had money to pay, we'd be waiting a bit (maybe not long, I dunno). We made a list last night of all the things we want to purchase. LOL! It's actually not as long as you'd think, but it is always a dilemma to realize that you do have money to spend, but you have a longer list of things to spend it on than there's money to do and you actually have to prioritize. But that's not bad. It's good. And then there's always the question of whether just to save it for emergencies and try to squeeze everything else out of the regular budget. :sigh:
The biggest two expenses we were considering were a new a/c unit (since our house really does need that) and a second functional vehicle. I know we don't need either of those things this year and, while Josh's Jeep is really a hobby vehicle, in theory it could be a backup vehicle for those rare times that I really need the car (although that's kind of unnecessary anyway since he's usually at work and I can just drop him off - not that difficult, really). So maybe a backup vehicle is more for if the Lancer isn't doing so well and needs to spend some time in the shop.
The other major thing we've been wanting to do that is kind of a variable expense is purchase furniture and organizational stuff for our house. Honestly, when we bought our house, my philosophy was that I'd rather be working on paying off an empty house than have nice furniture and no house to put it in. I figured we'd make do as long as necessary with whatever we could get from garages and auctions (and not the nice good deal stuff, either :-P). In our quest to become more hospitable and organized and functional in general, I've started to realize that it could be time to allocate some money towards accomplishing these things...
So I think that, after refinancing our house and making sure we have the money up front to do that (it shouldn't end up costing anything other than having the money up front to pay into the new escrow account, which will then be reimbursed to us from the old escrow account), furnishing our house will be next on the agenda. And we'll figure out everything else from there. We made a list and now we'll be doing some research to see what we can do to accomplish our plans as economically and functionally as possible. We're cheap. We're also kind of traditional. So it really should be fairly easy...between Craigslist and just getting cheap stuff at the store. :-P I think it'll be fun. :-)
Now to work on getting my clutter, laundry, and dishes addressed for this very moment...
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