No, not me! eesh, like if I was I’d blog about that?? 😉
The potato I had for a late dinner tonight, it was baked, in my oven, in my new apartment – the first thing to get put in the oven since I moved here, yah me for cooking! Well, ok, it barely counts as cooking, just like boiling some pasta and throwing a jar of pasta sauce on top of it doesn’t count as cooking either but hey, it’s the little steps! lol
It’s weird, I used to cook everyday, but since moving in to this apartment I barely use the kitchen, and when I do it’s to make tea, Mmm tea 🙂
First it was because when I moved my stuff in I blocked off the stove and could only open the fridge wide enough to squeeze out a small bottle of diet coke. You’d think I’d move the stuff in the kitchen so I could access those two appliances fairly quickly, but nope, not me, didn’t see the point. For the first week or so of living here I survived off of Clif Bars and diet coke, so healthy huh? Then I got some food in, actually wait, did I? Huh, no, I actually didn’t. I ate at work or grabbed take out or ate with friends and brought back left overs, but didn’t stock up the kitchen. I take some sort of weird pride out of my almost empty fridge, like the less items I have on the shelves the better. I don’t know where that mind set came from and really, I don’t care enough to track down its origin within my brain, it is just there, shrug.
But the other day I went grocery shopping, I was actually going specifically for milk for my tea (Mmm tea! lol) and while I was there I meandered on over to the produce section. I wasn’t really in a shopping frame of mine, well, food shopping, if it had been shoes or clothes or that ring I saw on ebay I really want then I’m sure I’d of dived right in to the shopping experience, but food? Nah. On a whim I decided to get a potato, I’d gotten the image of a baked potato in my head earlier that day and I guess it stuck enough that I was still semi-thinking about it when I was in the shop. Well, if I am going to bake a potato I need toppings for it right? Right! I already had cheese but I required maple flavoured baked beans to make this meal perfect. Don’t make that face! I can practically hear you making a cringy face and going “maple flavoured baked beans on a baked potato???? gross!” to that I say “don’t knock it till you’ve tried it!” 😛
I love anything maple, yummmm! and maple baked beans are a particular favourite, they are made by Heinz, go Heinz! lol They have other flavoured baked beans if maple isn’t your thing, but, well, how could maple not be your thing? *confused face* It had been so long since I baked a potato (I wasn’t allowed them on my most recent meal plan and they have remained on my personal list of “don’t touch that food!”) that I actually had to google how to bake a potato, lame. Luckily, I found a great site, not like baking a potato is hard *rolls eyes* but they had some ideas I hadn’t heard of before and I quite like how the potato turned out. Basically, oven at 425F, scrub clean the potato, stab potato, rub potato with olive oil, sprinkle some salt and pepper on it, place on tin foil that is on a baking tray, stick in oven. It takes 50-60 minutes in the oven, remember to turn the potato every 20 minutes and occasionally stab it to check on its progress. Easy peasy!
My addition of course is to heat up the baked beans so when the potato is done I can cut it open, put some cheese on it, drown it in baked beans and then settle down to a nice cozy yummy dinner. 🙂
The result had a nice crunchy skin and fluffy inside. 🙂 I think I will skip the salt and pepper next time though, I never use salt in anything, seriously, never. I am not that person who feels salt needs to be added to every freakin dish to provide some flavour. I generally like how foods taste when they taste like themselves, not when they taste like salty versions of themselves…this seems to be something not many people agree with me about, ah well, it’s good to be different lol. I found the salt and pepper taste to be quite strong and I didn’t use all that much, I guess it is because I so rarely use pepper and never use salt that my taste buds notice them quite easily. For the most part though I could drown out the salt and pepper flavour by making sure some cheese and baked beans were on the spoon with the potato.
I suppose I should get back in to the swing of things cooking wise. Don’t really have the excuse of not being able to access my fridge or stove anymore but, sigh, I got so used to not cooking that the idea of doing it again, on a daily basis, *groan* is enough to make me take a deep sigh and contemplate living off of Clif Bars again. 😛 Well, Clif Bars and maybe a multi-vitamin or something…
😉
The Amazing Shrinking Woman 