Chicken Night

The night of grocery shopping is usually eating out.  I've done enough.  But the night after...it's chicken night.  I love chicken night.

The logic in it is simple.  I have uses for whole chickens, but I don't have the freezer room, so they get cooked first and the rest of the meat goes in the freezer.  If we are cooking one chicken, we might as well cook two.

Maggie roasted them tonight.  She coated them with olive oil spices.  She decided to try thyme, basil, garlic powder, and salt.  This was a mixture I'd never tried, and it was dreamy.  Nestled side by side in a 9x12 Pyrex dish in a 425 degree oven, breasts down, they became golden and toasty, juices running into the pan so that the white meat was immersed in the juices,soaking up the flavor of the herbs.  Amazing.

Accompanied by roasted cauliflower and sugar snap peas, a salad, and iced tea, it is one of my favorite dinners.

Then the work starts.  We pick all the meat off the bones, saving the breast meat for salads and chicken salad, which is what the rest of the cauliflower is going into as well.  The dark meat is going into the freezer to wait for a soup.  The bones will be in the freezer too, for stock.  Those juices that in the Pyrex are strained and the herbed chicken fat will be used for sauteing veggies.

And then there's the dishes.  It's more work than I like to do on a warm night in an oven-heated kitchen, but it will be worth it.

(Pictures would've been nice, but I decided to write about it after it was all cleaned up).
 

The New Domesticity

"The New Domesticity, Or a Step Back for American Women?", a Washington Post article, is most fascinating.

I really appreciate its acknowledgement that a force behind the movement back to domestic skills is partially a political movement against commercial foods, and also a movement toward independence -- a desire to be able to take care of ourselves, not unlike the conflict posited in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (are you truly free on the roads if you do not have the skills to fix your own bike and you rely on others who have these skills, or are you becoming more and more disconnected from yourself and your experience? was one of the questions explored in the book.)

Aha.....

For those of you seriously concerned about my dreadful couch situation, it has been solved. I knew something was missing in the process. Basically, what was required to solve it all was for me to have a temper tantrum.

Jeff and I went shopping yesterday at lunch, and found four or five sofas just across the street that I would be perfectly happy with. With each one, there was something that he couldn't bring himself to embrace (the microfiber sectional was just a little too wierd feeling, the other one was too expensive, the other one didn't support his back, the other one was just a bit too short to be able to nap on....)

So then I vented my frustration regarding the fact that he actually had an opinion on it at all (and in reality, I am very happy that he has an opinion on it, even if it makes my life harder) and then I went clothes shopping, where I found a couple of cute outfits that I was definitely due and needed for work and life. Feeling somewhat better for some reason, I stopped into Klopfensteins by my favorite sushi place (oh man, I'm jonesing for sushi..but I resisted). I really didn't expect to find anything that would work(though there was lots that was really nice that certainly pleased me. But like Elephant's Child pointed out, I have two kids and a big dog. And that dog occasionally thinks he should be allowed the same privileges as the child before I put him aright. The dusty rose plaid/floral Broyhill pattern probably would have put me into a coma if it were permanently ruined by a muddy dog print.)

But then I walked toward the back. And there it was. And it possessed EVERY SINGLE TRAIT that we have ever wanted in a sofa. It wasn't microfiber. I was happy about that (the more I read about it, the more I read that static is a HUGE issue. People have had ruined laptops computers, etc. from them). It was comfortable and had good back support. Amazingly, it was all that, and a sleeper sofa. It is a medium brown and is soft and comfy. It also has a matching snuggler (smaller than a love seat, bigger than a chair) that also has a sleeper bed in it (when we lived in California, Jeff really just wanted to get a snuggler and forget that we might at sometime or another actually have to seat guests). And it has a matching oversized storage ottoman. And all within our price range (and really a price I would've expected to find at a factory outlet). I brought Jeff in today and he really liked it. Chris sat on it, and the 2nd most opinionated male in the household's first words regarding it were "its comfy." Then he and his friend Jonathan spent the rest of the time sitting on it playing Mad Libs while we finalized the details.

This picture is from my phone, so I will have to say, the color is better than this. and it is bigger than it looks (here it looks no bigger than a loveseat, but my 6 foot tall hubby can lay down on it). Unfortunately, it doesn't come with the leopard print throw blanket....darn. Needless to say, Maggie is tired of furniture shopping.

So, I got my couch, AND increased the bed capacity at the Horn Hilton. It gets delivered next Friday. The snuggler will soon follow.