I realized when I was looking at this recipe that I had never made pudding before from scratch. Jello? Sure. Other pre-mixes? Sure. But fresh from the ingredients? Nope. This one is very tasty without overwhelming, but you still have to consume it in small batches. Super easy, no prep. Just put the ingredients in the pot.
Type of meal
Cuisine
Difficulty
Dessert
General
Easy
Cooking Time
Yield
Rating
Cooking: 10 min Total: 10 min
4-6 servings
🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸
Adapted from The Teen Kitchen: Recipes We Love To Cook by Emily and Lyla Allen
Ingredients
REC00011 Dark chocolate pudding
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3 tablespoons cornstarch
2.25 cups whole / homogenized milk (3.25% fat)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
Main preparations
Mix together the first four ingredients (1/8 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar, 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, and 3 tablespoons cornstarch) and start heating in a large saucepan on medium.
Slowly blend in the2.25 cups whole / homogenized milk (3.25% fat), about 75ml at a time (1/4 cup).
Bring to a simmer, about 6-7 minutes.
Stir or whisk lightly for 2 more minutes, as the mixture starts to thicken.
Remove from heat and add 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, letting it melt and stir until well-mixed.
Serve.
Variations / Notes
If serving cold, place in fridge for an hour first.
Consider adding toppings such as cookies to dip (like biscotti), chopped nuts, cinnamon, or even small fruit.
I was looking for a new dish to try that wasn’t too complicated, with a bit of southwestern zing to it. This one isn’t too aggressive; most of the zing comes from the salsa, so you can determine your own heat level. The time required is a little deceptive, as you can do all of the prep while the quinoa is cooking. It isn’t the most appetizing looking under the top layer, but it is pretty yummy.
Type of meal
Cuisine
Difficulty
Dinner, Main, Chicken
North American
Easy
Cooking Time
Yield
Rating
Prep: 15 min Cooking: 15 min Baking: 25 min Total: 55 min
6-8 servings
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Adapted from The Teen Kitchen: Recipes We Love To Cook by Emily and Lyla Allen
Ingredients
2 cups dry quinoa (when cooked, this will make 6 cups)
1 tablespoon taco seasoning
1½ cups shredded pre-cooked rotisserie chicken
15-ounce jar salsa (mild, medium or hot)
2 cups frozen corn kernels
3 cups shredded Cheddar cheese
Topping
Crumbled tortilla chips
Sour cream
Alternate toppings
Diced avocado
Chopped cilantro
Shredded iceberg lettuce
Sous-Chef Preparations
Cook 2 cups of quinoaaccording to package directions, adding 1 tablespoon of taco seasoning.[Estimated time: 15 minutes]
While the quinoa is cooking:
Grease 8×11″ glass or ceramic casserole dish (preferably with a lid).
Add to the casserole dish the1½ cups shredded pre-cooked rotisserie chicken, 15-ounce jar of salsa, 2 cups frozen corn kernels, andhalf of the shredded cheese (1½ cups).
Once the quinoa is done cooking, set aside for the desired setting time and pre-heat the oven to 350°F.
Add the quinoa to the casserole dish and mix well.
Add the remaining Cheddar cheese (1½ cups)evenly over the top.
Put the lid on the casserole dish. If you don’t have a lid, you can tent some aluminum foil.
Main preparations
Bakefor 15 minutes covered (lid or foil).
Uncover and bakefor another 5 to 7 minutes. The cheese should be bubbly.
Variations / Notes
The original recipe called for two cans of black beans, drained and rinsed, but we prefer not to include them.
Another variation omitted the chicken to make it simply vegetarian.
While looking for an interesting recipe for an Instant Pot to try, I found this one that is for chicken thighs. It’s so simple, it’s hard to even call it a recipe.
Type of meal
Cuisine
Difficulty
Dinner, Main, Chicken
Instant Pot
Easy
Cooking Time
Yield
Rating
Prep: 5 min Initial heating: Depends on Instant Pot Cooking: 5 minutes for browning, 9 min for pressure cook Total: 19-30 min
4 servings
🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸
Ingredients
8 chicken thighs, boneless & skinless
Seasoning of choice (Epicure’s Rotisserie Chicken seasoning is our preferred choice)
Avocado oil
1/2 cup of chicken or vegetable broth
Sous-Chef Preparations
In a bowl, coat 8 boneless skinless chicken thighs in seasoning. We use Epicure’s rotisserie chicken seasoning and use fair bit for flavour.
