Learn To Love Your Freezer.

Listen, there are times when it’s darned near impossible to find the time to bake a chicken pot pie for your family. (For the sake of this blog, let’s just go ahead and mentally swap each “you” with “Keely,” okay? That way I won’t feel so alone in my time management ineptitude and you won’t feel berated by a snacky blogger. Good? Good.)

Anyway. Chicken pot pie. Let’s be honest- you don’t even know how to bake a pot pie. Even if you had unlimited time and resources (which, again, you do not). This does not change the very simple fact that every single person in your household would lose their curly-headed minds in joy if you were to present them with chicken pot pies multiple times a week.

So you think to yourself- there’s gotta be a way around this. And you contemplate buying frozen. And you hem and you haw and then you learn that Healthy Choice and Marie Callender’s meals (which include honest-to-gosh gourmet chicken pot pies!) are made with fresh, real ingredients. Like, real real. Created with appealing and crave-worthy recipes. And, surprisingly enough, with over 80 meals coming in at fewer than 400 calories apiece, Healthy Choice and Marie Callender’s can be a smart option for a healthy, portion-controlled diet.

For which you promptly take yourself out of the running when you devour three pies in a row. Because they’re downright delicious. Your 3 year old, for example, calls the individual chicken pot pies “the dessert crust.” (Your husband, for that matter, just silently gives you the thumbs up while eyeing the baby’s slow progress on her own pie.)

Which is all you want in a mealtime, anyhow; culinary adoration and grateful requests for seconds.

You could learn how to bake that chicken pot pie. You totally could. Or, in the time it takes to prepare the flaky crust (hiding chunks of tender chicken and flavorful carrots), you could do something else.

Like thaw one of those insanely awesome coconut cream pies.  

***

Healthy Choice and Marie Callender’s created a video that follows two women on the adventures of their daily lives, imagining how new technologies will impact their routines, especially in the grocery store. From apps that store your grocery list to recipe research on Pinterest, the landscape of shopping is quickly changing. With various resources available to consumers, they are now, more than ever, interested in learning where their food is coming from. And just in time for National Frozen Food Month (March), these brands are helping shoppers to predict the future of shopping for frozen food!

***

ConAgra Foods frozen meals give families access to real ingredients like crunchy, freshly cut vegetables, homemade pasta and ripe fruit year-round. Just like most people blanch veggies before freezing them – ConAgra Foods does too – to help preserve color, texture and keep them fresh!

Give it a try sometime! Marie Callender’s hearty pot pies are filled with tender meat, freshly cut vegetables and Marie’s authentic golden, flaky crust. And Healthy Choice recipes use chef-inspired ingredients like, apples instead of sugar for tart sweetness and a splash of red wine for a punch of flavor instead of added salt.

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of ConAgra Foods.

Mini Kitchen Makeover, Part 1, AKA PJ Twitches In The Corner.

So, once upon a time there was this kitchen. And it happened to be placed directly into the house which I had so recently purchased. (Meaning it now fell under the category of things which were entirely my problem.) Here is a photo of said kitchen, circa 2009:

Funny story- we have no idea what that brown glop consisted of, only that it required a chisel to pry free. A CHISEL.
Also, that orange travel mug on the counter was what I used to catch water from the gushing sink drain
mere moments after this picture was taken. Can you see the rat? Not yet? Wait half a year. They'll be right by that pipe.

Another pic circa 2009. It was around this time when I started having doubts of being a homeowner.
As in, I already wicked missed renting.

Ah, here we go. This was taken last week. That tile is really helping no one at all, huh? If you
can zoom in, it's easier to see the dated pattern, impossible-to-remove grease stains from the '50s,
and more than a few splotches of my teardrops. The flash of my camera, however, IS my friend.
It masks the "Victorian Pearl" shade of paint better known as "Baby Pink." (We realized it was "Baby Pink"
once the third coat had dried in the kitchen. And up and down three staircases. Ha HA!) 

Same kitchen, same last week. Those cabinets aren't really bringing their A Game, now are they? Probably
because they're warped, faded, and at least three separate grains and types of wood. And that counter just puts the
lame in laminate, doesn't it? (If you try really hard and shove the 'e' from the back to right next to the 'm'.) 

Last Friday: So we had our guy- he of Oh My God, My Sewer Exploded, Can You Fix This Floor fame- rip the
backsplash tiles out and away forever and ever Amen. Not Pictured: Me, sobbing on the ground
when Danny informed me that the walls in the kitchen were made of yellowed, crumbling plaster.
("How old is this house, again?" Asked in grudging admiration. Answer: Not old enough or with
character enough to be fully awesome. Juuuust...old enough to be broken.)

I took advantage of this mini overhaul to scrape three layers of shelf liner from each cabinet. It was a soul-crushing job. I kinda wished the house's exterior had been made of this stuff. IT WILL OUTLIVE US ALL.

This past weekend: Here I am, attempting to heat and peel the third layer from the first board in the first cabinet.
Also, pleasantly telling my eldest to kindly not spray me with a bottle of water while I'm holding an electrical appliance.
Shortly thereafter, we switched to flat razors. ON THE SHELVES, THE SHELVES.
You can also [kinda] see that I've painted the walls a color that Behr calls "Pip" and I call "Well, I guess
we just have white walls, huh?" P.J. is thrilled. He thinks white walls are what adult homes have. 

Monday: After the guys from N-Hance wood renewal took our cabinet doors back to their warehouse
for prepping, I realized that my daughters FINALLY- at long last- had somewhere to sit and read. 

