After my mass cooking for my work week I am usually left with a few scraps of various veggies and sometimes a little meat. I only cook for one so I don't always throw it all in because then I'd have way more prepared than I could eat. I'd rather bag the veggies and freeze the meat in order to make a different dish later on. So today I found myself with some veggies in the fridge and not much direction in the culinary sense. After some thought and visit to the freezer I thought I would just throw a bunch of stuff in the skillet and hope it turns out. Here's what I had on hand: a ziploc baggie of cubed butternut squash, a bell pepper, onion and some mushrooms. The freezer yielded some Italian sausage so I decided to combine it all. It turned out pretty tasty and I was able to use everything up. The bad part is that it made quite a bit and so I'll probably be eating this for the next 4 or 5 days. Maybe I'll freeze a couple of servings and take them with me when I go to my parent's place. Here's a pic of the dish:
I just slice the onions and peppers and sauteed them until they were soft and starting to caramelize. Then I added the mushrooms. While this was cooking, I cheated and nuked the squash a little bit so that it was partially cooked. I removed the onions mixture from the skillet and took the casing off the sausage and made mini-meatballs. I dropped them in the skillet and cooked until they were 3/4 of the way done. I wiped out most of the grease and then added the onion mixture and squash. I rummaged around in the fridge and found a small container of fire-roasted tomatoes (about 1/3C.) and added that with a splash of chicken stock. I covered and let it stew for about 10 minutes and called it good.
I also prepared a chicken dish that I found on PaleoMiddleEastern's blog. Here's the link to the recipe. It's super tasty! I used all the same ingredients but my cooking method was different because I didn't want the oven on for an hour. It was pretty toasty here today and we haven't turned on the air yet so I didn't want to heat the house up more than it already was. It was just 40 degrees here a couple of days ago and rainy yesterday but it warmed up to 85 today. So the dogs and I were fussy little babies about the house being warm. I ended up preparing this in the crock pot and didn't have a bit of problem. I just put all the veggies in the bottom and piled the chicken (I used legs) on top. I put it on high and let it go for about 3 1/2 hours. After a couple of hours I took the chicken out and browned it in a skillet so it would look so pale. I put them back in the pot and mixed it all up. I was really please with how it turned out. Super yummy!
Today, I took a little leap towards my next goal...exercise. I don't do any right now and I know that I need to be moving. This is probably going to be tough for me. I took the dogs to an area near our house that is only used a couple times a year for tractor pulls and an antique tractor show. It has lots of open space so the mutts can be off leash and I don't have to worry about running into other people or run a chance of them getting to the road. Today I decided to do some short "bursts" of running. Although I don't think you could call what I was doing running or bursts of speed. At one point I kicked it in high gear and was loping along when the little guy thought it would be fun to sideswipe me. I, of course, dropped like a sack of potatoes. At least I was on the meadow so the impact wasn't too bad which is good because I dropped right on my bum knee. It has a huge scab from a tumble I took about a week and half ago that skinned both knees, sprained my thumb and tore a big whole in the knee of my jeans. Perhaps I'll get better at staying upright while running or at the very least maybe I'll learn how to fall more gracefully!
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