Parsley Rosemary Pork Ribs

So despite having all the chicken, I found this recipe and desperately wanted to try it as it sounds delicious.

Hardware:

Crockpot
Cutting Board
Veggie peeler
Sharp knife


Ingredients:

Boneless pork ribs
Potatoes
Carrots

Parsley
Garlic powder
Paprika
Rosemary
Salt/pepper

What to do:

It's a very simple prep and recipe

Peel and cut potatoes into bite size pieces. I used 6-7 medium potatoes and covered the bottom of the crockpot with them. Next lay the pork rips on top of the potatoes.

Peel and cut carrots. The original calls for baby carrots -- why spend the money, get regular carrots and chop them into baby carrot sized pieces. I cut the thicker ends in half, and then arrange them around the ribs and potatoes.

Sprinkle the veggies and rips with paprika and garlic powder (be easy with the garlic). Then with chopped parsley and rosemary. I couldn't find fresh rosemary so I used dried and did my best to chop it in with the fresh parsley I was able to get. The dried rosemary tends to "jump" a bit .. but being careful you can do it.

Leave in the crockpot for 8-10 hours on low... you house will smell great.

chicken, pounds and pounds of chicken

I've been hit by a bug to freeze as much as possible, not sure if it's due to my budget or due to the cold weather finally hitting us, but when I saw a sale on chicken breasts -- which is kind of my main staple meat right now, I jumped on it... 20 pounds of it be exact.. and then I had to figure out what to do with it.

Once I took all the fat off I had roughly 18.5 pounds of chicken breasts to freeze. So what I did was divide it up. I had the bowl for the ones that were going to be left as whole breasts, one for what was going to be ground and one for the breasts to be cut up. When de-fatting the chicken there are the "wings", little pieces of meat that are really more fat than meat and it's a royal pain to just take the fat off, generally I just cut them off and discard them, however, for the grinding I would take the ones that didn't have a lot of veins left and throw them into the bowl to be ground with the chunks. Chicken is normally a very dry meat so a little bit of fat is ok with this.

What I ended up with were 3 packages of 4 whole breasts. 2 packages of chunked chicken, and 6 packages of ground chicken. The ground chicken is divided up into 2 different kinds. Plain ground chicken (2 packages) and 4 ranch chicken.

The whole breasts were divided into the three packages of 4 breasts each -- easy division with about 3/4 of a breasts per meal. The the chunked chicken I can use for chicken bites or tenders or whatever -- they are decent sized pieces that will be easy to pound out flat if I want to.

The largest portion of this was the grinding -- yayyy for kitchen tools and my mother's foresight. When I asked for a kitchen aid mixer last year I was certain I wouldn't ever need any of the additional tools that go with it. My mother, being her normal "you'll want it eventually" also got an attachment kit that included the meat grinder, juicer, and slicer/shredder attachments. Never again will I denounce the need for more kitchen gadgets.

The biggest lessons learned with the grinder attachment: use the course grinder die. The fine is way to fine for grinding it up.

Now you may be asking what the heck is ranch chicken. It's simple as you're grinding the chicken add in your homemade dried ranch dressing -- cleanup is a pain as the powdered milk in the mix sticks to the inside of the grinder attachment.

Ranch dressing mix

1 C powdered milk
dried chives
basil
oregano
garlic powder
dried minced onions
salt/pepper

The ground chicken packages are ziploc baggies... about 1 1/2 C of ground chicken, spread out thin with as much air taken out as possible. Lay flat in the freezer to make nice neat packages.

While I'll never reach my mother's capacity to freeze foods (until I have a space where I can have a giant upright freezer like hers) It's a start.