Tuesday: The fellas at N-Hance sanded and polished the cabinet frames while the doors were off becoming fully
awesome. And those are the stripped shelves which drove me (and Peej and Nora and Suzy and my oh-so tolerant pal Bethany) fully crazy. If I ever suggest using shelf liner to anyone, you all have full permission to bludgeon me to death-
or at least give me hundreds of floral, plasticky papercuts.

Wednesday: It pretty much looks we got all new cabinets. These puppies were buffed, repaired, and stained
Burnt Umber, AKA The Color Which Renewed My Faith In This Ridiculous Kitchen.

I love this color. Also, the new drawer pulls. "Keely," you ask. "Are those dark brass with
copper edging?" Yes, yes they are. And they're spectacular.

This was totally worth shoving the entirety of the kitchen into dining room for the better part of the week.

But boy, those counters are still janky, right? And what about that unfinished plaster wall, just primed n' ready for a new glass mosaic backsplash? Stay tuned for next week, when we get a non-janky counter and a new glass mosaic backplash! I'll be here. 

P.J., however, might be somewhere breathing into a paper bag.

The Post Where I Beg My Dad To Come Back To Chicago.

Dad, today you start your seventh round of chemo. And while it's not the super-funnest thing you'll ever do, I'd like to remind you of a time when you were working on a house so hopeless you [silently] wished to burn it down.

That house was my special fixer-upper house, Dad. And I'm so very glad that you didn't follow through with your initial response of kicking the house into a bricky heap while choking back Ugly Tears (uh, maybe now I'm confusing you with me.)

This picture kinda sums up what you were working with. Remember that fan? Yeah, that fan was roughly five and a half feet off of the ground. And totally hanging at an angle. It was the Fan Of Certain Decapitation. I called it The Highlander fan, remember that? (Yeahhh, you thought that was a nerdy joke then, too.) Well, you fixed that fan- as well as lifted it to a whopping height of about feet, making it slightly more suitable for the next family of borderline carny-folk to move right in. (And you placed six more ceiling fans in the house, giving us air all over the place! Sure, we couldn't breathe all that well due to the boarded-up and shot-out windows, but you work with what you've got, right?)

Baseboards were boarded to bases. Things like nails spiking out at face height were secured behind actual trim. Locks were changed and storm doors were added- preventing random passersby from just waltzing on in. (Not sure who would've wanted to, but you ensured that they couldn't, and that's my point.)

And that door resting against that pocked wall in the photo? If you'll recall, there were many, many doors resting against many, many pocked walls.  You fixed 'em all- doors were hung, walls were spackled. By the time you left, the place looked a lot like a building where one could actually reside and not worry about things like rodents running in from the backyard. (At least not through the door.)

And that's a wicked teensy fraction of the work you've done to this Money Pit [Of Dreams.] At the end of each day, your clothing would be so drenched in sweat and unknown/unmentionable substances that we all offered to bury your shirts in the backyard for you.

So Dad. You can do this chemo thing. Because- seriously, remember what was going on in the bathrooms? You're tougher than chemo because you could handle what was going on in the bathrooms. Seriously.

And get better soon.

We have a lot more work to do.

March Date: Sushi And Board Games And Nic Cage.

March's Date Night brought us to Macku, one of my favorite restaurants in Chicago- formerly Kaze, which had the distinct honor of being the sushi joint down the block from our Roscoe Village apartment. (It moved and changed names. Then again, so did I.)

We always get some sort of super white tuna appetizer. We always order drinks- my choice has never strayed from the lychee mimosa, each sip prompting me to implore P.J. to pick up some lychees somewhere- and Peej either gets a Manhattan or a Japanese beer or just water is fine, thanks. We always get "our" soups- they have a dozen fabulous ones, I'm sure, but we always stick to the two we randomly chose during our first time there in 2006. (His is a ginormous urn of spicy sweet potato something-or-other, mine is a carrot and crab puree in the teensiest demitasse cup you've ever seen. It's small because of its utter richness, but I dig using a miniature spoon and feeling like a giant.) We always get a handful of makimono- it doesn't matter which ones, they're all wicked good. And we always get the crazy-goodest dessert we've ever had; a sweet asparagus pudding swirled with chocolate and strawberry dipping sauces. (The first time we ordered it, we were surprised too.)

I love everything about you. (This is to my carrot soup and my husband.)

The meal was terrific, although our conversation never strayed far from the odd argument we seemed to be having regarding the Nicolas Cage flick The Family Man. (Our fight got really heated, despite the fact that P.J. had only seen the movie once and I never saw the thing at all.)

We agreed to disagree and drove north to Lakeview. P.J. asked if he could surprise me with the second part of Date Night. I said sure, fairly certain that he wasn't going to do anything crazy like propose, so I didn't worry about how my hair looked. [Awesome.]

I knew exactly where we were, however, once we turned onto Addison. Since I was pretty sure he wasn't heading into Wrigleyville, that left Guthrie's Tavern. The home of fabulous hot winter drinks and walls and walls of board games. Creature of habit that I am, I ordered the Hot Apple Pie, a wicked combo of cider, cinnamon sticks and Tuaca liqueur. (Peej got some sort of spiked cocoa, surprising no one at all. For I am married to a consistent eight year-old.)

Everyone looks sassy sippin' with straws.

And we played Last Word, a board game for which we understood roughly a quarter of the rules. I still won. Because I don't care if it's a board game, a novella, or a smoke signal- if it's called Last Word, the female's gonna have it.

Which P.J. obviously knew (and knows). Making him the best date ever.