Most of the time when Stefan is on vacation, I fall out of my usual groove a bit and don’t run around like a crazy woman all day. You probably noticed by my lack of posts for the last week or so…and I’m just now starting to catch up on everything here in the house. I guess you could say that we both take a bit of a vacation when he’s off work. We all need a break sometimes, right? But unfortunately my lack of crazy also makes our eating schedule suffer. Not only do we need something for breakfast/lunch/brunch, but dinner has to be prepared too. A couple days we either got Thai food from the kiosk down the street or we ordered pizza from the local Italian place. But later into the week I finally got inspired to cook something as the carrots we’d harvested from our garden started to wilt. Why not grab the whole chicken from the freezer, cook up the carrots and throw in some beer rice. I just randomly selected a chicken recipe from my Southern Living: 30 Years of Our Best Recipes cookbook that I had all the ingredients for (and which didn’t need to marinate for 8 hours since I’d unfortunately not thought ahead that far). The good news about that cookbook is all the recipes we’ve tried are so good…which means I’m always excited to try something new.

We were thrilled with the results, and Stefan will never refuse any meal that includes beer rice. I was even able to include some of our own bell peppers in the beer rice recipe which made it extra special. The rice always turns out a little different every time but it’s always fantastic. The chicken was extremely juicy with a nice, mild flavor. Next time I might throw in a few fresh herbs to change it up a little.