Prepare1/2 cup of chicken broth (or vegetable broth).
Main preparations
Heat Instant Pot to sauté and add avocado oil.
Brown the 8 chicken thighs a few minutes on each side. Remove chicken from pot.
Add 1/2 cup of chicken broth.
Scrape up the pieces that are stuck on the pan (a wooden spoon works best). Put the chicken back in.
Put the lid on. Set to high pressure for 9 minutes.
Once done, let it naturally release for at least a couple of minutes before releasing the rest of the way.
For those of you not familiar with the acronym, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing in a Month. Ignoring the awkward construction of the title, the premise is simple. People around the world are encouraged to write, write, write every day for the month of November — binge-writing, if you will — to produce a 50,000-word manuscript.
There are LOTS of views about NaNoWriMo, ranging from “everybody just writes crap, it’s quality that counts” to “what a great way to just blast through and remember what’s fun about writing.” There is an equal number of views about HOW to do NaNoWriMo, including from those who plot and plan in advance (plotters/planners) or who write by the seat of their pants (panters).
But I really enjoy the premise. This isn’t a Hallmark commercial thing, the “organization” that came up with the idea is a not-for-profit. Sure, there are lots of commercial options out there tied to NaNoWriMo for trackers, notebooks, mugs, websites, webinars, writing groups, etc., but at its core? It’s writers talking to writers and encouraging them to do nothing more than put their butt in their seats and write. Maybe the 50K will never amount to anything more than the wordcount itself. Maybe you’ll never turn the doc into a book or even look at it again. It’s a small writing milestone where the journey is the goal, not the destination.
Most Novembers, I ignore it. At least, I don’t aim for 50K, I don’t join the community groups, I don’t post updates, I don’t “do” NaNoWriMo in conventional terms. I often try to write a bit more, maybe blogging, for example. Or editing.
This November, I’m fully committing to writing SOMETHING, I just have to choose which WIP, as I have three that are up for grabs. Although, technically, there are six, I suppose, but three aren’t ready for primetime.
My HR Guide
I have been promising / threatening to finish the damned doc for four years now, and I never quite get around to writing it from beginning to end. There’s a solid old draft, and I do bits and pieces, but then I think of something else and I restart a section. Or COVID hits and everything changes for the process. Or there are tons of “new” features to talk about in each section. It is truly evergreen, but I want to FINISH a version in time to release it on January 1st as the 2022 edition. Fortunately enough, it was about 50K words for the 2017 edition. Not a novel, not a lot of “fun”, but a workable product.
My Astronomy Guide
This one is probably too nascent in development to really start blasting through. A couple of the sections I could do easily enough, but there are some that require a lot more research before I can write them. Not really the best option for a NaNoWriMo binge if I have to keep stopping to research stuff. I’ll pass on this one.
Novel 1 and 2
I have two novels in mind for a character, whose initials are CC, and that’s about all I’m going to say at this point. I started writing #2 some time ago, and I was struggling with too much exposition to try and deal with some extended backstory. Until I realized that the main problem was that the novel shouldn’t really be the first book in the series. I actually needed to start with Novel #1, because a whole bunch of stuff that comes up in CC01 is enough to have a whole separate novel, and much easier to plot in linear order than constant flashbacks as a first novel. So CC02 is definitely “out of contention”, I have to do CC01 first. The problem? Well, there isn’t one. I could easily choose CC01 as a perfectly valid choice for NaNoWriMo. It’ll probably be closer to 80K, but that’s a small detail to be ignored. My only hesitation is that I feel like if I get sucked into the novel, I might never come back to finish my HR guide. Perhaps “work before pleasure” is the better side of writing valour?
My Performance Guide
This one is so far removed from development, it barely qualifies as an idea. And yet a little bit of work and I’d be off to the races. But I would never finish my other guides, and the performance guide can wait until I retire. I may even have a chance to do some preliminary work that will make such an endeavour easier but might be a conflict of interest, although more “perception” than “real”. So that one is out too.
