I like to eat.  My ever tightening jeans can attest to that.  I follow quite a few blogs that post fabulous looking recipes on a daily basis and I would love to try to make nice dinners with fresh ingredients every night, but I have some issues.  Most involve my kitchen.

The previous owner of our house was a big “do it yourself” type who had absolutely no idea what he was doing.  Not only that – he also had TERRIBLE taste in decorating.  These were the kitchen cabinets when we moved in…

Yeah.  Those would be salmon colored kitchen cabinets.  They have since been painted, but unfortunately we are still stuck with the stupid kitchen layout left behind by the DIY Dodo.  Wall oven, tiny sliver of counter top, sink, slightly wider bit of counter, ELECTRIC cook-top (I grew up cooking with gas; how to properly bring something to a boil and then simmer on this god awful thing still eludes me), another tiny bit of counter space, wall.

Trying to chop up a bunch of fresh veggies and whip together something on the stove is always a test of my patience.  I have no room, and the stupid cook-top is either not hot enough or so hot that whatever I am trying to cooking ends up looking like a lump of charcoal.  I HATE trying to make dinner in my kitchen.

So you can imagine my excitement when I started seeing all these pins on Pinterest about freezer crock pot meals.  A few hours of torture in the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon and then you have dinner for the rest of your life!  Okay, more like two weeks but that seemed like a good tradeoff to me!  So I picked out some recipes, got all the necessary ingredients and enlisted the boyfriend’s help in prepping everything and loading the meals into freezer bags.   After about two hours we had ten nights worth of meals (leftovers for lunch were promised too!) stacked neatly in the basement freezer.  All I have to do it grab whatever I want the night before so it can thaw in the fridge and then drop it in the crock pot in the morning.  I’d need to make some rice or noodles or whatever to go with each meal, but that’s easy.  THIS was going to be the solution to all my cooking woes!  Right?

Well, not exactly.  I have made three of my meals so far.  Each one had the house smelling yummy and tasted pretty good, there was just this minor issue.  All these lovely blogs about freezer meals failed to mention that EVERY STINKING MEAL was going to end up under a foot of water by the time it was done cooking.  I have cooked plenty of meals in the crock pot (without freezing them first) and have not had this problem.  So unless my grocery store is secretly injecting my vegetables with water to up their weight so they can charge me more I think it has something to do with the whole freezing bit.  Nobody wants sopping wet beef fajitas.  Just saying…

So cooking dinner is STILL annoying and it will be until the day – hopefully in the not so distant future – when we can redo the kitchen.

Making a cocktail, however, is easy no matter how much counter space I have.  All I need is a shot glass, a cocktail shaker, ice and some easy to open bottles of booze.  The biggest annoyance there is when someone puts the ice cube tray back in the freezer without refilling it.  Ahem.

In addition to the ease with which a great cocktail can be created the fact remains that crock pot Chicken Teriyaki could NEVER taste as good as a Kahlua Pumpkin Cheesecake Martini.

That’s right.  I said Kahlua Pumpkin Cheesecake Martini.  It was a decadent as it sounds!  This is definitely a dessert drink.  It’s rich and creamy and sweet and…drool.

Kahlua Pumpkin Cheesecake Martini

Ingredients

2 parts Pinnacle Pumpkin Pie vodka
1 part Kahlua
1 1/2 parts half & half
2 teaspoons cheesecake pudding mix
ice

Directions

In a cocktail shaker combine vodka, Kahlua and cheesecake pudding mix.  Stir until the mix is dissolved.  Then add half & half and ice.  Shake, pour, and float away on a creamy, dreamy cocktail cloud.