So the repair technician for the microwave oven came out yesterday and pronounced the microwave oven officially in critical condition. A part needs to be ordered and it will take several days for the part to arrive. When the part arrives he will call me to schedule a time to come back out and fix the microwave. Yeah, right. Thoughts race back to the time when my dryer broke and a part had to be ordered. That time the part was sent to the wrong place and after waiting six weeks with the patience of a saint the dryer was eventually fixed. Will it take that long to fix the microwave?

Well, I asked the technician if the part could be shipped to me directly and then I call HIM to schedule the appointment, and he said he didn’t think so. He was very nice (and a cutie too) and PROMISED that it would be less than a week. He gave me some paperwork and went off to his next appointment. I don’t want to say that I don’t trust the guy, but I wrote a note on my calendar to follow up in one week, and then went down into my storage room to pull out my old “college dorm” microwave that had been gathering dust for the past several years and brought it upstairs. I’ll be using that to cook my meals until my “good” microwave is up and running. Sometimes it makes sense to be a little bit of a pack-rat!

Coming home and finding the two cheesecakes that I ordered online at Cheesecake.com had been delivered was the highlight of my long hard day. The receptionist at work is off on maternity leave and they are having a hard time finding a temp to come in and take over for her until she comes back in a few weeks and we have all been doing what we can in order to keep the office running in her absence. It has a been a wake up call to us all on how much we all rely on her and how much she does each and every day and we are more than ready to have her come back and we will show her a lot more respect and less attitude after this experience.

Anyway, the only thing that I was asked to bring to Easter dinner this year is cheesecake. Last year I surprised everyone with one and it was a big hit and now it looks like it will be our Easter desert tradition, which is fine by me. I love cheesecake, any kind of cheesecake and cheesecake goes with just about everything.

Don’t you love extended warranties?

I was cooking dinner last night in the microwave oven.  The timer told me that the meal was half cooked and it was time to stir it. As I opened the microwave I discovered that the dish was still very cold!  I checked all of my settings on the microwave to make sure it was set on “high” (it was) but the food was not getting hot.  I reset the microwave again, started it up again and let it run for another ten minutes. The light was on, and I could hear the microwave humming, and I went back to doing something else, hoping that all was well.

When the timer beeped I went to the microwave, opened it up, took out the meal, and was quite disappointed to find that it was still cold!  Not a happy camper, I can tell you that! I immediately put the uncooked microwave meal in the refrigerator, pulled a saucepan off of the pot rack, put a couple of inches of water in it and put it on the stove top. Then I dropped in a couple of hot dogs and while they were cooking pulled out the extended warranty information from the filing cabinet. After eating dinner I called the telephone number from the extended warranty information and made arrangements for a technician to come out and take a look at the microwave.

Tonight I decided to cook something special for dinner I’d never tried before.  I cooked chicken cordon bleu, rice, peas, gravy, and dinner rolls.  We had company for dinner, so it was really nice to have something special like that turn out so good!  I’m getting to be a pretty good cook, if I say so myself!  I think cooking is actually quite a bit of fun, if you can get people to eat what you cook without acting like you’re trying to kill them!

My mother asked me to cook supper tonight, she wasn’t feeling very well.  I asked her what she wanted me to cook and she said “whatever.”  So I know she REALLY wasn’t feeling well.  So I scrounged around the kitchen to see what I could come up with.  Something a little bit different than what we eat.  I felt like experimenting.  So I found some skinless chicken breasts in the refrigerator that had a “use by” date of tomorrow, so I decided to pull them out and use them.

Then I went to the pantry and was looking around.  I found a can of Healthy Request Cream of Chicken soup, and a can of Healthy Request Cream of Mushroom soup.  I pulled them out.  I rinsed off the chicken and cut it into strips and put them in a covered casserole dish.  Then I opened the cans of soup and poured them over the chicken, put the lid on and cooked it at 350 for a half hour.  While that was cooking I cooked up some minute rice, some dinner rolls and some veggies and we had a great meal!  I’ll have to cook that again sometime!  Definitely put that in my recipe box!