Cooper Street Shenanigans

 This past weekend I went home to visit my family. Although I live like 15 minutes away, I don't go home that often. I wanted to see my little sister because she just got her wisdom teeth out. This weekend was full of puppy snuggles and baking. Finn, pictured below, is not growing fast and that means I can still pick him up and he still falls asleep on my chest. But he sure does have a TON of energy. I was trying to take him on a walk and all he wanted to do was play with every single plant that we walked past so we did not get that far. He is at the age where he does not sleep a lot. My mom says he has been waking her up by barking at 5 am and then he won't settle down for bed until 11 pm.   The rest of the weekend we cooked. On Saturday morning my mom put a pork butt into the crock pot with some seasoning and bay leaves for pork carnitas later. Let me tell you, it was delicious. I made my special salsa to finish off the tacos. One thing I have come to love with my tacos is w...

     Just when I thought we might have a mild fall then weather got freezing fast. So here I am sitting in my old house at Bradley freezing. We had been waiting to turn the heat on because we didn't know if it was going to get warm again. I woke up on Monday morning and our house was a brisk 50 degrees so we decided to turn the heat on.  The best thing to do when it gets cold enough to turn the heat on? Carve pumpkins. Did you know you can get really good pumpkins for three dollars at Walmart? My roommates and I got two pumpkins and started figuring out what we should carve them into. I chose to do a spider and my other roommate wanted to the normal scary pumpkin carving.  Something about seeing a pumpkin lit up in a dark room is one of my favorite things ever. I remember when I was little we would carve about 3 pumpkins every year during Halloween. What I don't remember is how hard it is to cut the pumpkins perfectly. Maybe I am a little more of a perfectionist...

Has anyone ever made chicken in the crock pot? Asking for anyone! Monday I went to class but before I left I put 3 boneless chicken breasts in the crock pot with some salt and pepper. I thought that would be good and didn't think much about it until I was halfway to my class, that I might need to add some sort of liquid to the bottom of the crock pot.  Of course, this happens when I can't do anything to fix it. I call my mom really quick and she said you could add some chicken broth to the bottom or water. I immediately text my roommates to add some water to the bottom of the crock pot because the chicken was said to take 3 hours.  Once I got back from my two classes the chicken was done. It seemed to be moist but I had not shredded it yet. Here is another question... how do you shred chicken? I used two forks and had such a hard time shredding it.  Overall, the chicken ended up being really good shredded just took way too much time shredding and had too much stress to ma...

 Another week of a pandemic and that means another week full of different recipes. This week was hard because I struggled to make something I have not made before. On Saturday I tried something different.  I went to the store and got fresh chicken breasts, mozzarella cheese, and pesto sauce. Once I got home I made the chicken in the skillet and seasoned it to perfection, then I put some spaghetti on the stove and made some pasta. Once the chicken was cooked I left in on the skillet to simmer and sprinkled some mozzarella cheese on it and put a little bit on pesto on the skillet. I let the pesto cook into the chicken to give it some flavor. Then I added the cheese and pesto to the spaghetti as well. I forgot to take a picture but the dinner was amazing! Then on Sunday night I thought of another great idea. I still had left over chicken breast that I had not cooked yet so I cooked up one breast of chicken with just salt and pepper. Once it was all cooked, I used two forks to spr...