Day: October 7, 2019

MJ Monday: MJ’s Meals-Chicken with Accessory Vegetables

Ingredients: 

  • Boneless, skinless chicken breast cut into bite-sized pieces
  • olive oil
  • Sweet onion, thinly sliced
  • garlic, minced
  • 1 can artichoke hearts, drained and quartered
  • 1/2 jar sun dried tomatoes packed in oil
  • 1/2 jar deli sliced roasted red peppers
  • 1 jar vodka sauce
  • 1 box rotini pasta

Cover the bottom of a heavy kettle with olive oil and slowly “melt” the sliced onions, cooking until they are limp and translucent.

Start the pasta water. Once it’s reached a full boil, cook the pasta per package instructions, drain and reserve until “sauce” is complete.

 

Add the chicken and garlic, cooking over medium heat until there is no pink left in the chicken.

Add the rest of the vegetables to the pot and cook for 5 minutes.

Add the jar of vodka sauce and heat thoroughly.

Add the cooked pasta and mix well.

Serve with freshly shredded Parmesan cheese.

MJ’s Musings: SEP-What I Did For Love

One of my top three favorite Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ novels is WHAT I DID FOR LOVE. Many people refer to this book as her “Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie/Jennifer Anniston” book, and there are many strong reasons why people consider it to be so. That’s not why I love this book so much. I barely know who the aforementioned celebrities are.

The story about how the protagonist finds true love–and grows up in the process–is captivating. The hero, a bad boy through and through, has unsuspected depths and maybe isn’t as bad as we think.

But I love this book for it’s textures. The setting. The heroine’s wardrobe. The food. The characters, from the assistants to the treacherous ex and his new woman have a multitude of facets, both rough and smooth. I love details, and SEP creates a wonderfully specific world populated with  fully-developed personalities.

There was one “ick” scene involving a lingerie shop that I could have done without, but even the secondary romances in this book are riveting.

I cannot recommend the story enough.

 

MJ’s Musings-Thursday Thought: SEP-FIRST LADY

This month’s Susan Elizabeth Phillips book review is one of my top three favorite SEP books: FIRST LADY. My paper copy is in the process of disintegrating, which means  an e-copy is in my future.

Again, this story is not part of her Chicago Stars football series. It does introduce a character who becomes a heroine in her own book.. I’ve seen it classified as part of her Wynette, Texas series, but the connection doesn’t happen until a couple of books later, so I believe that’s a stretch.

This book manages to wring my emotions each time I read it. The major romance trope is on-the-road.  NEELY (Nell) is the widow of the assassinated president of the United States who was coerced into continuing the job after her husband’s death. She manages to escape the White House and goes “undercover,” where she runs into  MAT, a disillusioned and discredited journalist trying to find the big story in order to reclaim his career.  They each have secrets, although Neely’s are the major ones. Mat’s big internal conflict is family. The primary issue between them, however, is trust.

The book was published in 2000, which means one or two things have changed since then, but the gist of the story rings true.

There is no secondary romance in this story, which is unusual in an SEP book. The on-the-road aspect of the story doesn’t leave room for that kind of subplot. There are plenty of wonderful characters in the novel, though, and one of them–Lucy, who grows up to be the heroine of another SEP novel–will shred your heart.

If I were to give out stars on a 1 to 5 scale, FIRST LADY would receive five.

MJ Monday: Meals-Carol’s Casserole

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Welcome to 2019! I’m shaking up my blog a bit this year. Mondays are now MJ Monday…where I talk about food, music, movies, my manuscript in progress, and motivation. This week is the debut of MJ’s Meals.

One of my retreat friends has been on a very restrictive diet, so when we were planning a recent retreat, we had to take her food situation under consideration. I love the challenge of finding and/or creating a meal that meets the affected one’s needs.

I had some leftover garlic scapes, which my friend could have. The only kind of oil she was allowed was olive oil. So the first thing I did was harvest chives (another food she could eat) and add them to the garlic scapes in my blender and pulverized them.

Then I added the pulp to olive oil in glass jar (my husband doesn’t understand my need to save glass jars with excellent lids on them).

I placed the concoction in the refrigerator for a week.  After the week was up, I strained the oil through a fine mesh tea strainer.

Voila! My very own garlic infused oil.

I dusted some chicken breasts with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika and sautéed them in olive oil.  I find pre-cooking as much as I can when going on retreat is the way to go.

On the evening it was my turn to cook dinner, I cubed the precooked chicken and added it to diced sweet potatoes, a sliced sweet onion, and chunks of red bell pepper, all of which were on my friend’s OK-to-eat list. I drizzled in the infused olive oil and mixed it well.

Forty minutes later (in a 400F oven), we had our very first Carol Casserole.

It’s a keeper.

Quirk Question

One of life’s quirks that annoy me:

The 10-key calculator/adding machine has been around for a long time.

Touch-tone phones came around in the 1970s.

Why aren’t the key pads the same?

The numbers 4-5-6 and 0 are in the same position, but the others are not.

My guess is because alphabetic characters were assigned to the numbers on dial phones, so if you were an ORchard or GRanite exchange (old phone talk), you would still be 6-7 or 4-7.

But alphabetic exchanges were already long gone when touch tone (push button ) phones came to be.

Okay, I’m whining. I use the numeric key pad on my computer with one hand and make calls with the other. I am constantly mixing up my ones and sevens etc. because number pads aren’t standard.

Positioning of gas pedals and brake pedals on a car is standardized. Hot water faucets are on the left and cold on the right. Why can’t we make numeric keypads the same?