what makes you feel hot?
very nice red wine makes me feel hot and giggly, but some strong rum makes me feel hot and kooky, haha!
Cook It! crockpot edition: Coca-cola Chicken
Yep, you read the title right.
A geeky reason to love this recipe: as we all know, Coca-Cola makes for very potent acid. You can practically use it to clean off rust in the inner workings of your car, scrub stains of your bathroom porcelain, clean burnt pans, remove gum in your hair, even clean ancient coins! With so much acid in the drink, why not put it to good use as a meat tenderizer?
A lazy reason to love this recipe: It's only got four ingredients. 'Nuff said.
The best reason to love this recipe: It's goooooooooooooooooood. Deserves every singe extra O in there, yes it does.
You will need:
- 1 whole chicken, about 3 pounds. This will also work if your chicken is cut up into parts, like mine was.
- 1 cup ketchup
- 1 large onion, thinly sliced
- 1 cup cola, Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, etc.
- Salt and Pepper
Let's Get To It!
Wash and pat your chicken dry. Rub salt and pepper onto the chicken meat to taste.
Be sure to keep your cat away from the chicken.
Slice up your onion. Set aside.
Arrange your chicken in a nice, neat pile inside your crockpot.
Add the sliced onion, the one-cup ketchup...
... and the Cola, in all its fizzy glory.
Take sometime to admire Science at work before putting the glass lid back on.
Set it to Low, and let it cook for 6 to 8 hours.
Peeking every now and then is optional. This is what your chicken looks like after an hour.
After merely three or four hours. Look at all that chicken essence. Yum yum.
When the chicken meat is all tender, turn off the crockpot and let it cool for a bit. Once cool, you may wish to transfer the dish onto a bigger container. again, make sure to keep your chicken away from the cat. Above, the chicken sans sauce...
... and the chicken with sauce.
This serving I cooked up quickly vanished in two days' time, courtesy of James, me, Irl, Ditas, and a number of colleagues. Talk about potent stuff!
I plan to try this dish with pork instead for next time. It certainly sounds like a very promising idea.
UPDATE: the Coca-Cola Pork needed more time to cook to get it to the same tenderness as the chicken. (Can you say overnight?) I decided to dunk in a chopped-up chicken to to the ensemble and let it cook on Low overnight. James and I had it for brekkie the next day, and, in James' words, it was "a world of difference". I reckon it was the additional time and the chicken oil that did it. Voila!
Hope you liked this recipe! If you've tried this out, or made some variations of your own, I'd love to know how it turned out for you in the comments below. 
All hail the crockpot!
James and I have had the pleasure of having my good friends Jo, Irl, Ditas, and their twins Jodie and Ronnie for a night of good chili, yummy pasta, and some good-old beat-em-up games on the PS2 last weekend. It was fun watching the boys go at their combos and super-moves and us cheering them on to "Go get 'em, go get 'em, that's him! You can do it! Beat that Boss up! YEAAAAAH!"
Beat-em-up games. Always makes for awesome stress relief. (We presently recommend Warriors Orochi 2 for the witty, funny dialog and fantastic character design, and Dynasty Warriors: Gundam for the Mecha fans out there. Both make for great, straight-forward gameplay, and are pretty easy to understand once you've got the controller in your hands. they can get very challenging and addicting -- one scenario might not be enough!) Of course, bashing virtual bad guys coupled with good food and great company makes for a winning weekend in my book.
The chili, as with most of my lunch and dinner dishes now, was made by crockpot. It's a simple affair of half a kilo of ground pork and half a kilo of ground round, set to brown over a high setting for about an hour and a half or so. I next put in a large packet of tomato sauce and a small can of tomato paste, let it simmer for a bit, then added about three medium-sized cubed potatoes, and two large peeled, cubed carrots, and set the crockpot to Low. I let the veggies cook while I puttered about cooking the rice. After about half an hour, the chili was ready, and we all ate rather heartily that night. (And voila! A covert recipe in this post!)
