I have a love/hate relationship with magazines, as everyone knows.  Remember my monthly column about Panic Attack Magazine?  Hey, I wrote it for 3 months, that is some serious dedication.  Well, now that my children are all grown up, and I have stopped caring worrying enough to read parenting magazines, I have moved on to cooking/decorating/lifestyle magazines, and the love/hate affair has continued.  Mostly I read recipes in the car on the way to Eldora, decide what to make someday, fold down the corners to mark the page, and then lazily cook the same old meals and recycle the magazine because it told me to get rid of clutter.  But when I was reading all my magazines on the beach, it was dangerously close to New Years Day, and I decided to turn over a new leaf and cook some of the recipes.  For real.  I also read an article that was so wonderfully awful, I could write about it for days.  It had the perfect mixture of a good idea taken too far, first world problems, pretention, and hypocrisy.  I laughed and laughed and then mocked it with my friend Laura.  And then…  and then we came up with an article I could write about my own family that followed that exact formula and it would be so perfect for that magazine.  So do I link to the article and make fun of it, or do I write my own version and become magazine famous?  It’s a real Sophie’s choice.

In the meantime – here is a round up/review of the recipes I have tried last month:

Martha Stewart Roast Spatchcocked Lemon Chicken – (Martha Stewart Living, January 2013) Dave made this one, so I can’t comment on how hard/easy it was, but it tasted good.  It wasn’t the best or worst thing I have ever had, but it was necessary for the following:

Roast Lemon Chicken and Rice Soup – (Martha Stewart Living, January 2013) I usually have an idea of whether or not I am going to like something, and I usually like it.  This was the rare exception.  This soup was gag-inducingly bad.  “It tasted like a cough drop” was the nicest thing I could say about it.  It was gross.  Thankfully, I didn’t use all the leftover chicken from above, because it would have gone to waste.  I did make the kids eat the chicken out of their bowls, and I did the same.  Dave made a valiant effort to eat the leftovers but most of it got tossed.  Oddly, the Daily Camera featured this exact recipe this week and I gagged all over again.  Do Not Make.

But I did use the rest of the chicken in a noodle bowl recipe from Sunset February 2013.  The noodles are here, and the veggies  here, (I just used veggies that I had and that the kids like) and I threw the leftover chicken in broth with some scallions.  I seasoned half the noodles and half the veggies and let people pick what they wanted in their bowl.  Everybody went with broth, chicken, noodles, and veggies.  (Kids unseasoned, adults – seasoned.)  The kids LOVED it.  Luke said he wanted me to make it for his birthday dinner.  We’ve already had it twice.  I may have set the bar really low with the cough drop soup.  The noodle bowl recipes were in an article about this book: The Hakka Cookbook.

Quinoa and Pumpkin Seed Granola – (Better Homes and Gardens January 2013) I am not going to link to this one because it’s from Better Homes and Gardens and you have to login to see the recipe.  But if you are motivated, you can find it.  It was really yummy, and good, but I was the only one who liked it so I probably won’t make it again.  The kids were sad that it was nothing like granola made with oats, and it was very crumbly so it was hard for them to eat by the handful.  I liked it on top of oatmeal, and in yogurt.  It’s great if you get your organic quinoa in a giant bag from costco and then worry about what to do with it.  Yep, that is a problem that people have.

So there you go – not too bad for January.