Category: Cooking/Recipes

Books, Cooking/Recipes, Health & Fitness

Beauty and reconnection on the weekends

heather

Work has been really busy lately.  I know that millions around the world work 50+ hours every week without a second thought, but I’m not used to it.  Not used to it yet.  I feel as if I wake up, drive to work, work, drive home, eat supper, read for 15 minutes and fall asleep.  That is my week-day life.  So, like everyone, I really look forward to the weekend.  I get to see my husband again.  I get to see what my house looks like in the daylight.  I get to spend time thinking about things that don’t involve numbers.  It’s quite pleasant.

On Saturday Tim and I finally made it back to the gym.  I don’t think I’ve mentioned this in the blog, but Tim came down with an “acute viral infection” a couple of weeks ago that landed him in the ER for 6 hours (his family practicioner was worried Tim had menningitis).  It took several days before Tim felt well enough to go back to the gym.  I was off my normal schedule due to the NY trip and the long work-days, so I didn’t go all last week.

It felt great to go back to the gym.  I did my leg weights and the Precor.  I could tell I was out-of-practice because I was sooo tired afterwards.  I have reverted back to the fitness level where working out exhausts you instead of giving you energy.  But I know it’ll get better.

After the gym we headed to 11th Street Precinct for some grilled pork T’s, which were delicious as always.  It was a beautiful, weird fall warm day, so we took a walk along the bike path after lunch, admiring the river, the geese, the lily-pads, and the mansions overlooking River Drive.  We crossed River Drive, so that we could get a better look at the houses on the way back.  They are so huge and beautiful.  One even has an English telephone booth (it looks like the Tartis) on the front patio.

The rich and privileged even get better moths on their grounds than do us lowly peons.  Tim and I saw the most beautiful moth.  Its wings had blue ovals on them that looked as if they had sunsets hidden in them.  This is the closest picture I can find on Google.  It was the most beautiful thing I have seen in weeks.  I don’t know how people can truly believe there is no God, when beauty like that exists in the world.

Today Tim and I have been warding off the back-to-work blues.  So we are making the ultimate comfort food – autumn harvest soup and double corn corn bread.  Cutting up vegetables while listening to a Tim-engineered mix of Modeselektor, Radiohead, and Nightmare Revisited is my  idea of a perfect Sunday.

For desert we bought some Banquet fruit pies.  They were only $ 0.60, so even if they are extremely terrible, it won’t be devastating.  The ingredients actually look fairly good – fruit, wheat flour, brown sugar – heck, these might even be good for us!  Tim and I figure these are the perfect pies for us.  We can never eat a whole pie, nor should we.  These should be perfect for one piece each.

While it’s back to work tomorrow, at least we have next Saturday and Sunday to look forward to.  We have no plans yet.  Maybe I’ll finish my Mom painting.  Maybe we’ll start on our novels.  November is National Novel Writing Month. I’ve read that one should write about what one knows.  Since I know very little and lead a quite, unassuming life, I’ve always believed that my life provides little fodder for writing.  However, I’ve been listening to Romancing Miss Bronte on my way to work, and it’s helped me realize that having an active imagination and un-lazy mind is more important than living an adventurous life.  Emily and Charlotte Bronte grew up in a parsonage and traveled very little, yet they wrote two amazing books that shattered the literary world of their time.  If they could write books out of minds that were raised on fecal-laced water and rotten rice pudding, I should be able to write something worth reading on a mind raised on Iowa goodness and autumn harvest soup.  Unfortunately, I lack inspiration.  I enjoy the actual physical act of writing – of scratching a pen across paper, of filling up pages and pages in cool notebooks.  I just need a good idea…  I have 7 days to think of something.

Cooking/Recipes, Uncategorized

I’m baking a chicken

heather

And it smells delicious.  Timmy Tee is fighting a cold, and I had a weird almost-fainting spell whilst bicycling this afternoon, so we need some comfort food.  I’m using a recipe I got from Real Simple years ago.  You basically cut up 2 lemons and 1/2 a head of garlic, shove it into the chicken’s innards, rub down the whole thing with olive oil, salt and pepper the hell of out it, and then toss it in the oven.  It’s super easy, and the skin turns out crispy and delicious.  I’m surprised no one has tried to sell oiled and baked chicken skin by the bag.

