farm season

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it Begins. first trip out today, staggered off the weekend because it’s not a chicken day so I don’t Have to Be There on Monday.

i’m tired. and i couldnt make myself pack so everything i think i might need is in a laundry basket i still have to transfer to a suitcase.

i want to leave in an hour, i can manage that.

no, i don’t have any music to listen to particularly, and i don’t think i’m up to making the experiment about podcasts again. five hours alone with my thoughts. could be worse.

if we can finish the wall of the cabin loft i’ll sleep there this weekend. if not, i’ll have to ponder my options, as another friend is visiting and i can either share the guestroom or go to mom’s.

i also need to spend time at middle-little’s this week, as she’s moving, and i know that clearing out her hoarder nest packing her apartment will fall to me, the Sister Who Won’t Judge. That’s my task. I’m pre-tired. It’ll be great. Mom’s been having Anxieties about M-L’s living space ever since Uncle Pete died suddenly and Mom was left to clear out his objectively horrifying house on her own*,* and M-L has done nothing to alleviate these anxieties and indeed keeps making jokes about her own drinking habits despite that having been a contributing factor in UP’s demise, so really, we are all very excited about getting her out of that apartment and into a space where she won’t do that. (She lived with me before that, and was a fantastic roommate, so it’s really being alone that enables her in these patterns.) Anyway this is a rambly method of psyching myself up to go not ask her why she has so many reusable bags filled with other reusable bags and nothing else.

I also got off my ass and put through an order for a new computer. i’d decided several years ago that this would be my last Macbook, but then when I was looking at my options, I’m… aware that if I get anything else then I will have to entirely redo my entire file structure and will lose several paid programs I do use that I’m not sure even come in Windows versions and I will have to fight with Cortana and…. and and….. ok the Macbooks don’t look that bad nowadays. I can get one with…. exactly the same specs as this 2014 Macbook… for the same price I paid for this 2014 Macbook…..

wow we’ve really done nothing in technology in ten years that is horrifying.

(When I looked like four years ago, after having damaged this one, they were in their absolutely-no-ports phase and were also $1000 more expensive, so I guess that was just a weak moment in Macbook history.) (No, this one doesn’t have any ports besides USB-C. I’ll cope. My current Macbook’s only port I use is the SD card slot which is currently filled with silica gel beads, whoops.)

Anyway we went to order this on apple dot com and discovered that the checkout page is a 404 file not found. (We tested this extensively, from multiple browsers on several computers, Windows and Mac machines, and all of them confirmed: no dice. You can’t actually purchase a Macbook from apple.com currently. It’ll let you go through the whole configuration process too, which is maddening, it’s just the final page that fails!)

So we went to BHphotovideo.com instead, B&H being a venerable online and in-person NYC superstore, and they were perfectly willing to sell it to me contingent on my understanding that they won’t ship it until Passover is over.

This is fine, I don’t want it until next week.

Now, watch this computer lose its tiny mind….. we’ll see. It just can’t load images on like any page. If I wipe it clean and reformat it, it might serve someone else very well, or it might just die entirely.

OK OK OK OK i need to go pack. (Your picture was not posted)

(casserole anon from… a very long time ago 😅 he

around here, keep warm babes

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ah! yes! i did comfort foods at the beginning of winter… I innovated a new casserole since then!! I should share it!!

Well. It’s not insanely innovative. It’s just that I took an old family recipe from Dude’s family, which we’d made a few times, and combined it with an amalgamation of half a dozen things off the Internet, and have come up with an easier way of eating the recipe than the original one which was off the back of a packet of seasoning or something.

So, I present:

Modified Chicken Parisienne

The main important thing here is the sherry. It’s distinctive because of the sherry. I also like to flavor it with thyme. The original recipe had you bake the chicken in the sauce and then cook the rice separately, and then remove the chicken and thicken the cream sauce with sour cream at the last minute.

This seems silly to me when you could just bake the rice in as part of the dish. So I looked up chicken and rice casserole recipes, and am making that now! Since it’s fucking snowing out and the heat’s broken at work and I froze my ass off all day, here’s a good chance to share it!

So you can use basically any vegetables in this. For excitement, I took my bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs and browned them briefly, skin side down, in a hot cast iron Dutch oven, in lard, while I got everything else ready, and then left them sitting on a plate to the side while I did the rest of this.

Start with aromatics. I used several small onions and two medium carrots. You could also use like, celery, fennel, celeriac, whatever. I put those in the hot fat for like 5-10 minutes while I chopped everything else.

I diced some garlic and threw that in. Then I cut up a whole bunch of fresh broccoli, dicing the stems really well and cutting the florets apart. I threw those in and mixed them around, and then threw in a cup or two of sliced mushrooms I’d bought special for this because I love mushrooms. You could also use spinach, kale, cauliflower, green beans, peas, corn, I mean, any vegetable you care for. (Ideal way to use up anything in your freezer you have no other plans for.)

I stirred all that around, and then put in 1.5 cups of white rice, and stirred that really well also. I then tossed in about 1/4c of sherry. Stirred that around some, and then put in 1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup.

To that I added a cup of water and 2 cups of milk, and then put in a little extra water just to make sure. I added salt, pepper, oregano, and rosemary, because I’m almost out of thyme, which lends itself to puns but does make me sad.

On top of that I nestled my 2 chicken thighs. The recipes call for more chicken than that but there’s only two of us and so I don’t bother. I’d say put a piece of chicken (thigh or breast or leg) per person you’re serving. I don’t bother having enough chicken for the leftovers, as I find skin-on chicken doesn’t reheat appealingly. You could also shred cooked chicken into here if you’d rather, it doesn’t matter.

Then I topped the whole thing with ehhhh like a cup of shredded cheddar cheese, because the chicken casserole recipes call for it and I love cheese. It’s clearly optional here. I had the chicken thighs skin-side-up so I put the cheese around them, not on top of them, in the hopes that the skin will crisp a bit.

Into a hot oven I put the casserole, uncovered. Bake at 350-375 until the chicken is done, 35-45 minutes probably.

Serve hot. (Your picture was not posted)