Frequent visitors to CbsoP will already have noticed a few changes around the site.  For those who are reading via RSS, you may have a few surprises coming when you next visit.

I’ve just begun the most extensive upgrade that Cooking… by the seat of my pants! has ever undergone.  I’ve wiped away the old and moved to a new way of doing things.  Hopefully it will help most people find what they are looking for a lot more quickly than the old system would.

In that bent, I’ve moved every single recipe to the “Recipes” category.  Over the next week or so, I’ll be adding proper tags to each and every post, with the aim of making search by tag more relevant than a search by category.  Other and less useful posts have been deleted.  For those of you who were looking for a morning cuppa entry… Sorry.  thery no longer exist.

In the end I think this will make Cooking by the seat of my pants more valuable to anyone using it.  At least that is my sincere hope.

The site is now faster, cleaner and above all else, less cluttered.  And while I will be adding new advertising and other features, my goal is to keep the place as tidy as humanly possible.

For those that know me… welcome back.  For those who are new here… Please excuse the mess.  I’m working on it.

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Folks, I’m taking a break from blogging for a few days.  I’ve just finished a 47 page freelance project that took nearly a month to write and came in at just over 17,000 words, so I must say I feel like I deserve it.  To be honest, while in the throws of writing I’ve let the house go to pot, and I think going through and getting everything straightened up will help to spark my creativity.

So… For the next day or two at lest, my activities on the computer will be limited to answering emails, performing any edits necessary and perhaps a few hours of RuneQuest, because goblins are a bad thing!

I’ve got good things coming after the break!

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If you’re looking for a quick, simple pasta recipe that won’t let you down, this is the one you’ll want to keep handy. We used gemelli for this dish, but it would work equally well with rotini or any other full bodied pasta.  Gemelli just happens to be our recent new favorite, os we’re doing a lot of experimenting with it.

This particular recipe came about from the need to get something on the table quickly. my wife called and announced that she would be coming home for lunch on this particular day, even though she was supposed to be having a lunchtime meeting.  The result…  Well, in a word it was fabulous.  Or to quote Billy Crystal as Fernando, it was “Simply Maaaahhhvelous”.

This recipe is also my entry for the ninth edition of the Frugal Fridays food blog event, where myself and several other very talented people, including Ben, from What’s Cooking?  There are others working on the project with us, but I’m not at liberty to discuss them just yet.

The purpose of Frugal Fridays is for foodies or food bloggers to create a recipe that costs $10.00 US or less that will feed a family, and this recipe falls so squarely into that category that it really should be a crime.

But without further discussion or ado, I present to you…

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One would think that after running a food blog for over a year and a half, I would have already managed to post all of my favorite chicken recipes.  I certainly thought so.  I mean, how many different recipes did I have in my arsenal when I started?  How many could I have had?

Apparently, a lot more than I thought.

When I started writing this, I figured I’d show off a few of my faves, especially those from childhood.  I opened the chicken category and went looking through the entries…

To find that I have not posted a single one of my favorite childhood chicken recipes!

Oh, sure.  I’ve posted some good recipes, even a few that I would consider great, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve overlooked at least ten recipes that were staples in my home throughout my formative years. I just can’t believe that i have yet to post these things that I still hold so dear to my heart, not only as reminders of time with my mother and my family, but as the first glimpses of the wonderful and nearly mystical culinary star that chicken really is.

Chicken is more versatile than any other protein in the kitchen, save perhaps tofu, which I am unexperienced with.  As a matter of fact, it’s so wonderful that we associate any flavor we can’t quite define with it. You know, like when someone says that frog legs “taste like chicken”. (They don’t, but hey, some people think they do.)

So while this post is about my thirteen favorite chicken recipes to date, it most definitely lacks my all-time favorites.  This, my friends, will be corrected in due course. An oversight this heinous must be rectified, and it will be.  But not until after I’m done with this particular post…

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