Winner winner, chicken dinner

I tossed all the eligible names into a large copper pot, blindfolded myself, tightly squeezed my eyes shut, held my breath, and then drew one name out from all the comments/entries; and the winner is….

…Vicki Dickerson!

Congratulations, Vicki. I will email you later today to work out the delivery arrangements for your baker’s dozen cookbook prize. A huge thank you to everyone who took the time to leave me a comment. I don’t think most people realize how much each and every comment left by readers means to your average blogger. Trust me, they mean so much and it warmed my heart to receive 40 comments for that particular post. (Although only 38 qualified  as entries since immediate family members were not eligible,)

I also wonder if most people know where the phrase “Winner winner, chicken dinner” came from? Well the story goes that in Las Vegas for many years, (and many years ago) every casino had a three-piece chicken dinner special for $1.79. With the standard bet being $2, a winning bet would be enough money to buy a chicken dinner. Hence the phrase.

And speaking of chicken dinner, beginning tomorrow, I’ll have a week’s worth for you. I received an email from a reader who had a couple of great suggestions. First, I add a Menus page with suggested menus using the recipes posted here. As I told her, “great idea – I wish I would have thought of it myself!”  It will take some time to get that in order and create all the necessary links. I’ll let you all know when the Menus page is up and running.

Secondly, she asked that I put together some “Cook Once – Eat All Week”  ideas. At least that is what I will be calling it. This is how it will work: I’ll give you a recipe for a large piece of meat and then 3 or 4 recipes the following days using that meat for dinners for the rest of the week.  We’ll start with roasted chicken. I once asked Julia Child what she thought was the “perfect” dish and she replied, “a perfectly roasted whole chicken.”  I could not agree more. Of course, with the convenience of store-bought rotisserie chickens, you can skip roasting the bird yourself, but more on that tomorrow.

Thanks again to everyone who entered/commented, and thank you all for reading and cooking along with me!