Novel Series, YOTG #1-12
For a very long time, I have had a movie projected in my head. It’s disjointed, some parts are missing, but it is a story told in at least 12 parts. Over the last 18m of COVID, my view of that series has changed. I thought it was something I wouldn’t touch until I retire. And yet a few times recently, I’ve had a sudden flash of a scene that was missing, giving me an enhanced feel for YOTG01. I know what happens generally in #01 (80%), 04 (30%), and 12 (60%). I don’t feel I’m ready to write these novels, that I can’t do them justice yet, my writing ability isn’t good enough for them. So, again, a pass. I won’t be able to wait until my retirement to start them, but perhaps 2023 at least. I’m ruling this one out.
WIP Showdown
The showdown is between my HR Guide and my first CC novel. The pros and cons are relatively clear…
I want to finish the HR Guide, it is more “pressing” so to speak, and if I spend the next month on the CC novel and perhaps carrying over into December, I might not finish the HR guide by January.
The HR Guide is a manageable project, I know exactly what is required, and I can finish within the month. It’s almost a guaranteed win. The CC novel, by contrast, is still stuck in the opening chapters, and I am not sure yet if I’m sure who the extra suspects are, let alone how I get them all to the murder scene to make them viable suspects. Which means I could get stuck half-way through and NOT reach my NaNoWriMo goal.
By contrast, the HR Guide is NOT a novel, nor is it a new project. The whole point of NaNoWriMo is to blast through something new. Am I cheating by having something in draft mode, even if I have to completely re-write major portions of it? Novels work well for the binge. A guide? Not so much.
Yet the CC novel would be scary fun. I literally have no idea where parts of it will go, and I know sitting down at the keyboard, the words will come from somewhere. I know my style well enough to know that I can “dream my solution” as I type, although it may mean going back to cut some of the drivel once I know the path. Smoothing out the story trajectory, as they say; eliminating meandering streams of consciousness, as I say.
Pressing and manageable vs. new and fun?
And the winner is…
The HR guide. Another thought occurred to me, which is that if I do the novel first, I’ll likely push the guide back another six months. On the other hand, if I finish the guide in November and edit it in December for release in January, I just might be enamoured enough of the novel to start writing right away.
So I’m going to finish the HR guide for NaNoWriMo. Jacob is going to join me in the writing quest. He’s working on a novel, probably middle-grade level, with a likely length somewhere around 30-40K. He has a title and even the cover. I don’t know if he’ll stick with it, but I’m already proud of him for trying. Of course, he’s already a published author as part of a group writing course he did last summer, so he’s got a leg up on me. Maybe he’ll give me tips as we go. Andrea’s going to write some stuff for ToastMasters as well.
Writing as a family for NaNoWriMo? That sounds like #MoreJoy to me.
Okay, so the heading was a bit cryptic to see if you clicked. 🙂 By “dasher”, I mean somebody who likes, designs and uses dashboards.
Obviously, the simplest dashboard is a to-do list. A simple list by itself doesn’t qualify — it shows info, but not status. But as soon as you add a check-box of some sort to show pending vs. completed? Now you’re in dashboard territory.
Those two elements — simple info plus some sort of metric — are the two essential elements of a dashboard. Some people argue that it requires a graphical representation, or an indicator of completion, but that is getting too close to specific forms of dashboards. Your car dashboard indicates speed graphically, which is true, maybe your tachometer in a graphical representation (both usually dials), but it also indicates if your headlights are on or how much gas you have, maybe what your tire pressure levels are currently registering. Even distance. Not all of those are “status of completion”, they’re just a metric.
For those who aren’t really into “planning”, they often think that anyone who makes a list is some form of planner. That the list i.e., the plan, is the most important part. It isn’t. True planners know that the most important part is not the end, but the means and the process. Just as military commanders know that no battle plan ever survives engagement with the enemy, a true planner knows that the value of a plan is the process that went into the actual creation. Knowing what troops you have, how you can deploy them, what resources they’ll need, etc. The end doesn’t justify the means, the means justifies the end product.
I have a huge to-do list, I confess. And it is divided into multiple categories so I’m comparing apples to apples when setting priorities, and into multiple columns for levels of priority within that category. Part of the benefit of that long list is to get it out of my head on to paper so I can easily see what I have in each category and which priorities I might want to tackle this week. But that “list”, even as a to-do list, is not really a dashboard because there’s no real element of it meant to be visual and it runs multiple pages.
