Heaven and Bloomingdale’s

I had dinner with my mother-in-law last night, who works in downtown Chicago.  We went to a cajun place called Heaven on Seven.  Their motto was something like “When people come back from heaven, they always say… Try the gumbo.”

The walls were lined with varieties of hot sauce bottles…

And the tables had a good 20+ bottles on them. 

I ordered the Louisiana Soul Deluxe, which included a yummy spicy sausage of some kind, and three different kinds of rice/bean mixtures, along with some greens (blech!).  It came with soup, so following in my current trend of new and different, I got turtle soup.  It was awesome… I may have had turtle in the past, having been the granddaughter of a turtle fisherman type, but I don’t recall.

Anyway, it was a unique flavor, worth looking into.  I may try to recreate it with chicken or something, unless I can get the boys to wrangle a turtle from the river. 

Afterwards, we browsed through the Bloomingdale’s, filled with expensive stuff I can’t afford.  The building however was beautiful… here’s the ceiling:

That’s all for now.  Can’t wait to come home.

 

 

The Wonder Blog, and some links

Not much to report for today.  The boys had a field trip to a Honey Bee Farm, in which they learned about honey bees and brought home some honey and honey candy.  Boy #2 was inspired by this enough to begin a blog, called The Wonder Blog.

Tomorrow the boys have another field trip to a recycling center.  They have some crushed cans they have collected up to submit for cash.

Also, Grandma and Grandpa M. brought home some plain looking rocks from their trip to New Mexico, and the boys discovered that the rocks were actually geodes when they cracked them open with hammers.

Some links of interest…

• 25 Things That Are Not What They Seem
• Space Bubble Real Estate
• Books as home decor items
• Seasonal Ingredient Map

cooking, jello, and reading

Last night’s spectacular supper ended up to be red beans and rice with sauteed sage chicken.  Turned out to be not too bad - no complaints from the youngens.

Our future chef, Boy #2, cooked with his first recipe from the Cookie book we picked up on Sunday.  It was a tea cookie recipe, which I will post later.  They turned out great, and he is very proud.

Meanwhile, Boy #1 made lime jello in a Lego mold.

In the evening, we read The Westing Game together, and then after bedtime, the husband and I worked on his taxes.

Contemplating dinner

If I was a really good cook (or housekeeper perhaps), I would have my meals neatly planned out, ingredients already shopped for (bargains had), food pre-prepared the night before… but I’m a spontaneous (lazy? procrastinating?) cook instead.

So, while the hubby is away at work and the boys are on their way home from the Field Museum, I am considering what to make for dinner.

First, I was thinking I would make more lasagna, since I have leftover pasta from that, and maybe spice it up a bit by making chicken lasagna.    Then I ran across this Greek alternative, Pastitsio:

Pastitsio is a layered baked dish. There are variations throughout the regions of Greece but typically the bottom layer is bucatini or other tubular pasta with cheese and egg as a binder; the second layer is ground meat (beef, veal or lamb) with tomato and cinnamon, nutmeg, or allspice; the third is another layer of pasta; and the top layer varies from an egg-based custard to a flour-based Béchamel or a Béchamel with cheese known as Mornay sauce in France. Grated cheese is often sprinkled on top and a dusting of cinnamon and/or nutmeg makes the dish classically Greek.

But, I’m thinking I’m might be too busy for something so elaborate, and I may be missing a few ingredients.  So I will have to think of something spectacular yet simple (read: quick).

I found a link for Superfast Chicken Suppers at CookingLight, considered grilling outside, thought about kabobs, contemplated chicken stuffed with ricotta cheese… and when it came down to it, decided to be really lazy, and just cook some chicken up on the grill and have it with some pasta or rice and some pre-made sauce.  Just to get it done.  Perhaps I will be more creative another day.

The weekend

Yes, we finally found Peanut, our lost kitty.  Specifically, Boy #2 found it.

