Well…I’ve been meaning to brag about the cooking I did on/around Thanksgiving but my crankiness and bitchiness has gotten in the way. So, let’s try it today!

Since I had family visiting in the days surrounding our Thanksgiving, I made several things in four days.

The Non-Thanksgiving Dishes I Made Over Four Days Around Thanksgiving

• White Chicken Chili (recipe on the back of the Northern Beans can)
• PDub’s Pinto Beans and Cornbread (I make sweet cornbread from the box though because I love it so much I can’t part with it.)
• Buffalo Chicken Dip (for the Iron Bowl)
• PDub’s Chicken Salad (a huge hit!)
• Mihow’s Pumpkin muffins (the non-healthy variety)
• Super-Moist Pumpkin Bread in a Bundt pan (I bought a Bundt pan!) that sat out in a cake dish all week for people to snack on. GREAT IDEA.
• NikkiZ whipped together this pumpkin dip which was yummy but it made SO MUCH we ended up throwing a lot of it away after several days.

All of this was done just to have foods for snacks, breakfasts, lunches and non-Thanksgiving dinner. I cooked three WHOLE chickens. I used my stockpot more over those four days than I had in the 5 years prior to me getting laid off. And I’m not exaggerating on that one. Now…for the Thanksgiving meal. PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THE AWESOMENESS.

Thanksgiving Cooking I Did This Year

• I brined my Turkey! Just like Pioneer Woman told me to.
• I made Whoorl’s pumpkin brownies as a dessert. Wanted to do something other than pie for a change.
• Homemade and delicious mashed potatoes
• PDub’s truly amazing sweet potatoes
• Green Been Casserole (Your basic on the back of the French’s onions can)
• Broccoli/Cheese/Rice Casserole (Not at all healthy but one of my faves)
• My own personal dressing I do every year which is not at all exciting but everyone loves it. I just basically cook the dressing like the bags tell me, mix it with sliced black olives and cooked ground spicy sausage, put it in a casserole dish, pour some chicken broth over it to keep it moist, and “bake” it for 30 minutes on 350.
• I roasted my turkey in my roaster (keeps my oven free).
• Velveeta Shells and Cheese! My kids’ favorite so a necessity at dinner.

I did all of that: MYSELF. I just bought my potato masher a few weeks ago and between Thanksgiving and the homemade applesauce I made two days ago – I’ve totally justified the purchase. I cheated with three things on Thanksgiving. I did the cranberry gel in the can and the gravy out of the jar. I did these two things because I LOVE THEM. I am not a fan of homemade turkey gravy and Hormel makes some jar stuff that I fell in love with several years ago. It makes my life easier and it’s yummy! And the cranberries? I love them – only out of the can. And the third thing? I bought rolls ready to serve in a bag. Because I only have ONE oven and I was going to be cooking/warming SIX casserole dishes in it pre-dinner. I had no room for rolls and the ones I bought? SO GOOD.

I forgot to take pictures of the full spread of food – I think I was so hungry I couldn’t think straight. But, I did take a few about 30 minutes before it was all done!

I cooked successfully for 11 people that night. Everything was almost warm on time. I did get a few bites of cold potatoes (I made those the night before) but no one else mentioned them. This means I cook for very forgiving people! MrZ about died over the sweet potatoes and everyone loved the Turkey. I tried to carved it myself but I doubt I’ll try that again. My brother had to hold the legs to keep it from flopping around (that would have been a good picture) and my slices were ugly. So, the presentation looked awful but it tasted SO AMAZING. I will always brine for ever and ever, Amen! All in all it was my best Thankgsiving meal and I made no glaring Newbie in the Kitchen mistakes (that I can think of) so I say: Mission Accomplished!

I’m cooking a Thanksgiving meal at my house this year. Not the Thanksgiving meal. Actually, not even on the Thanksgiving. LilZ spends Thanksgiving with his Dad this year, MrZ’s parents will be in Slidell and none of our siblings will be in town or if they are, they have other obligations. Basically, on Thanksgiving Day, it will just be MrZ, myself, AndyZ, NikkiZ, and at some point during the day my Mom will arrive. So – we’re just going to call it Thursday and do a nice family dinner with those who are here. Our Thanksgiving meal will be Saturday night, when everyone will be here.

