Hearts and Laserbeams

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!

Here’s a little sneak peek of style guide stuff I’m working on this week – check out some fun apple characters!

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!

a couple of years ago, my friend gayle and I embarked on a mission to watch all six seasons of sex and the city. (we have very lofty goals!) every now and then, we’ll get together for another chunk of episodes, some drinks, and delicious food, and we’ve been very lax about getting through all of em. as summer gets going, bringing with it the knowledge that gayle’s moving to la in the fall to go to ucla, we have re-visited the quest and are trying to finish up season 6!

it’s been awesome because I haven’t really seen any of season 6 so while i had a general idea what the storylines were, these episodes are all new to me. and barishnakov is still pretty cute these days.

so last night we got together, gayle made tasty thai food for dinner, and we got our knit on as we watched four hours or so of SATC. we are so close to finishing, and plans are being formulated to watch the last two episodes over the 4th of July weekend!

what cracks my ass up about this show is all the superdrama that happens over lame shit, but actual dramatic events are completely glossed over. like there was an episode last night where candice bergen’s character is at a party complaining about being single and there’s shenanigans because she starts flirting with SJP’s boyfriend. drama drama drama! and then the chick from 3rd rock from the sun accidentally falls out of a window and DIES and it’s a super-minor thing that gets glossed over. I love this show, but stuff like that is a little weird.

since I wasn’t really keeping track of counting rows when I was knitting that baby sock at last week’s etsy craft party, I started over on it AGAIN, and by now I am an expert at that strange faux-cable texture they got goin on in the pattern! I just gotta knit a toe on this thing today and sock 1 is finished!!

I do so much better when I’ve gotten enough sleep!

It’s funny – sometimes I’ll get little to no sleep for whatever reason. Throughout the course of the next day, I’ll kind of forget that I didn’t get enough sleep the night before. I’ll get all crankypants, and things frustrate me super easily. Like yesterday, I was in what can only be called a superfoul mood. Then towards the end of the day, I remembered that the night before I had only gotten like 5 hours of sleep because Josh and Chris got to the house really late and I stayed up to meet em.

Mystery solved – went to bed at a decent hour last night, got a full night of sleep, and today everything’s right as rain!

Sleep is good for you, America. So are Mexican Pizzas from Taco Bell. I’m totally getting one at lunch.

i was offline all weekend getting caught up on things around the house, but lemme tell ya, friday night was SO MUCH FUN!

we had our etsy craft party at the road less traveled shop in santa ana, and i think it’s safe to say it was a big success! the party was held to celebrate etsy’s 5th birthday, and the site encouraged folks all over the world to join in a big day of crafty celebration! it was really neat knowing at our little gathering that others all over the planet were doing the same.

i think in total our party had about 20ish people throughout the course of the evening – lots of tasty snacks were had, like this etsy birthday cake made by katie. i made a cake, too, and as i’m gettin it out katie arrives with this amazing fondant-covered concoction and just blows my little sheet cake outta the water! it was such an awesome moment… all i saw at first was the bottom layer, and then she starts assembling it and holy snaps that cake is three tiers?!?! and THEN she starts adding chocolate buttons to the sides of it!

AND THEN katie busts out these “happy birthday etsy” flags she made out of white chocolate! it pretty much stole the snacky show. (though everything else was delicious too!)

so many great peeps showed up to join the fun – along with some of my craft mafia gals, i got to hang with aileen holmes and her friend tracy from the artery gallery, christina from le modern trinket was there, my longtime pals other steph and gayle were there with knitting projects… and craft show friend anna brought me a surprise little onesie/bib set for the pending baby boy! new friends jennifer and yoli miramontes were fun chatty pals, and there were more people there that i didn’t even get a chance to talk to we were so busy!

the road less traveled was a perfect location for our craft party, thanks again to delilah for lettin us have it there! hope to get to hang with y’all again soon!

