housekeeping

Hello, blog.  It's been awhile.

The posts I posted and deleted 4 minutes after don't count.  Sorry about that.

I post tonight in a most domestic mood.  I just spent 4 hours making dinner from my new Greek cookbook.  Proof that domesticity can = insanity can = getting slightly happy off red wine.

The dish I made should not be served to infants.  I was drawn in by the ingredients - anything that has chicken, red wine and tomato paste, onions, a cinnamon stick and allspice has to be wonderful, no?  Yes.  But how much yes?  Well, yes it was wonderful to the tune of 5 tablespoons of olive oil and 1 entire cup of red wine.

Not for the weak-veined.  Or the lightweight.  But there's more.

I made more olive-slobbered stuff.  They call them chicken rissoles in the trusty book, but I know them as Falafel from my favorite lebanese (note the placement of the "b" and "s" in that word) restaurant.  Making them required soaking chickpeas in water overnight.  Something this involved has not been attempted by my self since I started making the Drunk Chicken described above.  For this ditty, you cook the chick peas.  Then you mash 'em.  (Then I added too much water which made them too fluffy . . . slap and note to self).

Then you cook two onions (which amounts to a table-pile of eye misery) with - get this - sage and parsley.  Mmmmm.  Sage is God's gift to mankind and me. Then you add a boatload of cumin and an egg and self-rising flour and the leg of newt . . .wait, wrong recipe . . .and then plop little balls of 'em into normal flour and drown them in yep, more bubbly-hot olive oil.

I need to buy more olive oil now.

In Italy, it took about a month to go through a bottle.

In the last 6 months, I have gone through half of one bottle of the stuff.

In one night, I used up at least a cup.  Maybe more.  Probably more.  Everything is oil. Dang it tastes good.

Oh, and the Drunk Chicken?  You put it over oodles of pasta pretending to be rice, but it's really pasta/orzo.  It thankfully sops up the liquidy sauce.  Because you know what I'm having for lunch tomorrow since I didn't have enough chicken to soak up what I made?  Drunk Soup with orzo.

This domestic kick is brought to you thanks to moving into a new, huge room with a big huge new bed that makes me want to actually stay home.  The new, huge chair is on its way on Saturday morning.  Life is good.  It still doesn't make any sense.  But when has it ever?