November 4, 2013 by kimicalreaction - 3 Comments

NaBloPoMo Day 4:It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Sunday was such a gorgeous day that David and I decided to get out our beach bikes and go for a ride.

(And then there was the fact we made a huge pan of lasagna the night before, ate most of it in one sitting along with an accompanying bottle of wine {read: 2} and needed to ride it off.)

We cruised all over the neighborhood and down the PATH trail.

The trees are finally turning, leaves morphing into brilliant reds, golds and yellows. The air was crisp and bright and somehow luminous.

Overall, a perfect day.

So happy we made time to spend time in the sun, enjoying time together…enjoying Fall.

November 3, 2013 by kimicalreaction - 8 Comments

NaBloPoMo Day 3: Lazy Sundays

Yay! It’s a Lazy Sunday!

I’m not sure which one of us decided, but at some point after waking, we threw any plans for an industrious morning out the window and decided to revel in a bit of sloth.

By the way, sloth totally rocks.

To maintain my investment in this delicious decision, I am totally phoning it in with a “picture” post today. Thank you for your support.

Yummmmm. Omelets!

Lazy Sundays do typically involve some work (well at least for David) making a delectable Breakfast Which Is Bad For Us.

This means Bacon.

Asiago and Caramelized Onion (with the last garden tomato) Omelets with BACON!!!!

Sloth + Bacon = Happiness.

January 21, 2013 by kimicalreaction - 3 Comments

“Weekend at Rabbie’s,” or Burn’s Supper (and Breakfast)

Last January, right around this time, David and I hosted our second annual Burn’s Supper, the traditional Scottish celebration of the life and works of the historic Bard of Scotland, Robert Burns.

That very next morning, we hosted our second Burn’s Breakfast, seeing as our guests from Burn’s Supper, as in the year prior, were still at the house when we woke up.

Yes, not only do I believe that a pattern is emerging, but I think I have identified the culprit.

In my post about our first supper, I spoke of the joy of finally finding a man who would host a Burn’s Night with me.

I had no idea then what I had gotten myself into.

David started planning Burns Supper 2012 most likely the morning after Burns Supper 2011, but adamantly and obsessively – oh, around January 2nd of this past year. While I limited myself to “do you think we could actually squeeze in more people ‘cuz wouldn’t it be fun to invite ______ too?” he was actually designing menu cards, fretting over tablescapes and mentally rearranging furniture. To be honest, he did a spectacular job, but it brought into sharp contrast the extreme differences in our personalities. I’m about the party – he’s about the parts. Overall, it makes for a very successful combination and better him than me.

It’s probably a good idea, in actuality, to have someone putting brakes on me…I would have invited half my facebook friends, all the neighbors, everyone from work and probably an accidental Sasennach or two. As it was, we worked together to create an event just as memorable as the one before, for a select group of friends brave enough to attend.

Bill O’ Fare

Flush with our success from the first year’s event, when we conspired to create a truly tasty Neo-Haggis (read: no sheep entrails) and actually edible Neeps-n-Tatties (read: add booze) for our lone, intrepid guest; we scampered recklessly out a culinary limb and invited five people to to the 2012 dinner.

We became a little more adventurous menu-wise as well, upping the ante with an additional course, Cock-A-Leekie. Sounding more like a disease of the enlisted man, this soup is actually a traditional Celtic recipe; the first written records dating as far back as 1598.

I’ll share with you all, as it’s quite tasty, and an admirable addition to your chicken soup repertoire.

Cock-A-Leekie Soup, from the Food Network website:
Ingredients

6 pitted prunes (David omitted the them in his version, but I’ll leave them in, since to not do so would be most irregular. Heh.)
4 teaspoons Scotch
One 3 1/2 pound chicken, cut into 8 pieces
1 teaspoon kosher salt plus more to taste
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
6 medium leeks, (light green and white only), halved and cut into 1/2 inch slices
10 sprigs flat- leaf parsley
3 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
5 cups homemade or canned low-sodium chicken broth

Directions
In a small bowl combine the prunes with the Scotch and 2 tablespoons of water and set aside. Season the chicken with 1 teaspoon of the salt and the pepper. Place a large Dutch oven or soup pot over medium heat and melt half of the butter. Saute the chicken on each side until well browned, about 10 minutes. Transfer the chicken to a plate, and pour off any fat left in the pan. Add the remaining butter to the pan, saute the leeks over medium-low until tender, about 25 minutes.

Tie the parsley, thyme, and bay leaf with a string. Add the herb bundle, the chicken and the broth to the pot. Bring to a boil, and then lower the heat to maintain a gentle simmer. Cover and cook the soup for until the chicken is cooked through and tender, about 25 minutes. Remove the chicken, set aside to cool slightly. Remove the herb bundle and discard. Skim any fat from the surface of the soup with a spoon or ladle, if needed. Remove the chicken meat from the bones and cut into 1-inch chunks. Add the chicken cubes, the prunes, and their liquid to the soup. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer for 2 minutes. To serve divide the soup evenly among 6 warm soup bowls.

