“Dragon Chicken” Jury-rigged

Sometimes my Dragon, but mostly my Sous Chef and his chicken.

This morning, after I waved goodbye to my kid’os on the school bus, and completed most of the basic Thursday morning chores…I realized I had one more daunting task keeping me away from my workout.  What Am I putting in the crock-pot for dinner?  I should already know, right?  Seeing how on Sunday I planned the week’s menu.  However, we received a change in plans for today, and now I won’t be home at the time to start dinner. Therefore, in short of hiring a cooking stunt double, my crock-pot and a change in menu will have to do.  As much as I tried to squeeze my original menu plan of “scallops” into the crock-pot, the more unmotivated I became. Then I thought, “Snap out of it and what meat do we have in the freezer?” A venison roast?   Not in the mood.  Tilapia?  I really enjoy seafood, but even the thought of another sea creature brought me right back to the thought of scallops. So, no.  Chicken? Yes!  That might work.  So now what is it going to dance with in the crock-pot? I usually  would of meandered through one of my tried and true cook books, but I was in a huge hot hurry, remember?  So I pulled out my Nook and looked for an App. with recipes.  Surprise!  In less than 30 seconds I had one with it set up for me to list the ingredients that I had on hand;

1. Chicken
2. Crock-pot

It then delivered the recipe of “Dragon Chicken.”  I had some of the ingredients.  Quite honestly, they were the chicken and the crock-pot. The rest of the ingredients were a stretch of the imagination.  But the dragon was speaking to me and so I was going to pull this off anyway.

As the classical music played in the background, the rain outside was misting down, and my Grandmother was quietly enjoying her paper and breakfast. I love cooking on days like this.  I continued rummaging through my kitchen substituting one ingredient after another and even tossing in random additions to boot.  It hit me! I’m “jury-rigging” this poor recipe.

Growing up I had heard the term “jerry-rigged”, but I would joke that when I pulled something off or made something last-minute, that I “jury-rigged” it.  I thought it was a humorous term that I made up. This was not the first time that I just made up a word to fit the situation.  So, again I used my Nook to look up the actual term “jerry-rigged” to make sure it actually meant to fix or make something.  I didn’t want to go around misusing my made up version of the word anymore.

So a few lines following the term “jerry-rigged”, was a word, and  I could not believe my eyes. I was actually seeing another term right there on the World Wide Web.  It was “jury-rigged.”  I guess I didn’t make it up after all.  But how could it be a real word? I thought that I had made it up by taking “jerry-rigged” and inserting my own name.  But here it was in the dictionary, and this is what it states:

“……something poorly built is “jerry-rigged.”  Something rigged up temporarily in a makeshift manner with materials at hand, often in an ingenious manner, is “jury-rigged.” “Jerry-built” always has a negative connotation, whereas one can be impressed by the cleverness of a jury-rigged solution.”  I thought, “Spot on!”  And I intend nothing personal to those of you name “Jerry”. With that in mind, the concoctions I whip up from time to time tend to excite me a little, but definitely do not impress all.  And my excitement gets my children involved in the culinary process.  However, my kitchen creations are probably not ingenious, but maybe creatively hopeful!