Lazy Girl Recipes: Honey Ginger Chicken

When it comes to cooking, I'm pretty... relaxed. I love doing it, but I'm no gourmet cook. I mean, come on, I'm in college; I can deal with Descartes before noon, but ain't nobody got time for fancy recipes. But if college has taught me anything, it's that variety is the spice of life, particularly when it comes to food. So I've been experimenting, and I've come up with some pretty good recipes for those of us on a budget.

Without further ado, may I present my Honey-ginger Chicken recipe?

Ingredients:

2-3 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp ginger paste
1 Tbsp honey
Salt and pepper
1 frozen, skinless, boneless chicken breast

Equipment:
pyrex dish
foil

What to do:
If you are ambitious you could thaw your chicken, but if you're a lazy bum like me, you can pull it straight out of the freezer. Dump all the ingredients on the chicken. If you want to be fancy, you could mix the olive oil, spices, and honey in a small bowl, but I usually just pour them straight on to the meat. Cover with foil and cook at 350-400 until the chicken is done through. *If your chicken is frozen it can take up to an hour to cook.*

Okay, so I totally took a bite before I took the picture. It was just too yummy!

Life at Bag End, Among Other Things

Well, we're finally settled into our apartment, and the semester is in full swing. We've christened our apartment Bag End, which really makes no sense because we live on the second floor and our front door is decidedly rectangular, but we needed a name for our wifi, so after rejecting "The Wardrobe", "Narnia", and other such names we decided that Bag End seemed dorky and literary enough for our home. Little did we know what repercussions our seemingly innocent wifi naming would have. Now we all have Hobbit names: I'm Merry because apparently he was the youngest hobbit in the fellowship.

We're still working on decorating the rest of the apartment, but I've definitely got my room all sorted out. Sure, it's basically the same as last year, but our apartment is cute that I just have to share it. I absolutely love the window above my bed! I doubt you can see it, but there's a tree right outside, so it's like our room is in a tree house! As you can see Little Miss Sunshine is still around, and what's even scarier, after a year in storage her batteries still work, which is utterly terrifying when, oh you know, you sit on her in the middle of the night, and suddenly a cheery voice says, "Hooray for everybody!" Terrifying I tell you.

I'm also doing a pretty good job keeping myself well fed. My roommates are always chopping vegetables and stuff, like they're gourmet ninja's or something, while I'm dumping things out of cans on to frozen chicken. But all in all I feel pretty satisfied with myself.

This is one of my favorite "quick fixes" from last week. Basically what I did was brown some ground turkey in a frying pan with some olive oil and other spices, then I added it to a jar of Prego pasta sauce. Sure, not the most original recipe ever, but it's a good way to add some protein to basic pasta.

As far as classes go, my schedule is pretty weird: I have classes at 10 or 11, and then my next one won't be until about 3 in the afternoon. I really hate afternoon classes because if I've spent my day studying, the last thing I want to do is go sit in a classroom for an hour. I really prefer to get my classes over with as early as possible, so I can work all afternoon and then, occasionally, have the evening to do my own thing. On the up side, I really do like all my classes, so it's worth the goofy schedule.

I did decide to drop down to twelve credits this semester, which does feel like kind of a cop out, but I am taking four upper level English classes, so I need the extra time just to get all my reading done. I had originally thought about auditing an intensive German class, but I'm already taking Old English this semester, and I really just don't have time to learn another language. Unfortunately, because the German language is absolutely beautiful. Ah, well, perhaps Senior year.

Speaking of English classes, I am really excited about my major now. This semester I'm focusing heavily on poetry, what with the Junior Poetry project as well as Medieval Lit., and we're even translating a lot of Anglo-Saxon poetry in Old English! I have studied poetry before, but never as intensely as we are this semester. I have a feeling that soon I'll be spouting lyric out of my ears.

Even though I'm not getting to spend this semester without one of the loves of my life (German), I am getting to spend a lot of time with my other one- the Anglo-Saxons. I don't know what it is about those lovely tribes, but I absolutely love them. I was a little wary about Old English at first, but when I got the syllabus, and realized that the first class was entitled "Getting in Touch with your Inner Anglo-Saxon", I knew that I was in the right place. The first poem we worked on- Caedmon's Hymn, is one of my favorites, and I actually translated it out of Medieval Latin when I was in high school, so I was super excited to get to read it in the language in which it was composed. The Anglo-Saxon history class I took last semester is also helping me out a lot both in Old English as well as Medieval Lit., which is really nice because I already done most of the reading for both classes.

Anyway, I'm supposed to be working on the Wife's Lament!

Domestic Goddessing

After my Elizabeth Bishop brownie catastrophe, I felt a bit down in the dumps about this whole cooking thing. There's nothing like standing over your almond-y, greasy brownies and remembering that you have to keep yourself alive for the next four months. But today, the parental units were going out to dinner, and I was presented with a pack of frozen pork chops, instead of the pizza I was anticipating. And, hey presto, I made a pretty good dinner, if I do say so myself.

I covered the pork chops with, olive oil, salt, pepper, a little lemon pepper (because it was there), and oregano. Then I put it in the oven until it was cooked through. I also stewed some peaches to go with it. This past week mum bought a huge box of rock-solid peaches, so I cut about four up and put them in a covered saucepan with a little water and honey. I think the water may have been overkill because the peaches gave off a lot of juice, but I was afraid that they would burn to the pan at first. Then for desert I made brownies from this recipe. I thought that the raspberries were a nice touch, and they even turned out great. The only problem was that it took absolute ages to cook, but once they were done, they were
delicious!

Yummy brownies in the making!

In other news, I'm finally packing up to go back to school. It seems that all my clothes have been breeding in the back of the closet for the past couple months, and I'm having quite a time trying to shove them into my duffle. Sometimes I wonder why on earth clothes are so important. Why can't we all can't just be nudists? It would make life so much easier. Anyway, I've decided that this is not the semester to experiment with such things, so I've got a bulging suitcase that looks like it's packed for the end of the world.

Fortunately all my bedding and other random dormhold (like household, but more primitive) items are in storage in Texas, so I don't have to worry about bringing those down. I'm moving into a flat this semester with three friends, and we're having an interesting time figuring out what we're going to do about about cookware and what not. Personally, I own three plates, four mugs, a lot of spoons, and an electric kettle. I also picked up two pyrex dishes with plastic lids, which I am very pleased with, especially since I picked them up for $6 a piece. Gotta love T.J. Maxx!

Siiiigh.

I also have to admit that I'm cramming to finish all the seasons of my new favorite old show via amazon prime, As Time Goes By. Mum introduced it to me at the beginning of the summer, and we were watching it together, until I was gone for most of July and got way ahead. Now I'm forging through season 7 (of 9), while she and dad are still somewhere in season 4. I don't actually watch it all that much though, I usually just put it on while I work on blog posts and various other things. There's something really soothing about just listening to British TV. Maybe it's just because I grew up there, but I just like background noise with familiar accents. In honor of this bizarre quirk, here's a photo from my post-Rome trip to the UK. You're welcome.