Slow-Cooker Lamb Stew

Living in Kansas, you are sure of one thing at the meat counter - BEEF, and lots of it.  Steaks, T-Bones, Kansas Strip, Ground Beef, Roasts, a plethora of moo-meat.  Chicken is another favorite out here.  Pork has its fans as well.  Unfortunately, that is usually the extent of the butcher counter display.  So whenever I see turkey, veal, and lamb, I snag as many portions as I can.  And yes, I have been verbally berated - by other customers, mind you - at the meat counter for getting these items instead of a nice Kansas Strip.  So I managed to snag a couple of packages of lamb chops recently and thus my muse for this next slow cooker recipe.  I found this one at the Crock-Pot Recipe Center.

Irish Lamb Stew

Ingredients:
6 large slices bacon, diced
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 pounds boneless lamb shoulder, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup beef broth
1 cup white wine
1 1/2 cups frozen peeled pearl onions, thawed
3 medium carrots, cut into 1-inch pieces
3 medium potatoes, cut into 1-inch pieces
3 cloves garlic, sliced
2 whole bay leaves
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Steps:
1.  In a medium skillet, cook the diced bacon until the fat has rendered and the bacon is crispy. Remove the bacon and set aside.
2.  Combine the flour, salt and black pepper.  Dredge the lamb cubes in the flour mixture and brown in the bacon fat in the same skillet.
3.  Remove the lamb from the skillet and set aside.  Deglaze the skillet with the beef broth and white wine.
4.  Place the lamb, bacon, and the beef broth mixture in the Crock-Pot® slow cooker and add the remaining ingredients. Mix thoroughly to combine.
5.  Cover; cook on Low 4 to 6 hours (or on High for 2 to 3 hours). Skim any excess fat off the top of the stew before serving.

The finished product:

A shot after we had already dug in!  Yum!

First, a warning - this made the house smell absolutely delicious while cooking.  The only way to keep myself from popping the lid was to remove myself from the kitchen.  The recipe calls for boneless lamb shoulder but, seeing as how I already explained my meat predicament, I used bone-in lamb chops.  I think it added something extra to the stew.  The meat was super tender and fell right off the bone with your fork.  For the white wine, I used a cup of Little Penguin Chardonnay and don't forget - a little sip for oneself during the process.  I had no pearl onions - so I just quartered 1 medium sized white onion.  I peeled and chopped 5 smaller sized potatoes.  I cooked on low for 4 and a half hours.  About 20 minutes before the end of cooking time, I threw some crescent rolls in the oven.  I don't think you can eat a hearty stew without some bread.  Verdict:  Totally yummy with one little issue.  I need to boil off the wine a bit longer during the deglazing process - or possibly use a different white next time.  Other than that, we had a fantastic dinner, definitely being added to my recipe book.  So good, even JT spent the time in his high chair smacking his lips like he wanted a bowl.  Just another week before he gets started on solids!

CrockPot Turkey and Rice Casserole

Earlier this week I tried my hand at a another slow cooker recipe.  This time the subject was turkey.  Now there are quite a few recipes for nearly whole turkeys cooked in the crock pot.   But I was looking for something to use up a frozen package of turkey breast cutlets.  After lots of searching I settled on this recipe from momswhothink.com:

Crock Pot Turkey and Rice Casserole

Ingredients:
2 cans cream of mushroom soup
3 cups water
3 cups converted long-grain white rice (uncooked)
1 cup thinly sliced celery
1 to 2 cups cubed cooked turkey
2 cups frozen mixed vegetables (peas & carrots, oriental mix, etc.)
1 teaspoon poultry seasoning
1 Tablespoon dried minced onion

Steps:
1. Pour soup and water into Crock Pot and stir to combine. Add remaining ingredients and mix well.
2. Cover and cook 6 to 8 hours on low or 3 to 4 hours on high.

