Tabi's version of crock pot orange chicken

I love Chinese food...the problem is it's too expensive and way saturated with fat. So I trialed and errorred a couple of orange chicken recipes. They were ok, but I've found the best combination out of my trial and error. Below is my version of orange chicken....in a crock pot. It is sure to please and a lot healthier than going out. I also think it is more tasty. The picture below I got from online because I keep forgetting to take pictures of my food! But it looks pretty close to that.

Orange Chicken in a Crock Pot

Ingredients:

1 lb of boneless, skinless chicken breasts chopped into bite sized chunks

1/3 cup of flour

1tsp of salt

1 tsp of pepper

olive oil

4-5 oz of frozen orange juice concentrate (thawed)

2-3 TBSP of Balsamic vinegar

3 TBSP of ketchup

3-4 TBSP of brown sugar

2 tsp of ginger

3 tsp of garlic

1-2 TBSP of soy sauce

Red Pepper flakes to taste or liking

In the crock pot mix the Orange Juice, Balsamic vinegar, Ketchup, Brown sugar, Ginger, Garlic, Soy Sauce and red pepper flakes to combine all ingredients.

Place the flour into a small bowl. Sprinkle your salt and pepper on the chicken chunks, then place them into the flour and cover them. Shake off excess flour.

Heat olive oil in a pan over medium heat. When it is hot enough, place all the chicken chunks in and cook. Cook the chicken until they have a nice light golden brown color to them. (You don't need to cook them all of the way, just enough to get some color on them) Place the browned chicken into the crock pot mixture.

Cook on high for 1-2 hours or low for 3 -4 hours. I personally stick them in the crock pot for only 1 hour on high as it retains the moister of the chicken better.

**Note: you can make the sauce thinner by adding 1/2 cup of water to the mixture before adding the chicken, if you'd like.

If you try this recipe, let me know what you think!

Discovering New Things

This new year has been all about trying new things so far. We've been trying new recipes, going to new places, and I have been trying new activities. Why not? There is so much out there that there's no point in secluding yourself to what you know...that's just boring. I want to discover it all!

Trying New Activities:
I've discovered Pinterest...and I'm obsessed. I got myself an account and have been glued to it ever since.

The shooting range. I've always been kind of fearful of fire arms. Mostly because I've never handled a gun or been close enough to touch one. Pretty much the only guns I've seen were on TV. The unknown is scary. Lucky for me I've married into a heavily armed, yet knowledgeable family. They hunt on a regular basis so fire arms are no stranger to them. To break me of my fears, my husband took me to the shooting range and taught me how to use a gun. I was quite nervous but once I shot a few times, I felt more comfortable. My weapon of usage was a 22. It was light and something I could manage. My husband also had me shoot from a 9mm. That recoil was bigger than I expected but I would definitely have to practice.

Trying new recipes:
I love going online or looking in my cookbook for something new to try. Ever since last year when I discovered polenta, my eyes have been open and my stomach eager to taste new foods. Since we don't have any children, the only taste buds we have to worry about are our own. This gives us the opportunity to explore and experiment.
I've concocted things like Honey-garlic balsamic chicken with couscous, Tuna cakes and tonight I made roasted chicken with balsamic peppers. Delicious!

I've also been having more fun with baking. I was assigned to make a birthday cake for a co-worker. German Chocolate cake. This gave me the chance to practice my cake decorating skills that I gained but never use. Everyone enjoyed the cake and were impressed were my amatuer decorating skills. Today I also decided to make white chocolate truffle cupcakes. I'm excited to take them to work tomorrow.

Trying new places:
We've gone to a couple of new restaurant joints here in the Springs. A little outside of our box. Of course we only entered those places because friends invited us. Our good friends, the Nimers, invited us out to dinner a couple weeks ago to a chinese eatery that we had never been before. Their food was quite excellent, just as good if not better than P.F. Changs...probably because it is authentic chinese.

And last night I went to a hopping restaurant called Nosh. It's upscale dining that allows you to really experience the food. They have dishes that I've never heard of before, concoctions that sound odd but it's all very fresh and exquisite. It was very enjoyable...and a little pricey. But definitely a place I want to go back.

I hope to continue this expedition of experiencing new things for the rest of this year. It's a little scary, yet exhilirating.

1 more Year until the BIG 25/100

January 19th 1988 was the day I entered this world. And already 23 years have flown by! I turned 24 this past Thursday. That means I only have 1 more year until I'm a quarter of a century years old! A CENTURY!!! I've got to live it up this year!

I had a wonderful birthday this year. My co-workers celebrated my special day with me by taking me to lunch and having ice cream cake! I was also able to get off of work a little bit early. When I went to go pick up James he had beautiful roses, chocolates (only in the small boxes of twos so I wouldn't feel so guilty) and a wonderful heart-felt card waiting for me. Isn't he the sweetest? I certainly think so.

