I Have a BLOG??

You're KIDDING me!

Lots of stuff happening in the Katze and Ash household, but I can't really blog about the really big thing yet, and so I face a double hurdle in blogging:

1) I can't think of anything else to blog about except the thing I really want to but can't,

and

2) God, am I busy.

So let me blog about some of the little stuff until I get tired and/or bedtime rolls around.

Item #1: Our cardboard castle is much much smaller. We've still got a few piles of boxes but the piles consist of maybe five or six boxes each, as opposed to the towering walls of boxes we used to have everywhere. That means we are sort of living like Real People again. We had a visitor this week for job-related reasons, which gave us a burst of motivation. We got the living room in very good shape over the course of an evening, and then for an encore, we fixed the leg on the TV stand (it got broken in the move, as we were unloading things at 11 p.m. The snap of the leg was the straw the broke the camel's back and resulted in the outbreak of tired hysteria and muchas tears. Let's not talk about it anymore.) and Ash hooked up all of our various electronic doo dads. At night, when the lights are off, it looks like Mission Control with all the little blinking diodes and displays. The thing that's kind of thrown me a little is that the addition of Ash's Playstation and the cable box means that I don't have room for the VHS tapes that I stored in the little shelves anymore. I would just go out and replace all of those VHS tapes with sleeker and smaller DVDs, but we're really not at the point where we have silly amounts of disposable income just yet.

I'm especially happy that we've got the kitchen up and running so that we can make and eat proper meals. All the fast food and junk we were shoving down our throats for a few weeks there has already show up on my hips and belly, and I've got this wedding dress to fit into in 93 days. After our first week or so, I was freaking out about grocery shopping because it seemed like I bought all this food and Ash ate it right away. But now it's getting easier to judge how much food to buy for the two of us. Funny thing: I'm finding it easier to plan and stick to a food budget when I have to take both of us into account than I did when it was just me. I wonder why that is? Maybe just because I have to think about it consciously instead of just walking into Aldi and buying whatever strikes my fancy?

Item #2: What is up with the chicken we bought at Aldi this time? I buy the big frozen bags of chicken quarters and thaw them out two at a time. They are super good when you bake them with the skins on and something shoved in between the skin and the chicken. I cut the skins off before serving and everything is moist and the spices soak right into the flesh. So tonight I decided to make a slightly different version of a dish I've made many times, chicken curry. I normally buy a premixed spice paste, add tomatoes and onions and chunks of chicken, then bake the whole mess in a covered casserole dish. It is deeeelicious. Ash and I picked up some Thai curry past and coconut milk awhile back and I've been meaning to make something using it ever since, and I prepared my normal curry dish with the Thai curry paste instead of the Indian paste I usually use.

When I was getting the chicken ready for the baking dish, I had Ash chop off a big, nasty bony chunk that had something attached that looked suspiciously like bits of unidentifiable chicken innards-- kidneys, maybe. I don't know; I'm not a chickenologist. After a sojourn in the oven, the kitchen smelled amazing and I pulled the chicken out to carve it up and put over the bean curd noodles that were boiling on the stove. I put the knife into the first piece and red liquid shot out. I told myself not to panic-- after all, this dish was swimming in diced tomatoes. I probed a little deeper with the knife and revealed a huge red blood vessel, which promptly burst, creating a blood filled cavity within the chicken.

Now, don't get me wrong: this is meat and one sometimes finds blood vessels in meat. But this was no ordinary tiny capillary that was missed in the chicken butchering process. It looked like the damned jugular or aorta or something and the amount of blood that came out of it was sickening. I yelled and Ash came running. It was clear to both of us that the bleeding chicken had to go-- I certainly wasn't going to eat it and Ash didn't look too excited at the prospect, either. And the longer I looked at the blood oozing out of the chicken on the plate, the clearer it became to me that I would throw up if I ate even one bite of chicken. Even if the other piece was perfectly fine. In fact, for a minute, I wasn't sure that I wasn't about to throw up right then.

Luckily, I had planned to make paneer makhani later in the week, so I fried the paneer in some olive oil and we ate the sauce and noodles, which were simmering innocently (and fragrantly) on the stove the whole time. We threw out the chicken and onions and tomatoes. I hate to waste food like that. But really, there was no way that either of us was going to eat it.

Item #3: It's bedtime. I'll be back for more when I get some time...