Copycat Recipes

Years ago, I tried a copycat recipe of KFC's coleslaw. I don't know why, but its the ONLY coleslaw I've ever liked. I'm weird, we know this.

Anyway, it turned out perfectly. So I went hunting for it again after buying (insert ridiculous number here) large containers of coleslaw out of laziness, only to find this last time, that KFC had changed their packaging-and the amount they give you. They tried to tell me it was the same amount, but I see through their lies. There's no way in heck that's even close to the same amount. Pft.

After finding a copycat recipe that looks right on (haven't tried it yet), I started looking for others. And naturally the first one I thought of was Panda Expresses orange chicken. Excuse me while I grab a rag....

I have found numerous copycat recipes for it, many of which people rav over the sauce, but in every single one they say that the chicken itself never cooks up the same. I kept looking and looking with no luck. Then tonight, two things occurred to me. One, if you can't get the chicken right, why not just buy precooked and battered chicken?? Its not much more than plain chicken breast and the hardest parts been done for you-and done well. So this is my plan of attack. Buy plain popcorn chicken or something along that line, and throw together the sauce.

So what was the second thing I realized? That Panda Express sells their orange chicken sauce. In grocery stores. How did I remember this? I went hunting in the fridge for stir fry sauce...and there was half a bottle. I have no idea how I forgot this. I feel about as bright as...a burnt out light bulb. Yeah, that's all I can come up with.

In any case, I now have a sure fire copycat recipe for orange chicken. Sort of. Whatever, it'll taste good.

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Road Trip Done. (part 1)

I feel the need to put this out there. We drove over 3o00 miles, 46 hours, with 3 kids in the backseat of a car. We did it. I know, I'm surprised too.

We did exactly what you shouldn't do...we drove straight through the night. By the time we got there (and home) we were utterly exhausted. But, driving at night was the best thing we could have done, as the kids slept like logs for 8+ hours of peaceful driving.

During the day, we had a wonderful rotation of movie watching, stopping to pee, Mieke screaming (and puking. Yeah. Fun.), stopping for gas, stopping to pee, stopping for food-despite my hope to avoid fast food, we ended up eating almost nothing but fast food both ways, as it was an opportunity to get the kids out of the car.

Now, as for the actual drive. We went through eastern Washington (been there, done that, was just as boring as the other times I drove through), Idaho (mountains ho!), Montana (hills and mountains and then hours upon hours of wide empty fields), South Dakota (fields. That's it, I swear. Oh and more tourist attractions then they had people), Iowa (an entire state of road construction. And an exciting detour due to the interstate being closed down, at 3am), Missouri (I won't lie, I slept through Missouri), and then a bunch of other states that looked like green, grass, treey areas, slowly moving into more green, but with lots of that wonderful loving plant, Kudzu. Eventually we made it to NC (mountains) and into SC. Where we discovered that Mieke was very much constipated. "Hi, we missed you, Mieke needs to poop!" Yep, thats us.

I'll finish this later. I'm hungry :D

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