Hearts and Laserbeams

I ain’t gonna lie, our dogs are pretty cute.

Yesterday Josh walks into our office and says what no chicken owner wants to hear:

“We’re missing a chicken.”

Ummmm WHAT?!?! How are we missing a chicken?! I mean, last fall I saw a hawk hanging around our backyard cuz he was looking for a chicken dinner, but that was because our dog was in the other room and couldn’t tell us something was up. And none of the neighborhood cats messes with our chickens! Where could Judy Plume have gone?!?!

Josh went back out to the yard and searched for another 20 minutes. And then he noticed the box under our lemon tree.

The sturdy one that sits on its side as an option for places for our chickens to lay their eggs.

The one that was now sitting overturned.

“Nooooo….,” he thought, “she’s not under there.”

But oh yes. Yes she was. With 2 eggs, which leads us to believe she’d been stuck under there for 2 days. Josh let her out and she hightailed it for the water bowls, where she spent the next 10 minutes drinking, poor girl!

Moral of the story? A chicken in the hand is worth 2 eggs in the cardboard box you find her in 2 days after she’s gone missing.

So exciting to start thinking about things like maternity leave – our little guy gets here so soon! This morning I put our Etsy shop into vacation mode. It feels like there’s still so much left to do before the boy makes his arrival in September, but this will be one less thing to have on the plate which will be good! Now we just need to finish licensing style guides and all of our art projects are set! And in less than three weeks, I go on leave from my day job, too!

Then it’s on to the fun stuff – setting up the boy’s room, getting lots of rest, waiting for my balloon feet to explode… EXCITING!

A few weeks ago we started getting tons of tomatoes from the dozen or so plants we have growing in the back and front yards – to the point where I got all Martha Stewart and tried my hand at canning em so they wouldn’t go bad before we ate em!

But then, as we got more and more tomatoes and I canned most of ‘em for later use, I started thinking… what if, as a newbie canner, I didn’t quite do it right and they tasted bad? I better crack open a jar and use it just to make sure, seeing as there was another big ol’ bowl of tomatoes sitting on the counter waiting to be processed. So last night I made up a chicken recipe using a jar of our tomatoes – it turned out so freaking delicious that I’m gonna share! (The recipe. Sorry, the tomatoes are much to delicious to hand out, especially since it takes a few hours for each batch of canning to get done!)

Caprese-inspired Chicken Dinner!
Serves 2, takes about 20 minutes in the kitchen to prepare.

You’ll need:

2 defrosted chicken breasts

1/2 cup grated mozzarella cheese

1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped

1 pint jar of tomatoes (or a 14.5 oz can of crushed tomatoes)

5 cloves garlic, minced

olive oil

salt and pepper

red pepper flakes

We served it up with:

some frozen asparagus

frozen garlic bread

***

1) Start up the frozen garlic bread, which takes about 15-20 minutes to cook. (We like that texas toast in the white and green box. You know the one. Delicious.)

2) Heat up the ol’ George Foreman grill. What? You don’t have a George Foreman grill? Hmmm… then I guess heat up whatever cooking implement you’re gonna use on your chicken? While the grill’s heating up, go ahead and generously brush some olive oil on each side of your chicken breasts, and give em a little shake of salt and pepper.

3) Throw em on the grill when it’s all heated up, and let em cook til they’re not pink in the middle anymore.

4) While that’s going, heat up a medium skillet with some olive oil in it. (Over medium heat is good.) Throw your minced garlic and some red pepper flakes in, and sautee those for about 2-3 minutes. Then add your jar of tomatoes, liquid and all. (Be careful, though – one of the two kitchen fires I’ve started in the past was caused by pouring a can of tomatoes and liquid into a pan of heated olive oil… remove the pan from the heat, add the can carefully, put the pan back on the heat if you’re super cautious like I am. Fire will do that to ya.) Add chopped basil (but save a little for a fancy garnish at the end!).

5) Let  the tomato mixture get all nice and hot – soon your chicken and garlic bread’ll be done cooking. Get the garlic bread out of the oven, and do whatever you like to do to keep it warm til serving. You could get fancy and wrap it in a towel and put it in a bowl, or you could have your husband sit on it for a while. Turn up your oven to the broiler setting. Put your chicken breasts in a little pan, and give em each a good smattering of mozzarella cheese. Put em in the broiler for 2-3 minutes.

