N & M Renaud

I have a recipe for Chicken Pot Pie. It’s easy, because it uses up leftover cooked chicken. And because it came from Campbell’s, it has soup in it. That makes it tasty with minimal effort. Original recipe:

Campbell’s Original Chicken Pot Pie
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 cup frozen veg, thawed
1 c shredded chicken
1/2 c milk
1 egg
1 c Bisquick
Preheat oven to 400. Mix soup, vegetables and chicken in 9″ pie plate. Mix milk, egg and Bisquick and pour over top. Bake 30 min until golden.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? I never make it like that. This is how I make it:

M’s Tweaked Chicken Pot Pie
1 can cream of chicken soup
A goodly portion of on hand veg, chopped carrots, celery, frozen peas…
One frozen ziplock baggie of shredded chicken (that I’d cooked and dismantled and frozen weeks ago)
Mix in square baking dish and sprinkle with cumin and paprika (the secret ingredients!). Make Easy Peasy Baking Powder Biscuits* and plop them on top. Bake 20 min until golden.

It’s good, reliable and easy. But yesterday, I had an abundance of uncooked pizza dough and did not want pizza. I knew I wanted to freeze half the meal, so I didn’t want to use freezer chicken, since it just seems wrong to stick chicken in the oven for 20 minutes, only to stick it back in the freezer again for a few weeks. I had also just been grocery shopping, so my on-hand veg selection was bountiful. Last night’s recipe (doubled for freezing):

No Chicken Pot Pie
2 cans creme of celery soup
1 large carrot, chopped
2 stalks celery
1 zucchini
handful of fresh green beans, chopped up
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 tube of grocery store frozen pizza dough, thawed.
Mix everything (except the dough, obviously) in a big bowl,. Add some cumin and paprika. Put the mix into two dishes, spread out the pizza dough as much as possible on top. Bake 20 min until golden.

And, despite everything, it turned out deliciously! I loved it, and N… well N ate it, which is a victory in my books! Not that I’ll retire my tried and true Tweaked Pot Pie recipe, but it’s good to know that it’s can be adjusted to suit my needs. After this experiment, it’s definitely one of my favourite recipes!

*Easy Peasy Baking Powder Buscuits
2 c flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/3 c margarine
2/3 c milk
Sift flour, b powder and salt into a mixing bowl. Add in margarine, smoosh with a fork until mixed but fairly chunky. Keep stirring while adding in milk, a bit at a time. Use enough milk to form a dough that’s soft but not too sticky. Knead a bit on the counter, flatten it and cut circles with the mouth of a cup or jar. Bake 12-15 min @ 425.

Four loads of laundry.
In my pyjamas. No one
saw me in the hall.

(win.)

Sure, they look harmless enough, all flopped and relaxed.

But I spent hours cleaning their area recently: the hay, the litter, the fuzz (oh, the endless balls of fuzz I vacuumed!!) And how do they reward me?

By reminding me that their cage is their cage. And while they’re 100% litter trained, sometimes a few territorial poops go a long way in making a statement.

Sigh.

For fun, I tried to do the Wii Fit every day for a month in order to make a pattern.

See how I did? I almost made it. My proudest day is the 20th. That’s the day after I missed one, and I decided to keep going anyway. The day that I decided that my pattern wouldn’t be perfectly complete, but that Mostly Complete would be better than Given Up.

(Full disclosure: I don’t have any stamps for the month of March. Make of that what you may.)

Today, I’m happy to report that I’ve made my last payment on my student loans! We put half of our our debt payment allowance in February toward one last lump sum for OSAP. That means that 8 years after graduation, I’ve finally earned my degree.

I would have posted this earlier but somehow I miscalculated my final payment by $0.22.

Who can blame me? It was an Arts Degree.

You can’t imagine how excited I was to see this booklet in the brochure rack of our waiting room at the hospital. Somehow, despite the apparent recession, the pulse growers and pulse producers of Canada got a lot of money. They produced this slick looking magazine (click here to download the pdf) and, now that I’m doing a little research, I see they have a slick website, too. (clicky-clicky)

A mere two years ago, I wouldn’t have looked twice at this publication. But today I took a copy, read it cover to cover, exclaimed over the tips and recipes and preached about it to the friends we were visiting with tonight. Apparently, I’ve become a bean fanatic. An unapologetic, bean evangelist, so to speak. I think we can expect to see a lot more chickpea recipes coming our way here at RenaudFamily.com!

*I cannot take credit for this pun. I can’t imagine who was the first person to say it, but I read it most recently on the Pulse Canada website.

I’m having a friend over for lunch tomorrow. That means today is cleaning day. I almost wish she could see the before, to know that I actually did try and clean up for her.

She suffers from allergies. I have suggested she stock up on Benadryl.

Just so you don’t think I sit around and read magazines all day at work, let me tell you that today was one of those days when all of a sudden you realise it’s 6pm and you haven’t gone pee since lunch (at 11am.) Yep, we all have days like these, and the last few weeks it’s been my turn.

I just realised that the lovely flowers I bought for myself are still on the dining room table. I’d forgotten about them in the rush of day-to day (not to mention I’ve been avoiding the pile-up of papers and books, also on the table.) It’s a grey, rainy, slushy day and I think it’s time to contemplate the daisies. Maybe with a cup of tea.

And in other news, I just finished my first ever pair of fingerless mittens! The least practical woolen item a Canadian can knit – just warms the palm of your hand, the part that never gets cold. But cute as a button and fun to knit up!

While it may look like I was the model of efficiency this morning, with all the laundry and dishes and meal making I did this morning, I actually squandered much of my time knitting and let the washing machine, dish washer and crock pot do my work for me. It’s no Rosie the Robot, but every little bit counts!