Leftovers Lorna-style

I am not great at eating the same thing twice in a row.  Sometimes I do, but mostly I like to change it up.  This is easy to do when you have great ingredients on hand. A left over chicken leg became a venue for fresh basil and tomato with some quinoa and a couple of beans left from my earlier visit to the antipasti bar at wholefoods, and voila: a brand new lovely and flavorful dish.  I ate it with a salad to my delight.

Grilled chicken with zucchini & peppers

When buying chicken straight from the person who raised it, you most likely aren't going to get a lot of choices. There is no creature that grows four boneless skinless breasts or thighs.  This packaging abstracts us from the source of our food: an animal, and to a certain extent babies our cooking skills. My chicken options are: half or whole and it comes frozen. I usually opt for halves because the defrosting is much faster.  At first making the transition to dealing with bones and skin totally threw me. I was pampered by packaged meats.  Through experimentation and research I have learned how to quarter a chicken and also spatchcock which removes the backbone. One cannot be squeamish when performing these tasks and it makes me face my food. There is no abstraction, I am eating a creature. I think that's good. I think everyone should face the reality of their diet if they chose to eat meat.

This chicken was marinaded with garlic, hoisin, and toasted sesame oil and grilled on aluminum foil.  I made greens in little aluminum foil packets and mixed some sautéed fava beans with garlic scapes into some quinoa for fun.  Fava beans and scapes being a new food for us.  Great meal!

Survived the Six month checkup

My little guy is weighing in at 20 pounds and supposedly on track to be over 6 feet tall.  My goodness!  He is growing well and was had a great time crawling around the examination table.  He cried a bit when he got his shot but recovered well.  Unfortunately, he has had some side effects from the shot, namely restlessness through the night that has left us both very tired. 

Grabbing is getting to be his favorite past time.  Nursing on the couch yesterday, he suddenly was eating the remote and today I found myself wearing my morning tea.  The lesson is: mama must be very careful with what goes on the shelf behind the couch, as in nothing is safe from Reachy McGrabsalot. No problem, I can do that.

Mobility is also blowing my mind.  He is not crawling exactly but can turn and turn and scoot where ever he wants to go. Backwards is also a favorite direction.  When the motivation is there, he's determined to get there. It's entrancing to watch him explore his world.  I love every moment.

Oatmeal for breakfast

Breakfast is easily to look forward to when it's so delicious.  We start our day with oatmeal filled with nuts, seeds, coconut, dried fruit, and honey .  I usually skip the dried fruit and honey for berries and cinnamon because I try to stick to fruits with a low glycemic index.  This breakfast starts the day right with lots of fiber, protein, and deliciousness.  Oatmeal doesn't have to be bland or boring or sweetened with sugar.

Camping Meals

My husband and I are avid hikers and love to be in the woods.  This summer we caught the camping bug and our little guy seems to have it too! He loves the woods too! No one should be surprised.

My husbands new favorite meal is highly portable and about as easy as it gets.  After learning that Trader Joes canned goods are bpa free, this meal has become a staple. It's chicken chili. Combine all this in a crockpot or for me a dutch oven with cumin, garlic, chili powder and oregano and cook on low for several hours until it is thick and the meat  shreds.  So good so easy. Eat it in the woods, even better.

You'll notice kale has been added, no meal is complete without a leafy green. And a salad.

Grilled pork chops with sweet potatos and green beans

Porkchops used to throw me.  I cook using a thermometer because food safety is paramount in our house and I am not that good at determining when things are done yet. So I was cooking pork to 165F. Don't do that. It's too much. Once I learned that 150F is perfectly fine, my porkchops became delicious instead of dried out.  I don't get too fancy with them: I usually pair them with rosemary.  Sometimes I use maple syrup with Dijon mustard if I am doing a roast loin but really rosemary is so good with pork, I stick to it.  Because grills are hot, I sliced some apple to be my porkchop's protector. I always have apples to spare and this makes an impressive plating too, who doesn't love a little warm apple and cinnamon?

The green beans get wrapped in aluminum foil with garlic & olive oil and just hang out on the cooler part of the grill. They take about 10 minutes to get super green and tender then take them off and wrap them back up.  The sweet potato is actually Japanese sweet potato and if you try it, you'll never go back.  I sprinkle coin slices with cinnamon and coconut oil then on the grill they go. Slice them thin for fast cooking but not too thin or you'll get fast burning.

This is a really easy meal and a standard at our house. The green beans get swapped out for whatever green leafy is in season and a salad always tags along.

Movie lover & hater

I rarely have mellow reactions to films. I like it, or I'm angry. A lousy movie can spoil an evening and spill over to the next day.  Do I think this is one of my more endearing qualities? No. Do I intend on changing? No.

 I love to take movies on fully and be immersed in the characters and story.  The price of that is occasional disappointment when faced with a poorly crafted film. Of which there are many. I will be reviewing new movies I see here and also blathering on about some of my favorites, but first I must tell you a little more about my feelings about movies.

I consider films the same way I think about dreams.  Like little windows into understanding masked with sometimes outlandish characters and settings that can be deconstructed into important personal meaning.  A movie should entertain while you are watching it but should later linger as you wonder how it relates to your life as you would a dream.  This extremely personal and perhaps self indulgent view of films has me locked in and always looking for more.  But most important to understand is that I rarely think of them as a project created by lots of people as a job for profit who sometimes don't give a fig for viewer enlightenment.  This is exactly why I failed to break into the film industry. There, I said it.