kitties

What Do You Mean You Want To Make The Bed?

/ TaMara

When the kitty won’t move, you just have to make the bed around him.

Zander yawning since he was so rudely awoken so I could make the bed. Poor babies.

 

Tidbits

/ jeffreyw / 1 Comment

Here’s half of the kitteh crew, the youngest half.  They’ve arranged themselves on the tree by order of seniority – Bitsy on top, Ginger Boy, and Ollie, the newest addition.I tried a couple of those refrigerated pizza crusts that come rolled up in parchment paper.  I figured they couldn’t be too bad.  I figured wrong.  Those roasted garlic cloves were very good – cooked at 400 for 45 minutes or so.I peeked into the oven after 14 minutes and saw that the crust edge had little or no color so I gave them a few minutes more.  That was a bad call.  The edge was hard and tough, the rest was just tough.  I have a tube of pizza dough that they package like the biscuits that you rap on the counter edge to pop open.  I’ll give that a go but my hopes for it are limited.It’s getting to be soup weather – the temps are below 90 and that is what we call fall weather these days.  I made a potato soup – boil some ham hocks in chicken stock with onions for an hour or two then add chopped potatoes and continue to simmer until they are soft enough to run a stick blender.  Take out the ham and set aside to cool, run the blender, then pick the meat off the hock and return to the soup.  I added a splash of half and half and melted in a handful of shredded cheddar but that’s optional.I still had a package of sour mustard greens that were an ingredient in this dish – pork belly with mustard greens.  I thawed some of the pork belly I had saved from our last trip to our supplier to use in this and I have the rest of it curing for homemade bacon.  Still have a few days left before that will be ready.I thawed a brick of the last batch of red beans and made a new batch of rice to go with it.  I can see why Louis Armstrong often signed letters “Red Beans and Rice-ly Yours”. Tsk tsk, I see Homer has been out frog hunting again.  He’d best hope he doesn’t step in a snapping turtle’s open maw.

Tidbits

/ jeffreyw

DSC_6136 [1600x1200]You may remember this soup from a few days ago.  I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to the mung bean noodles.  I’m all puffed up and itchy with a whole body rash that I’m treating with antihistamines with some success.  At least I’m not scratching myself bloody.  I’ve had a reaction like this before, a couple of years ago.  At the time I blamed it on something in this soup:DSC_0645 [1600x1200]It’s made with assorted sea critters.  The day after I ate this I started noticing bumps and rashes and puffy eyes.  I rode it out with benadryl and haven’t bought any more of the frozen seafood since.  This time around, I suspected the mung beans may have been the culprit because they were the only thing unusual to my regular diet, notwithstanding the lag time between ingestion and peak symptoms.  I wondered if the soup I made with those seafood items used mung bean noodles so I looked through my archives.  Nope – those are ramen noodles and I’ve eaten them before and after without problem.  I did see this from a few days prior:DSC_0183 [1600x1200]There are the mung bean noodles.  The lag time is what threw me off before.  On reflection, I can see that the reaction built over a few days, I noticed some odd bumps on my hands and fingers earlier and though maybe they were from poison ivy or oak because I had pulled some weeds out of the garden.  At least this is something I can avoid without much problem.  I just hope the mung bean hypothesis is correct and it isn’t something else.  I did have a peanut butter and jelly sammich within the same time frame.  Here’s a cute kitteh for you:IMG_2108 [1600x1200]It’s a new arrival at the shelter.  Mrs J took a scad of pictures trying to get a good one, this is the only one that isn’t blurred by movement.  He was a squirmy little kitty.  And speaking of squirmy little kittehs, here’s one I dug out of the archives.  It’s Bitsy tasting a nose:P1000102 [1600x1200]She was a brand new kitteh for us when this was taken. I made a stab at a double crusted pizza the other day, I made a regular cheese crust pizza, then added a layer of sliced provolone and covered that with another layer of dough, then built the pizza out with sausage, mushrooms, and onions:DSC_6150 [1600x1200]