Stadium Brat Kickasserole

I had a slow start to my day. I looked for job listings, I sat on the couch, I ate lunch… I felt a slug day coming on and was determined to fight it. So, I started making my list for Practice Thanksgiving, then realized I’d need a better estimate of attendees before purchasing the turkey. And I needed to decide on the second, in-bird stuffing. So, I wrote RSVP reminders and made an appointment to get my hair cut. Progress!

Then, I started on the basement. Oh, man. Basement. I got about half of it cleaned while I watched a movie down there. I’m going to have to find another exciting-but-not-intellectually-involved movie to watch tomorrow while I clean the other half. Something along the lines of “Galaxy Quest” or “National Treasure” (both of which I’ve already watched this week.)

So, it’s dark by this time, I’m hungry and I’ve been cleaning all day, so I feel finished. I didn’t expect TCB home for another hour, at least, so I started some rice and thawed the brats without a plan in mind. I mean, I guess “brats and rice” for dinner is kind of a plan, but not really a good one. TCB gots home and wasn’t thrilled with my half-assed plan, so he sliced up the brats into medallions and quarter-pieces. I grabbed the chinese eggplant from the fridge and cut that up into similar sizes (love the eggplant. $1 for two large ones? yes, please!) These items, we dumped into the large pan and started cooking them on medium heat. And then, because they needed to be eaten, I also chopped up the large garden tomatoes that I harvested this week, which were surprisingly solid. I thought I’d play with ketchup and mustard on bratwurst flavors, so I sprinkled bavarian seasoning over the sizzling eggplant/brat mix. I liked this mix because of the herbs, but mostly because of the crushed mustard seed in it and my lack of separate whole mustard seed.

So! The brat/eggplant mix had browned nicely by then, so I turned the heat to it off, TCB got out the deep casserole dish, I dumped the tomatoes into the pan to heat up a bit, then stirred it all together with a little more bavarian seasoning, a dash or two of aleppo pepper, and some lemon peel for extra “brightness.” I tried a different method of mixing my casserole, too: layering. Instead of my previous method, dump it all in and then try to mix a full casserole, I layered rice and stuff, stirring after each complete layer. This worked out really well, especially with the soft eggplant.

Result: Tasty! The tomatoes were spectacular but, as the gardener, I may be biased. I liked the larger pieces of eggplant and the smaller bits of brat: the former stayed together better and were nice and meaty when I bit into them, and the latter browned better and were more evenly distributed. I think that a crunchy veggie, like green pepper, would have added another color and texture, but I was ok with today’s result in my belly!

Recipe:

• 1 package bratwurst (we used staduim brats), sliced into rounds, and then those slices, quartered
• 2 large chinese eggplant, sliced (or about a pound of sliced mushrooms, just add them later)
• 2 cups brown rice, uncooked
• 4-5 large tomatoes, diced (1-2 cans of diced tomatoes, drained, I think)
• Bavarian seasoning (or about a teaspoon of whole mustard seed, curushed, and the herb mix of your choice)
• lemon zest (or juice, whatever ya got)
• aleppo pepper, regular pepper, salt, all to taste
• optional: crunchy veggie

Cook the rice.

Brown the brats and eggplants over medium heat. When that’s nearly done, add the first round of seasoning, stir. When the brats are browned, turn off the heat, add the tomatoes, add any more mustard seasoning, add the lemon and aleppo (also add the crunchy veggie.) Start heating the oven to 350F.

Start layering the rice and meat mix in the deep casserole, stirring after each complete layer, until all mixed. (I didn’t fit about a half cup of rice in the dish, which was fine.) Bake, covered, for 20-30 minutes.

I’m trying

I’m trying to chill the f out. I know that I haven’t been entirely happy with my jorb, and I know that I’ve been waiting until all the happily required travel this summer/fall to start looking for a new jorb, and that this layoff has just forced my hand a little sooner that I’d expected, but I’m still, this weekend, having a hard time of thinking about this as a 2-week paid vacation, with semi-paid vacation afterward.
I really don’t see this as all bad, I see that as a potential opportunity for some awesome (though, if you are in need of a flex/flash programmer with extensive knowledge in working with Eclipse and also knows coldfusion/another scripting language, lemme know), but I’m having a hard time divorcing myself from the “gotta have a job!” mentality and the “Maybe you should like what you do!!!” mentality.

Trying to make the weekend a “chill the fuck out” moment, and make myself enjoy it, because it’s not lost time if I do or don’t.

