Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day to all my friends and family! We enjoyed a semi-quiet night at home. Our teenage daughter is out of town for the week, so we did our dinner out Sunday night, just the two of us. So on Valentine's Day, I served leftovers (romantic, eh?). It was actually better than it sounds. I mixed the crock pot minestrone soup with the leftover crock pot "fried chicken." It was just what the soup needed. The soup was excellent by itself, but we are a bunch of meat eaters here, so the missing meat was really missed. I also made crescent rolls and a cheesecake.

This is my cheesecake attempt. It was supposed to be a crock pot recipe, but to do that you had to have a baking dish that will fit inside your crock pot, and it turns out I don't... which I didn't know until I was ready to cook it :( So I put it in a pie pan and baked it. Problem is, with a crock pot, you just put it in and let it cook forever. I didn't have any idea how long it should cook in the oven. Also, I have no positive experiences with cheesecake. I didn't realize it would puff up and seem wiggly even when it was done, so I overcooked it. Imagine my shock when I went back to it and it had fallen and seemed much more brown around the edges than I wanted. Oh well. Cherry pie filling covers a multitude of flaws. And, my sweet husband said it was still really good. I'm gonna have to find a pan that will fit in the crock pot, because I think this would be really good done that way.

I told you I would get back to you with how the "fried chicken" recipe came out. It was pretty good, surprisingly it was a little crisp, too. For the most part we loved this, but decided we are definitely NOT drumstick lovers. We don't care for the flavor, and the amount of grease it put off was staggering. Next time I will use breast and thigh pieces instead (with the skin removed) and it should be great. I also think it could use more salt, but then I over-salt everything, so maybe that was just me. I had a bad cold the day I made this and that afternoon the spice smell was so intense that it kept tickling my throat and making me cough. In fact it smelled incredible within 30 minutes of putting it in to cook. Yummy. We just need to tweak it a bit.