The Old Switcheroo

For lunch, I hit up the old Crack House (Cracker Barrel), and went with my usual, the Chicken Fried Chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy (white on both), fried okra and dumplings.

The food was very good, I ate almost every bit of it. I only hate half of one of the biscuits though.

For dinner, I had the other half of that flat iron steak to get rid of, so I fried it up, and added some scrambled eggs, for the old breakfast of Steak and Eggs. First time I've ever actually gone with that meal:

It was outstanding. I put most of that praise on the steak. It had the same seasoning as the other half, only they'd been sitting in a ziplock bag for a few days. It was stupidly tender,so much so that I made steak and egg biscuits out of those and had no problem eating them. Flavor was top notch as was the tenderness.

Dump Day!

On the Monday after Mother's Day, the cafeteria had their version of chicken and dumplings as one of the choices, and it was the most appetizing, so I went with it. The chicken they use is their cubed up chicken breast that they use in a lot of stuff, and the dumplings themselves are similar to what you'd get in canned dumplings. Which doesn't sound too appetizing, but the broth that they do it in does wonders for it. The chicken is really good and the dumplings are on the upper side of OK. They don't hold a candle to Cracker Barrel's, mine, let alone Mom's or my Aunt's. But not bad for a quick lunch:

As you can see, I went with the omnipresent mashed potatoes and gravy for the side dish. Unfortunately, the potatoes were pretty much unseasoned at all, and even their outstanding gravy could hardly make up for it.

I had planned on doing something stupid for dinner (homemade shrimp fried rice) but luckily Mom called and invited me to stop in for dinner. She had made.... chicken and dumplings. So, I said sure, beat what I was going to try. She called back a little bit later and said to not worry about stopping in, they were horrible. Knowing how bad some cooks can be on themselves, I assured her I was sure they couldn't be horrible, and I'd still be stopping by.

Unfortunately, she wasn't too far off the mark. While they weren't horrible, they weren't good. They were edible however, so I ate some, and a baked chicken breast. Which (much like the next handful of posts) I forgot to get a picture of.

Saturday at the Crack House

Saturday was a pretty decent lazy day. I hung out with Mom, we went to Cracker Barrel, then watched Captain America and Mission Impossible 3.

At the Crack House (as we affectionately call Cracker Barrel), I had my usual, which is to say: Chicken Fried Chicken, mashed potatoes (both of those doused in their country gravy), fried okra, and dumplings. You've gotta love a place that has chicken broth drenched biscuits as not only a side, but a veggie.

This was an outstanding lunch. It was better than it's been prepared by them in a long time. The weakest part of the lunch was the dumplings (which have already been eaten in that photo so the okra could take their place), and since you don't see the dumplings, that should tell you they weren't bad. The okra was the best I've ever had at a Cracker Barrel. Not the best I've had period, but pretty high up there. The chicken filet was cooked well and seasoned well, as was the gravy.

Catchup!

No, not as in ketchup or catsup. Catch up.

Sunday, I noticed an incisor was starting to get a hair sensitive. As Monday went on about its business, the tooth didn't get much more sensitive, but the gum above it did. As I was irritable and not in the mood for anything that would tax having to take a frontal bite, I decided to try my hand at fried rice, again. The last time I tried this was ... well last century. One doesn't get make time references like that often, so I take great joy in getting to use it. It was probably in '99 that I last tried to make fried rice. Seeing as it was that long ago, I hope you can infer how well it went.

Luckily, this time went much better. The one problem I had this time was very similar to what went wrong last time, except kind of opposite. I discovered, after this attempt, that what went wrong last time was that I had overcooked the rice before trying to fry it up. This time, it was mostly under cooked. Last time I tried some kind of usual boil rice or something like that and it was just horrible. This time, I used my roommate's rice cooker. It did a fine job, I place the blame solely on me not  adding enough water to the contraption. But the rice was cooked enough for me to attempt frying it up:

I used a bit of olive oil, jasmine rice, salt, pepper, parkay, garlic salt,soy sauce, and a scrambled egg. It came out looking very similar to what it was in the skillet:

And it tasted a lot better than I had expected. Other than the under cooked crunchy kernels, it was really good, I somehow nailed a good combination of seasonings in my rookie attempt. Next time though, I'll make sure there's enough water so the rice is fully cooked, so I can eat it all.

I took a hydrocodone around 11, feel asleep around 2, then the tooth woke me back up at 5:30, so I took another pill. These pills happen to be left over from the last abscessed tooth I had (oh yeah, spoiler alert). Once I got up on Tuesday, I called the dentist, they got me in and yes it was abscessed. Had the first part of the root canal yesterday. It went pretty well, except for when he had to deaden the nerve. In order to do that, he had to pretty much jab the needle right into it. Luckily, it was worth it, by 1pm my mouth didn't hurt anymore and I ate at Genghis Grill around 5:15 for a combined breakfast lunch and dinner.

This is a bunch of chicken, a little bit of pork and some steak with some squash, bean sprouts and a few chucnks of potato with their udon noodles and a combination of 3 different sauces. It was tasty, not the best concoction I've had from their, but far from the worst.

And that brings us to today. I stayed home today, my throat got irritated, as did my sinuses. I'm not sure if it's fall out from the gunk getting released in the root canal or the drastic weather change we've had here, but either way I felt like crap for most of the day. So, I finally got around to making another batch of chicken dumpling soup. And this one was better than the last.

Andrew had a bowl of it also, once he got home and he loved it.

Chicken dumpling soup

My roommate recently got married. We're from the South, the Memphis area. So, I'm familiar, in fact, a large fan of, chicken and dumplings. His wife, however, is from Wisconsin. So, we went up there for the wedding. One of the days up there, I stopped into a local restaurant for lunch. On their menu was a chicken soup, but instead of the usual (for my area) chicken noodle soup, they had chicken & dumpling soup. I was astonished, never in my 36 years of life had I ever put together chicken and dumplings and chicken soup. These people had, and it was good.

But, I thought it could be better. Had to "southern" it up some, so I did. This is also the point where I should note that I've attempted chicken & dumplings a few times, and only once was it anywhere near good. Edible was probably more credible a description. They would either disintegrate in the broth, or never cook through.

This time though, I was determined. I was sick, and chicken soup always makes me feel better.

So, I left work early, stopped at the local Wallyworld (was closer to the house than the Kroger), picked up some chicken thighs (I'm usually a breast man [haha], but the thighs have more flavor, therefore would do better in a soup. Plus they didn't have any breasts that weren't boneless/skinless and I needed that for the flavor), a couple of potatoes, some carrots (they are only good in tiny doses) and celery.

Got home, salted and peppered the chicken, tossed it in the oven to roast for an hour and change while I took a nap. Woke up, got the chicken out, got a pot, tossed in the veggies (cut up of course) and 2 of the thighs, some bones and the skin, and a bunch of chicken stock. Put it on low heat and took another nap. Next I made some dumpling going by the directions on the Bisquick box, with the exception of adding a bit extra mix. Tore off chunks, and tossed them into the soup and left them alone for about 30 mins or so. And here is the result:

That stuff was so good I had to make myself stop eating. The only thing wrong with it was I had made the dumpling slightly too large, but they cooked through well and were easy enough to cut apart with the spoon.