How I spend a nice bit of my morning. Red lights that go on…and on….and on…..

This would have been a really great picture – had I actually had my real camera in my purse. Alas, all I had was my trusty iPhone.

I put my camera back in when I got home. This will not happen again.

The intersection of Prince and Washington in Old Town Alexandria. I walk through here no less than 4 or 5 times a week. Pilates or knitting or shopping or….
I just *live* in Maryland on a technicality. I do everything else here.

I had every intention of posting this on Friday – but the day got away from me. And then, the weekend here was beautiful – gorgeous weather, lots of time outside! I went to Pilates like a “good girl” early on Saturday morning, and J and I went down to the shore for the first crabs of the season.

They were SO worth it.

We won’t talk about my first speeding ticket in 15 years, or how it was a total trap because he was sitting in the few hundred yard window where the speed limit went from 55 to 45 before going back up to 55. Honestly, I am a speedy driver, so my number was up.

ANYWAY – I mentioned last weekend that we had reverse engineered a recipe…and we call it a success! Are the originals still better? Of course! But they’re not the easiest thing to come by, and my poor, sensitive stomach took days to recover from them, so I’m quite happy with this substitute. A couple of weeks back, we checked out a new (to us)  music venue called The Birchmere, which has almost a “dinner theater” kind of setup, to listen to Juliana Hatfield (Bonus! Remember her?) and Bob Mould rock out on the night of the launch of his new CD. It was an awesome show, and the food was great. We wondered what “chicken sliders” could possibly be, and upon reading that there was BBQ’d pulled chicken involved, we were all in.

They were AMAZING. Open faced, tangy/spicy pulled BBQ chicken on garlic bread, topped with mozzarella. To die for. And easy enough to make our own version, right?

Well – sort of. We tossed the chicken into the crockpot with some BBQ sauce on the way out the door to the museum and came home to…well…a bit of a mess. Not enough sauce. While my Dad dug in and salvaged as much as he could of the chicken breast, I ran out to the store to get a container of the ol’ standby Lloyd’s.  In the end, we mixed them together and it was just perfect.

The moral to the story? Premade BBQ chicken = good. Chicken in the crockpot with anything less than about 2 cups of BBQ sauce = bad.

Chicken Sliders

1 lb (-ish) chicken breasts, thawed (or just one package from the store)
1 FULL bottle BBQ sauce of choice

OR

1-2 packages of premade BBQ pulled chicken (Lloyd’s was great)
Gouda cheese, grated, for topping (a little more character than the mozzarella)
Loaf of crusty bread, sliced into 1 – 1.5″ slices
Butter
Garlic powder and/or minced garlic

The morning of, toss the chicken and the BBQ sauce into a crock pot, mix, and set on low for 8 hrs. Go to work. Pray for the best. (If using prepackaged, obviously, skip this step.)
When it’s done, use two forks to shred the chicken. Set aside. Preheat broiler. Spread butter and garlic on one side of each bread slice, broil until lightly toasted. Remove, flip the toast, and do the same to the other side. Add chicken, top with shredded gouda, and broil again to melt the cheese.

Eat in large quantities. Best with beer.

Dad and his wife have been here this weekend – the closest we get to Easter around here is breaking out a Paas kit and feasting on Peeps and Creme Eggs. So, while everyone else spent Sunday at church and at family gatherings, we spent it at the newly-reopened Museum of American History. Two of the exhibits we really wanted to see had lengthy lines, but we were able to see the Star-Spangled Banner and this:

Any ideas?

It’s Julia Child’s kitchen.

I was amazed by how homey and real it is, and at the amazing array of gadgets – the mix of single-use gadgets and the best of the best multitaskers. Her knife collection. The pots and pans on peg boards on the walls. The solid, central kitchen table that could serve as a dinner place, a gathering place, and an extra workspace.

Nothin’ fancy, but heaven conceptually for the home cook.

The exhibit included TV’s playing her old PBS shows – as a New England girl, shows from WGBH-Boston were regular Saturday fodder. This Old House. New Yankee Workshop. Jacques Pepin. Yan Can Cook. And of course, Julia Child – who, by the time I was on the scene, had long ago settled in Cambridge and was filming her show, finished each episode buy sitting down to dinner with a glass of wine. It was actually a mix of water and Gravy Master, I learned today – she didn’t want to be drunk and filming, but did enjoy good wine with her meals – a lesson learned from her time in France at the Cordon Bleu. Forty plus years ago, she was making a point of cooking in season, with locally grown produce. Sound like a familiar “trend?”

“Food should have sense of time and place,” one of her friends said in a video. I wholeheartedly agree.

We came home, newly inspired. We tried a little recipe reverse-engineering for dinner tonight. I think we have a winner – a fun, easy meal. With a sense of time and place – at least, a reminder of it for us…