To finish off my celebration of birth-day he took me out to Red Lobster. We never go to a seafood joint because he is not a fan of seafood...however I LOVE it! So it was very exciting for me. I absolutely indulged in the fluffy mouth-watering cheesy garlic biscuits that are so unique to Red Lobster. The juicy and suculent snow crab and crispy coconut shrimp tickeled my tastebuds. Oh how I missed you seafood!...that's what I was thinking anyways. It was a fabulous dinner finished off with an apple crumble a-lamode desert.

We finished our evening cuddling up on the couch watching The Help. Which, by the way was a great movie. Although, it had my stomach tied up in knots because I was so angry during most of it. But it really plays on your emotions. That's what makes a good movie, I think.

What a wonderful birthday I had! And I thought that was the end.....until.....my husband decided he wanted to celebrate my birthday on Saturday too! My tricky and darling husband decided to make me a scrumptious breakfast when I got home from my body pump class. We then proceeded to laze around the house for the morning. Ahhh...nice and relaxing. He felt, however that it was not enough, so we went mini-golfing and hit up the batting cages. It was nice enough weather to have some outdoor fun. After mini-golfing we headed up to Denver...for what, I had no idea. But I was ok with it, getting out of the Springs is always a good idea. HA HA! After doing a little shopping at the 16th Street mall we went to dinner. And this was my surprise. He had set up dinner with a bunch of my friends to surprise me.

We went to a little Mexican Denver joint called Jack n' grill. Supposedly it's the 13th best mexican joint in the Nation. I was surprised to see my good friend Missy and some friends from the Springs. It was such a nice surprise. My hubby was a little disappointed though because he had invited a few of my friends from Fort Collins to come but unfortunately were unable to attend at the last minute. I was happy enough that he had even thought of all of this for me!

So we enjoyed good conversation and pretty yummy food.

Bruce and Shafer decided to share the restaurant's famous 7 pound Burrito. They did a pretty good job eating it all but it was A LOT of food.

What a fantastic Husband I have. I'm so blessed! Thank You James for making my life so astounding!

Blog Fail: But here's the 2011 update!

So obviously I've failed horendously at blogging. I haven't posted anything since October 2011 and here we are in the middle-end of January 2012. Never a good sign. But maybe I'll be better this year! To catch you up, here are the things that have been going on:

In October and November James and I (mostly I) discovered geocaching! Basically it's a huge scavenger hunt that people all over the world participate in. You can check out Geocaching.com for more information. It is a lot of fun. James and I decided to be adventurous and try it out. All we did was find a geocaching excursion and located it on our GPS. We had to look for various containers in these hidden locations to find the prizes inside. The prizes are just little toys or contraptions or notes that you are supposed to find. It was a lot of fun. Then we got to write our names in the sign in and head on to the next one.

I think we'll do more when it's warmer.

Thanksgiving was different for me. For the past 4 years or so I've gone to the Metz's for Thanksgiving. Now that I'm married it was time to spend it with my hubby and his family. It turned out to be a lot of fun. It was really warm out (try like 70's) so James, Mathias (his brother) and myself threw the football around outside for a bit until dinner. Dinner was fabulous! We had a deep fried incredibly delicious turkey with all of the fabulous fixings. I even contributed by making sweet yams with marshmellows. YUM! I felt so blessed to have married into such a great family.

Christmas was just as good as Thanksgiving. James and I invited my little sister and his friend Matty over for Christmas breakfast. Before breakfast James and I did our little Christmas before our guests came over. For Christmas Breakfast we had Pancakes, eggs, bacon etc for a delicious breakfast. I think everyone enjoyed it. It was nice to have people over th enjoy the holiday with. We then headed over to my in-laws and celebrated Christmas with them. I felt a lot more comfortuable with them than I did last year for Christmas! Although last year James and I had just gotten engaged and I still didn't know the fam all that well yet.

I also made sure to bake tons of cookies this year! We ate cookies every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner for about a month!

So Christmas came and went.....fast! Before I knew it it was New Year's! Prior to the new year I wanted a change. I wanted to do something different with my appearance. And so....I decided to dye my hair. I was going for a nice dark chocolate brown. However, it came out a little darker than I wanted. I didn't like it at first but now I think I love it. It's definitely growing on me. It

was fun to show off my new look at our New Year's Eve get together

We decided to get out of the house for New Year's Eve and headed to the bowling alley's for some midnight bowling with some friends. It was a lot of fun, a lot better than sitting at home doing nothing. I had a blast, and it was the latest I had stayed up in a long time! (How sad!)

Here's to the New Year!