Facebook Recipes

    Lately, Facebook has been filled with yummy looking recipes. Not many of the recipes are low-cal either! Today I printed off four interesting ones and hubby Dale & I went grocery shopping. Home and $100 poorer I decided to make two of them. (Would have liked to have tried that one with the chocolate chip cookie dough, peanut butter cups and brownie mix, but sanity prevailed.) I opted for the Crock Pot Beer Chicken and the Baked Zucchini Fries.

   Whatever possessed me to try a recipe for beer and chicken I can't say. While at the store we looked to buy a single can of beer. I have never learned to like beer. Dale likes it okay but is more a Sapphire & Tonic kind of guy. We had to do a bit of searching at the store to find a single can that we could buy. $2 for a large can of beer. The recipe was for 2 lbs of chicken breasts, so I put a number of breasts in the crockpot, thinking we could use the cooked meat in other recipes. It also called for garlic powder, and a tbsp. of oregano. Hmmmmm. Oregano and beer - that should have been a clue. Mid-afternoon my house started having a distinctive yeasty aroma. I kind of enjoyed the smell, thinking of breweries, Germany, pubs.... By 4pm I commented that I thought the house smelled kind of good. Dale said he thought it smelled........interesting.

    5:30 found me slicing zucchinis into long strips for the zucchini fries. The recipe called for Shake & Bake, shredded Parmesan and a whisked egg. Dip the zucchini in the egg and then shake them in the topping of Shake n Bake with the cheese added to it and then lay them on a baking sheet. Dale came out to help me and I asked him to get out an egg and the cheese. I didn't specify and he assumed the cheese went into the egg mixture. That made the egg mixture clumpy and once into the Shake n Bake bag, the powdery topping just adhered to the cheese/egg and not to the zucchinis. The powdered topping became more clumps of cheese and egg. I finally gave up and just put the plain zucchini on the baking sheet and tried to de-clump the orange looking globs of cheese/egg/topping over them.

     I haven't tasted Shake n Bake in years. But, a fat glob of it baked into a somewhat solid orange mass held together with egg and cheese is not too appetizing. Yuck. This was not a bad recipe - it was our mess up for not following it. As for the chicken - I swear I only put the 1 tablespoon of oregano into the slowcooker, but each breast was covered with it - you would swear there was over a cup of oregano in the pot. The beer made it multiply, I swear. The only thing good I can say about the chicken is that it was moist. Dale and I had dinner. With many sips of water in between bites. Shake n Bake clumps, oregano/beer topping, naked zucchini. What possessed me?

The wonderful news (not) is I have lots more beer soaked chicken to use in other recipes. Dale suggested something Mexican that we can use LOTS OF SPICES on.

As soon as dinner was over, I dispatched him to Starbucks to buy a Frappuccino to get the taste out of my mouth, while I Fabrezed the entire house to rid it of the smell of a rank brewery. (I was really wishing I had made the cookie dough-peanut butter cup-brownies.) Remember those commercials for Frabreze where they took blind-folded people to a dump sprayed with Frabreze and the people thought they were taken to a flower garden? Hah! My house smells like a pub with flowers.

I have the groceries for two more recipes. Wish me luck. But first we are having very spicy chicken tacos.