Tag: chicken

Soup

Tonight my dinner was the universally accepted dinner for people with a bad cold. Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. It was lovely, though it did bring up a question for me.

I am less than two months away from the two year anniversary of my gastric bypass surgery. Things are going well. I haven’t had dumping syndrome once and I have lost over 200 pounds. Huzzah, babie. Life is good.

There are rules that those of us who have gone through the full gastric bypass have to follow. Two in particular. First, if you have something to drink you need to wait 15 minutes before you can have something to eat. Second, similarly, if you have something to eat you have to wait a whole hour before you have something to drink.

Easy peezy, lemon squeezy.

What about soup though? I had a great big bowl of soup tonight and it was delicious and it cleared my stuffy head a little. As I was lapping up the broth I had a moment where I questioned everything. I just ate the chicken and the noodles, should I wait an hour before I drink the broth? I had a spoonful of broth as my first taste of dinner, should I have waited 15 minutes before I ate the chicken and the noodles? Putting it simply, does soup count as a food or a drink? I was lead to believe that one meal could not count as both, so which is it? Should soup be off limits? I chose to count it as food but is that an incorrect choice?

One other, unrelated, rule that I have to follow in this post surgery world is no alcohol. Does that mean I cannot have a dose of NyQuil to help combat my cold symptoms and to help me sleep at night? I am pretty sure NyQuil lives on the no fly list for that reason. I was going to have some tonight but I have decided to error on the side of caution and skip it.

Oh, what a fascinating new world is this post surgery life. Fascinating indeed.

For the Birds

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite thing to cook?
View all responses

I cook a lot, but I don’t cook a lot of stuff. Does that make sense? It will.

I am a meat and potatoes kinda guy. Unfortunately for my family and their diet, when I cook I cook like a meat and potatoes kinda guy. There are only a few dishes that I am competent enough to prepare without supervision. If I had to pick a favorite it would be boneless chicken breasts. In the oven, in the air fryer (that’s been my go-to since the early days of the pandemic lock down), once in a while on the gas grill outside (though that often ends in fiery destruction), and on even rarer occasions in a frying pan on the stove.  I could seriously have chicken for dinner every night and not complain once. 

Side dishes are a little more varied, but I get into ruts in that area too. Lately it has been instant mashed potatoes or instant stuffing (Stove Top) or maybe a canned veggie. Sometimes I get a little more elaborate and air fry some mini potatoes or a fresh veggie. For a long time (before my gastric bypass surgery) it was almost always a quinoa and stir fried vegetables thing that my wife taught me to make. My new stomach and I have a tough time with quinoa now though so if I make it I can’t eat it. Jen likes it though so I have no problem making it, and I should make it for her more often.

In the interest of mixing things up, for the last few weeks we have been using one of those internet delivery meal prep services a few nights a week. Jen signed us up for Dinnerly. So far we’ve been very happy with it. They send us a few meals on Fridays and we usually cook them together. Jen does most of the heavy work, but I help her where ever she needs. Even with the service, most of what we make is chicken. Chicken is my favorite thing to eat as well as cook. Just call me a bird brain, right?

My Foot Hurts

Both feet are hurting today. It must be from the running in place. My right ankle started bothering me last night when I did the star pictures. It has been bugging me pretty steadily all day. My left foot is much less of an issue. I think I have a callus or a corn or something coming in on the side of my big toe. It hurts and it’s annoying but it’s nothing bad.

All of my activity rings are closed. I did the make pretend 5k walk thing. It took 45 minutes. The ankle and the toe were both feeling okay and my calorie goal was over 90% so I just kept going.

My headache is still there, but not too bad. I might take another round of Tylenol before dinner. I’m going to air fry some chicken, broccoli, and potatoes tonight. Should be good. My protein and liquid intake goals for the day are both are really low, but I’ll get it all in. I missed breakfast today. I might need a protein shake later tonight. We’ll see.

We’re scheduled to pay a visit to the Apple store tonight. That’s going to be fun. Maybe I’ll post 50-60 pictures.

Until then…

Milestone

Yesterday was a much better day as far as gas and pain are concerned. I was very pleased to hit a milestone too.

The goal in the puréed food stage is to try to eat a quarter of a cup of food at a time. Last night at dinner, Jen puréed some chicken for me and gave it to me with a teeny little side of mashed potato. The combined size of the serving? About a quarter of a cup. Awesome!

Even better? I had a bite or two of potato left and I had to stop eating. I felt full. Like legitimately, unquestionably full. It was a bit of actual hard evidence that my tiny new stomach is getting with the program. Two weeks ago I would have eaten that meal in one bite. Chomp, gulp, done. Not any more. Here’s to a lifetime of small, healthy portion sizes.