Sidenote: One of the things about being divorced and sharing a child with a parent you’re no longer married to, is that you learn to be flexible with the celebration of holidays. It’s actually a very valuable skill as you learn that when you celebrate is not as important as how. On the holidays we don’t have LilZ, we simply move the celebration or do it twice. But we always do it just as thoroughly if we can, so that he still gets the holiday with us…just maybe on a different day.

So…I will be cooking Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. This won’t be my first Thanksgiving Dinner. It’s funny, for being a newbie in the kitchen, I actually have my basic recipes I use every year that I feel no real need to adjust. They’re nothing fancy, but they’re good. I do the basic green bean casserole, the much-loved Cheez Whiz rice/broccoli casserole, my own dressing (I don’t stuff the Turkey) that changes slightly every time I cook it, and then the Turkey. I guess after enough years of doing Thanksgiving, I’ve developed my own dependable arsenal.

BUT…I consider myself a real cook this year. So, I feel like I need to use a few new recipes. I already tested Pioneer Woman’s Mashed Potatoes and I loved them. They’re a perfect recipe because I can prepare them the night before. I usually do my potatoes from a box, (What? I also use gravy from a jar which is so yummy I’ll never do it from scratch.) so I don’t really want to add to my That Day tasks. I usually do my Sweet Potatoes in the crock pot to clear up room in my oven…but Pioneer Woman’s Sweet Potatoes look really good. I don’t know. I’m torn. I’m torn between messing with a good stress-free menu that has worked every other year, and the urge to really test out my new cooking skills.

So…I thought I’d throw it out there to you guys. Do you have any Sweet Potato or Carrot recipes that can either A) be made the night before or B) be cooked somewhere other than my oven. If you have any other Go To recipes for Thanksgiving that fills either requirement feel free to suggest them, but I’m really hoping for something with Sweet Potatoes and/or Carrots. I need more orange in my meal…I already have plenty of green. And I may not be an expert yet, but I do know the value of a variety of color in a meal. As a matter of fact…if you have any purple side dishes? That would be awesome.

First – let me do a follow-up on yesterday’s post. You all are wonderfully amazing, truly. I felt much better about the “negotiating” thing by the end of the day. Which made me feel much better in general because sometimes I’m just not confident enough in my parenting decisions to let them stand alone without validation. And I’m aware that is a whole other issue right there, I’m sure. Bedwetting: Last night I took NikkiZ to go potty before I went to bed. I just snuck in the room, picked her up, brought her out to the potty and sat her on it. AND SHE PEED! A LOT! I’m hoping between that (Why had I never thought of the Wake Her Up To Pee Again method?) and the fluid restrictions after dinner (we eat dinner around 5pm, she goes to bed after 7pm) we will put the kibosh on this pottying in bed thing. Bedsharing: We decided to use the Sleep On The Floor method. If she comes in? She has to sleep next to the bed on the floor. I have a pillow and blanket already out just in case. Maybe if she does that a few times (she didn’t try anything last night) it will lose the appeal. That’s all of the follow-up I have right now, thanks for your ideas!

How about a follow-up on the whole Stop and Think adjustment to my life? Eh. Regarding my parenting? I think it’s going well. Now, I am using the method several of you suggested to explain to NikkiZ what I’m doing. That I’m trying to relax and not freak out and that would be easier if she would avoid certain behaviors. Now…in every other part of my life? FAIL. I’m still doing a lot of impulse eating. Especially now that I have a freezer full of cookie dough from a fundraiser. SOMEONE COME GET THE COOKIE DOUGH OUT OF MY FREEZER.

Here’s a long overdo follow-up to Greening the Zoots. Man…we are making solid improvements in this area and I’m totally proud of myself for that. Biggest step? I’m almost completely free of plastic bags at the grocery store. I’ve gotten an assortment of reusable bags that stay in front of AndyZ’s carseat all the time so I have to think about them every time I get him out of his seat. Target has started a great thing where they take 5 cents off your total for every reusable bag you use. I also bought a bag from Target for 1.27 that crams into a little pouch and stays in my purse. That bag gets used all the time, if I make an uplanned stop somewhere or if I forget my bags in the car.

We are also still recycling like madmen, I make trips to the recycling center twice a week to take in glass, paper and cardboard. I fill up two bins to be picked up curbisde every week. I’m sure we could do better, but not much. I have also been trying to switch all of my cleaners out in my home to Earth Friendly. This is a slow transition as I’ve not found suitable replacements for some things yet. Mainly I’m trying to be Phosphate Free with my selections when I can be. If you have any suggestions of good earth friendly cleaning products? I’d love to hear them.

