Continuing to keep boring grilled meats at bay, I dumped whatever I thought would taste good enough if sprinkled on top of the pork. (No one said real dry rubs were being utilized in this fight...) Some paprika, chile powder, and... I don't remember coat the top. The baby carrots were growing old, so I divided what was left and called it a meal.
Again, in my attempt to fend off boring grilled chicken, I decided to mix balsamic vinegar, olive oil, lemon juice, and a bunch of Mrs. Dash (we don't have any salad dressing in our fridge--that would have been easier) to marinate what I thought were going to be a few chicken breasts but turned out to be lots of strips packed together.
I wanted to make twice-baked potatoes, but didn't bake the potatoes initially for a long enough time, couldn't get the insides to mash, fed it into the food processor, and would up with potato chowder-filled baked potatoes. It could have been worse.
There was this episode of Family Matters where Laura decides she can make breakfast in half the time if she just cooks everything at twice the temperature. Then Urkle has to rush over and put out the blaze she's started in the kitchen. I didn't set the kitchen on fire, but the episode came to mind when I decided to just guess that increasing the temperature would be a good way to get the London broil cooked in half the time.
If you've followed the posts here, you've seen the charred thing that comes out of the oven after 6 (or more) hours at 225 degrees. At 4 'o-clock, I put this in the oven at 325 degrees, hoping it would be ready by 7:30 (or whenever LV got home). LV always proclaims that charred lump tastes good, but this time it really did. Maybe it was the smaller baking dish. Maybe it was the decrease in time. Maybe it was a thicker, fattier cut. Whatever it was. It as soooo much better this time.
I wanted to start taking pictures from one new uniform angle for all my posts (the extreme close up is getting old to me), but the chicken just didn't look as a good as it tasted in the overhead shots. The secret to this batch being so tasty was that for the first time ever there was more batter than chicken. And then I kicked some serious butt in Jeopardy with far more correct answers than bad guesses.
After the chicken enchiladas were rejected in 2005, I tried pulling a recipe from Epicurious. Now, if I hadn't had a leftover bottle of green olives from a recent attempt to shoot a proper martini, I probably never would have looked at this recipe. It was 2005. Ground Cumin was not in my cabinet. "I hate ground cumin" was the review of the dish, so I never made it again. Until now.
I'm not even sure how I made this dish back then. I never bough fresh parsley. I don't feel like there was fresh garlic on hand. And there was definitely no food processor. While last time might have just been old chopped green olives, this time I went slightly crazy with the garlic. I just kept tossing more and more into the food processor, forgetting that this wasn't a roast or something--it was all going to end up on top of the chicken.
Overall, though, it was better than the first attempt. Scrappy, meanwhile, had plain chicken with BBQ sauce.
These are my Chia herbs. They are supposed to thrive at 65 degrees with direct sunlight. I don't cannot provide them with a 65-degree climate that has direct sunlight. I have a sunroom that's approximately 102 degrees with plenty of sunshine or other rooms that about 90 degrees with plenty of shade.
I think the end is nigh for my Chia herbs...
Chives are supposed to take a noticeably longer period of time to develop compared to the other Chia seeds, but I fear we will only have two Chia Chives. All the seeds seem to be on the surface now, where they won't grow. I had followed the instructions (sort of) to plant them below the surface of the Chia® Growing Sponge... When did they leak out to the surface without me noticing?
Herbs continue to grow... (I swear these are different pictures than on Chia Watch 3. At least, there's a real difference when you're the one watering them twice a day and wondering if they're ready to come out of their sandwich bags.)
Dill (foreground) and Sweet Basil (end) are growning well. Their sandwich bags can be removed for a few hours. Parsley is still too small. Chives grow below the surface, so I can't tell how they're doing. I only know that I don't see them. And their sponge hasn't taken up much water.
We thought it would be a good idea to plant something with Scrappy. Now we have a Chia Herb Garden. They make it hard to go wrong. Water the sponges (yeah, sponges), sprinkle the seeds, cover with a sandwich bag, wait.