The always dapper Dana

Food in the oven, cooking merrily along; table all set and David and I dolled up in our Highland best, we awaited our guests: the ever adventurous Dana and his companion, Troy; married friends and fellow foodies, the couple affectionately known as Tomkitten; and our buddy Hil, always up for cocktails and snacks.

David, who never ceases to amaze me, actually went to the trouble of setting up and taking a formal portrait for each couple as they arrived, sorta like Prom, but cooler and with more plaid (he actually printed the photos out, framed them, and gave them as party swag. My husband rocks.)

As always with our gatherings, we enjoyed a wonderful evening with such fantastic friends. Everyone raved over the food and the wine and scotch flowed freely (yes, you might be sensing the pattern…) David gave another spectacular rendition of the “Address to a Haggis,” Dana provided an eloquent “Toast to the Lassies,” Troy treated us to an acapella song (he has an amazing voice), Tom provided an interpretive dance to “I Could Walk 500 Miles,” and I actually managed to complete my counter-salute to the gentlemen, the “Reply to the Toast to the Lassies.” Further more, upon my rousing invocation of “Down with trousers, up with kilts!” my husband flashed me.

That, lairds and ladies, is a successful dinner party.

Dana and Troy, workin’ the tartan.

David’s lovely dinner table

Our handsome host, hard at work.

Dana and Hil

Festivities about to commence!

The official KAVID ~~Prom~~ Burn’s Supper Portrait

Another year has passed and we will be celebrating Burns Supper again this weekend, our third year, which I find absolutely astounding. It’s becoming more of a Scottish-American version of Thanksgiving to me, as I reflect on last year’s event and look forward to the upcoming. I try to count my uncountable blessings: my joyous new marriage, the addition of my parents joining us for dinner this year, and David’s parents “skyping” in; a reprise of almost all of last year’s guests and even more good friends joining the mix for the first time. I am rich indeed, and most grateful for the happiness in my life.

I leave you with some fitting words from the birthday boy himself, and promise to recap our upcoming adventure a little faster this time!

Then catch the moments as they fly,
And use them as ye ought, man:
Believe me, happiness is shy,
And comes not aye when sought, man

June 6, 2012 by kimicalreaction - 1 Comment

Dirt, Redux

Last year around this time, I wrote the first post about my losing battle with SHDD, Seasonal Home Depot Disorder.

For those of you unfamiliar, SHDD is a form of dementia typically striking around the end of March, when the combination of sunny days, balmy temperatures and sassy commercial jingles conspire to fill even the brown-thumbed loft dweller with visions of gardening grandeur. The naive Mr. Green Jeans-wanna-be, lured to the lair of the devil, a.k.a. Home Depot Garden Center, is sucked into a kaleidoscope of burgeoning flora promising to transform their winter-weary lives with Spring fecundity. SHDD is characterized by delirium, dissociation from reality, impaired judgment, and a dangerous lack of financial restraint. There is currently no known cure for SHDD, although there are some interesting therapies in development.

This is what actually happens. It’s Saturday. You go to Home Depot with your fiance to buy a toilet flusher repair kit. In your excitement to preview the latest bathroom chandeliers, you run ahead, innocently cutting through the garden center on the way to the lighting aisle.

An hour later, your frantic fiance finds you staring transfixed into a display of Heirloom Pepper plants, a trickle of drool running down your chin, mumbling your grandmother’s chowchow recipe in psychotic litany. Helpless to dissuade you in your maddened and disoriented state, he protestingly loads $200 worth of seedlings into the back of your SUV for a garden you have no land for.

Nice, Home Depot Garden Center. Nice. Your time will come.

This year, girded by wisdom gleaned by hauling $200 worth of dead plants off my balcony, I was able to ward off the Center’s siren song until almost June. Unable to stay off the junk, but unwilling to ride the horticultural horse alone, I finally cajoled my poor fiance into driving to the Home Depot in Smynings with me the other week to “pick up a tomato plant or two.”

Two hours later we returned to David’s house with a pre-fabricated cedar garden box riser, 24-cubic feet of special Miracle Gro enhanced dirt (in contrast to normal dirt, which is free) two Heirloom tomato plants, three Heirloom pepper plants (chowchow time!) basil, thyme, oregano, curly parsley, tarragon, a strawberry plant and a watermelon seedling (couldn’t resist).

Donning gloves and a hat, David quickly cleared a rough patch of land in the backyard, assembled the pre-fab riser, laboriously filled it with the special earth and then carefully placed the seedlings according to each’s light absorption preferences and bio-relative soil conductivity.

