Things to Make for Dinner When Your Kitchen is Dysfunctional: Volume I

One of the topics I'll be covering ad nauseum here is the fact that our kitchen does not... how you say... work. We knew most of this from the outset; the seller disclosed on her listing forms that the dishwasher, oven, and range hood were mostly broken. Since moving in, we've also found that two of the stove burners and the garbage disposal are not so functional. I will cover the esthetic issues in another post with photos, but the takeaway is that we are gutting this here kitchen. It's a little terrifying, but the two attempts I've made to cook anything in this place have solidified my commitment to this plan.

In the interim, though, we're getting creative with what and how we cook. Some friends have offered to lend us both a microwave and a toaster oven, but we haven't picked them up yet. (We will eventually buy a microwave but don't want to do it until we know more about our final layout plans.) So this leaves us with two stove burners, and the slow cooker we received as a wedding gift last September. Little did those gift-givers know that one day it would be prized as our least sketchy cooking appliance.

So, following a recipe that was floating around on Pinterest, this morning I put a whole chicken and a can of beer in the slow cooker. "Meat + can of something random" seems to be a common theme of slow cooker recipes; I've seen others with Coke and Dr. Pepper, and in fact I'm sure we'll have the pleasure of trying them out before this kitchen is done. Anyway, the chicken was fine. Very chickeny. Honestly I was just so glad when I came home at the end of the day and the house hadn't burned down (I'm learning a lot about the electrical system, yet another topic for another post) that the chicken was kind of secondary. We ate it on sandwich buns. I wanted barbecue sauce but we have not yet built our condiment selection back up since the move. (I threw out so many condiments. They should really sell hoisin sauce in tablespoon-sized units.)

So yeah, I don't know, put a chicken in your crockpot. It gets tender and stuff. When you're done you can probably scrape your plates into your functional garbage disposal and then put them in your functional dishwasher and think about me and my first-world problems.

Just realized that "Me and My First-World Problems" is a good alternate name for this blog.