The finished product:

First, let me get a few recipe specifics out of the way.  As I said at the beginning, I had a package frozen turkey.  So I thawed them out and cubed the cutlets into bite-sized pieces.  The pound package of turkey yielded about 2 whole cups.  I placed the slow cooker insert on the stove, added a touch of olive oil and cooked the turkey cubes.  I used 2 celery stalks and a frozen steam-fresh mixed vegetables package.  I recently got a sampler of Penzey's Bouquet Garni - which they describe as going well with poultry and fish.  So, I used that for my poultry seasoning.  I cooked on low for 6 hours.

I can not deny that as it was cooking it smelled really delicious.  I had to hold back from lifting the lid on a couple of occasions.  When we were finally ready to eat, I lifted the lid to this wonderful sight.  Two little problems that I found.  The recipe calls for 3 cups of rice.  It is a lot and I mean a lot of rice.  So, next time I would either cut back to possibly 2 cups of rice and 2 cups of water or cut more turkey cubes.  The second issue was the taste - it turned out very bland especially when it smelled so fantastic.  I would probably add a bit of garlic, some pepper (maybe red pepper flakes or cayenne for a kick), and a little salt.  All in all, it did win the hubby's approval so I am pretty sure we will keep the recipe around for later consumption.

Frustrated Son

My son was born nearly 4 weeks early.  With the exception of his time at the NICU, a herniated belly button, and a bit of reflux, I can not really complain.

The doctors warned that he would be behind his peer babies developmentally for a little while.   Whatever a three month old should do, John would be performing at two month old levels.

At his 4 month immunizations, we had to fill out a little form indicating what functions John had mastery of.  Apparently, screaming your little head off is not one of them.  They said it would be totally fine if we had to stop on the front page.  John made it to the back of the form and stopped just into the 5 month level skills.

Yes, so you say he is frustrated.  Nothing of what you wrote indicates frustration.  My son likes tummy time but despises the "crawling" motion.  He would much rather stand.  I mean a nearly unaided stand.  His leg muscles are strong enough to support his weight but he needs a bit of help to keep his balance.  I can get away with very little support under his armpits or his now preferred balance assistance method - gripping onto my thumbs.

It is a little disconcerting to see this little not nearly 12 pound kiddo making like he is walking down the street.  Yes, I said walking.  He likes to pick up his feet one at a time in an ambulatory fashion.  Now he gets extremely mad when you do not allow him to stand up and let him take a walk.  I have been getting this face

on more occasions than I would like.  I apologize for the grainyness.  Crying babies won't sit still for a picture for some reason.  So I am stuck between a rock and a crying baby.  I would love to let him walk around - but that requires both hands and all of my attention.  We have a great exersaucer but unfortunately JT's legs are not long enough to touch the bottom nor is he heavy enough to cause the springs in it to compress, allowing him to touch the floor.

What is a momma to do?  I guess I will be waiting for JT to get a bit bigger.  It also means I get to see a lot more of that oh so adorable angry frustrated face.

New Year - New 'Do

This past Friday, the 13th, I took a plunge.  I walked through the salon doors and got my hair chopped.

I am an odd person when it comes to my hair.  I am not a fashionista at all.  So hair styling has never been a big deal.  I get the urge to get it cut and then it usually goes away.  Case in point:  I spoke with the stylist to find out the last time I was in to see her was October 2010.  That means, I got it cut just in time for my hubby to return from deployment and then it grew unchecked through a pregnancy, birth, and nearly 4 months of a new life.

It was a lot of hair, and a lot of time - the entire chunk of time missing from this blog.  But now I get to start off fresh and short.

I guess the good thing is that the cut did not turn out a disaster given the date.

Pork Chops on Rice

Sunday night I tried my hand at another slow cooker recipe - Pork Chops on Rice.  I had some pork chops in the deep freeze so I set out on a hunt for a pork chop recipe.  I found this one at the CrockPot Recipe site.

