What’s in the Crockpot? Part Eight

We haven’t played ‘What’s in the Crockpot?’ in months! Time to fix that. Ready for a new installment? It’s easy to play. I won’t even have to explain the rules – you’ll pick it up as you go. I promise!

READY TO GO? LET’S PLAY!

What’s in the Crockpot?

October Weight Loss Chart Update AND Crockpot Ratatatatatatouille

I’ve been trying to focus on the positive the past few days, because it regards to my eating and exercise, it hasn’t been a fantastic few days.

I delayed this post a day so I could include the results of my October 1st weigh-in. Let’s see what the ol’ weight loss chart has to say, shall we?

Up three pounds. That’s five pounds that I’ve gained over the past two months. No bueno.  And here’s the crappy part about having a weight loss chart… it only took me approximately 15 seconds to realize that this is the heaviest I’ve been in about 18 months. The last time I weighed 241 pounds was March 2011.

What’s In The (Brand-New) Crockpot? Part Seven

On Sunday I got to break in my brand new fancy-pants Crockpot! It was a very exciting day. I couldn’t wait to pull that lid off and sample the contents, but I had to endure hours and hours of waiting, because as you know, Crockpots don’t cook things fast. They cook them slow… which is why they’re also known as slow cookers (whoever thought that name up should definitely get bonus points).

So… are you ready? Ready for the first-ever edition of this game that features my brand-new crockpot? Strap on your knee and elbow pads, because it’s time to play!

WHAT’S IN THE CROCKPOT?

My New Toy!

I’m as excited as a hooker at a Secret Service retreat because… I GOT A NEW TOY!  Wanna guess what it is? I’ll give you a hint… it’s to use in my kitchen.

Need another hint?

What’s In The Crockpot? Part Six

A big thank you to everyone who sent good thoughts my way yesterday. My first day at the new job was great – I met a lot of great new colleagues and absorbed a lot of info… now, onto Day 2!

Like I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I spent part of my Sunday loading up my crockpot to make some meals to eat throughout the week. There’s no better way to reveal my crockpottery than by playing a riveting, edge-of-your-seat game of What’s In The Crockpot?!

What’s In The Crockpot? is a spin-off of the very popular, smash hit, blockbuster blog game What’s In The RediSetGo?, all of which are archived here. (I haven’t archived my What’s In The Crockpot? installments yet, but it’s on my list.) If you’ve never played before, hold on to your hat! Don’t worry about the rules – you’ll figure it out quickly. And if you get hooked, click here and here to play a couple more installments!

So stuff some shin guards into your socks, because it’s time to play…

WHAT’S IN THE CROCKPOT?

What’s In The Crockpot? Part Five

Wow. Has been really been 7 months since we last played “What’s In The Crockpot?” It has!  I published Part Four last October 31st – Halloween – and the dish that I featured was what I contributed to a Halloween party potluck (click here to see the recipe – I won’t spoil the game if you haven’t played yet!)

Just because I haven’t published any “What’s In The Crockpot?” posts doesn’t mean that my crockpot has gone unused. I made a perfectly mediocre vegetable and bean stew in it just the other day. But because it was just mediocre (at best), and the internet is already flooded with mediocre recipes (just google Sandra Lee if you need proof), I refrained from blogging about it.

OK, Enough chit-chat. Pull up your socks and lace up your sneakers, because it’s time to play!

WHAT’S IN THE CROCKPOT?

What’s In The Crockpot? Part Four

We haven’t played “What’s In The Crockpot?” since February – where has the time gone?  That doesn’t mean my crockpot has gone unused – I’ve used it a few times, for dishes that turned out wonderfully (like this one) and for dishes that could… um… use a little work (like this one).

I pulled out the crockpot again over the weekend, to make something for the Halloween potluck party I was invited to, and the results were devilishly delicious. Monstrously magnificent. Bloodcurdlingly beyond compare.

OK, enough with the Halloween talk.

Never played “What’s In The Crockpot?” before? Don’t fret. You’ll pick it up as we go along – although, if you’d like some practice, check out these three posts first.

