Barefoot in the kitchen

And, NO I am NOT pregnant...never have been and never will be!  I am talking about cooking.  Do you like to cook?  Are you spoiled and get to have someone clean up after you make a mess in your kitchen?  Or are you just someone who would rather gobble everything all up and clean up for the person who cooked for you?

I am a mixed emotions of all of the above.  I have to cook sometimes I don't want to.  Sometimes I LOVE to and sometimes I HATE to.  I mostly hate cleaning up afterwards which I have to do far too many times.  From time to time, its nice to go out to a restaurant and get spoiled so that I don't have to cook OR clean up, but I am getting tired of having to do both all of the time.  Especially when I have the mind set that when ever anyone ever cooks for me, they certainly don't have to do the dishes after.

But don't you just love it when you can take something out of the freezer the night before and not have anything in mind for it.  And the next day comes along and you just do what comes naturally.  Like today for example; last night I took a pork roast out of the freezer...and this afternoon I automatically took it out of the wrap and just popped it into the smaller slow cooker, using just a box of that vegetable liquid broth.  I didn't put anything else for flavouring in it.  It cooked for a handful of hours, and I was going to put potatoes and carrots in with it, but decided the slow cooker was too small for all of those veggies, so I did them in separate pots on my gas stove top.

Then, as they were cooking, I decided to make the gravy in the juices of what was in the slow cooker, right in the slow cooker, just like I did the last time I made gravy, when I cooked the little turkey we had acquired after Christmas.  It actually does quite a nice job.  It was not that long ago that making gravy actually intimidated me.  But my brother in law taught me how to make gravy, and my good friend Maureen before that, and my mother before that but I could never really figure it out, but I got a handle on it, now....

Anyway, I absolutely LOVE it when an unplanned plan comes together.  At first I thought the pork was simmering for too long, but it came out just perfect, and so did the gravy, it was a tad bland, but nothing a bit of salt and pepper wouldn't fix. I also baked a chocolate cake earlier today and Abby is making the jello pudding topping for it now as we speak...this will be interesting, as we didn't have any cherry jello, nor did we have any chocolate pudding, but we did have raspberry jello and we did have butterscotch pudding.  So instead of having chocolate jello pudding cake, we are having chocolate raspberry butterscotch pudding cake.  YUM it sounds deslish!  Happy Cooking everyone.