Monthly Archives: February 2008

Eating

Streamlining dinner works for me

Works for Me Wednesday

After trying a few “once a month” and “once a week” cooking plans, I found that I missed cooking on a day-to-day basis. That being said, it is nice to have a day off from kitchen duty every now and then. I’ve found that doubling my favorite recipes works well for me. It’s important around here that I set aside the portion that’s meant for the freezer before we start eating dinner. Otherwise, the freezer-bound food might well get eaten.

Here are a few recipes that I’ve found work well for doubling and freezing.

  • Shredded Salsa Beef. Good for tacos, enchiladas and quesadillas.
  • Chicken pot pie. Make and freeze extra filling. On serving day, thaw filling and heat through, then add it to the crust and proceed as normal.
  • Southwestern pork and sweet potatoes.
  • Chicken enchiladas.
  • Sloppy Joes.
  • Honey-pecan chicken.
  • I also like to have precooked, shredded chicken on hand for use in things like Chicken tortilla soup.
  • Lasagna primavera.
    • Flotsam / Jetsam

    Narrowly averting disaster

    I can’t say enough good things about Bluehost. I tried my darndest to destroy esmon.net this afternoon, and they saved my bacon.

    How did I try to destroy the site? I deleted its database. Oops.

    When I realized what I’d done — trashed every post and every comment on the site — I cried. A lot. I emailed Bluehost and the people at Install4Free (who’d originally installed WordPress for me) for help. I didn’t hear back from Bluehost right away, but one of the Install4Free people got back to me right away (Thanks, Michael!) and said he thought Bluehost would have a backup.

    There are so many posts on this site about silly things Poppy has said, or goofy things we’ve done, or nice posts from Rockford. I was seriously feeling nauseous about losing everything.

    But Michael gave me hope. I still hadn’t heard from Bluehost, so I called their support phone number. About 20 minutes later, they’d restored everything through February 9. Per another suggestion from Michael, I searched Google for cached pages of posts after the 9th. I was able to find some of them, but I wasn’t able to resurrect all of the comments. After facing the prospect of losing the whole site, though, that didn’t bother me too much.

    Here’s the moral of the story: Backup, backup, backup. And don’t mess with your database when you’re on cold medicine. And if you’re looking for a Web host or help installing WordPress, use Bluehost and Install4Free.