All set? Wonderful. Put on your reflective clothing and wear a jacket if it’s chilly, because it’s time to play!

WHAT’S IN THE CROCKPOT?

GHOULISHLY GLAZED CARROT, PARSNIPS & EYEBALLS* are in the Crockpot!

*not really

It couldn’t have been easier to make, either.  First ingredient? Carrots:

You need 5 cups worth. I used regular carrots, which I peeled and cut on the bias, which is a fancy way of saying that I cut diagonally, for pretty presentation reasons. You could save yourself some trouble and use baby carrots, which are already peeled and washed and ready to go, but I don’t like cooking with baby carrots. I think it looks lazy. And if you happen to think that that rationale is snobby, consider this: regular carrots are way cheaper than baby carrots. I can find regular carrots for 50 cents a pound, whereas baby carrots are $1.50 a pound.

Ingredient #2: Parsnips!

Parsnips are relatively new to me – I don’t think I’d ever had one until a few years ago. They’re kinda like a cross between a carrot and a potato: similar in shape and texture to a carrot, but similar in taste to a potato. Meaning, of course, that they taste like nothing and are disgusting raw. But, like potatoes, they take on flavors well, and so I added some to this recipe (3 cups worth) just to mix it up.

So, to recap, that’s 5 cups of carrots and 3 cups of parsnips in the crockpot:

If you don’t like parsnips, leave ‘em out. If you love parsnips, add more! Aim for around 8 cups of veggies, and you’ll be fine.

Now for the glaze. I started with 1 cup of orange juice, and to that I added 3 tablespoons of honey:

Here’s a tip: if you spritz your tablespoon with Pam before measuring out the honey, the honey won’t stick to the spoon, and all of it will end up in your recipe.

Next, I grated some fresh ginger – about a teaspoon’s worth (although I didn’t measure it, so I can’t be absolutely sure):

I also added 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, and 1/4 teaspoon each of salt and pepper:

I gave it a stir and poured it over the veggies in the crockpot:

I set the crockpot for 4 hours on High, and that’s it! They’re done! Because crockpots leech the liquid out of everything, the glaze was a little thinner than it would have been had you made this same recipe in your oven, but give the dish a good stir before serving and it’s fine.

I made a display card for the potluck:

A day later my cousin had the wonderful idea that I could have actually included eyeballs in the recipe had I thrown in some pearl onions. Dammit – why didn’t I think of that? I was able to put the calories and fat on the card because I had figured it out using an online recipe calculator. The full details:

Tomorrow, I’m sharing picture of my Halloween costume (it’s a good one!). And now, I’m off to the gym!

Keep it up, David!

My Weight Loss in Corn Dogs, Toilet Paper & MORE!

I love a good visual weight loss comparison.  These posts are probably the most fun for me to research and compile, so if this is your first time reading one of these posts, then welcome, and enjoy!

The Backstory:  It all began last fall, when a friend and I piled up 147 pounds of dog food as a visual aid to represent the weight that I’d lost at that point.  Since then, I’ve occasionally scoured the internet and calculated all sorts of outrageous and interesting weight loss comparisons, from quarters and Oreos to bowling balls and KFC to Butterfingers and iPads (they’re all archived in My Favorite Posts).

I’m ready for some new comparisons.  Are you?  Let’s see what else there is on this vast planet that also weighs 167 pounds – the amount of weight that I’ve lost!

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I PRESENT TO YOU, MY WEIGHT LOSS IN…

…CORN DOGS.  It’s state fair season, and I don’t even want to know how many different deep-fried menu items are sold each day.  I did calculate, however, how many corn dogs I’ve lost.  A single corn dog weighs 2 and 2/3 ounces, which means I’ve lost 1,002 corn dogs!

…JERKY.  Jonesin’ for some protein, but don’t want a deep-fried hot dog?  Try some jerky, which is low-calorie, low-fat, and high-protein (it’s also high-sodium, so don’t each tons).  This jumbo bag weighs 6.2 ounces, so I’ve lost 430 jumbo bags of beef jerky!