It’s been another excellent weekend in the Longoria household.  Tim and I haven’t seen much of each other, since I was in NYC last weekend and in Lakeville Wed – Thursday, and Tim was doing trips the other nights.  So on Saturday Tim drove me to Iowa City where I had lunch with a friend I hadn’t seen forever (ate tapas for the first time ever at Devotay), and then we did a little shopping at Coral Ridge.  Tim found 3 pairs of chinos at Banana Republic for $7 to $20!  I didn’t find much, but it was so nice just hanging out with Tim, spending time together, laughing together, drinking strawberry smoothies together.

We made it back to Dport in time to feed the dee oh gee and then headed to Biaggis for our favorite meal combo – messina salad and chicken piccante pizza.  It was delicious.  The crowd in the joint was pretty interesting – it was full of a bunch of elderly folk and teenagers.  Apparently it was some school’s homecoming, so the place was chock-full of high heels, tans, and awkward hair cuts.  I wonder if we were that annoying at that age?

Today after reading the morning news, we headed out for bike ride.  I don’t know if it was the 3 cups of coffee or the cold wind on my hot face, but once we reached Emeis Park, I felt really not good.  I had to lay down for about 10 minutes while I decided if I was going to throw up or pass out or both.  I didn’t do either, fortunately.  I was able to bike home, albeit at a much slower pace.  It was really weird.  I hate it that my body is so temperature sensitive.  It makes me panic in situations where I get too warm.  Pass Out City, man.

Anyway, it was a great weekend – exactly what I needed after a stressful week of work.  Now, only five more days before the weekend comes again…

Cooking/Recipes

Weird Food

heather

As I mentioned, Tim and I recently had a house-full of guests.  As a result, we had a medley of unusual food loitering about the place.  Tim and I often take the easy road and pick something up for supper, but last night we decided to be resourceful, and we actually ate food that already existed in our kitchen!  It was weird but delicious mix of:

1.  A microwaved sweet potato.  I did the old grocery bag trick, and the potato cooked up perfectly in about 12 minutes.  It was a huge potato, BTW.  I added butter and salt and pepper, and it was delicious.

2.  We had 2 leftover jalapeno and cheddar hot dogs, so Tim sliced them up, fried them in a skillet and added them to a can of Pork and Beans that mysteriously appeared in our cupboard.  It was right next to a package of ramen that was tucked away deep in the cupboard.  The interesting thing was, that someone had only used HALF of the ramen packet.  Yes, half of an 18 cent package of ramen.  That person then sort of folded over the open end of the ramen, tucked the 1/2 used packet seasoning back into the package, and then stashed it in the back of the cupboard, never to be seen again.  I’m pretty sure the culprit was the Teentz, but I can’t say for certain.

3.  Cheese!  The Beentz is a huge cheese freak, so we had 3 different kinds of cheeses opened and half-eaten – colby jack, swiss, and a mysterious soft, white cheese I couldn’t quite identify.

4.  Our bucket garden is starting to produce, so Tim cut up some tomatoes and peppers.  He added the peppers to the pork and beans and hot dog stew – tried to health it up a bit.  We ate the tomatoes straight-up.

5.  Tim polished off his supper with some Rold Gold sourdough pretzels.  I was already full by that time, however.

It was a weird, albeit delicious, supper.  We felt very proud of ourselves for using our groceries, too.  We are so grown up.

Tonight Tim is making pasta.  He added some garden-fresh peppers to the sauce, as well as some black olives, and he is grilling MorningStar patties.  We are going to cut them up and add them to the pasta.  I’m sure it’s going to be awesome.

Cooking/Recipes

How to poach an egg (and not just the yolk)

heather

I loved poached eggs on toast.  I especially love poached eggs on English muffins with slices of avocado.  My problem is that many times, I lose at least 50% of the egg white when I poach an egg.  It turns into ghostly wisps that separate from the main egg section, and I end up just washing it into the drain or garbage.

I recently read that to make a good poached egg you should boil water in a deep skillet, add a little salt and vinegar into the water, and then use a little bowl to ease each egg in one at a time when the water reaches a rolling boil.  I tried this yesterday, and I don’t know what I did wrong, but one of the eggs was a complete disaster.  The other one was undercooked, and I didn’t drain the water off well enough, so when I broke the yolk, it mixed with the water and was disgusting.

Today, though, they turned out EXCELLENTLY.  The combo of the vinegar and water keeps the egg in a nice compact, fluffy-looking mound!  Here is how they look in the skillet:

If I was using my former method (using a tiny pot, bringing the water to a boil, and then adding two eggs at once to the water), the water would be full of stringy, wispy egg whites.

I boiled the eggs for 4 minutes, and the yolks were perfect – not too hard and not too soft.  This method is more work and more resource intensive, but the eggs turn out so much better.