cooking with no kitchen

I say "cooking" lightly. There really is no cooking without a kitchen.

Oh, sure we can throw some stuff in the crock pot and have a delicious meal, but real cooking involves so much more. Like the dicing and sauteing of veggies, the peeling of potatoes and simmering of sauces, the broiling of garlic and the mixing of ingredients. 

Not to mention the not having to wait 6 hours before you can dig in. 

That's torture is what that is. Usually when you cook in a crock pot, you throw it in, and leave your big open house while it cooks, and then when you come home from your shopping and lunches with friends and mani/pedis and all the fun stuff you can do when you're not sitting in a truck traveling 70 mph all day every day...

When you come home from all that, the food is ready to be eaten.

However, if you so happen to be sitting in a truck traveling 70 mph all day every day, and there happens to be something sloooowly cooking away in the crock pot, you smell it. 

If you're not hungry already, you will be. 

There's no airing the truck out. If you dare open the windows more than a crack, all your belongings will soon be scattered all over the USA. And while it certainly does sound like a good reason to go shopping for all new belongings, you simply will not have time to do so, because there is a load to be delivered and as soon as it's delivered, there's another to pick up. 

All you will be left with is the clothes on your back, providing they survived. 

That being said, we love the crock pot!!! 

Because when you have to choose between a slice of truck stop pizza that is dripping in grease and has been sitting under the warmers for who knows how long and a nice hunk of pot roast and carrots, 9 times out of 10 you are going to choose the pot roast.

And trust me, if you have to choose between a truck stop soup bar, and freshly slow cooked chicken and rice, 10 times out of 10 you are going to choose chicken and rice. 

Shucks, even if you have to eat the grease-on-a-crust, you aren't going to eat from the soup bar.

If you are presented with a choice between prepackaged sandwiches and some good old slow cooked pulled pork with BBQ sauce on a premium wheat bun...well the answer is obvious.

And that is why we love the crock pot. It's not as good as real cooking, but it's a luxury we are glad to have.

But, we don't always cook in the crock pot. We have a microwave and we have a huge box full of microwave meals.

I usually eat pastas, like these:

As far as microwave meals go, those are the best.They each come in several different flavors, so there's bound to be something you'll like. 

Jesse usually eats these:

They come in lots of different meals. He's had chicken and rice, meat loaf, some Mexican concoction, raviolis, and lots more.

I don't really care for them. They all seem to have the same underlying flavors, and they are certainly nothing special, but that's just my personal opinion.

Breakfast is the hardest. We have done a sausage egg casserole in the crock pot that was awesome.

I keep a box of cheerios and some milk in the fridge.

I slice up a banana with my spoon-knife and have me a regular old breakfast.

Before we leave, I fry up a pound of sausage patties for Jesse, he eats them on English muffins with mustard. That usually lasts about a week.

When we don't eat cereal and sausage sandwiches, we usually eat a honey bun or a Dole fruit cup.

On occasion I insist we eat out, because when else are we going to eat at the Lone Star Grill or Crazy 'Bout Crawfish? I like to eat at little one of a kind places, and as long as we can get in and out of the parking lot, Jesse doesn't mind eating with me.

By far the best little hole in the wall place was Crazy 'Bout Crawfish, a Cajun cafe in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

I got the seafood platter, because I couldn't decide on one particular thing.

The food:

some sort of shrimp on rice

super spicy fried shrimp, tail on

crawfish pie

fried crawfish

fried fish fillet

crawfish cheddar jalapeno cornbread

and 3 other things that had foreign names and were really tasty!

We also have some snacks! A typical day consists of a small breakfast, an afternoon snack, and either a crock pot meal, microwave dinner, or eating out somewhere. 

And there you have it, the glamorous life of a foodie stuck in a truck.

It really is quite tortuous at times. I constantly am thinking of things that I can't wait to cook when I get home. For example, deviled eggs, angel food cake, pumpkin pie, a salad with avocado, sausage gravy and biscuits, apples-anything with apples, all foods that I can't fix, and you just can't buy them to taste like you want.

What foods would you miss the most if you didn't have all the comforts of a kitchen?

On a related note-I will be so glad to come and cook for you when I am home! Just let me know in the comments, and I'll text you when I'm home and we'll set up a date!

commenting on my blog; HOW TO.