6) Incidentally, that’s about how long it takes for frozen asparagus to heat in the microwave. So cook that goodness up while your cheese is getting all good and melty on top of the chicken!

7) Take the chicken outta the broiler and put it on yer dinner plates. Put some of the tomato-basil mixture on top, sprinkle a little fresh basil on top of that… serve it up with the asparagus and garlic bread! Marvel in your culinary amazingness!

I wish I had gotten a picture of this dinner cuz it’s probably one of the first times I sorta winged it making something up in the kitchen, and it was so effing tasty! Instead, you get this hastily-drawn representation of the final product! The end!

There’s still some work that needs to be done on the Hearts and Laserbeams website, but sometimes other projects just need to take a higher priority! My brother in law Chris opened a new canvas shop in Oregon City, Oregon last month and in this day and age a website for your brick and mortar store is pretty much mandatory. I spent this weekend working on the Seven Seas Canvas website, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out – if you’re in the Portland area and have boats that need covering you should give him a call!

Chris does some pretty amazing things with a needle and thread, and Seven Seas Canvas isn’t limited to boat covers – if you’ve got a project in mind take a look at his site and give him a shout to receive a quote!

AAAAAAA!!!!

Our chickens have officially started laying eggs!! Josh found the first one hiding behind a bush in the backyard yesterday morning, and throughout the day two more eggs turned up behind a rosebush! We prompty cooked up the eggs  into omelettes for breakfast this morning, and they were super-delicious!

Click here to check out some pics - taste test between our homegrown eggs and storebought eggs coming soon!

We’ve started seeing awesome results from some of our backyard garden! Corn, jalepenos, onions, tomatoes, garlic – it’s all there and accounted for!

I say awesome results from some of our backyard garden because other crops have not faired as well… Chickens, I’m looking in your direction when I say our strawberries and broccoli have met an unfortunate, pecked-at-looking end. We planted artichokes, too, but while the plants have done well we haven’t seen any actual artichokes! It seems like our yellow tomato plant that’s right next to it may be leaching all the good nutrients from the soil, because it’s grown like a monster.

Our buddy Jay has pumpkins starting at his house and he has to thin em out soon, so we’re hoping to snag a few seedlings from him – here’s hopin’ we can have homegrown pumpkins by Halloween!

Josh and I have had this conversation about 2,700 different times, and we’ve decided it was time to get this thing settled once and for all. Maybe you can help?

Everyone we’ve shared this with has an opinion. This time, we’d really like to hear from folks who could be considered experts – if you know an English professor or someone with a degree in English, point em towards this blog post! We’d LOVE to get a discussion going on the comments here as to which is correct.

Basically, we’re at odds over the use of the words this/these/those, and adding a word after it. Specifically the word one/ones. Here’s an example:

You walk into Krispy Kreme Donuts, and there’s 27 different kinds of donuts in the display case. You decide to order a dozen assorted donuts. The gal behind the counter asks “Which ones do you you want?” and you point at a couple of different ones, saying “These ones,” or “Those ones”.

Is it grammatically correct to say “These ones,” or “Those ones”? Or if you wanted to be correct, would you simply say “These,” or “Those.”

Josh’s argument for just saying “These,” or “Those,” is that making the word one plural is completely incorrect, since it’s one of something. (Unless, say, you’re holding a stack of ones for a stripper.)

My argument for being able to say “These ones,” or “Those ones,” is that I think it’s grammatically okay to say “This one.” And if saying “This one,” is okay, then pluralizing it to “These ones,” should be okay, too, right?

And that’s the gist of it! We’d love it if you’d leave a comment – share your grammar police credentials and what you think of this ongoing discussion!

a good chunk of months ago, i set up the spare bedroom in our house as an art studio. the rationale was “well, gettin prego is taking longer than expected… i may as well set up the room and use the space because once i get everything settled in there we’ll of course get prego and i’ll have to change it all back.” and boom! i believe about 3 weeks after i set up the art studio in the house, i found out we were finally having a kid.

so back to the garage all the supplies went in kind of a jumbled heap! i’m really jazzed, though – this weekend we’ve spent some time cleanin up my workspace in the garage, and we’ll be puttin lights in there and setting up my folding tables so i can get back to making things at the drop of a hat. here’s the cleaned up workspace!