Pork Chops on Rice

Ingredients:

½ cup brown rice

⅔ cup converted white rice

¼ cup butter or margarine

½ cup onion, chopped

14 ounces sliced mushrooms, drained

1 teaspoon dried thyme, divided

½ teaspoon rubbed sage

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

4 boneless pork chops, 3/4" to 1" thick

10 ½ ounces beef consomme

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

½ teaspoon paprika

¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

Steps:

1. Spray inside of stoneware with nonstick cooking spray. Combine white and brown rice with butter in skillet.

2. Saute over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until rice is golden brown.

3. Remove from heat and stir in onion, mushrooms, 1/2 teaspoon thyme, sage, salt, and pepper. Pour rice mixture into stoneware. Arrange chops over rice.

4. Combine consomme and Worcestershire sauce and pour over chops. Combine remaining thyme, paprika, and nutmeg; sprinkle over chops.

5. Cover and cook on LOW 7–9 hours (HIGH: 4–5 hours).

The finished product:

Normally, I shy away from recipes with a long ingredient list.  But I realized that most of it was herbs and spices.  Those are no biggies.  Until I checked my drawer of spices and herbs.  I guess I do not really cook recipes with thyme, or sage, or nutmeg, or even paprika.  This called for a food shopping trip.  It also meant that the taste of the dish will be something new.  It opened up a whole new flavor experience for me.

It was really quite tasty.  My only reservations are that food was turned out this dark brown color and that the one inch chops really shrunk over the course of cooking on low for seven hours.  But it is so yummy that I can overcome these and add this recipe to my cookbook.

Speaking of my cookbook - I have been really awful with data entry.  So I might take a couple of days off of blog posting to type in my recipes.  Check in with you in a few!

Packing Up the Pump

This post may be more than you bargained for.  So for the faint of heart, you may want to skip this.  But for mommies, I feel that this topic is important.

It's a new year and with it comes the end of old habits or routines.  On Saturday the 7th, the journey with my "pump" ended.  In case you are scratching your head about what I mean by my "pump", here is a picture.

We have been working together for the past four months.  It was the most expensive item on my baby registry.  I knew that I had wanted to give breastfeeding a whirl.  It is the recommended (best) way to feed a baby.  But JT had other plans.  He came three weeks and 5 days early.  He showed up weighing 3 pounds and 7 ozs.  All the doctors kept saying was how tiny he was, oh he is fine but he is sooo small.  As happy and as pain free as all the drugs could make me, I was sad.  I vowed in my loopy state do everything I could to make sure he was big and strong.

Then later that evening John was med-evaced to the NICU.  I felt helpless.  I could barely sit up for all the pain and the incision from the emergency C-section.  I talked with the lactation consultant and they got me set up with a pump.  It was the only thing that I could do in my condition to help my son.  I threw all of what little energy I had into it.  I think my husband thought I went nuts with it.  I was so happy to send what little I had "pumped" to the NICU for John.  After 48 hours, I was released from the hospital.  I was not going anywhere fast - but I could still pump.

I finally managed to get out to the NICU and talk with the doctors there.  They had tried to feed John formula, but his little tummy did not respond well to it.  So continued use of my "pump" was essential.  For the next 10 days, I pumped like crazy.  John would have all the milk he wanted so that he could be big and strong to come home.  Twelve days after being admitted to the NICU we finally got to take him home.

I could try breastfeeding again - slowly.  After nearly a month of frustration, appointments with lactation consultants, waiting hours at the emergency room, and a bout of mastitis (not fun), I decided to stop breastfeeding.  I told myself I would continue on with my "pump" to get John what he needed.  The experience everyone says they have when breastfeeding there child - was not there for me.

Once I switched over to solely pumping and bottle-feeding that milk to my son, we finally got a chance to enjoy ourselves.  It was fantastic.  It felt so much easier.  I did this routine for another month.  John was not eating nearly as much as I was pumping.  So our deep freeze became home to all of John's food.  It was over flowing really.

So I decided I would take my time and cut off my access to the pump.  Every week we spent less time together.  In the mean time, I slowly introduced John to formula again.  In this way, I could make the milk last longer and JT would still be able to receive it's positive effects even after I stop pumping.

