ohmigosh it has been soooo long since I have posted anything. Recently I have been perfecting the art of dorm cooking and wanted to share with you my first dinner that turned out amazing!
Now to let everyone know, I recently moved to PA to live with my boyfriend and have been doing a lot of living on campus, he finally just recently got a mini fridge so we can now keep some things cold, but the Kitchen is broken so, I decided to try to make homemade meals anyway, using our neighbors microwave. And here are the results:
Dinner: Chicken, boiled carrots with butter, and colcannon.
The first dinner I made was my take on a homemade irish potato leek soup, I'll post pics of the leftovers when we warm them up on a later post.
Now the chicken part was super easy, I just bought a rotisserie chicken and cut it to bits taking off the wings and legs and breast and warmed in the microwave with some butter on it. Followed by sliced carrots in water, which I put in the microwave to boil/steam, when I took them out I added more butter to them ^^ and last but not least colcannon, I microwaved the cabbage and potatoes together in water, when the potatoes were done so was the cabbage, I mashed them together with butter (if you have cream, add it for an extra yummy).
recipe:
rotisserie chicken
4 peeled and sliced carrots
3 peeled and diced potatoes
2-3 leaves of cabbage washed and diced
butter(we used Irish butter because its delicious)
salt and pepper
slice up the chicken and put onto a plate with butter set aside. Put the sliced carrots into a microwave safe bowl with enough water to cover, cook for about 15-20 minutes or until the carrots are cooked all the way through (alternately you can out the carrots cabbage and potatoes in the same bowl but you have to dig the carrots out after) add the potatoes and cabbage to a microwave safe bowl with enough water to cover. cook 15-20 minutes or until the potatoes are mushy tender. Drain the carrots and the potatoes. Add butter to carrots, cover, and set aside. add a good glob or two of butter to the potatoes and cabbage and mash, I didn't have a potato masher but I had purchased, the day before, a soup ladle, so I just used the back of it to mush the potatoes. You can do the same thing with any large spoon, or if you are daring use a small plastic spoon, just know, it will take you longer. Before you mash the potatoes put the chicken in the microwave and nuke for about 3-4 minutes just check it to make sure it doesn't get all dried out. The butter will help with that.
Plate it up and you have a delicious Irish inspired dinner, home cooked and better for you, and better tasting than take out, or cafeteria food. Happy Dorm Cooking!!
~Alisha
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| The finished dinner, this is my boyfriend's plate, I ate the breast meat. If you put a glob of butter in the middle of the colcannon, dip each bite into the well of butter instead of mixing it in, it's more traditional and waaay yummier. |
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| This is my prep space ^^ |
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| And the tiny crummy microwave we use, it's my boyfriend's suite mate's. It's nice of him to let us use it though. |
Back a few years ago we tried to grow potatoes in a five gallon bucket. Unfortunately the experiment was not a success. At the end of the growing season all we had to show for the effort were a few handfuls of marble sized potatoes. After the failure we decided to read up on how to grow potatoes (no we didn't do that first). Did you know you are supposed to 'hill' potatoes?! Sure you did because everyone knows that, well except for us we didn't know that. Anyway we decided to try it again this year with a little more knowledge and a little bit bigger buckets. I went to TSC and got water buckets from the horse/barnyard animal department. The color choice was made by the kids they actually agreed on the color! It was a small miracle. After we got the buckets we took them home and explained our plan to Jeff and then told him he needed to go with us and get dirt. It was a little like how I got my garden last year. Buy half the stuff then he will feel the need to help us with the rest.... I'm evil like that. We went to several stores and got a bunch of different opinions about the soil we needed. As with many things we decided to just wing it and got the supplies you see in the first photo. Jeff grabbed one of the spare barrels and mixed them all together. We let it all sit for a few days and incorporate. Or we got busy, something like that. Jeff drilled holes in the bottom of the buckets for drainage and we got some stones from the neighbors for the bottom of the buckets. In theory it will help the water drain without all the soil also leaking out. Well that's the way it's supposed to work for house plants right? 
These are the potatoes. I purchased them from one of the stands at the Farmer's Market. She gave me some advice about planting spaces and whatnot. She's great and sells 50# bags of potatoes for $8 if you don't mind a mixed bag of the not so pretty ones. Can't beat that with a stick right? 
So we (Jeff) planted the potato bits and then hauled them to the back rock area. We didn't water the soil because rain was expected that night. If you would like a great link to learn more about growing potatoes try this one. Have a great week.