I'm glad I took Irl & Ditas' advice to get a crockpot. With a crockpot, you can pretty much put in all the ingredients your dish needs, set it to cook on Low for a number of hours (say, 6 to 12? Long enough for you?) go to work, sleep, or do your thing, and come back with your dish ready to serve. What's more, your meats will stay moist and juicy, since the moisture just circulates within the ceramic interior and glass cover of the appliance. Oh, and sauce-y dishes are best prepared with crockpots.
I'd say this is a big help for me, specially with weekends. This now means I can start cooking Lunch early in the morning when I come home from work while I bustle about and clean around the house.
Breakfast is not a problem for me, really. I can whip up rice-omelette-hotdogs-tocino in an hour and a half, bam, done.
It's Lunch, however, that can get freaky.
Picture this: you and your boyfriend get some shut-eye late-morning Saturday after a long evening work shift. You both wake up mid-afternoon, both groggy and hungry. Very hungry. It doesn't help either that your boyfriend's tummy is hyper-acidic, and must be filled before the acid gets the better of him. You yourself have just woken up, and you barely remember what the contents of your pantry and fridge are.
Time's tick-tocking. Your boyfriend's on the brink of a hunger crisis, your brain is post-sleep slush, and you have no food ready.
Did I mention the crockpot's our saving grace? ^_^"
Another plus I've encountered with crockpot-cooking is a return to packed lunches. With the recipes I've been experimenting with, I find they yield more than James and I need for a day. Even two days! The sauce is also a major bonus, I think. So, why not pack a lunch for myself to bring to work? It's a great way to save money. I've also noticed that I've begun to eat rather well ever since I started bringing packed lunches to work. Most definitely beats fast food very often. :)
I'm really excited to keep trying more recipes with this baby. I've next set my sights on this Mac-n-cheese recipe, and maybe, just maybe, make an attempt with home-made yoghurt. Think of it: lassi to go with curries like Rogan Josh, right in the comfort of your own kitchen.
What about you? Do you also cook with a crockpot? What are your favorite recipes?
Baubles, Bangles, and Beads
There will always be an element of fun in finding a package on your table -- and much more when you find it comes from a friend.
Meream sent me this quite a lovely trove in the mail, all thanks to her birthday giveaway. (Thank you, Meream!)
A confession: It's been quite a while since I truly wore hoop or dangling earrings. I'd always felt they were quite decadent for everyday wear, and oh how unabashedly womanly they were.
Earrings like these would go tremendously with low or shoulder-baring necklines. Oh my.
Behold the necklace. It delights me how it closes in front instead of the back. Lockets are designed to house secrets, and I shall find one such secret to keep in this.
There's just something sensual I find in large pieces. Perhaps th word sensual is not enough to capture the entire idea; jewelry is meant to kiss your bare skin, give it another layer of sensation aside from the touch of cloth or air. It could be the susurrus of fine chain, or the friskiness of beads rolling, rolling, rolling about.
Large jewelry pieces also make me strangely more aware of my body, and how each part flows, melts into the other. Take a necklace. The necklace makes me aware of my head, which flows into my neck, which flows into my shoulders, into my chest, my breasts, my sternum. It leads the eye down this path, and it makes me keenly aware of it over and over again.
Wearing jewelry is another way of seducing yourself.
Coco Chanel instructed to "... put scent where you want to be kissed". I believe the same is true for jewelry. You wear jewelry where you want someone's eyes to linger. You wear jewelry where you want them to feel arrested, enthralled. you wear jewelry where you want them to wonder what it must be like to kiss you there.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Ahem.
Together with the jewelry came yet another gift from Meream: Grill Pan Cookbook: Great Recipes for Stovetop Grilling, by Jamee Ruth. It's been a long-standing desire of mine to treat James and I to delicious indoor-grilled food, and this just might be the start to giving in to it. This, and a sturdy grill pan, of course. Much love to you, Meream. You shall be the first to hear of the book's christening one day, hopefully soon. :) Ahem.
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