That day came.  It was bittersweet almost.  But I am glad to close that chapter.  I now have the ability to spend the entire day with my son as he starts to crawl and discover the world around him.  No more time lost to "pumping".  Yet, I am so thankful for it.  Without it, who knows how much longer my son would have spent at the NICU.

A New Year and I am ready to spend as much of it with my son as I can.

Slow-Cooker Chicken Pot Pie

On Monday, I tried out a recipe for my slow cooker.  I am aiming to do one slow-cooker recipe a week, more if possible.  So this week's recipe comes from the Hyvee online Recipe Center.

Slow-Cooker Chicken Pot Pie

Ingredients:

2 lbs. boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
⅔ cup flour, divided
1 cup frozen peas
4 carrots, peeled and chopped
3 celery stalks, chopped
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
½ teaspoon black pepper
1 bay leaf
2-⅓ cups chicken broth, divided
Quick biscuits, optional
salt and pepper, to taste

Steps:
1. In a medium bowl, coat cubed chicken with 1/3 cup flour; place in slow cooker.
2. Add peas, carrots, celery, onion, garlic, Italian seasoning, pepper and bay leaf; stir in 2 cups chicken broth. Cover and cook on LOW 7 to 9 hours or on HIGH 4 to 5 hours.
3. Remove bay leaf and discard. Combine remaining 1/3 cup flour and 1/3 cup chicken broth, stirring until smooth. If cooking on LOW, turn heat to HIGH and stir in flour mixture. Heat an additional 15 minutes or until thickened.
4. Serve over quick biscuits and season with salt and pepper, if desired.

It turned out fantastic.  A bit on the peppery side but the hubby likes the heat.  I used Penzey's Italian Herb Mix as the seasoning and Pillsbury Buttermilk biscuits.   I cooked on low for 7 hours.  If you pop the biscuits in during step 3, you have nice warm biscuits ready when the meal is done.  Only thing I would do is add a touch more salt.

What made this meal even more fun, someone joined us at the dinner table:

No solid food just yet but hopefully soon.  I am excited about trying my hand at baby food.

MacGourmet

To help me reach my goal of creating my own family cookbook, I have been researching recipe/cookbook programs online.  I finally settled on MacGourmet.

There were a couple of things that I really liked about it:

1.  It is a breeze to start entering recipes - fill in the ingredients, then the steps, any special tools you may need, add a picture, it'll even calculate the nutritional information for you.  I was a little bummed that I couldn't import my really old Yum cookbook file - but that is what happens after years of not updating.  Thankfully, there is the good ole cut and paste.

2.  There is a built in web browser that you can scour all the great recipe sites.  Then in that same window, you can magically highlight sections of the webpage and with a little "command - 1", etc., magic you fill all the recipe fields for a new recipe.  It made life really easy when I wanted to add the slow-cooker chicken pot pie recipe to my "recipe box" in the program.  I will share in another update - never fear!

3.  You can purchase plug-ins that allow you to create meal plans, cookbooks (that's what it is all about), and do all that nutritional calculation stuff.  While I am tempted to create a cookbook using this method, I realized a few things.  I am constantly trying out new recipes - some I like, some I don't.  I need a way to preserve them that allows for addition or deletion in the long run.  It is a little hard to do if I print out one designed cookbook and bind it.  Right now I am setting up a temporary binder home for all of my recipes.  But who wants to pass down all their family recipes in a binder???  I would like to keep them in something more along these lines or maybe something like this.  Birthday idea anyone?!?!? or even anniversary gift!!

4.  It also has a wine "recipe box".  You can fill in all the info about the wine you had with dinner.  We have an actual wine journal but I think it might be getting full.  Might be nice to add all this info and any new wines to this program.

5.  It has sister apps for the iphone and ipad - which is great.  I can bring my recipes anywhere then.  No need to worry about what the heck those extra ingredients were.  All right there in one spot.

