On Sunday when I got the second chicken, I had some surprise guests. I was in the midst of making the second chicken carcass into stock, so I got busy making some chicken salad for my friends for lunch.

Menu:
Brie
3 cheese semolina bread (supermarket bakery, not as fancy as it sounds, but good!)
Chicken salad with homemade mustard mayonnaise
Citron Presse

Brie was room temperature and served with the bread. I was panicked and I still making stock, so I sacrificed my chicken for the soup to make lunch for the drop in visitors to save myself from going out to eat and taking time away from my work in the kitchen. (And some code I had to execute for work!) I had casually asked one of the guests if he’d ever had homemade mayonnaise before and he said no. Well, I thought I had some mayo in the fridge and I didn’t! But I did have two eggs! (And while cooking later, I found a small new jar in the pantry! DOH!)

Well, the first yolk went poorly, so I I started over with the second. I dumped in some of the leftover lemon vinaigrette from the pasta salad I made last week. (Lemon juice, garlic, mustard and olive oil, nothing that was going to spoil quickly.) I slowly added some good olive oil while using the hand blender and ended up with a creamy dressing.

They were happy with citron presse even though I offered them orange juice or water. I think the He was bewildered by the whole process. I nuked a large lemon, rolled it on the counter (yields more juice if you do this), reamed it with a knife so it was nice and pulpy, and squeezed it into two pint glasses. Then I poured some sugar and cold water into a Nalgene bottle and chatted with the guests till the sugar was dissolved. I put out a pitcher of cold water and voila! Citron presse! I don’t keep sugar syrup premade in the house, so I usually end up just mixing it on the spot like that. I wish I had some raisins, apples, or grapes to add to the salad for my friends, but I am allergic to fruit. Good enough though for last minute entertaining.

So the last recipes I gave out certainly didn’t use up 6 quarts of broth. But SFOrdinaryGal asked me a few weeks ago what to do with lentils. I was waiting to reply because honestly, all I do is make them like this. This week, I am trying out lentils with fresh broth, but with A LOT more herbs!

Lentil Stew:
4+ cups of savory chicken broth
some fresh thyme
lots of garlic
1/2-1 cup of lentils
4-5 sundried tomatoes
1/4 cup carrot, diced
1/4 cup onion, diced
LOTS OF SALT AND PEPPER
1-1 1/2 cups chopped cooked chicken (optional)

Boil all of it together. Could it be any harder than that? Sure! You could blend it to a puree for a smoother soup (leaving out the meat). If you are feeling fancy, add some nice crumbled smoky bacon. I love bacon! Serve with rice or bread.

Anyhow, my point with all this is that I’m not a lousy cook and it’s really not that hard to make something to eat that comes out to be around $3.50 or less per meal. (By my calculations, it would have been ~$3.02 if I hadn’t bought the first chicken for $6.99. boo!)

It does take work. I’ve been cooking for the last two days but I am really happy. I gave some corn and pea soup to my boss and a taste of it to someone else. I also gave my boss some of the lentil chicken stew to try and a quart of frozen chicken stock because I really have more than I can use before I get another chicken.

I think next time, I will boil some potatoes in stock instead of making a noodle soup. One of frozen quarts of stock I have will later become chicken orzo soup. I will add maybe a little poached chicken, dill, and lemon.

As part of the tire research, I bought a new subscription to ConsumerReports.org for $26/year.

This is ironic because THREE DAYS AGO, I CANCELED THE RENEWAL. I thought I wasn’t going to need it because I don’t have any new purchases coming up where I would want the rankings. I looked at a few items that have been on my mind, like cell phones, laptops and financial advice. I have had it for three years and pretty much only looked at it 4 or 5 times. I just don’t buy a lot of stuff where I need the rankings. I bought it to replace my broken dishwasher and never even got around to buying even that.

Well, well, Life has a way of laughing at me, pointing its pudgy finger and guffawing at my misery.

I didn’t have to buy a new subscription. I have about 2 weeks left of the old one, but I figured if I get this much value out of it right now, there might be something else I will want to view again soon. For instance, one really interesting tidbit I found is that spinach has a lot of pesticide residue. I think that’s something that will make me buy organic spinach from now on. Consumer Reports does have the power to change your behavior! So do your research!

NOTE: I do take corporate sponsorship for this blog, but not from Consumer Reports. This is a genuine endorsement but your own mileage may vary due to your needs and shopping habits.

My tires told me ’screw you’ last night. Literally. I have a screw stuck in one of the tires. I *THOUGHT* I heard something funny driving from work to happy hour last night but I wasn’t sure. As I was leaving the restaurant, I needed to fuel up so I stopped at a Shell (and got gas for $2.93).

My father was an auto mechanic and taught me very little about cars, but the few things he taught me are these:

When you stop for gas:
1) Check your oil and top off if necessary.
2) Check your wiper fluid and fill that too.
3) Walk around the car, check your lights, look for new dents, dings/scratches.
4) Look at the tires to see if you need air.
5) Clean your windows.

