Two in Two

My lovely parents took a short vacation while my lovely brother was in Colorado, which left me and Groucho home alone for a couple days. I took advantage of the (relative) peace and quiet and invented a couple new recipes that are really just riffs on normal things.

The first one I made for my lovely friends Honor and Torie. I'd been wanting to have a dinner party for awhile and it happened that they could both come over on Friday and then I have basil growing out front so it just kind of fell together.
I made some chicken, which is always good. First I flatted the chicken out so it wasn't quite as thick. Then I combined some flour, fresh and dried basil, lemon pepper and salt. I dipped the chicken in a beaten egg and then into the flour, after which I browned it in a pan and then put it in a small pan (along with lemon juice and a little more fresh basil) and placed it in a 350 degree oven for... Probably an hour. Very tasty, though I would have browned it a little more.

I also fried fresh (red) tomatoes. This was a completely new experiment! I dipped them in some olive oil that had fresh basil and lemon juice in it, and then into the flour mixture from before. I melted some butter in a nonstick pan and fried away! They tasted MUCH better than I thought they would. They actually went pretty well on the baked bread with olive oil that I also made.


Tonight I was hungry and didn't have bread and had had cereal for breakfast. I got out a pound of hamburger, fried it up with some onions, garlic and green peppers, and then added some cooked wild rice. I added some mozzerlla cheese before I ate it and let it melt a little. Very good!

As always I was to busy eating all these good things to get pictures of them, but I promise you that they were wonderful and my tablesettings were something indeed to behold.

Best sandwich

I made a really good sandwich today. I'd show you a picture but it was so good I ate it before I even thought about pictures (or anything else).

Ingredients:
- Homemade bread
-cream cheese mixed with a little lemon basil from my plant
-Tomato fresh from the Farmers Market, sprinkled with salt and lemon pepper
-Caramalized candy onion (from the Farmers Market too)
-a little fresh grated parmesan cheese.

It was so good I laughed while I was eating it. No jokes.

Mini

Recently I've fallen in love with mini cows. And mini sheep. And mini goats. Picture:

mydairycow.com

 

Yes, this woman literally has a cow in her kitchen and it only comes up to the countertop.

sodahead.com

 Again, a kid the size of a rabbit.
Personally, I think that among the trifecta (cows, sheep, goats) of new mini farm animals (Horses are old news at this point), goats are the best. Not as stupid as sheep, but with the benefit of fiber production, not as (presumably?) smelly as cows, but with the benefit of milk. All in a nice, compact, dog-sized animal that has potential to be housetrained. I'm excited.

Small houses

I love small houses. No joke. They're lovely. The whole idea behind small houses is downscaling to just the things you need. This part is hard for me sometimes, as I find myself thinking "Well, couldn't I use that for something? Isn't there a way to upcycle or reuse it?" and then I keep it and never actually get around to upcycling or reusing. My current vice is t-shirts. I've been making yarn out of them to make rugs like this one. But I digress (blogging is so fun! So many things to say!)

Small houses, though. There's a lot of diversity in the size (well, as much as you can have within the "small" range) (which is usually between >100-1000 square feet). Okay, picture:

tinyhouseblog.com

 I believe this is one of Jay Schafer's creations. Mr. Schafer built his first house in Iowa City, which just makes my heart a little happier to see my state getting a drop on all the others. But look at it. Look at how small. This one would be somewhere around 100sqft. Click the link below for more wonderful stuff (their "Tiny House in a Landscape" posts are particularly wonderful), or just google "small houses" or "Jay Schafer" and you'll get enough links to keep you up all night.



It's my dream to live in a small house. Probably not that small (100sqft is pretty hardcore, not going to lie), but somewhere in the 800-1200 range. With a garden. And a mini goat. Those are two posts unto themselves though :)

Away

I went away for a week and you wouldn't believe the things that changed! The corn tasseled out, my basil plant grew and inch and a half, my mint got flowers, Groucho looked like he lost weight (it may have been an optical illusion), and last but certainly least, the cicadas started their yearly assault on my hearing.

Around the corner:
-Sweet corn
-Getting my list of PGMs for fall NSO!
-Dog sitting
-Obtaining more things to make tea out of this fall!