A Few Hours of Cooking

Almost every day when we sit down to eat, I say to myself . . “I’m so happy I love to cook!” There’s a serious lack of good restaurants around here. Friday afternoon Vince said “Do you want to go out to eat?” I said “Where?” We couldn’t come up with a single place we’d like to eat. That’s kinda sad but probably good for our pocketbook.

I think how much I dislike housekeeping and the house always needs cleaning and I have no interest in that at all. Cooking . . I have to be careful not to cook more than we’ll eat. So many recipes make more than we can eat before it goes bad and there are so many recipes I want to try.

Remember the salad dressings I made last week? One of them was the French type and I love using that to marinate chicken and then grill it.

A package of six chicken breasts for $8.94 will be at least six meals.

I do not like thick chicken so the really thick breasts, I cut in half and pounded it all thin. I divided the chicken and put three breasts in a container to go into the freezer.

When grilling chicken that’s been marinated in this dressing, I also grill sliced pineapple. I use the pineapple in heavy syrup because the sugar helps the pineapple slices caramelize a bit on the outside. I pour the pineapple juice into the dressing. You can see that there are two containers of chicken in the marinade, and two containers of fresh dressing/marinade that I will use to brush the chicken as it grills. One container of each went into the freezer.

Dinner was grilled chicken and pineapple rings, rice salad and baked beans. There was enough chicken leftover from the original three breasts that I’ll be able to make baked potatoes, stuffed with chopped chicken, sour cream, cheese, butter and green onions, and there’s enough chicken to slice and put on top of a big salad for lunch one day.

Not bad — three meals for about $4.50. The other half of that package of chicken is in the freezer and will provide three more meals!