Food Roll Overs

I have too many food pictures, so I need to do a quick post to display them all. Wyatt and I aren't big on left overs. I personally like to get my knives and frying pan out and Wyatt likes variety. There are many terms for reusing left overs in new ways, my favorite thus far is Rachel Ray's coined name Roll Overs.

Lately, I have seen many recipes calling for a store bought rotisserie chicken. Recently, I saw a show where Tyler Florence broiled a chicken beautifully by cutting out the back with scissors, so I decided to use that for a base of several roll over meals. Not to mention the whole organic fresh free roaming chicken was 79 cents a pound, so I got a 4 pound bird for a little over $3 (about half the price of rotisserie I think). Meal 1: Broil chicken in lemon, olive oil, and thyme with roast vidalia onions, garlic rice and bulgar, and garden tomato salad.

I took my traditional America meal and transformed it into a Southeast Asian staple, chicken tikka. Meal 2: Sliced broiled chicken with reused tomatoes, vidalia onions with tikka spices, a touch of cream and topped with coriander over rice. Note: The broiled chicken was so tender on the second day and absorbed the flavors of the spices perfectly.

If you still have some left over chicken, try this last combo. Meal 3: Puff pastry squares stuffed with a mixture of cream cheese, chopped vidalia onion, mushroom and shredded broiled chicken served with brown rice and seasoned tomatoes.

Veggies can be rolled over too. I prepared roasted acorn squash with cinnamon and sugar as side dish in Meal 1 with roast pork and onions. Meal 2: I added the left over squash to chicken stock and blended with a submersion blended and added a touch of cream for a rich soup.

Finally frozen shrimp are a great way to roll over meals, ok so this technically isn't a roll over, but a good tip. Shrimp are sold frozen in larger bags at the store, often at significant discount. We especially like the jumbo freshwater shrimp cooked with shell on to keep a nice texture. Meal 1: Angel hair pasta tossed with grilled shrimp, roasted cherry tomatoes, Alaskan jumbo king crab meat, parsley, lemon, and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Meal 2: Spicy Cajun fried shrimp with lemon and green beans. Both meals are super easy and can be made from your pantry if you have the frozen shrimp on hand.

Believe it or not I have several other shots I wanted to blog about, but I will save them for later. I would love to hear about your roll overs and the largest number of meals you have made from stretching one option.

Thought for the Day: The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook. ~Julia Child

From Vampires to Jesus

I know nothing of God or the Devil. I have never seen a vision nor learned a secret that would damn or save my soul. A quote from one of Anne Rice's main characters in Interview with a Vampire. This movie was a favorite of my youth. Was it Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in one movie or the existential search for meaning?

Anne an atheist for 30 years now pens stories of another supernatural being, Christ the Lord. You might wander what journey brought this women from devout atheism back to devout Catholicism. A new found podcast reminded me of the fascinating conversion Anne underwent that suddenly transformed her main character from a vampire to Jesus.

The Whitehorse Inn a delightful podcast that interviews many leading thinkers and answers difficult questions recently interviewed Anne Rice (Listen Here). Anne discusses her return to Christianity, as well as, the reliability of some New Testament scholarship.

Anne grew up in a strict Roman Catholic home in New Orleans. She left the church and her faith upon entering college where she describes, "No personal event precipitated this loss of faith...there was the world itself, without Catholicism, filled with good people and people who read books that were strictly speaking forbidden to me. I wanted to read Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus. I wanted to know why so many seemingly good people didn't believe in any organized religion yet cared passionately about their behaviors and the values of their lives..." (Read more here.)

So Anne threw herself into her work, embracing atheism, and began publishing many best selling books (50 million plus). Anne's novels have always tried for complete historical accuracy, whether it be the 18th and 19th century for her Vampire Chronicles or the 1st Century for recounting the life of Jesus. Fascinatingly, she does not use an editor for any rewrites and brings each work to perfection herself.

In fact it was her own research into the first century and Roman culture that brought her to the questions--How did Christianity actually 'happen'? Why did Rome actually fall? The mystery she couldn't explain was the survival of the Jews. This set into motion the idea that there might be a God. She returned to the church in 1998. She read the Bible now with a state of utter amazement at its variety, poetry, and startling portraits of women. She posed herself to exhaustively research Jesus and how Christianity emerged.

Anne did much research into New Testament scholarship. She first looked at the skeptical New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment. To her surprise, she did not find strong, well examined arguments, but incoherent, inelegant assumptions and conjectures that reached absurd conclusions on the basis of little or no data at all.

In summary Anne found--"the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it-that whole picture floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years- that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I'd ever read."

Anne had never seen such kind of emotion in any other field of research. Luckily she came across other scholars who took seriously the words of the Gospel and presented their individual authorship and unique coherence. Among those include A.T. Robinson, N.T. Wright who addressed that Christianity achieved what it did in fact because Jesus rose from the dead. It was this fact that sent the apostles out into the world with the force necessary to create Christianity, nothing else would have done that.

Given these two directions in scholarship, Anne was confronted with how to write her novels about Jesus. Anne has accepted that challenge and chosen to write about the Jesus of the Gospels! So with that I am encouraged to read her work and happy to know I will not find the ill researched, poorly presented history of someone like Dan Brown.

Please let me know if you have read her work and your thoughts.


Thought for the Day: If God were to make reasonable promises: a spiritual high, a tax break, then a secular age might credit the word of the Almighty. But God promises a new nature, physical resurrection, a new heaven and earth, and eternal life.

Chicken and Noodle

Some things are just great combinations, like chicken and noodles, cookies and milk, Tracy and Wyatt. I am currently reading The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaeffer, which was recommended to me by Noel Piper. It is a lovely book that encourages us to be creative as we are made in the image of God, the ultimate creator. Creativity can flow in many areas of everyday life from music to decorating to cooking.

Cooking is something I love to experiment with as you have seen from other posts. Last night I made steak tacos and changed our normal flour tortillas and crispy corn shells out for fresh soft corn tortillas. It made a world of difference, so I highly recommend trying it. We used the Migas brand made in Chicago. Also add a homemade salsa of tomato, cilantro, and lime and queso fresco (fancy cheese aisle) to give it a very fresh taste.

Wyatt and I started having a tea time where we sometimes have a devotional, podcast, or just discuss the day. To switch things up, I made homemade chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies. This was courtesy of the Toll House package directions, since it was a whim inspired by the Food and Wine magazine I was reading at the moment. As always I am trying to convert Wyatt from Starbucks to coffee at home, so we bought Intelligensia espresso beans and Ghirardelli mocha powder and I whipped up a Chocolate Mocha with my espresso machine. The satisfaction of creating things from nearly scratch is definitely worth the time.

The same evening as the mocha, I introduced Wyatt to the wonderful world of soap carving. Astonishingly, he had never heard of such a thing. I would consider this a lost art, as it has been buried in my repertoire for many years. We both opted to carve turtles at my suggestion. Toothpicks make the perfect tool for chiseling. I dug out my bag of hotel soap and we each selected our medium. These were pretty quick pieces, so look for more developed ones in future blogs.

Thought for the Day: The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.