…TOILET PAPER.  One roll of toilet paper weighs a tad over one-fifth of a pound, which means in total, I’ve lost 795 rolls of toilet paper!   And here’s where it gets really fun: A two-ply roll of toilet paper has 500 sheets, and each sheet measures 4.5 inches square.  That means that if you unrolled one roll of toilet paper, it would be 187.5 feet long.  Unroll 795 rolls of toilet paper, and lay them end to end, and they would stretch 28.23 miles!  That’s the distance across Lake Erie (at its narrowest point)!

The toilet paper fun’s not over yet!  Now that we’ve unrolled 795 rolls, we’re left with 795 cardboard tubes lying around.  Stack them, one on top of another, and they’d reach a height of 298 feet – only 7 feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty from the ground to the tip of her torch!

…MY FRIEND TOM.  A couple weeks ago, my friend Heidi noticed a rare weight-loss-related eclipse.  Her husband Tom reached a weight of 164 pounds (he’s lost more than 55 pounds since January) – which was exactly the amount of weight that I had lost.  It was a short-lived eclipse (the next day I had a weigh-in, and I had lost two more pounds), but his weight and my weight loss are still eerily close, and I can’t imagine carrying Tom around on my back all freakin’ day long.  It might be fun for him, though.

…GASOLINE.  A gallon of gas weighs 6.16 pounds, so I’ve lost slightly more than 27 gallons.  My car gets about 23 miles to a gallon of gas, so 27 gallons would get me from my home in Los Angeles almost all the way (within a few miles) to the Arizona/New Mexico border!

…GIANT OCTOPUS.  The largest species of octopus on the planet is the North Pacific Giant Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini), and the largest specimen on record tipped the scales at 156.5 pounds.  That is one giant Giant Octopus, and I’ve lost that giant Giant Octopus!  See the Giant Octopus in action.

…CROCKPOTS.  I love my crockpot, and it’s a heavy bugger.  But it’s not as heavy as this top-of-the-line All-Clad Deluxe Slow Cooker, which sells at Williams-Sonoma for $280 (!) and weighs 18 pounds!  So I’ve lost NINE of them.

…CHEEZ-ITS.  One of my favorite crackers.  A box of regular Cheez-its weighs 9 ounces, so I’ve lost 296 boxes.  Wanna know the damage if you eat 296 boxes of Cheez-its?  A grand total of 399,600 calories and 21,312 grams of fat!  If you’re watching your figure and choose to eat 296 boxes of the reduced-fat variety, you’ll only take in 269,360 calories and 9,324 grams of fat.  Only.

…SUITS OF ARMOR.  A full suit of armor that knights wore in medieval times could weigh anywhere from 40-90 pounds.  The replicas pictured above weigh in at 55 pounds each, so I’ve lost all THREE of them.  One of those replicas, by the way, can be yours for only $2,998.00 – get out your credit card and act now!

If you have ideas for other items I could compare my weight loss to, leave them in the comments section!  No need to do the research or math – leave that up to me – I’m good at it!

Keep it up, David!

Dinner with Kenlie!

You’d think two blogs in one day would be enough (one featured my weigh-in results; the other had a photo of me with antlers), but here I am, composing my third blog in less than 24 hours, and it’s a good one!

I’ll start with a picture of who I spent my evening with.  Maybe you already know her, as she’s a very popular weight-loss blogger.  Yep, it’s Kenlie, from All The Weigh!

Kenlie moved to Los Angeles a few days ago, and I think she’ll be a lovely addition to this city.  She’s been talking about moving to LA for months now, pretty much since she visited in May, and I’m glad it’s finally happened!  I invited Kenlie and her two aunts, who helped bring Kenlie’s stuff cross-country, over for dinner.  Her aunts are lovely women, and it was great to meet them and shoot the shit with Kenlie in person, as opposed to over Twitter, Facebook, or our blogs.