Anxious to do my part, I poured a glass of wine and busied myself naming each of our new leafy “kids”: Emily and Cleveland, the tomato plants; Basil, the basil (be sure to use the snotty-sounding British “ah” instead of the hard “a”); Reggie, the Oregano; Tex, the Texas Tarragon; Curly, the Curly Parley, and of course, Charleston Grey III, the watermelon. And no, I didn’t name the pepper plants. That’s silly.

Veggies finally all planted and watered, David and I sat back with the smug satisfaction native to the owners of vast estates and haciendas, purveying our tiny 4′ x 4′ farmstead with proprietary greed and dreaming of what will most likely be the world’s most expensive summer salad.

I might be mental, I might be an addict, but at least I’m not alone.

And Home Depot, you’re still the devil.

Update: June 9, 2012. View of the North 40 (inches). Growing like gangbusters.

September 18, 2011 by kimicalreaction - 1 Comment

Cat Scratch Fever

Shortly after going to bed last night, I was woken by a really loud noise.

It sounded like someone had “cow-tipped” a 300-lb. rat, and the big fat rat was desperately scrambling, with its giant scratchy ratty toenails, to right itself on the hardwood floors. It fell. It scrambled. It scratched. It took out a lamp. It fell again. Scratchie, scratchie, scramble, scramble.

I sat up. David grumbled something in his sleep that sounded like “Fracklefarklefrack. Cats.”

I grabbed my glasses and squinted through the darkness. Cats, yeah, for sure; where are the cats?

Brodie, typically the first against the wall in a shennanigan revolution, was fast asleep at the end of the bed. Well, was fast asleep. He cracked an eye open by a slit, like, “Awww, Ma. I’m sleepin.”

I peered through the gloom for Keegan, who should have been curled up on the other corner of the bed.

Keegan, the good cat, who never misbehaves or causes trouble. Keegan, the quiet, dignified cat.

No Keegan.

Giant rat falls over again. Louder. Thump. Scramble, scramble. Scratchie, scritchie, scramble.

“Keegan?” I whisper.

Silence.

“Keegan??” Louder.

Thump. Scratchie. Scrible. Scramble.

I crept downstairs, based on the noise, expecting a scene of tsunami-like destruction. At the least, the kind of damage that a 300-lb rat would inflict on a living room after consistently falling over and scrambling to right itself.

I turned on the light.

No flipped over furniture. No tossed cabinets. Not even a beat-up, discombobulated rat. Simply a small, slightly-chubby, orange and white cat. A cat calmly sitting in the middle of the floor. A cat looking up at me with the most innocent expression I may have ever seen on the face of a small, slightly-chubby orange and white cat. Nothing dumped over. No chaos. No calamity. I swear to God he smothered a yawn with one immaculate paw.

“Keegan! Jeeezuuusss. We’re sleeping!”

He begins to lick his butt.

Shaking my head, I climbed the stairs, crawled back into bed and drifted back into sleep.

Minutes/hours pass.

WHOMP! SCRAMBLE! SCRITCHIESCRITCHIESCRAMBLE!

I leapt from bed, ran down the stairs and peered again into the gloom. Dear God, what is up with the racket!!!

I turned on the light.

“WTF? Keegan!”

What was he doing to make all that noise? Juggling with power tools? Rollerskating in circles? Re-arranging the furniture? Sliding down the hallway on just his claws? What the hell was he trying to do, drive me completely insane?

Frustrated, I stormed down the stairs, swooped him up and carried him to the couch. Shaking my finger in his furry face, I explained to him that it was sleepy time and that meant for ALL of us. I pointed to the corner of the couch.

“Go! Sleep!”

Keegan looked suitably chastised. He curled up on the assigned cushion.

I went back upstairs and back to bed.

Time passed.

Thump. Scratchie. Scrible. Scramble.

At this point, I was getting really angry. I don’t usually lose my temper with the cats, but I was exhausted and this was ridiculous. Some sick feline game. Well, in theory, I was Mom. Breadwinner. Possessor of thumbs. Opener of cat food cans. Certainly due some form of respect and obedience.

“Keegan!” I hissed, into the blackness.

Thump. Scratchie. Scrible. Scramble.

Wearily, I drug myself to the stairs. I flipped the wall switch and the stairwell filled with light.

“That’s it, you furry little bastard.” I snarled. “It’s seriously sleepy time now. No more of that.” I snatched him up and dumped him on the foot of the bed.

David groaned in his sleep and pulled the covers over his head.

“Keegan! Stay there. Sleep. Now.”

Keegan obliged and I climbed back into bed. Finally, I think. He’s finally tired, too. I’ve won.

I felt fairly smug, in all that silence, so eventually I drifted off to sleep.

