I have no culinary imagination whatsoever, though it goes a level deeper in that I don't even want to have culinary imagination. I love to eat good food as much as the next person, believe you me, but I don't want to have to be the one who makes it.
Being a wife and a mom, I don't get to get away with not cooking. Though I told The Man that when we grow up, and there are no more kids in our home, dinner is going to be a phone call at the end of the work day asking him what restaurant he wants take out from.
As it is, that's not really an option, and as it is it's my duty as a parent to make sure my children are well fed. And though I loath cooking, I kind of like my kids a lot so I guess I need to feed them.
This brings me to the actual point of this post. When it comes to dinners I want them to be really good, because obviously I have to eat them too. One of the demands I have is that whatever recipe I'm following for the evening needs to be ready and on the table in under a half hour. I'm a working mom and by the time I get home there just isn't a lot of time in the day left, and I don't want to spend my time standing over a stove. Plus, eating before bedtime is generally a bonus.
Finding recipes that can be ready in under a half hour can be challenging, but as I've been trying to build my recipe stash (when you have no culinary imagination everything you cook comes from someone else's culinary imagination. Recipes please.) I've started noticing that a big portion of my time cooking dinner is spent on cooking the meat. So I started thinking about this and realized if the meat could be already cooked by the time I get home, it's really not a big ordeal to throw all the ingredients together and call it dinner.
We eat a lot of chicken because, frankly, I have a taste aversion to red meat. So generally I stick to chicken recipes, and would be quite alright with picking up some no-meat dinners but The Man has an aversion to no-meat dinners.
Chicken it is.
There are two things about chicken and dinner. The first being that I feel half the time of dinner prep goes to just simply cooking it before it can be added to the recipe I'm making. And second, I hate cutting it. Cutting raw meat gives me the heebie jeebies.
I've realized I can shortcut on both those points and not have to deal with either of them.
Ever again.
Guys, the crockpot is the most amazing thing.
In the morning I simply add a cup or two of broth (usually made by throwing water and bouillon in), drop the chicken breasts in, and turn it on.
By the time I come home from work the chicken is not only fully cooked and ready to use in my dinner recipe, but it's falling apart juicy. And falling apart juicy means take a couple of forks, shred it up a bit, and you didn't even have to cut it.
Suddenly throwing dinner together is a bit more bearable.
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