(p.s., wanna see pics from our party? click here to check out my flickr set!)

this is too funny to not share with y’all – at dinner with gayle tonight, we were talkin baby shower. I tell her, “hey I’m cool with havin some kind of boozy drinks there if you think the ladies’ll be into it, I’m not that way where if I can’t drink no one else can either.”

it made it that much funnier that Gayle didn’t realize the perfect comedy that happened when she took a swig of her wine and said, “no it’s cool I don’t need booze to have a good time.”

true story, every time i make omlettes they get a little prettier. can’t wait til this summer when our chickens are laying eggs!

ok so you know how i go back and forth in my book reports – i’ll do some books that are classic high school reading list pieces, some fun chick lit, some nonfiction brainy stuff…

after reading ya ya’s in bloom, which i loved by the way, i really was needing something a little more thinky if ya know what i mean. i’d heard from a few peeps that omnivore’s dilemma was good so i made that the next read on my list. (i think it’s interesting to note that this book was such an intellectual read that i went right back to the other end of the spectrum afterwards and am now reading sophie kinsella’s confessions of a shopaholic.)

hearts and laserbeams book report: the omnivore’s dilemma: a natural history of four meals by michael pollan

so the omnivore’s dilemma the title refers to, it basically is people have so many choices in food we don’t know what the hell to eat anymore. food overload. i mean there’s more to it than that, but that’s the general idea.

if you’re into food this book is for you. it basically follows four different food chains from start to finish, with finish always ending up as your mouth. he looks at corn, cows (both commercial and grain fed), and the hunting and gathering lifestyle. and this whole book pretty much makes you want to curl up on your couch and never buy anything from a grocery store ever again.

and it makes you start thinking about effed up the system is.

here’s one of the big things i took away from this book, something that bugs the shit out of me:

farm subsidies are given to farmers because they can’t sell enough crops to pay their bills. they can’t sell enough crops because prices are too low. in an effort to make more money the only thing to do is grow more crops. which equals an even higher market surplus and even lower prices.

there’s a huge corn surplus, and every day They (whoever they are) finds more ways to shove it down our throats. one way is to process it so it’s kinda corn-flaky and feed it to cows. sounds like a great idea, corn fed cows are supposed to be real tasty. problem is it’s a myth; cows aren’t even supposed to eat corn and get sick from that diet. so farms have to drug up the cows with antibiotics to keep from getting sick.

another way the corn surplus is shoved down our throats is through value meals at fast food places. you don’t need that much food. you don’t need a 5 gallon paintbucket full of soda or a 12 pound hamburger. stop it.

basically i got really angry at these parts of the book, and then in the following chapters it talks about a farm that grows all kinds of crops and has all kinds of happy animals living on it in a perfect symbiotic system (thanks to the farmers help), and it made me want to run away to georgia and make all the food josh and i eat. those chapters made me so happy, i am not kidding you.

i loved the last section that was all about hunting and gathering, and i kinda wanna try catchin my own yeast to make bread with… i wonder what it would taste like?

and that’s pretty much it – book about food and pretty non-biased but still very much an expose on the system. if you like brainy stuff, and long descriptions of different kinds of food totally turns you on then this book is for you the end!

ratings:
4 hearts: really good stuff to think about, and also it gave me some ideas josh and i can put into practice now
1 fart: it took me a really long time to read this – i’m a busy woman, dammit!

sorry i’m not giving away this copy, my buddy gayle already asked to read it when i was done – but stay tuned, i’ll totally be doing a giveaway of my confessions of a shopaholic book.

last night josh and i busted out our new fondue pot for some cheese-dipping delicousness!

we used this recipe!

and then, because i’m in the process of coming down with a nasty cold, i was alseep on the couch by 7pm. at around 9pm i woke up and realized i should just give up and go to bed. so i said good night to josh, grabbed my phone, and as i was plugging it in i was like OMG i got a text from my brother brandon!

this is news because el brando is an old school sort who is not too fond of things like the internets and texting. it’s part of what makes him awesome. he’s like the dude from big lebowski, but more sean penn looking.

so i read his text and it says, and i quote:
“best buy is giving away $250.00 gift cards to the first two-thousand callers due to some “lawsuit” i just got one; i was #381. 1-800-429-5683″

and i was like hot damn i will put off going to sicksleep for five minutes and get us some best buy goodness! i try calling the number, and it’s busy.

i try calling again, and it’s busy.

again.

busy.

again.

busy.

finally, i think on the 11th try i got through! SUCCESS!!! i hear some fun music and then a voice welcomes me to THE BIG GAY CHATLINE!!!

I GOT SERVED!!!!

i called brandon immediately after this and we shared a hearty chuckle and then i went to bed!

the end!!!

also, just a heads up i just got signed up as a contributer on the found handmade blog! make sure you check it out periodically throughout the day, there’s a bunch of us folks that’ll be sharing amazing links to handmade goodies on the internets for your shopping enjoyment!