unexpectedly, leisurely.

It’s been a while since the last time I booted up excel. Since rolling off my last project ~2 weeks ago I’ve been experiencing a lot of this thing called…free time. How bizarre.

Over the weekend I did a lot of perusing the aisles @Trader Joes (awesome) trying to decide what I wanted to eat. The result was a lot of chicken (difficult to screw up):

Chicken experiment number 1 - Veggie lovers’ chicken soup:

Ingredients:

• 5 chicken legs
• 2 large leeks, chopped
• ¼ packet Trader Joes ready to cook Kale (super easy, prewashed and prechopped)
• 1 large potato
• 1 large yellow onion
• Dried shiitake mushrooms
• ample salt, pepper, and rosemary, dash of cayenne pepper for a bit of kick

     

boil on low heat until the chicken is falling-off-the-bone delish! (~3 hours)

Chicken experiment number 2: Veggie lovers’ (can you tell I’m a fan of the veggies) roast chicken

     

Start with a liberal layering of vegetables on a foil-lined baking sheet (then most importantly, douse in lots of olive oil) I used:

• 1 large fennel (don’t toss the fuzzy green stuff! Its super fragrant)
• 2 large onions (1 red and 1 yellow for color contrast)
• Asparagus - 1 bunch, chopped into thirds
• 1 large potato (left over from weekend soup)
• 1 lemon, cut into quarters
• fresh rosemary and thyme

Then add chicken!

Rub chicken with sea salt, pepper, chopped garlic and squeeze the lemon on top

then bake! (1 hour @400 degrees, or until “juices run clear” not quite sure what this means, but its what all the cookbooks say…)

omnomnom. This was all gone in about 30 minutes. (we added kale on top about half way through the baking process, and voila - kale chips to boot!)

Switching gears from cooking to my other favorite activity –shopping (so much for my efforts to limit my amount of stuff…) Today’s post gym wandering down Newbury st. yielded an awesome pair of red heels!

Not sure if I am “kickass” enough to sport them to work…I’ll report back once I actually get back to the office dressing frame of mind.