Portland, Oregon: Between all our cleaning, reorganizing and trips to the recycling center and Goodwill, our life goes on. Friends we want to see, meals to cook, the usual round of doctor/dentist check-ups before we head south for the winter, Duck football games, and Rosh Hashanah begins tomorrow.
Due to the approaching holidays, I switched up our usual Sunday night pizza to Friday night pizza and came up with a plan to use the half-cup of salsa verde left over from enchiladas the other night.
I hate to waste food.
When I told Lisa about my pizza idea, she wasn't too excited. When I told Dave about my pizza idea, he wasn't too excited. Green enchilada sauce (salsa verde) as a base, sliced green chiles, "Mexican Blend" cheese, and a sprinkling of jalapenos over all. These same ingredients, placed in a tortilla would be a quesadilla... I just substituted one bread for another. It was really good!Speaking of Lisa... and pizza... our clever girl is serving a pizza to her kids for the Jewish New Year - topped with apples, honey and cheese.
Speaking of Lisa... and her kids... Lenny took Lucy to her ballet class and sent this photo to me:
I can't handle the cuteness.Our closet purge continues and has moved out to the garage, where My Driver is reorganizing the few storage cabinets. He even reorganized his golf clubs. On a shelf, completely forgotten, he found my Mom's old Sunbeam MixMaster! (Mom had a Kitchenaid mixer, so we think this may have been a wedding gift - 63 years ago? Why it was in our garage, who knows or remembers?) No beaters, but with a stainless steel bowl. I unwound the black electric cord from the base. The cord was a bit dry and cracked a bit, but when I plugged the mixer into electricity - the motor churned! After a little clean-up and a quick look on eBay to see if it would pay for a European vacation (nope, barely a European chocolate bar), I had the brilliant idea to display the old mixer as a piece of "art" on the cookbook shelf in the kitchen.
Kitchen Kitschy? Not sure, but I just didn't have the heart to take it to recycling.One of my favorite (I just love her photography!) food bloggers, Mandy of Lady & Pups, posted a very interesting recipe for Supple Slow Cooked Soy Sauce Chicken. Mandy is Taiwanese, and the recipe did remind me of chickens hanging in the windows of shops in Taipei. The method involved marinating a small chicken overnight (in a mostly-soy sauce mixture) and then roasting it in a slow oven, basting the roasting bird every 15 minutes. There were a lot of ingredients, but nothing unusual. I followed the recipe, except excluding the requested one tablespoon of not-Kosher oyster sauce.
How gorgeous is this bird?The recipe asks for a 2 pound chicken and there is no way to find a two pounder anywhere around me, but I had the butcher at New Seasons Market get a three pound bird. The larger bird required an increase in cooking time (about 30 minutes). Oh Goodness, did our house smell divine tonight.
We invited Kathy and Woody (they also used to live in Taipei) to share the chicken and watch the Duck football game. It was a little trip down memory lane... and another memory was invoked as the Ducks lost to the Washington State Cougars, just as they did last year.
Until my next update, I remain, your "I shouldda roasted a duck" correspondent.