Cooking Chicken Without Spoons

This week has seriously lacked spoons.

 

 

 

Not these kinds of spoons. Although these are pretty!

If you don’t know about “spoon theory”, this is what I mean  http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/wpress/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/ It’s written about Lupus, but it really applies to any long term health condition, physical or mental.

Not these spoons either. But I think these are cool.

The Prednisolone has been totally playing with my head and my moods have been everywhere this week. Yesterday was not a good day, and it was very difficult to get motivated to eat (really not good when you’ve lost the amount of weight I have), never mind to cook. Fortunately, my boyfriend was willing to rescue me from the doldrums and came for dinner. Sometimes you need someone else to help you get motivated.

I had taken a big piece of chicken breast out of the freezer and needed to do something with it. Lacking spoons (the metaphorical ones, I had manage to run the dishwasher the day before), I wasn’t really sure what to do with it, so I made some good old chicken soup.

I threw the chicken in a pot, filled it with water, added a bit of salt, pepper, a bay leaf, thyme, rosemary and a bit of sage into it (don’t ask me quantities, I just put them in). The boyfriend chopped up some carrots and threw them in.

I boiled up some macaroni in a separate pot to go in it, as the last time I put the pasta in with the soup, it boiled off most of the stock! 

When the chicken was done, I took it out, and shredded it with two forks, and threw it back in the pot. It made loads, and fed both of us dinner and I had it again for lunch today. And there is still leftover chicken!

Lots of leftovers!

So as my boyfriend very kindly brought me some baking potatoes last night, I tried to think of ways to use the leftover shredded chicken with a jacket potato. I ended up going back to that yummy turkey meatball recipe, and threw one person quantities of the ingredients into a pot (don’t ask me what they were, I just guessed) and threw some of the chicken in and let that simmer down while I cooked a jacket potato in the microwave. It was really tasty! It took all of 15 minutes to make. And went down a treat!

Doesn't look pretty, but it tasted good!

So I’ve managed to figure out a few things I can make when I’m lacking spoons (figuratively, not literally!) that doesn’t involve raiding the diminishing stash of stuff that I’ve put in the freezer. And I think I’ve had about 2 more spoons today than yesterday. Yay me!