For dinner, I pulled out my most trusted kitchen appliance: my Crockpot.  I’ve had my Crockpot for 8 years or so, and it’s never let me down.  My Crockpot and me have shared many adventures together.  We participated in a weekly CrockPotLuck every Friday a year.  We won Runner-up in a chili contest.  Since I started this blog, my Crockpot has starred in 4 posts:

• Squash and Sweet Potato Soup
• Seitan and Vegetable Stew
• Balsamic Chicken with Pears
• Chicken Cordon Bleu Dip: A Cautionary Tale

And now it’s time for another.  I made up the following recipe, and it all started with a jar:

I picked up this jar of Spinach Curry Simmer Sauce a few months ago at Whole Foods and have been staring at it in my cupboard since then.  Finally, I have a great reason to crack it open!  (FYI: the jar has 6 servings, and each one has 25 calories and 1 gram of fat.)

I thought the sauce would be a good base for a stew.  And, as anyone who’s ever cooked with a Crockpot knows, everything in a Crockpot ends up becoming a stew whether you want it to or not, so that really couldn’t have worked out any better!

My favorite stews are loaded with vegetables, so I sharpened my knife and started chopping:

From left to right, we have 2 big turnips, 1 red onion, 3 parsnips, and 3 Italian eggplants.  I also added 3 minced cloves of garlic.  I got a few comments the other day when I mentioned buying a purple bell pepper, and I know Kenlie is a huge fan of my posts about oddly-colored vegetables, so I chopped up the purple bell pepper, too.  Here it is whole:

And here it is in the Crockpot with the other vegetables:

Oh, and by the way, I grossly overestimated how many veggies I’d need.  I could only squeeze in about 2/3 of the veggies before the Crockpot was full; the other 1/3 are sitting in my fridge, awaiting their destiny.  I may roast them off tomorrow; I’m not sure yet.

For protein, I added 6 chicken thighs.  I had to remove the skin and trim some fat from them, which is a total pain in the butt, but they looked pretty afterwards:

The thighs still had their bones inside them, but I’ve Crocked chicken thighs before, and they get so tender that the meat literally falls off the bones, making them easy to remove when you’re serving.

Finally, the jar of sauce got poured over everything:

The lid went on, and the Crockpot got plugged in and set to Low.  I started the cooking process at noon, and at 8pm, when it was time to eat, this is what it looked like:

I made some couscous to serve it over, following the directions on the box, except that I used some chicken stock instead of water.  And here’s the finished plate!

The chicken was tender, and the sauce was fantastic.  I love curry, and I’ll be buying that sauce again!

I’ll end this post with one more photo of Kenlie and me.  If you haven’t checked out her blog, do yourself a favor and click here.  She’s lost well over 100 pounds, and is wonderfully honest, open, and inspiring.  Keep it up, Kenlie…

…and Keep it up, David!

Chicken Cordon Bleu Dip: A Cautionary Tale

I recently had a few people over, and wanted to break out the crockpot and use it to make a healthy, hot dip.  I looked around online for a little while, but when you google ‘crockpot’, ‘dip’, and ‘healthy’, you don’t get too many results.  Crockpot dips tend to start with 2 packages cream cheese, or 1 container mayo or sour cream, or three different types of shredded cheeses, or all of the above.

So I decided I would invent my own healthy dip, and see what comes of it.  I didn’t want anything in the Tex-Mex/chili family (a very popular crockpot sub-genre), because those go best with tortilla or corn chips, and I didn’t want to have fried chips of any kind in my house.  Nor did I want to go the spinach/artichoke dip route, because, while tasty, I’ve done it before, and find it kinda boring.  I wanted to try something new.

I settled on a chicken cordon bleu flavor profile, and made a special trip to the store to gather healthier ingredients to put it all together.  Here’s eveything I needed:

I started with 2 pounds of ground chicken breast.  I contemplated browning the chicken in a skillet first, but ultimately decided against it.  It would cook in my slow-cooker.  That’s why it’s called a slow-cooker!  To the chicken I added about half a dozen cloves of garlic, which I minced with my garlic press, and a few teaspoons of fresh rosemary and sage:

The second main ingredient in chicken cordon bleu is ham, and for this healthy recipe, I opted to replace the ham with Canadian bacon.  Canadian bacon is surprisingly low in calories and fat (especially for a product with ‘bacon’ in the name), with 1 slice often having around 50 calories and about 2 grams of fat.  I picked up some Canadian bacon at the deli counter, and trimmed it up:

Then I diced it and added it to the crock.

