i survived a half marathon!

(no no no, not THAT kind of marathon... i'd totally die if i tried to run 13.1 miles in one shot)

i survived the STAR WARS half-marathon!!  as you know, mr p and i spent our entire sunday snuggled up on the couch watching episodes IV, V, and VI, all while we had a big pork butt roasting in the crock pot for pulled pork all week!  it's a feat if i stay awake through a single movie, let alone 3 in one day! 

i didn't shut my eyes once, and i actually enjoyed watching them :D


stay tuned later this week for mr p's recipe for pulled pork.  it can be some of the cheapest, most delicious food you will make at home!

happy monday!

Wait... isn't that why they made "quick oats"?  So it doesn't take so long to make oatmeal?  Why spend the time cooking your oatmeal overnight when can be cooked in 90 seconds in the microwave? I'm talking about steel cuts oats, "same same, but DIFFerent" (like the Thai people would say when they try to sell you the same trinket you saw at the previous 10 street vendors).  Steel cut oats are simply better for you, have more fiber, and they are processed less (I think they are more delicious and appetizing, but I can leave that to you to decide.)  Read this article for a more in depth comparison.

I started with a recipe from Alton Brown (though if you google 'overnight oats' or 'crock pot oatmeal' you will get very similar recipes).  I like to make them because they take 2 minutes to prep, then in the morning I scoop it into individual containers for the week so I can just grab one from the fridge on my way out the door.  Alton's recipe calls for dried cranberries and dried figs.  The first time I made this recipe, I only had dried cranberries, so that's what I used!  I substituted extra cranberries for the figs, but you could use practically any dried fruit (prunes, raisins, dried apples, dried pineapple), whatever you feel like.  If you're like me, you will use whatever is in the cupboard!  This recipe is nice because you don't need to add extra sugar.  Most dried fruits have added sugar anyways, so the tangy sweetness comes out from the fruit.  I also split my oats into 5 servings instead of the listed 4, because the first time I made it, I got SOO full every morning, and decided I would feel better eating a bit less of it (I know, crazy right? ..but oatmeal is solid, so it fills up the tummy very quickly!)

Here is what has become my standard recipe the last three times I made this.


Overnight Oats
(modified from Alton Brown's Overnight Oatmeal)

1 cup steel cut oats
4 cups water
1/3 cup heavy cream
1 cup dried cranberries (or more if you really like them!)
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger

Put all ingredients in a crock pot, stir, cover with lid, and set on low for 8 hours.

That's it!


PLEASE let me know if you try any of the recipes!  I encourage feedback (even if you had an awful experience, haha)

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Toodles.
J&H

Remember the last time I posted about making pulled pork?  We made this and this and ate it for a week.  Well, surprise surprise!  We have even more from that same batch.  We froze what we knew we wouldn't eat, and we pulled it out for dinners for this week!  We had amazing tacos, with homemade bbq sauce, homemade guac, taco sauce, tomatoes, lettuce, Mr P's super hot unnaturally-green habanero sauce (soooo spicy!!  ...you know what I'm talking about), white corn tortillas, and yes... pulled pork!

We didn't even have to use the stove... we used all fresh veggies, and just heated up the pulled pork and white corn tortillas in the microwave.

I got home late from work, after getting an oil change, heading to Home Depot, and Shoprite.  When I got home the homemade bbq sauce was cooking, fresh salsa was made, and cole slaw was done.  Mr P is just awesome sometimes... (though he will say he is awesome always ).  He was in the midst of making pulled pork tacos!

After staying until 3am on Saturday night (Sunday morning) with friends visiting from Ohio, I'm shocked at how much we got done today!  After a trip to Game Stop, Home Depot, and the grocery, we still managed to start food for the week (in the crock pot of course) and finish some projects for the renovations.

Shoprite sent us coupons for limes (8 for $0.99!!) and pork shoulder (our favorite, $0.99/lb, crazy!), so our meals this week will include pulled pork and lots of limes (unless we end up making limeade).

Wait, it's already Thursday??  Where did the week go??

At least we are still moving forward with the renovations, even though it feels like we haven't done much this week.  Most of our time this week has been spent moving the rest of our things from Hoboken to Jersey City.  Though we only take 1 carload per day, it takes a good hour and a half at least just to pack up a carload, take it to Jersey City, unload the car, and put it in a place in the apartment where it won't be in the way (the "won't be in the way" part is getting tough the more things we bring!!)  Last night we brought all of the hanging clothes.  I've gotten pretty good at this part considering how many times I've moved.  I brought my rubberband ball home from work (that I worked so hard to get that big!!) and unraveled it to rubberband bunches of hangers together.  This is my easy way of moving hanging clothes.  The first time I moved I took them all off the hanger, folded them, put them in a box, then put all the hangers in a messy awkward mess in a trash bag, only to hang up wrinkly clothes again once I got to the new place.  Bundling the hanging clothes together by rubberbanding the hanger tops saves sooo much time!  It's a little riskier though, as some clothes may fall off the hanger.  Last night we only had one casualty, a cotton shirt of mine... Luckily it wasn't one of Mr P's expensive suits!!

As with all of the plumbing we had to do with this renovation, we ran into a few bumps while trying to connect the plumbing for the kitchen sink.  After making a few trips to our friend Danny at Home Depot, we finally have a working sink! 