Jobbage

Ahh, and another one bites the dust. Reason for ending: same as the other ones, but they at least fired us all a month ahead of time, so we avoided that "end of the month surprise!" talk.

(That’s 3/3, if you’re keeping track.)

Turkey-pasta kickasserole

Last night, we made super veggie pasta sauce- ground beef, lots of eggplant, some green pepper in pasta sauce over quinoa garden pagodas. Yum. Tonight, I wasn’t feeling like a repeat, and I had some ground turkey that had been intended for meatloaf in the fridge. TCB suggested kickasserole, and I agreed!

I feared that the turkey would turn out bland and/or watery, so I browned it first with Penzy’s Bicentennial Rub. I picked that spice mix because I had just put it away last night and it was in front. After adding it, I read that it was a good mix for turkey. Hooray!

After nearly browning it, I added half a green pepper, coursely chopped, and a small jar of mushrooms (hey, it’s what was in the house), and some more spice mix.  While this all cooked, I made a box of quinoa pasta, elbow-style. I only cooked it halfway through because TCB hopped in the shower with Angus at about that time, and I figured I’d just cook it all together in the oven while Mr. Dog got clean, but didn’t want the pasta to fall apart. I added canned diced tomatoes, more spice mix, some basil for fun, the stirred to in the casserole, baked around 250F for maybe 20 minutes. When we finally had a clean dog again, I pulled the casserole out, sprinkled the rest of the parmesan on top, the re-covered it to let it all melt.

The result: a tasty, crunchy, colorful kickasserole with a beautiful layer of cheese and non-crumbly pasta. The course black pepper and other spices in the rub really brought out the turkey-ness, and I don’t think this would have been as tasty with a stronger meat. Success!

Recipe:

• 1 lb ground turkey
• 1/2 large green pepper, coursely chopped
• small jar mushrooms (or fresh, just add them earlier)
• bicentennial rub (a mix of coarse flake salt, Tellicherry black pepper, sugar, turmeric, minced orange peel and coriander, heavy on the black pepper, it seemed.)
• little bit of basil
• garlic to taste
• olive oil
• 2 8-oz. cans of diced tomatoes
• 1 8-oz. box of quinoa elbows (or your usual elbows, I’m sure it would be similar)
• 1/3 cup shredded parmesan (roughly)
• Optional: onion, chopped

Brown the turkey in a large pan over medium heat with a little bit of olive oil. About halfway through, add some rub and onion (if desired). When the turkey’s nearly done, add the green pepper, mushrooms, garlic and a little more rub. Let that cook for a minute or two, then add the tomatoes, with the juice. Also add some basil and more rub. Don’t be afraid to slightly over-spice this, since the pasta will dilute the spice. Turn the heat down and let the mix heat through.

While this heats, start the water for the pasta and cook it most of the way. For my pasta, I let it sit in the boiling water for 6 of the 8 recommended. Drain the pasta, then mix the pasta and tomato mix together in a deep casserole. Put that in the over, covered, and let it bake for 20-30 minutes, about the time to clean up the kitchen and maybe take a shower.

After taking it out, sprinkle the cheese on top of the casserole, then re-cover it to let the cheese melt, about 5 minutes. Enjoy!

Wedding Weekend #2

This weekend! On an island! A Wedding!

Abby & Sydney’s wedding is this weekend! Hooray! Half of Team Bride is getting married all in one weekend! It’s all gearing up- I went over on Tuesday to drop off my dress, so it would be included in the massed hanging bag (to reduce luggage overall), and volunteered for kitten wrangling duty while Abby & Syd wrapped presents. It was lovely to hold a sleeping kitten again. Hooray for kittens!

Yesterday, I was on the hunt for dress tape (upstairs, by the sewing machines at the Buckhead Target.) I also ran some other necessary, secret errands for the happy couple, and helped with finishing crafts. One of the tasks (done by someone else) was typing up their karaoke list, but not all the cds also listed the performing artist, so we, as a group, played “name that singer” with the karaoke music. ‘Twas awesome, especially when we just made up the words. Also: kitten wrangled.

Today, I headed to work early to get on the road to Sapelo early in the car of Groom. (TCB will be following tomorrow, since he has a super-top-secret-required presentation at school in the morning, from which he has been given permission to leave early, even though the whole thing is only an hour and a half.) We stay in Darien tonight, then catch the 8:30 am ferry over to Sapelo, where the getting-ready will begin! Probably no kitten wrangling on the trip, though.