To do all this, my dad gave me paper funnels, a jug of wiper fluid and my very own squeegee! My daddy loves me! Of course, I only do these things some of the time, but I do it when I am likely to need it, i.e. check the oil level when I’ve gone over 2K miles. But I always, always, ALWAYS walk around the car while it fills up. I have had bad luck with my tires from the get-go because my car was installed with the infamous Firestone tires that were recalled.

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Last week I bought a chicken for $6.99 and noticed a sign that said whole rotisserie chickens are $3.99 on Sundays. DOH!

I also noticed that they have a packaged time on them, so I made a point on Sunday of buying a $3.99 chicken that had been packaged within a 2 hour window.

A few weeks ago, J.D.’s wife, Kris, had a great post about making stock from a rotisserie chicken. Even though it’s summertime, I LOVE chicken soup! So I’ve been making stock and soup like a fiend.

This is lesson how to make a series of meals around a chicken. This assumes you are like me, single or perhaps in a couple with no extra mouths to feed.

First, how to pick a whole chicken apart:

1) Take the chicken home and let it cool to the touch. Set out a bowl for bones/stock pot and bowl for meat.
2) Pick the chicken apart with your bare hands. Don’t be squeamish. Learning basic chicken anatomy will help you do this.
3) Pull the wings and legs off. If you are lucky, the whole drumstick, thigh, and ‘oyster’ will come off in one piece.
4) Put the first two wing sections in to the bowl for bones. There’s hardly any decent meat on them so don’t bother.
5) Scrape the drumstick and thigh bones with a fork to take the meat off. Toss the bones *and skin* into the bowl for bones.
6) Take your thumbs and wedge them near the center of the chicken breast. Your thumbs should naturally find the breastbone and use your thumb to break it open and tear the breast meat away from the rest of the carcass. Peel the skin off and toss into the bowl for bones. Put the meat into the bowl for meat.
7) Pick as much of the meat off the rest of the carcass as you want. Don’t forget to flip it over as there is meat on the back of the chicken, just not a lot.

After that, toss your bones and carcass into a stock pot and follow Kris’ recipe. Personally, I like mine with dill, parsley, and thyme, with a lot of garlic. No need to peel the garlic either. I like to yield about 6 quarts from one chicken.

Since I had two chickens this week I made two stocks. One very plain, and one very savory. The first one was plain because I didn’t have the other ingredients, which was good as it allowed me to make something later that needed a plainer broth.

BIG CAVEAT - I don’t really measure stuff, so the amounts are mostly guidelines for spices and dressings. Experiment and make it your own!

Chicken Pasta Salad with Lemony Vinaigrette:

1 bell pepper, diced
1 medium tomato, diced
1 box Farfalle (bowtie) pasta
2 cups chopped cooked chicken
Juice of 1/2 lemon
2 cloves of garlic (or more if you like that)
1 teaspoon of mustard
~1/2 cup of good quality extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Make the pasta al dente. Cut up the bell pepper and the tomato into small bite sized pieces, but not too tiny, about 1/2″ dice. Toss the chicken, pasta, and veggies together in a large bowl. Into a blender, crush some garlic, add mustard and lemon juice. Start blending and slowly pour in the olive oil till it get creamy. Pour over your pasta mixture and serve warm or chilled. Approximately 4-6 servings.

Personally, I don’t add the chicken to it. I put the pasta into tupperware boxes first, then toss a fistful of chicken on top. I can see exactly how much I’m eating and that works better for me.

I actually made this and I ate it three times before throwing out the rest.

Chicken Egg Scramble:

3 small eggs
1/2 medium tomato, diced finely
1 cup of chopped cooked chicken
1-2 teaspoons of pesto
salt and pepper to taste

Dice your tomato and get rid of the extra moisture/seeds. Heat your pan and scramble your eggs in the skillet with the pesto. Throw in the tomato to let that cook and toss in your chicken. Approximately 1-2 servings. I like it with toast on the side.

Corn and Pea Soup:

I made this after reading a recipe by Teresa Heinz [Kerry, she was listed as Senator Heinz’s wife] in an old Washington Opera fundraiser cookbook at a friend’s house. I don’t remember her recipe exactly except that she called for frozen peas and corn and purees it. She says to serve this hot or cold.

1/2 10 oz pkg of frozen peas, or about 5 ozs of freshly shelled peas if you can get them.
2 cobs of fresh sweet corn
a little onion finely minced
2-3 cups of PLAIN chicken broth
cooked chicken - optional
salt

Peel your corn and remove all the silk you can. Rinse them off and slice off the kernels with a sharp knife. Stand the cob up in a bowl and slice downward. They might go everywhere on the counter, but most of them will land in the bowl. Thaw the peas till you get half the package and re-freeze the rest. Boil your broth and toss in the onion, corn and peas.

The trick to this is have a very plain broth. Fresh corn and peas have a lot of sweetness and so that’s what you’re bringing out in this soup.

