Hearts and Laserbeams

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.

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!

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!

I need to take pics of all the awesomeness going on in our backyard right now for you guys! I’ll do that soon, but in the meantime check out how well our corn is growing!

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 some major updates in our backyard:

our carrots got harvested last weekend! they definitely could have stayed in the ground longer, but we figured they wouldn’t get much longer since our planters are so shallow. so we’ll save carrots for another time (or big deep pots next year!), but these little guys were totally tasty!

and our sugar snap peas have started kickin out some peas – they’re so freaking good! it’s kinda crazy how tall these plants have gotten. we’re thinkin about planting some more so we can have peas to share with friends or freeze or something like that.

but the biggest news in our backyard last weekend was…

WE TOTALLY GOT CHICKENS!

the one on the left is martha stewart. an easter egger type chicken, she’ll in theory lay eggs that are blue, green, pink or brown. it’s a good thing. the one on the right is paula deen – they said she was a silkie but we’re not so sure, we’re thinking she may be a hybrid of some kind.

and yes. we named em that because they’re the dirtiest birds around! if we’d gotten a third it woulda been named oprah.

they’re old enough to be laying eggs, but nothing yet. we read they’ll most likely start molting because of the new home and then start again when they’re done molting, so we’ll see what happens! they’re super cute, we’ve let em run around the backyard and they are crazy wily when it comes to trying to get em back in the coop!

check out the full flickr set here, including pics of the sweet chicken coop josh’s uncle donnie helped us build!

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.

ok so about a month ago, josh and i started a little veggie patch in our backyard using the book square foot gardening by mel bartholemew as a guide for our gardening shenanigans.

here’s what it looked like when we first built the planter and got the dirt and seeds into it:

and here’s what it looks like now:

(these are just the radishes – check out everything else by clickin’ the pic!)

josh and i had a tiny balcony garden for like 2 years before this, and expanding the operation now that we have a little more space has been so fun! we’re both pretty effing amazed at how crazy some of this stuff is growing; in theory soon we’ll have watermelons, peas, pumpkins, corn, radishes, chives, tomatoes, carrots… i think it all kind of depends on the weather – we started all this pretty late in the summer but the growing season in california’s longer, so who knows! (we got to eat a few spinach leaves the other night, so freakin delicious!)

we also started a compost bin in the backyard, which both of us are a little unsure of – mostly because neither one of us has done that before, so there’s a whole lot of “uhhh are we doing this right?” goin’ on… we put this little vinyl fence up for like 60 bucks to hide the composting experiment:

(if you click to see the larger version of this pic in flickr, and you look at the telephone wires, you can see some of the zillions of birds waiting for me to go inside so they can get back to the bird feeder…)

so we’ll see how that goes! we added worms to the bin tonight… the gal that we bought em from basically made us smell worm poo, she says to prove that it smells like dirt, but i think it was so she could tell her friends later she got people to smell worm poo.

i feel like i need to get a better handle on timing out what we’re planting… what are good fall/winter veggies? anyone got any hot tips for what to plant and when in southern california?