The cheese in chicken cordon bleu is traditionally Swiss cheese, but I wanted to use one of the fat-free, vegan cheeses I’d seen at Whole Foods.  I was bummed they didn’t make a version of it in Swiss, so I picked up a block of Mozzarella instead:

One ounce of this stuff has 36 calories and is fat-free.  I also picked up a block of mild cheddar, which you can see in the first pic in this post, but I didn’t end up using any of it.  I grated the entire block of Mozzarella, and sampled it too.  It tasted like Mozzarella, although the texture was different – not as smooth or creamy.  I don’t know if I’d like this stuff just on a sandwich or something, but melted in a pot with a bunch of other ingredients?  I bet I’d be fooled.

I added the cheese to the crock:

Now to add stuff that would add creaminess and make it thinner, as a good dip should be.  I started with about 1/4 cup dijon mustard, then added 1/4 cup lite Miracle Whip (the entire 1/4 cup is 80 calories and 6 grams of fat), and then added about 2 cups nonfat plain Greek yogurt.  I topped it all off with a little black pepper:

Voila!  A loaded crockpot!

My idea is that is would cook for 6 hours on Low, and then it’d be ready for when my friends came over, and I’d serve it with pita bread triangles and whole wheat crackers, and we’d all love it.   But things started to unravel, in two ways:  my mistakes became evident, and call me a bad blogger, but I forgot to photograph things from this step forward.

I first checked on the dip about 3 hours into the cooking process.  I once read that every time you open the lid to your crockpot, you have to add 20 minutes to your cooking time, and ever since I’ve been careful to not check things very often.  Maybe I should have checked this dip a little earlier, though, because when I went to stir the dip 3 hours in, I found that the chicken had formed a 2-pound mass on the bottom of the crockpot.  Great.  This is why I probably should have browned it first in a skillet, so I could break it up in the process.

I hacked away at the chicken mass with a big spoon and broke it up to small pieces (a potato masher would have been handy, but I don’t have one, and seeing as how this is the very first time I’ve ever needed one, I don’t want one, either).  The lid went back on, and it crocked away.

My friends started showing up about 5 hours into the cooking process, and thanks to all the yogurt, the dip was pretty thin – more soup-like than dip-like.  So I decided to remove the lid, and keep the crock on, and let some moisture evaporate, which would thicken the dip.  I’ve done that before, with success, and thought without a doubt that I’d be able to do it again.

My friends and I chatted away, and had a lovely time, and people seemed to be enjoying the chicken cordon bleu dip.  I didn’t actually try it myself until a few hours into the evening, when it was no longer dip-like at all, but, instead, almost rock-hard.  My crockpot has a ‘Warm’ setting, for use when you want to just keep the contents warm, without cooking them anymore, and when I took the lid off to let the evaporation happen, I meant to switch the crockpot to Warm.  But I forgot to do it, which meant that the dip had now been cooking for over 8 hours.  Yikes.  I’m glad I didn’t take photos of this hot mess.

For the record, it didn’t taste half-bad.  The flavors were nice, even if, in every other regard, it was by no means a dip.

So, dear readers, if any of you attempt to make my chicken cordon bleu dip recipe, learn from my mistakes:

• Brown the chicken first.
• Don’t forget to switch the crock to ‘Warm’ when your guests arrive.
• Take photos of the finished product (in all its various states).

When it comes down to it, a not-super-successful crockpot dip isn’t the end of the world, and I can’t expect every recipe to come out perfectly, especially when I’m making them up.  Will this stop me from trying new things again?  Nope.  And for that, I say…

Keep it up, David!