Tuesday night dinner:<br />Chicken International (aka Chicken Country Captain)<br />quinoa<br />green beans<br /><br />I have been on a crock pot spree for about three years now. <a href="http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060710&amp;s=diarist071006">Chicken Country Captain</a> is one of my favorite things to cook in the crock. It's a whole, cut-up chicken dusted in flour and curry powder and cooked with onion, garlic, bell pepper, tomato and raisins. I like the sweet-savory combo. After eight hours, the chicken kind of dissolves into a pile of tender meat and bones, so it's really a stew. But that's not uncommon with crock pot fare.<br /><br />But the crock pot really should be restricted to cooking things when you aren't home to do it yourself. It really is delightful to come home from work to a house that smells like dinner, knowing that all you have to do is cook up some rice or make a salad and voila! Dinner is served. But that enchanting dinner smell loses its charm if you are there the whole time dinner is cooking. You end up smelling like Chicken Country Captain yourself. You might go to pick up a loved one at work and have him say, "I smell dinner" when he gets into the car. And then you have to wash everything you wore that day because even though dinner was delicious, no one wants to smell like Country Captain for a week.