My Life of Inconvenience

I took advantage of yesterday's sunshine and scorching heat, and dried my laundry on the line.  While TBG doesn't like his clothes stiff from the line, I do.  As a result, I did a load of my clothes and then hung them out.  When I do loads with his clothes, I give them a quick tumble to soften them up.  However, I prefer saving energy by using the power of the sun.  It's a lot more effort than just throwing the washed clothes into the dryer, but it's economical and environmentally friendly so I am up for the extra work.

Yesterday I purchased a tray of four large chicken leg quarters.  The .53 cents per pound fryer deal was past but I still knew we wanted meat.  As soon as I got home from work, I put the four quarters in the pressure cooker with some liquid, celery and spices.  After 25 minutes, I took them out and set them to cool while I walked the dog.

Once at home, I pulled off the skin and set it aside for the pup.  Then I pulled the meat off the legs.  I dumped the bones back into the pressure cooker and added more water, then set it that to cook.  Since the meat still needed a little more cooking, I cut it into slices and tossed that with lemon and garlic, then convection roasted it for twenty minutes at 325.  Once that was done, I set aside the larger slices for TBG to use in wraps and for me to make meals with during the week.

The smaller bits (to the right) went into a black bean and chicken chili tonight.  I added celery, onion and red pepper and a little bit of tomato sauce.  It was very yummy.  In the past, I would have made bread but TBG and I are trying to drop a few pounds and I also knew we would have the rest of the homemade blueberry pie for dessert.

The stock was enough to fill three sauce jars. I plan to freeze two of them.  Since summer is not really hot soup weather, there is no need to have three jars in the fridge.

Making up stock from scratch, cooking up chicken in bulk and getting it ready for other meals is not convenient.  Convenient would be to buy boxes of broth in the store and bags of chicken strips by Perdue.  Unfortunately, that would be expensive and the products would be super high in sodium and other additives.

I don't have apps on my phone, our cars are not "smart," and very few things I do outside of work are technology-centric.  The manual nature of my life would drive the average American crazy, however, I like doing these basic things.  We don't need the latest of everything and we don't need things to be easy.  What we do need, is time to get to do these things that take more time.  For me, part of the way to get that time is to ignore FaceBook and use my phone for phone calls (and sometimes text), and that's it.

The world is trying to sell us all more technology to save us time, in order to use even more technology.  Seems pretty stupid to me!