A day in the kitchen

I didn't do my dishes last night after dinner, so I was lucky enough to get to see them first thing this morning. Don't you hate that? So I spent my morning cleaning up last night's dishes, then I de-boned a chicken that I cooked in the crockpot overnight and did all the dishes for that. Last night I stuck frozen chicken pieces into my crockpot with all my vegetable "garbage." You know, onion peels, celery leaves, carrot ends, red pepper guts. I collect them all in a container in my freezer and when it's full I know it's time to make garbage soup. It sounds (and looks) gross, but smells (and tastes) delicious! I get about three meals out of one batch of garbage soup. Tonight I made Hawaiian haystack with some of the chicken and some of the broth. I put the rest in the fridge and will figure out what to do with it in a couple of days when I feel like eating chicken again.

I made a batch of chocolate chip banana bread in between running Jackie to the dentist and picking her up again an hour later, driving the kids to and from school and taking Hayden to his school a second time because he forgot to turn in his English binder and then finally to his violin lesson. This evening I was experimenting with my oatmeal cookie recipe because I am making cookies for church on Sunday to hand out to the fathers. I think I got the perfect size figured out. It should be a couple of hours of work, but I love baking, so it won't be a big deal. The biggest problem will be keeping my kids' hands out of the dough! While I was baking the cookies I also used all my leftover rice from dinner and made a batch of rice pudding. It tastes delicious and will be breakfast tomorrow.

Now that I've spent so much time in my kitchen today, my kitchen is a mess again. And of course I'm exhausted and will probably leave it until tomorrow when the cycle will continue. I guess if I had just done my dishes instead of updating my blog, my kitchen would be clean now.