More recipes later this week.

The tuition reimbursement came in last week. Very exciting stuff. I would turn it around to pay the credit card down, but there’s funky stuff going on with my dental bills. I’m holding on to most of it in savings for the moment, but using a chunk of it to pay off a dental expense that my insurance refuses to cover.

Due to some weird billing with the insurance, the very expensive surgery I had in March may not be fully covered. I have an appointment this week and I will be querying the surgeon’s office about it. The last time they looked, they said that they hadn’t attempted to get paid by the dental insurer.

Since my ‘emergency fund’ is down to the very last of the CD’s I’ve been holding, I socked away about $2K to build it back up. I will actually end up using that money to pay for the permanent crowns which are about $900 a piece, but at least I’ll make some interest in the mean time. They won’t go in for a few more months yet. (And I KNEW I would burn through my emergency fund if I didn’t lock some of it up in CD’s!)

I have to remember that I’m not suffering. I’m doing ok. Really. I am.

At least August is a three paycheck month. I’ll be able to throw some more money at my credit cards then. I hope.

In a small way, this article on co-housing makes sense, but it also seems silly to give a new name to an old idea.

For a while, when it looked like most of my generation was living in NorCal, our parents talked of getting a compound and living all together they way they used to in Korea. Everyone has their little house/area and sees family every day. I think a lot of people fear this, I do. But my folks and their siblings/cousins find it appealing.

That idea has fallen by the wayside as everyone is in different financial states and real estate in their ideal location is too expensive. But I still kind of hope that once my mean uncle dies, my mom and her sister will live together and take care of my pop. That would be kind of cool. They talk on the phone all the time anyway. I swear, the only reason we had long distance was so that my mom could talk to her sisters in CA.

My grandparents used to live in Section 8 housing in Philadelphia, where there happened to be a lot of other old Korean grandparents. The grandmother of one of my sibling’s high school buddies lived on the same floor. It was nice. They would shuffle down the halls to visit one another.

Anyway, yet another financial fantasy.

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July holiday yesterday if you are an American. I got to watch the DC fireworks from a rooftop in Arlington. I got to see shows all over the DC Metro area from the 360 view. The only bummer is that we should have brought a radio to listen to the NSO concert at the same time. I hope everyone was able to catch a free fireworks show! Now onto the post!

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I admit. I thought naming a blog “The Sun’s Financial Diary” kind of arrogant. Especially since I sit next to a Chinese guy whose last name is Sun. My officemate is funny and jokes about the Copernican view of the solar system all the time because he’s so great. *snicker* It’s all in good fun, but to put yourself out there as The Sun, woo. That’s a pretty serious declaration if you ask me.

However, I think The Sun’s Financial Diary is a great PF blog. I really like it. He’s written a lot of educational posts about investing. I’ve learned a lot as I begin to get serious about investing as part of my savings strategy.

If you are looking to get your feet wet when it comes to investing, this is a pretty good blog for starting. In the past month, I’ve found myself reading about DRIPs, US Treasury bonds, savings rates at online accounts, etc.

Sun, will you be my blogpal?

#1: I am disliking CleverDude for tagging me for this meme. to Mike.
#2: Mike rocks because he helped me bring down my motorcycle.
#3: I am at work.
#4: I am coding some SQL today and it is taking a long time.
#5: I <3 one of my Indian developers. He ran a great requirements meeting today. Every meeting should be as effective and efficient.
#6: I hate the new iPhone.
#7: I hate camera phones or phones that play music. I want my old StarTac back.
#8: I love silence. I am getting lots of work done today except when Mike pesters me to participate in his meme.

No. I refuse to tag anyone else. But if I had to pick people. I’d pick on:
English Major Money
HC of One Big Mortar Board
Tmac of My Financial Odyssey
Beachgirl from Beachgirl’s Budget Blog
Coddleshell
Sun from The Sun’s Financial Diary
Moominoid from Moomin Valley
Debt Hater

Two and half hours, but I now have VA tags and title on my bike. Tax, registration, title came out to $110.00. Cover and lock, $250.00. Bike ~$1700.00.

Missed the learner’s permit exam by one question. I pay $2 and I can take the test again. If I wait 15 days, I lose 2 weekends and 4th of July holiday to ride the bike. Guess what? I’m going to try and take it again on Monday.

Bought an octane booster ($13.50) for the bike’s gas tank because of the old gas in it. The idle dies after stopping, but I knew about this and the boys all recommend the booster and topping off the tank to get the bike into a shop.

Bike needs new tires, because unlike cars, you replace the tires based on time, not mileage. I knew about this when buying the bike.

It needs a wash. But I am totally freakin’ excited now.

When I get new tires, I will also be getting a new helmet. Again, you replace it based on time or else if you had a crash. My helmet was used from an MSF instructor and a bit old now, so this is the year. I’ll be getting a white or yellow one, because yellow matches the bike and much safer than the dark blue I own now.