Saturday night we had over the ‘rents (as my husband lovingly refers to his parents), my brother, and a friend for lasagna.  The ‘rents brought Clue (and caramel apple pie!), which we quite enjoyed.  I was greeted with a game of it Sunday morning as well.

The lasagna, I must say, was quite good.  The only problem with it was that it didn’t stick together terribly well but I think that is because I didn’t let it cool long enough before serving.  It was a standard lasagna - noodles + sauce + ricotta / shredded cheese+ ground beef, except that I alternated using alfredo sauce and marinana sauce, and used several different cheeses.  Mmmmm.

Sunday, we stopped by Barnes and Noble.  Boy #2 was an angel, sitting in the kids section reading Calvin and Hobbes while I wandered for something inspiring to read and Dad read comic books and sci-fi.  We settled on a sci-fi short story collection and a country living type book, and Boy # 2 got another Calvin and Hobbes book (surely he must have ALL of them by now!) and a Cookie cook book (he is an aspiring chef).

Update on pain:  seems to have subsided completely, aside from some residual soreness.  I’m going to give it a week and then see the doc about switching to Zyban.  Meanwhile, I am still a smoker.

Update on the “new regime”:  seems to be working pretty well.  We are all more productive and spending more time with each other, and the boys are behaving better.

Sunday

Pholph’s Scrabble Generator My Scrabble© Score is: 18. What is your score? Get it here.

We’re making pancakes and bacon this morning.  The soup from last night was quite good… I will be adding some of this morning’s bacon to it for good measure.  The bread turned out OK, but didn’t rise quite as well as I wanted it to.

Crock Pot Potato Soup

As I was cleaning, it occurred to me that I could throw some stuff into the crock pot and not have to worry about dinner later.

So, I googled up this recipe and started it going in the crock pot.

Of course, you need bread to dip in the soup, so I’m going to attempt to make a French baguette. It makes me miss my bread machine (which broke) but it’ll be good to know how to make it completely from scratch.

Chicken Curry with “fresh” Garam Masala

 

Tonight for dinner I made Chicken Curry from this recipe.  I decided to make the garam masala (literal meaning is ‘hot (or warm) spice’) myself rather than just buy it.  Sure, it’s more expensive, but now it’s more authentic feeling.  I even got saffron, which is the most expensive item, but I felt like I had to try it at least once.

Buying all of these spices makes me want to grow the plants for all of them.  I’ll be looking that up to see if that will work in my climate zone.

Crock pot roast

Tonight for dinner, Boy #2 (who declared that he will no longer become a paleontologist when he grows up, but a world-famous chef), just made cheese-filled sausages and cream corn.  Meanwhile, I began making up a pot roast in the slow cooker.

Here is the recipe.

Of course, I never quite get recipes correct, so my version has a few differences.

• I used twice as much garlic.  (There’s no such thing as too much garlic!)
• I used twice as much bacon.  (Ditto!)
• I was out of thyme (ha! out of thyme!  get it?  out of time?) so I used sage.
• I added a can of beef broth.

I’m cooking it now and will be able to try it out this evening.  Then I will let it warm overnight and bring some to work tomorrow.

Weekend of legos, curses, and corned beef

Just a quick update while the weekend is fresh on my mind.

Saturday - made corned beef and cabbage in the crock pot, with excellent results, along with mashed potatoes with green onions and homemade horseradish sauce.  Had a group of people over and played the Curses game again, which again was a great hit.  Also played Othello, at which I seem to be a grandmaster.   Stayed up til about 3 am!

Sunday - we took the boys up to Chicago for an expensive visit to the LEGO store, where the boys got some new Castle sets and custom mini-figs, followed by a quick stop at the Lincoln Park zoo where we checked out the lion house, snake / small mammal house, and primate houses.  Pics to come.  The boys spent the evening building their new Lego sets while we watched Dan in Real Life on DVD.  We weren’t terribly impressed with the movie but it wasn’t bad.  More a movie about making bad decisions (thou shalt not fall in love with your brother’s girlfriend and even if you do, thou shalt not pursue it) and lying, than about love.