I’m looking forward to this weekend, looking forward to seeing my friends get all hitched and stuff, and also, kind of, looking forward to sharing a sleeping wing with baby Camden (who, I’ve heard, has been practicing staying up all night drinking). Should be a good time!

Beeping and bathrooms

Last night, we went to a cookout baby shower and had a good time. We got home, had some chips & salsa, played some Wii, had some tea and went to bed.

About 6am, we were awake. TCB wasn’t feeling so hot and was hitting up the bathroom. I had a headache starting, and it felt like it was going to be a bad one. I wasn’t happy about either situation, because we were both looking forward to going to my cousin’s baptism in the morning. But TCB kept getting worse, and my headache started getting worse- the edges of the world started closing in, and light hurt my head even more. Laying down hurt, moving hurt, standing hurt, walking around hurt and I felt like throwing up. I also started seeing colors- mostly yellow and purple, very weird.

And then… with my headache, I started to get the same unhappiness-in-the-pants that TCB was already experiencing. I have to say, we were both happy to have two clean bathrooms, and I was really happy about the new giant, fluffy bathmat in the upstairs bathroom. It’s big enough to lay down on, and that’s exactly what I did for a few hours with a blanket over my head.

While I was starting to feel more sick, I started hearing a beeping in the bathroom. I looked around, went into other rooms, and couldn’t figure out the source. TCB got up and started looking once he heard it (couldn’t hear it in the bedroom.) We found it in a bathroom drawer- the battery in our thermometer was dying. TCB disassembled it.

Eventually, I felt confident enough in my body to move downstairs to the couch. By then we’d missed the baptism. I woke an hour later to beeping. Loud, infrequent beeps. TCB and I started hunting down the beeping again: this time, the smoke detector had complaints. The upstairs hallway wired-into-the-house-electricity smoke detector. Yeah. The back-up batter was dead. So, TCB disassembled it.

We both seem to have mostly recovered from last night’s adventure, spending most of the afternoon on the couch, playing video games, definitely helped, and we got a few things finished this evening in preparation for the coming week. We still haven’t figured out what took us out last night and we haven’t talked to any other partygoers to see if they had the same symptoms. Based on the limited menu I had to choose from at the party, and the minimal overlap of food choices, we’re thinking it was either the mini-hamburger patties at the party or the salsa once we got home.

The headache… I’m still not totally sure what the cause was, and I’ve gotten them before, almost always in the middle of the night. Might have been caffeine-related, since I hadn’t had much on Saturday or Friday, but I’ve quit for weekends before without the headaches. Might have been from fumes in the house from TCB baking engine parts to cure paint, but we used the oven tonight without incident. Not sure, but I’d like to figure it out- I don’t think I can take another one of those headaches in the near future.

More baking experimentation

Last night, after smelling the pizza at work that had been brought in for a user group meeting, I decided that I really wanted pizza, too. And, forseeing a need for pizza, I had ordered a box of 4 pre-packaged gf mixes from Amazon (Bob’s Red Mill variety) a month ago. I wasn’t sure how long this pizza dough would take to make, since I recall timing regular pizza dough with watching a football game- dough gets made and rises during the first half, we rolled it and sauced it and topped it during halftime, and ate around the start of the 4th quarter. So, getting home at 8:15 had me concerned for time, but I knew TCB wouldn’t be home for another hour, anyway.

This dough was easy! I just put the water and yeast in my mixer bowl for a few minutes, added the oil and egg, stirred, then in went the mix, stir some more. (I also added some rosemary into the mix.) Cover with plastic wrap, let rise for 20 minutes or so!

I had planned on spreading out the dough on the pizza stone for this experiment, but the method of spreading this dough is a little different. Instructions are basically “dump the dough on the well-greased surface, spread it out with wet hands.” I had dumped the dough onto a non-stick cookie sheet, and immediately realized that transferring the spread dough to the hot pizza stone wasn’t going to happen- I’d have to spread the dough directly onto the hot stone, and that wasn’t going to happen on my first attempt at this. The dough spread out nicely, as long as my hands were still wet, and I made a beautiful crust with raised edges. I baked it for about 10 minutes, as instructed. Even took a picture.

Then, I added toppings, baked for another 20 minutes, and at the end, a picture-perfect pineapple and pepperoni pizza came out of the oven. No pictures of this, we dove right in! Tasted like pizza, certainly no complaints from TCB! I liked adding the rosemary into the crust, and I might add more herbs and/or garlic powder to it next time I make it. This dough was definitely a success, and it was much easier and much faster to make than I had expected.