The vegetarian challenge.

I received my absentee voter ballot in the mail yesterday (how stoked am I that after re-registering, I still get to be an absentee voter? VERY!), and I was looking at the propositions, trying to figure out what some of them were saying because you know they try to make the verbiage so totally confusing that you end up voting the way you didn't want to.

Prop. 2 is titled: Standards for Confining Farm Animals. Initiative Statute. I read the body of it, which basically is going to force farms to give their livestock (some of the livestock animals, anyway) room to MOVE. Shocking! How dare we want to allow animals to move???

Okay. So I'm partial to animals; however, I'm not an animal activist. I wear leather. I eat the pig and chicken (but not the cow). I think it's fine to eat animals. Go ahead, eat all you want. I just don't like seeing the conditions animals must live in before they are slaughtered for our consumption. It's horrific. It's sad. It makes me cry.

When I told my husband about this proposition, he said he was listening to a newscast about it on NPR. They were talking to farmers about it all and what it would mean for them. I already knew what he was going to say; the already expensive chicken was going to cost way more if Prop 2 was passed.

So I told him I wouldn't expect any less than that. But he wasn't going to convince me otherwise about how I will be voting for this proposition because if I wasn't married to him, I would be a vegetarian.

Way back when, we both tried to eat vegetarian. My husband's hips started hurting him and I just felt plain icky, so we stopped. The hardest problem was cooking meals we would both liked. If I have the option of chicken or pork, then I fair much better. We're both picky in our own rights; I don't like meat too much and rarely like the meat things I do cook, and he doesn't like creamy things, including sour cream, heavy cream, mayo, cottage cheese....

I told him that there are plenty of vegetarian food staples I like to eat that I know he doesn't, so making dinner is hard. When asked what I was talking about, I said like lentils. He said he's eaten lentils before. And I said that the difference between him eating lentils before and me eating lentils now, is that I would choose to eat lentils whereas he wouldn't.

And then he challenged me. I call this the vegetarian challenge. He told me to plan a week's worth of tasty vegetarian meals and then we'll talk about it. He had to go and throw in "tasty," though, which means something different to him than it does me, but that's okay, because this gal loves herself a challenge.

Game on.

Foster Farms frozen chicken is sooo not ready to cook.

I thought I was outsmarting the grocery store by buying a 6-pack of flash frozen, individually packaged, boneless skinless chicken breasts. Why? Because they were 10 bucks instead of the normal 12 bucks for 4 unfrozen chicken breasts.

I generally plan quick, easy, healthy meals for my husband and I to eat during the week. Tonight was no exception. And with my lovely flash frozen chicken, it was going to be even quicker!

Or so I thought.

The box said to cook the frozen chicken in a preheated 375 degree oven. Check. Put in shallow dish, apply seasonings of choice, and lightly cover with aluminum foil. Check. Cook for 30-40 minutes. Check.

I was making "Asian Chicken" (yes, that's what the recipe was called), which was a combo of soy sauce, vinegar (I used rice wine vinegar), brown sugar, garlic and some pepper. I poured the sauce on the frozen chicken, the sauce slid right off and pooled under the the chicken. Oh well, I thought, I'm sure it'll soak up some of the sauce as it defrosts and cooks.

I spent the next 30 minutes with my child and husband. The husband and I talked about random things, basically catching up with the day's happenings while our child ran around tormenting Zoe and eating fruit jellies, sometimes with a box on his head.

Right before the chicken was done, we moved into Mateo's room to start the bedtime process. I left my husband with ensuring Mateo goes to sleep duty so I could finish preparing dinner.

I took the chicken dish out of the oven, took off the foil, and was greeted with four mostly raw chicken breasts swimming in sauce and patches of solid chicken funk and fat. Normally this would make me ill and I'd not want to eat it. But it was actually smelling darn tasty, so I decided to just put it back in the oven for another 30 minutes and cook the heck out of it. Chicken jerky, anyone?

And this is how we ended up not eating the chicken or the Thai coleslaw I never made or the leftover potato salad for dinner last night, and how we did end up eating pizza. Because by the time the chicken was done, it was going to be way too late to make anything more as this lady's brain shuts down around 7:30 PM.

Lesson learned? Defrost the individually packed chicken breasts like I would any other frozen chicken. And don't believe everything I read.