Mr P has been taking good care of his butcher block countertops, oiling them multiple times a day like Ikea said.  I always had this notion that butcher block countertops were expensive, and maybe really good ones are, but at Ikea, it's the cheapest kind of countertop!!  Mr P loooooves this kind too, so it was win-win.  He says he will take care of it, oiling it when he's supposed to, sanding out any scratches, etc.  It's the prefect compliment to our otherwise drab cabinets.  Most Ikea cabinets are the same, just with different finishes on them.  Just changing the color or type of facing on the cabients can double, triple, or quadruple the price!  ....even though they are all the same particle board cabinets!!  Insane, right??  THAT'S why we stuck to white.  $46 for each of the smaller 12" cabinets, and $56 for the sink cabinet.  Not bad!

We have been trying to give things a "place" in the new apartment, but it's hard putting things away when we don't have much space to put it all.  We have a billion kitchen gadgets and tools, but we're not even going to start unpacking that stuff until we get shelving installed, the new stove delivered, and the new stainless steel island comes in the mail!  This coming weekend, our friend Zack is coming to build a bed "loft" for us.  Yes, just like college.  Though our ceilings aren't super high, we can still raise our bed high enough to put a dresser underneath it and have hanging storage underneath too.  This will free up a lot of space.  I know it's not ideal to have the top of the bed ~4' from the ceiling, but we're gonna have to deal! 

Last night we began ripping up the kitchen floors and installing the new floors.  We got really lucky having nice plywood underneath the ugly black and white diner vinyl (seems like a cool idea, but really feels like you are walking into a funhouse when you see it day after day), so we only had to rip up the vinyl sheeting, clean up the dirt and dust, and install the new peel-and-stick tiles.  Simple as that!  I told Mr P that laying these tiles are my favorite part of the renovation, because you can SEE such a big difference with not a lot of work.  That's why I don't really like doing the plumbing, or other hidden stuff, because it takes so much effort, and even though it's absolutely necessary, there's not much for the eye to see.




Though we can't use the stove, and we don't have many kitchen utensils at hand, we still were able to make our first real meal at the new place!  Perfect timing for a good, hearty, veggie and chicken soup.  So simple to make, nothing to cook, just throw it all in the crock pot!  I cut up chicken breasts, carrots, turnips, potatoes, onions, celery, and cabbage and put it in the pot.  I put in 1 quart of chicken broth, then added enough water to almost cover everything in the pot.  Mr P added spices (oregano, bay leaves, etc.), we set it to cook for 10 hours, and went to bed!  Yum!  Delicious soup ready in the morning!  Though, the potatoes and carrots were stilla bit hard, so I took some for lunch and set it for another 10 hours!  That was a little over the top, but it was sooo good last night for dinner!



Hopefully we can lay the rest of the tile tonight to have the kitchen all ready for the stove to be delivered this Saturday and the ugly old stove to get outta here!!

Toodles.
J&H

Saturday afternoon I decided to do an impromptu trip to the grocery, called Mr P to see what we wanted to make for lunches and dinners this week.  His go-to solution was to get lunchmeat.  We could have made sandwiches, I could put it on salads, and the best part, no cooking and turning our little apartment into a sauna.  I took my number at the deli counter, and stood in front of the big processed chunks of plastic-wrapped deli meats trying to decide which to buy.  I thought to myself, "if we are going to get deli meat, we better get something that we will actually want to eat."  With that in mind, I picked out 2 kinds, pastrami and peppered turkey... which happened to be the most expensive meats in the entire counter at $10/lb!  For lunch and dinner, we would be lucky to get a full week of meals for $20 in just MEAT!!  Ridiculous, right??


So, I handed my number to someone else, and decided that I was gonna get chicken breast from the meat section, which would at most be $2.99/lb, but Shoprite usually has it for cheaper, sometimes $1.99/lb.  Before reaching the chicken, though, I walked past the beef and thought "hmm...bbq beef?"  But the big chunk of chuck roast was $20 too!  Then, the pork section.  Pulled pork?  I looked at the big chunks of shoulder cuts, and they were only $1.49/lb!!!  Score!  Into the basket it went.  8 pounds of pork for $8 cheaper than the 2 pounds of deli meat I was about to get.  Sure there would be some fat and liquid that would drain off, but still, way cheaper (and healthier without all the additives they put in processed deli meat).


Remember when I said getting a slow-cooker was a good idea?  Here we are using it again!  When we make pulled pork, we never cook it in bbq sauce.  We use a dry rub, then if we want to do other things with the pulled pork (besides slathering it in bbq sauce and putting it on a hamburger bun) we can.


Here is the recipe as per an email from Mr P, my friend wanted the recipe a few weeks back. We also had leftover dry rub, so when we made the pulled pork this time we didn't have to make it again! (followed by the recipes for healthy(er) cole slaw and bbq sauce,  the best way to eat pulled pork!)








Pulled Pork


Pork Cut:
Pork butt with bone in (pork butt is actually the shoulder, I know, weird)


Dry-Rub:


Equal Parts:
Salt
Pepper
Cumin
Paprika
Garlic Powder
Onion Powder


Half Parts:
Cayenne Pepper
Chili Powder
Red Chili Flakes (More if you would like more heat)


5 times as much:
Brown Sugar


Other ingredients:
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar per 1 tbsp of ketchup

I think everyone has watched The Food Network at some point (some watch more than others, some watch everyday, not naming names).  Mr P and I were deciding what to make as our major weeknight dinner for the week, and one of our faves, Ina Garten (i.e. Barefoot Contessa) was making 'Weeknight Bolognese,' one of our favorite pasta sauces.  Though we didn't end up using her recipe, it did inspire us to make some the long way by just 'throwing it in the pot,' meaning the crockpot, or slow-cooker!