As one might well imagine, I have a load of "data" entry to do.  I am hoping to get a few recipes entered a day although that might be wishful thinking.

Next update:  Slow Cooker Chicken Pot Pie

Firsts

All of a sudden, we are starting to experience a lot of "firsts" in JT's life.  I still think of him as a tiny little guy at 3 pounds but he has more than tripled in size over the past 3 + months.  Within the past two weeks, John has:

Mastered the art of "Reflection" - in geometry, this is essentially the flipping of a closed figure.  I used to tell my students that it is exactly like looking at your reflection in the mirror.  I caveat this statement by the fact that John can only flip from tummy to back and not from back to tummy.

Mastered the art of "Rotation" - in simpler terms, turning a figure around a fixed point, or center of rotation.  Think of it - as if you went out to dinner and had your food served family style.  Your waiter might put your food on a "lazy susan".  You spin the plate of the lazy susan to move the dishes around in a circle.  John is able to perform a 0 to 180 degree turn on his belly.

Working on the art of "Translation" - I like to call it "sliding" a figure around on the plane.  John is still working out how to get the combination of foot movements and arm movements in line so that he can "translate" himself wherever he would like to go.  He has managed to gather his feet under himself and lift his butt off the floor.

My apologies for the grain-i-ness.  It is hard to catch this kid in action with my camera phone.  I think John has got himself halfway there to crawling.  Unfortunately, all this butt up in the air leads to screaming over a rug-burned face.

Kinda Standing - JT can support almost all of his weight with his feet.   He likes to play at standing up all the time.  We need only help out with that whole balancing and center of gravity thing.

Wanting to have a Conversation - John has more sound coming out of his mouth other than screaming.  Finally!!!  I usually catch a lot of "talking" in the morning before he runs out of steam in the afternoon.  Here he is talking to his jungle friends:

In just a few short days, this little guy will be 4 months old.  Watch out world!!!

Slow Cooker Attempt

My big present this Christmas from my hubby was an All-Clad Slow Cooker to update my tiny Rival CrockPot.

What is awesome about this slow cooker is that the insert is nonstick cast-aluminum.  Blah, blah, insert, blah, cast-aluminum, blah.  That means I can take the insert and move from the slow cooker to the stove without any worries.  Hurray, for having one less pan to dirty when I need to brown meat before putting it in the slow cooker.

We finally got around to moving our presents to their new respective homes around the house, so clearly it was time to test it out.  We did on New Year's Eve.  I looked around online for some beef/steak recipes.  I looked for a while - could you believe it that I just didn't have the right grouping of ingredients?!?!  I will grant you that I have not gone food shopping in over a week but we stocked up big time prior to the arrival of my family for Christmas.  So what did I do - wing it!

Attempted Slow Cooker Steak

Ingredients:

3 - 4 steaks

1 onion sliced

4 - 6 medium potatoes, halved and sliced

approximately 1 cup sliced mushrooms

10 3/4 oz can Cream of Mushroom with Roasted Garlic

12 oz can of beer

olive oil

salt and pepper

Steps:

1.  Put the insert on the stove at medium heat.  Drizzle olive oil.

2.  Season steak with salt and pepper.  Sear steaks for approximately 2 minutes on each side.

3.  Place insert back in slow cooker.  Layer potatoes, mushrooms, and onions on top of the steaks.

4.  Mix cream of mushroom soup with beer.  Pour over vegetables making sure everything gets covered.

5.  Cook on Low for 6 hours.

How did it turn out?  Tasted a lot like a stew.  The steak did hold together because of the searing but was very easy to tear apart.  It did not turn out very garlic-ey.  Next time I think I would add some green beans to the mix, probably some minced garlic, and a bit more pepper.  Maybe a few herbs but I have not decided which ones yet.

Not a bad concoction - but could definitely be better.  I have a Chicken Pot Pie slow cooker recipe to try for later this week.

Signing Off.