To me, you have to be able to see the entire dashboard at a glance. If you can’t, you can’t tell quickly what’s going well and what isn’t, or where you might want to give more attention or take your foot off the gas in another. As such, when I’ve played with my to-do list, I’ve also often had a one-page summary at the front. While it is a dashboard of sorts, it is overly detailed (lots of priorities, not much info) and extremely simplistic (mostly checkboxes). It doesn’t inspire me in any fashion, I don’t look at it and go “There! THERE’s where my attention should be this week!”.
For my attempts at increasing my workout routine, I created a couple of different types of dashboard. The first two are more like info posters than true dashboards, as I don’t modify them regularly. They are overviews for my stretching and workout routines, including the pictures of the exercise for easy memory, and the # of reps or weights I’m using for each. It serves more as an instructional dashboard to get me through the routines than to tell me how I’m doing. It has info and metrics, but it isn’t a “management” tool so to speak. It just tells me where I’m at currently.
I created an actual dashboard for my health, which DOES include a lot of other measures, and which I can update monthly. I’ve even added a basic street-light-inspired heat map of progress – green is good, yellow is caution, red is cause for attention.
I’ve only used it for one month so far, and I ran into some other challenges this month unrelated to the content of the dashboard, so it will take some time to know if this is the right set of metrics going forward.
Wanting a writing dashboard
But I felt I wanted and needed a new dashboard. One that would help me with my writing goals. I focus a lot of time and attention on the content of my websites, but I rarely think about it terms of actual “goals” or “metrics”. I liked it when I hit 500K words, and again when I hit 1M. My visitor stats go up and down, and while I’m regularly above double digits, another week comes along, and I barely have single-digit coverage. I’m okay with that, partly as I am not blogging to become famous, build a brand or run a business. I’m posting what I want, even if it isn’t completely “brand-friendly”.
I have a post coming tomorrow that will talk about a series of posts in November, but I wanted to see “where I was”, a snapshot so-to-speak on my writing goals.
It is NOT very sophisticated, I admit. The top part is really just a current status of how many words I’ve written or the number of posts. When I split my website into two — PolyWogg.ca and ThePolyBlog.ca — I lost the combined totals showing up easily. I knew I was over 1.5M words, and over 1500 posts, but I had not tried to calculate a combined total recently (1.67M words + 1626 posts and pages), plus 528 comments. I suck at engagement, but hey, it’s something. I was also curious to see that my “blog” posts, albeit spread across two sites, is at 1042 by itself. I hadn’t really thought of extracting that number from the data previously. But this post, for example, is exactly that type of post. It’s not a review, it’s not a page, it’s just me blogging about, well, me.
While some of that is purely me being anal to see the numbers, the one that was amazing to see was the Reviews total. I often feel “down” about my review numbers. I started the original site to post book and movie reviews, and when I started, I had some 75 movie reviews in the can (but not copied over) and book reviews ready to GO, with hundreds of books ready to be reviewed. Fast-forward almost 20y, and I’ve only posted 199 book reviews? Really? How is that possible?
And movie reviews, some of that is format, design, time, lack of priority, but less than 10? Wow.
Yet I rarely think about what I am doing instead. A couple of music and podcast reviews, but almost 50 related to “general TV watching” and predictions of where shows will go or get cancelled. Huh. And then the real kicker.
I have 233 reviews of TV premieres and another 23 of full seasons of shows. What? I have MORE full TV reviews than I do book reviews? Really? When did THAT happen? Apparently, almost two years ago, and I never even noticed. I have never really thought of them as full reviews as they are more breezy and less structured. Yet I’ve generated 250 of them without even blinking in the last 8 years. Yet I never give myself credit for it.
At the bottom, I just added references to my current works in progress. I wrote it as if I knew what I was going to write about in November, a novel in particular code-named CC, or two other guides that I count as “works in progress”. I’m still debating which I’m going to use November to blast through. My HR guide isn’t really amenable to the next phase, but I might choose it anyway. I don’t feel like I’m ready for the Astro Guide in full yet, but the novel isn’t quite right either.
For now, I listed two types of metrics — word counts in one area, and table of contents as checkboxes in another.
As I said, the dashboard isn’t quite right, but it doesn’t have to be. The point of doing it was to push my planning a little farther from a simple to-do list and more towards thinking about actual outputs in my writing. Just gathering the data gave me a couple of surprises and a new way of thinking about what I am doing as a writer and where I want to expend my energy.
It’s not the prettiest dashboard, but it does give me #MoreJoy.
