I guess you could call this episode 2 of my survival experience in Holmes County, OH… haha. * Strange food alert. * I’ve basically been working a job and a half and I’m living in a basement with limited kitchen amenities, so I’ve had to get a little creative with what I eat. Add to that the fact that I like to save money and eat strange foods, and you will understand that I can think of some interesting concoctions. You can read more about some of my other concoctions and what I’ve been eating while working here in this post.
So I had gone to a grocery store the other day and there were chicken leg quarters for sale: a 10-pound bag for just $5-6. “Great price!” Thought. Not really knowing what chicken leg quarters were, I grabbed a bag and stuffed it into the freezer in my basement until I could find time to put these things in the cooking pot. When I thought I would soon have time to cook these things, I started thawing them in my refrigerator. One day, when I had an hour or two off work, I took them out and prepared for cloque, only when I opened the bag did I realize there were SIX quarts of chicken leg in my 10-pound bag. Meaning: These things were huge, and only 4 of them would fit in the cooking pot! Uh, plan B. I put the extra 2 quarts of chicken leg in freezer bags, and they’re still in my freezer. I added seasonings to the other 4 and cooked them in the cooking pot. Yum! The meat was very tender. A quarter chicken leg with a side of celery and natural peanut butter was all I needed for lunch for a few days straight.
So I decided to make something with the leftover broth. I just left it in the cooking pot, scraped the fat and added some sliced vegetables, in fact, a bunch of crockpot. I also added a pack of chopped hot dogs for protein. Don’t feel sorry for my hot dogs, folks. They were good hot dogs, and they were for sale! Use another meat if you want. The resulting ghoulash I got when everything was cooked together was really good! Again, I made up for my lunches for about a week. Fortunately I don’t get tired of eating the same thing quickly. So you see, healthy eating can be cheap and easy if you’re willing not to be picky. THM can be as easy or as difficult as you want to do it.
want to know what else I’ve been experimenting with? Well, I have this thing of trying to ferment things. Lactofermentation, you know (you can find more information about it here). I recently made some lacto-fermented peaches, which turned out to be the best lacto-fermented things I’ve ever done, and this gave me the incentive to try my hand at fermenting some other things in my basement. I had some cucumbers that my aunt had given me, so I put together some lacto-fermented dill pickles. Also, I’ve fallen in love with pickled red beets while I’m here at OH (all the salad bars in all the Amish cuisine restaurants around here stock them)… You know, the kind that is preserved in a brine of vinegar/spices/sugar. They are incredible. So I tried to lacto-ferment a bit. Well, my experiments worked and they didn’t.
I expected the lactofermentation process to produce more vinegar flavor than it did. Without vinegar, pickles and beets tasted a little… flat. Not pickle enough. In addition, I found that red beets must be cooked to soften. Simply fermenting them in a jar doesn’t make them soften enough to make them tasty.
(My workspace… haha)
However, I managed to save my experiments! I added some vinegar to the pickles and they taste good and pickles. I threw all the beet mixture into the cooking pot long enough to soften them a bit and then added some vinegar and more sweetener. Now they taste great! I hope I can have time to modify these two recipes and create a real recipe to share. Because everyone needs pickled red beets in their life.
A quick trick I’m going to share with all of you: mix natural peanut butter, cocoa powder and sweetener in a bowl of cottage cheese and store it in the fridge for a quick snack/dessert.
<img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.briana-thomas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/rev-0069.jpg" alt="
Chicken leg quarters in the cooking pot
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Question of the day: Do I have any advice for myself while I’m eating healthy and working at the same time?
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<img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.briana-thomas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Chicken-Leg-Quarters-in-the-Crockpot-pinnable.png" alt="Chicken Leg Quarters in the Crockpot
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