For breakfast today there was a quarter cup of scrambled eggs. I can’t say I feel full after eating it, but I do feel comfortable. Good job, tiny little baby stomach. Keep it up.

Dinner Recap

How did I do cooking dinner tonight? Let’s recap.

Jen and I both liked the chicken. I ruined the roasted green beans. Burned to a crisp. They looked like twigs.

The quinoa though… I don’t know what I did, but I aced the quinoa. Jen and I agreed. It has something to do with the onions. I need to just slightly over cook them and for some reason that makes the whole dish taste like an A+. If only I could do it consistently.

Chicken Dish

We ordered Chinese food for dinner tonight. We ordered two chicken dishes. Orange chicken and something else I can’t spell or pronounce.

We… well… we can’t tell them apart. One had something that looked like it might have been a piece of orange so… maybe?

It was really good though.

Now we are dipping our entertainment toes into the Sopranos. Thanks to Google I finally know what Jefferson Airplane song is playing in Christopher’s car.

Life is good. So is chicken.

Coming Home Tomorrow

My step son is coming home tomorrow. Have I mentioned that? Do you/they know it’s christmas time at all?

Jen just came into my bedroom/office/work nook and said that to her, today feels like Friday. It was a great minds think alike moment because I had been thinking the same thing all day. It’s only Wednesday but it totally feels like Friday. That’s going to make the next two days suck. I checked my work schedule tomorrow and it’s blank. I don’t have any meetings booked at all. It’s almost creepy.

My christmas wrapping is almost done. Did I mention that? I’ve still got a couple of things on the way (package delivery, a symptom of ‘Covid Christmas Too’) but as of now, everything I have to wrap is wrapped… and there are still 10 days left until christmas. That is also almost creepy.

I was going to do car music this morning, but I didn’t. I did a couple of errands instead. I snaked the drain like a faux plumber. As it turned out, I was able to sneak in everything I had left to do during lunch. You may have noticed that there wasn’t a lunch break blog post (no you didn’t. No one did. No one should). Two songs need both rhythm and lead guitar parts. Four just need lead guitar. Two more are already ready to mix. Music, ya know?

Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden has a podcast. World class fencer, airline pilot, novelist, metal god. The dude has range. It’s called Psycho Schizo Espresso. It’s Bruce and a psychologist talking about stuff. Okay, I’ll give it a spin.

Four minutes until the work day ends. Fingers crossed nothing comes my way during those four minutes, because I am cooking dinner tonight and the oven is already pre-heated. Chicken and Quinoa. They should call Chicken and Quinoa, ‘The Robert’ because it’s pretty much the only dish I am capable of making.

Three minutes to go…

Okay, clicking Publish now.

Chef Lardo

The chicken is in the oven, the veggies are all prepped. I have about 7.5 minutes before I have to start prepping the quinoa, and I typo’d the word “the” twice in the first sentence.

Yup, it’s time for bed.

It’s December 6th today and the weather is weird. It was raining and blah all day, but it was also warm. The temps were in the high 50’s. I actually thought about opening up some windows, and I had my little desktop fan on for a while. How crazy is that?

Today at lunch I read about a mini-galaxy with a black hole at the center that is almost as big as ours. That does not compute, but it is also awesomely cool. There was a lot of online buzz about the two Walking Dead shows from last night. Well… not Fear, that show was atrocious and pretty much everyone agrees. No, the item of interest happened a couple hours after the episode aired when they announced the original lead character, who was supposed to have been killed off three years ago, is coming back. Oh good. I sure the writing they use to pull that off will be stellar. Yes.

Also, lots of buzz about the end of World Beyond. Specifically the post credit scene where we visit another country for the first time, and a tie in to the original show’s season one finale. It’s interesting and all, but it seems odd to give us a cliff hanger at the end of a show that literally no longer exists. I mean, it would have worked better if they told us where we could expect the pay off to come from. As it is we know there’s a road trip spin off from the main show coming, an anthology show which seems like a convenient excuse to bring back dead characters without retconning the way the morons at Fear are about to, and a set of hypothetical, near mythical movies. Safe to assume any payoff would be in the theaters, but who the hell knows. Whatever, the end of World Beyond was pretty satisfying and on the whole the two seasons ended in a way that makes me happy I stuck with it.

Okay. Time to prep the quinoa. Enough of this TV recap bullshit. It’s time for Chef Lard Ass to get-a-cookin’!