Now…this week’s Kim is Kooking update. (Hee. Kooking. I’m a dork.)

Last night I cooked ALL THREE ELEMENTS of dinner from a recipe. I cooked country style ribs in the crock pot and then I consulted the PDub arsenal for Butternut Squash Puree and Roasted Garlic New Potatoes. The entire meal was amazingly delicious in every way. I thought MrZ and LilZ were going to fist fight over the potatoes and that squash? YUMMY. That was a first for me: cooking an entire meal from recipes. The most I usually do is an entree and maybe one side, but most of the time I just make ONE thing from a recipe and everything else is from a box or a can. Last night was a very awesome milestone.

And the night before? I cooked Guiness Pork Chops with Apples. I kept the potatoes out because I was cooking scalloped potatoes as a side. So…after that dinner? What did my husband do? He Facebooked it:

My husband doesn’t do much online other than the periodic Facebook update. So – when my dinner made it into his status change? I felt like I had won the Culinary Lottery! Of course…when he heard I had cooked with Guiness? It wouldn’t have mattered how it tasted. All that mattered was: “Mmmmm….beer.” But LilZ liked it too, so I consider him to be a little less biased towards the ingredients. Either way: TWO SUCCESSFUL MEALS IN ONE WEEK. I am just going to go ahead and admit it: I AM AWESOME.

So…there you have it. I’m becoming a better cook, a better Mom, and a better steward of this planet and I can honestly say I owe most of it to this blog and to you. You all deserve a cookie. Now…can you give me your favorite cookie recipe so I can make you one?

I’ve written before about how the challenges of being a Stay At Home Mom, a Working From Home Mom, and Working Outside The Home Mom are all VERY DIFFERENT. All challenging in their own – very different – ways. I know this because I’ve had points in my life when I’ve done them all and finally – mostly by choice – settled on being a Working Outside The Home Mom. And a million other times I’ve said that working outside the home? Made me a better Mom because I had much more enthusiasm and patience during the short time I had with my kids than I would if I was around them all day.

So…when I got laid off? I found myself facing a conundrum.

Should I keep with the habits that made me a crappy Stay At Home Mom? Or should I try to be better since I didn’t have much of a choice at the time. Make the best of things while I had to. Still try to be the best Mom to my kids I could be, even if it was under circumstances I didn’t choose.

I think that’s why I started cooking. I needed something that I could show at the end of the day as being My Accomplishment. Partly because I was feeling a little useless but also so that I could still have something to focus on during the day that would take a few of the impatient hours away from me. I think that when I stay focused on my kids all day? That’s when I lose my patience and why I need to be working outside the home, but if I have some big challenge during the day to focus on: Cooking, Organizing, Creating – then they learn to entertain themselves periodically while I can then choose the OTHER hours to dedicate to my kids wholeheartedly: Crafting, playing, tickling. This technique is going well in terms of MY end. I’m condensing my patience and good parenting to more valuable chunks of time during the day. But AndyZ? Not handling it well.

Essentially…the entire time I’m cooking? He’s attached to my leg saying, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” And because I’m a sucker? I pick him up whenever I can and try to cook with one hand. There are times when this is not possible, so I put him down, and he starts with the, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” bit again. It doesn’t help if MrZ is there as he was last night…because AndyZ has also become a bit of a Momma’s boy. MrZ will chase him around to try to distract him and that works for about 5 minutes and then he’s back at my feet again, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

I’ve tried sitting him in his high chair with snacks, crayons, stickers and sometimes CANDY. Anything to try to keep him occupied since playing with his toys by himself is never a consideration. These techniques work for about 12 seconds. And then he is actually climbing OUT of the chair (Have I mentioned he’s a monkey daredevil? He is.) trying to break his neck in order to get me out of the kitchen.

I keep hoping he’ll get used to it, start to accept that sometimes I cook and he has to play by himself but other times Mommy will play and we can get our snuggle time. But after several weeks of cooking? He’s still attached to my ankle, looking up at me with those dreadfully evil blue eyes. So, as soon as I’m done with knives or heat, I pick him up – making things worse, I’m sure – and continue cooking with him on my hip.