I've had several different people wonder how to post directly on the blog, and rather than explain it 15 different times, I thought I'd just go ahead and tell you all how to do it.

Click on this link:

Create A Google Account

It's pretty simple from there, but I went ahead and took the liberty of creating an account for Jesse, and I've got some step-by-step pictures here to help out.

The link should take you to this page:

Fill the form out.

This will give you a new email address, that you will use to log in, or a little later in the process you can change that to any email address you would rather use.

Make sure you uncheck that box that I circled in red. You more than likely don't want that.

Click on the "Next Step" button and you should see this: (with your name, not Jesse's ;)

Click on "Get Started" and that brings you to this page:

if you want to change your email address so you can forget about this new one, click on the "Edit" button right beside "Email"

Enter in the email address you want to use. It can't be a gmail-cus DUH that means you already have a google account and have been through this process before and have no reason to be doing it again. It can't be an email address that is already linked to another google account, which would also mean that you already have a google account, or someone has been using your email to access their google account.

Save that.

Then, go to my blog.

Oh.

You're already here.

Go to the top of the page:

Sign in with your username (the email that you selected) and your password.

That will bring you to this page:

For the purposes of commenting, you want to select the "Blogger Profile" which gives you this screen:

Fill in with the name that you want to show on your profile, and "Continue to Blogger."

That will bring you to your profile where you can start a blog of your own, or create a list of blogs that you follow, etc. But I'm just showing you how to comment, so...back to my blog.

You are now signed in, and will stay signed in on any page you have open in the browser, until you close it.

That's how you know you are signed in and ready to comment.

So go to the post you want to comment on, scroll to the bottom, "add a comment," and from the drop down menu, select "-yourprofilenamehere-(Google)." And don't ask me why this one says "Unknown (Google)" It should say "hubster."

Type your comment, and "Publish."

Naturally, they are going to want proof that you are not a robot. Please comply.

Hit publish, and TA-DAH. You have posted your very own comment.

So what information will the general public be able to see about you when they click on your name in the comment section?

Nothing except your profile name and the month you created your profile. And how many nosy people have clicked over to see what they can find out about you.

If you want to change anything about the information shown on your profile, click on the "Edit Profile" in the upper right corner, and go from there. If you can't figure it out from that point, I'll be glad to help, but the purpose of this post was to show you how to get set up where you can comment on my blog, not explain away the entire internets!

So. Now there can be no excuses for not commenting! :)

And here's something to brighten your day:

Thank you for reading my blog!

catching up.

So...it's been a while.

I had hoped to get all caught up on the blog while I was at home, but that visit got cut short and there was too many other things that I felt like I should do that took precedence over the blog.
'Cus you know, I'll have tons of time to do it once we get back on the road....

Yeah, right.
I was kept fairly busy this past week with a few good books I couldn't stop reading, and a bunch of naps I couldn't stop myself from taking. Not to mention the lack of cell service in most parts of the northern and north-western US. 

At the moment we are on I-35 just past Fort Worth, TX headed to Waco, where I will have the pleasure of helping take tarps off of our current load. I can't wait!  Ha.
But before I tell you all about today, I guess I obviously need to catch you up on the past 3 weeks.

I can't really remember the particular loads we were carrying, nor can I remember the exact day we were in any of these places, but I know the states. 

These pictures are on the road from Miles City, Montana to Sheridan Wyoming.

So my first thought when coming up on these mountains was "ROCKIES" but no, these are not the Rockies. They are a smaller chain called the Little Bighorns. Still pretty impressive, but I haven't seen the Rockies this close yet, so I can't really compare them.

These little boogers in the next picture, well, I'll just say they are really extremely sharp and sticky and they REALLY HURT if you sit on one. Oopsies. 

I'm going to separate the "catching up" pictures into different posts so they are easier to keep track of. Mostly just because I want to take a bathroom break and I want to post this so everyone can read it and leave me comments, 'cus comments warm my already warm heart (it's 98.6 in there, yo). Anyways, I like to read everyone's comments-it shows me that y'all really do read this and I'm not just tapping away on the keyboard (and ignoring Jesse's pleadings to heat him up some food because I'm too caught up in writing to pay any attention to him) for nothing. :)