Slow Cooker Chicken Soup

During Seattle's long winters, nothing restores your will to live like a bowl of homemade chicken soup.  Slow cookers make everything amazingly easy and amazingly delicious.  This recipe is incredibly simple.

Clean a whole chicken and place it in the slow cooker.  Throw in some veggies, spices, and chicken broth, and voila!

After 4 short hours on high, the chicken will just melt right off the bone.  Careful shredding that hot chicken, though.

Adjustments/Substitutions

Instead of using dried garlic, I used fresh garlic because it was all I had on hand.  No great tragedy there!  Two of the guys I shared this dish with loved it even more once they added some Sriracha.

Next Time...

This soup is a classic, so I would be happy making it again the exact same way.  However, maybe adding some leeks in the future could be a fun twist.

Source: http://www.bakedbyrachel.com/2012/01/slow-cooker-chicken-soup/

Guest Post: Trail Mix

(In honor of the beginnings of my humble blog, my awesome friend Catherine has written a guest post! I hope you enjoy!)

Ingredients

• Procrastination
• Fruit
• Nuts
• Outdoor seating

Directions

1. Be busy doing something awesome.
2. A day later, finally make yourself go to the grocery story anyway because apparently you are not going to run out of awesome.
3. Pay absolutely no attention at the grocery store. You may note you are not paying attention, but it is important that you then continue paying no attention.
4. Wander around putting things in your basket while listening to Sara's rendition of shoving her hand  in a chicken's "neck hole" to harvest its organs. Find this sufficiently distracting to continue paying no attention.
5. Realize after you have left the grocery store that you have bought nothing constituting a traditional dinner.
6. Shove it in a bowl and call it trail-mix per the advice of the best Tom.
7. Eat outside with feet up, using fingers.

Bon appétit!

Classic Brownies

Rich and flavorful, these gooey brownies are sinfully good.  (The sin being the 12 tbsp of butter that went into them.  Eek!)  The key to their fudgy consistency was being really dedicated to folding the flour into the batter instead of stirring it.  The recipe recommended folding with a rubber spatula until only a few streaks of flours were left, and this seemed to work great.

The delicious science underneath is that when you're mixing batter or dough, you are forming a gluten network.  According to The Science of Good Cooking, gluten is what gives bread its structure and chewiness, but this is a less desirable quality in brownies or quick breads (like banana bread).  By folding batter with a rubber spatula instead of stirring, you reduce much of this gluten formation and leave your brownies soft and crumbly.  Mmmm...

Another clever trick was the use of a foil sling.  By putting two foil sheets perpendicular into the pan, you can simply lift the brownies out after they've cooled.  And clean up is a snap!

"Making a Foil Sling" - America's Test Kitchen

Brilliant!

Adjustments/Substitutions

I didn't have any unsweetened chocolate on hand, or a burning desire to go to the store, so I substituted for semi-sweet chocolate chips and used 6 tbsp less sugar to compensate.  Also, I don't own a 13"x9" baking pan, so I had to use an 8"x8" pan.  This left a lot of guess work for the bake time, which ended up being close to 45 minutes instead of 30.

Next Time...

My biggest issue was using an 8"x8" pan instead of 13"x9".  This made the brownies much taller, and I thought I could simply compensate by increased baking time.  They came out of the oven looking picture perfect, but after cooling for about an hour, the center collapsed in.  I'm not sure if I should've let them bake for slightly longer, but I think just using the proper 13"x9" pan would be a much better plan in the future.

Source: The Science of Good Cooking (ISBN: 978-1-933615-98-1)