WHOMP! SCRAMBLE!

Furious, I scrambled out of bed only to find Keegan sleeping peacefully on David’s feet.

I looked over the rail.

The darkness was very quiet.

Suspiciously quiet.

I slowly walked down the stairs.

Quiet.

Wait a minute. Where was Brodie?

Scritch.

I turned on the light.

It dawned on me then, they’re working in shifts.

I’m outnumbered.

I gave up, went back to bed and buried my head under the covers.

September 1, 2011 by kimicalreaction - 6 Comments

We are Martial

I’m into weird exercise.

Oh, stop it. I’m merely saying I get bored with conventional workouts at the gym, so I’m constantly on the lookout for interesting things to do to keep in shape. This all started years ago, when a friend hooked me up with her equestrian team and I did some show jumping and endurance riding. Unfortunately, while earning a pile of street cred for gettin’ my National Velvet on, I lost my butt financially, as everything about riding is expensive – from horses to hats to halters – and you need a Robin Leach lifestyle to support your equine habit.

My next adventure was Rock Climbing. Yes, a major adrenalin rush, but ultimately rather lonely, as I have surprisingly few friends interested in scrambling up 40-foot walls and falling back down them. I moved on to Bouldering, a more social form of rock climbing at lower heights, until I fractured my finger jockeying for cool points with a passel of monkey-jointed teenagers I could have easily given birth to. Belly Dancing? ::sigh:: Epic fail. When the instructor you are paying money to teach you looks at you in a pitying way and says, “Wow, you really don’t have any sense of rhythm, do you?” you know it’s time to hang up your hip scarf.

Most successful, so far, have been classes in Aerial Silks, also known as Aerial Tissue or Ribbons (think Pink’s 2010 performance at the Grammys) which is basically hanging mid-air from two strips of fabric doing flips and spins and acrobatics. Really, exceptionally fabulous, both because it’s a great workout and, most importantly; it’s the coolest freaking thing you’ve ever done in your entire life. My dreams of running off and joining the circus were forever crushed though, when I sprained my shoulder last April loading glass racks into the van for a wedding and could no longer support my full body weight on one arm. Farewell, Cirque du Soleil and Vegas. What happened there would have stayed there. Now, I make no promises.

Iceskating at Piedmont Park

Just this past winter, I learned to Ice Skate, which probably doesn’t seem exotic to many of you, but I grew up in Mobile, Alabama and I live in Atlanta, Georgia so ice isn’t exactly thick on the ground in any kind of conveniently recreational way.

Ice Skating is a ton of fun and it was fairly easy to nail the basics since it’s a lot like Rollerblading (yet another one of my fitness fads in the 90s). As a matter of fact, David and I went ice skating on our first date, a lovely piece of trivia you might jot down for your personal notes.

The negatives of ice skating are:
a) it’s seasonal (there are some year-round rinks in the ‘burbs, but nothing close enough to be practical)
b) the pop-up Holiday rink near me is attached to a bar. While handy for liquid courage and hydration, it adds a lot of dangerously drunk dudes to the mix, slamming around a very small rink. This reminds me I don’t have health insurance and significantly reduces the light-hearted diversion.

At last we come to my latest fitness foray, Krav Maga, which I stumbled on in an internet search for martial arts classes in my neighborhood.

Krav Maga is an Israeli martial art made famous by the Mossad, and is foremost about self defence. Krav teaches you to disable and beat the living ~~Jesus~~ Moses out of an attacker, so you can flee to safety. This translates to a lot of punching and kicking, something I’ve never done before but that I find myself embracing wholeheartedly. I’ve been taking classes for about a week now, and I can see myself morphing into a cross between la Femme Nikita and Laura Croft.

David’s been amazingly supportive about the whole thing, even coming to my first class for moral suppport. I think he’s finally learning to take my wild tangents in stride, as evidenced by this recent text message.

Me: Hey baby. Finishing up early today. Yay! What r u doing 2night?
David: Washing car, doing some push ups. Reading.
Me: I’m going to punch stuff and yell, “Fire!!!!”
David: That’s nice.
Me: U really want me right now, don’t u?
David: I’ve never found u more desirable.
Me: R u being sarcastic?

The downside of Krav Maga is that you pretty much get the crap beaten out of you. I’ve never actually been in a fight so I’ve been a little shocked by the level of bruising and swelling of knuckles and knees. I’m working on a theory that cocktails before and after class could prevent inflamation by icing me down from the inside out, but David doesn’t think there’s any science to support this.

In the meantime, I’m just taking a lot of Advil and I bought some super cool boxing hand wraps, which are like spendy, bright red ace bandages to wrap around my hands to protect my wrists and knuckles. They can now join my collection of expensive weird excercise gear, which is packed into my hall closet gathering dust.