So – here’s my question to those of you Cooking Moms and/or Dads out there: Do you have a clingy child? How do you cook with said child? Do you adapt as I have or do you just avoid cooking when they’re at your feet and save it for times when they’re distracted or napping? OR…do you give them your sharpest knife and let them be in charge of cutting the onions? I mean…I know I don’t want to cut them.

We went to the concert Friday night in Birmingham and it was waaaay more fun than I predicted. I wish I had better pictures, but you just have to trust me when I tell you that NikkiZ? Totally a concert girl. She screamed and danced and was in general awe over the entire event. Since the first band came on about her normal bedtime, she did great even lasting through the whole show. During the slow songs she would be ready to go home, but as soon as Miley sang one we could dance to? She’d perk right back up. And she didn’t complain too much when her Mom belted out “The Climb” in her ear during Miley’s ovation performance. MrZ even enjoyed himself and was in awe as someone who used to be in a band on a stage that Miley obviously wasn’t lip-synching. I think he assumed she would since her shows have so much dancing and stuff. Nope. She’s the real deal, that Miley. And she now has a chunk of money out of our wallet to show for it. LilZ even had a great time and wore his concert t-shirt to school yesterday. We were all very close to passing out when we finally stumbled home shortly before midnight. I’m telling you all of this so you will be sufficiently impressed when I list out all of the things I cooked on Saturday.

• Red Velvet Cake Poppers (MrZ came up with “Poppers” instead of “Balls” so that we don’t have to giggle every time we say it.) I baked the red velvet cake from the box early Saturday morning but I didn’t finish them until after MrZ went to bed though so he wouldn’t see. I accepted they wouldn’t be as pretty but you know what? I think in terms of the difficulty of recipe/taste of product ratio? This may be my best discovery yet. It was really much easier than I thought it would be. While they didn’t turn out pretty, everyone who ate one had the same reaction: Eyes rolling back into the head. Seriously. SO GOOD. You must go try to make some right now. NOW!
• Buffalo Chicken Dip – Which I Adapted MYSELF from another recipe! Here’s my recipe:

  INGREDIENTS
  * 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened
  * 1/2 cup blue cheese salad dressing
  * 1/2 cup Frank’s® RedHot® Buffalo Wing Sauce
  * 1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
  * 2 cups of chicken shredded off a cut up fryer. (The original recipe said you could use 2 (9.75 ounce) cans of chicken but that stuff is often slimy so I opted to do the chicken off the bone since I am no longer scared of it.)

  DIRECTIONS
  1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Spread cream cheese in a 9-inch deep dish pie plate with a fork or whisk until it’s smooth.
  3. In a separate bowl, mix dressing, buffalo sauce and chicken. Spread mixture on top of cream cheese layer.
  4. Sprinkle top with the shredded Mozerella
  5. Bake for 20 minutes or until the chicken mixture is hot and bubbly. Serve with Fritos scoops.

• Sugar Cookies out of the role and that the kids decorated. There were days in the past that this was enough of a kitchen challenge for ONE day. Now? It seems a little lame.
• Truly the Best Lasagna Ever. Now…this one was tricky because I bought the wrong kind of noodles. I didn’t know there were wrong noodles, but I realized when I was cooking that I had “Oven Ready” noodles. You don’t boil those…you just let them cook IN the lasagna. Which I found to be an oddly mysterious idea. I crossed my fingers and layered them in uncooked and then added 10 minutes on PDub’s cook time as the packaging of the noodles suggested cooking a lasagna 35 minutes. Since I didn’t want the noodles to be undercooked, I opted to extend the cook time to compensate. And you know what? It worked out fine. It tasted amazing and someone at MrZ’s office already asked for the recipe when MrZ shared his lunch yesterday. I think I’ll always use the oven ready noodles simply because it took out a step that was supposed to be done simultaneously as other steps which ALWAYS SCARES ME. Where I multi-task excellently in the rest of my life…in the kitchen? Not so much.

So…I did ALL of that. ON SATURDAY. After only getting 5 hours sleep Friday night. And you know what? I didn’t screw anything up beyond the point of repair! As a matter of fact, the dip was so good I made it again on Sunday and took it to the family dinner. Where it was also devoured. I think this weekend was a huge turning point for me. I spent almost every moment at home cooking. And no one died from a kitchen explosion or from poisoning!