Food!

When I run out of ideas for dinner, things get ugly. I get grumpy and just want to eat take-out all the time, and let's face it, my family just can't afford to eat take-out all the time. Nor should we. But coming up with lunches and dinners every damn day just gets so old. I don't love cooking, but I don't hate it . . . I just have to try new things to mix it up a little. Last week I was nosing around on some online recipe sites, and I tried a Philippino chicken dish called chicken adobo. DIVINE! So I thought I'd share the recipe here:

Ingredients

For the Chicken Adobo:

6 chicken thighs, bone in, skin on
1/2 c. low sodium soy sauce
1/4 c. white vinegar
1-2 T. water
1/2 tsp. cracked black pepper
1/2 bulb garlic, very roughly chopped

For the Garlic Fried Rice:
 
2 T. oil
3 cups cooked rice (leftover rice works GREAT)
1/2 bulb garlic, sliced
1/2 tsp. salt (more or less to taste)

Rinse chicken thoroughly and pat dry. Place in large saucepan with a lid. Pour soy sauce and vinegar over chicken, add garlic and pepper, and stir to mix well and coat chicken with sauce. If there is not enough liquid, add water.

Place chicken over medium flame and cover. Cook for 30 minutes or so, mostly undisturbed, till chicken is cooked through and tender. Check a couple times toward the end of cooking time...the sauce will reduce drastically, which is normal, but if it gets too dry, add a little water as needed.

While the chicken cooks, heat oil in a large frying pan over medium high heat. When oil begins to smoke, add garlic slices and stir fry till light golden. Add rice and continue stir frying till garlic darkens and rice is warmed through. Cover and set aside.

When chicken finishes cooking, serve with rice. A squeeze of kalamansi juice (or lime juice) goes nicely with the chicken.

Number of Servings: 6

I found this recipe on a site called sparkrecipes.com, which is partnered with sparkpeople.com. Imagine a free version of Weight Watchers -- that's Sparkpeople. You can track what you eat, and many foods are available in their database, which means you don't even have to enter the nutritional info. You can track exercises, weight loss or gain, and specific nutritional goals that you might have. You can find recipes and articles, and you can also join groups and create a profile page along the lines of Myspace. You can then add friends to your page and check out what they've been eating so that you can hold one another accountable. I'm on there, and it's pretty crazy to see how much junk I eat sometimes!

I knew it wouldn't last...

Last month was warm and sunny -- unseasonably so. There was so little rain that I wondered how the May flowers would ever come. Well...the rain came in May. I knew it would. I knew one nice month was as much as we could possibly expect. Now it's chilly and rainy and not May-like at all. I'm not moving to Oregon. It would be like this all the time, and I would possibly jump off a bridge. Vitor wants to move to Quebec . . . ha! There's no way. I wish, but man, the winters last most of the year! I couldn't bear it.

I did plant some bushes in my front yard last week, but I've been hiding inside since then. I have flowers waiting to be potted, but I don't feel like digging in the dirt. I'm lazy and drowsy. I need sunshine.

Saturday was my birthday. According to my friend Lindsay, Saturn is now beginning its return to the degree it was at when I was born, so I'm officially entering adulthood. I'd never heard of the Saturn Return until she told me about it, but I guess I like the idea that the stars are aligning to help push me into a new phase in my life. At first I thought that if I'm just now becoming an adult, then what the hell have I been doing for the past nine years? I became an expat just after graduating high school, got married at 18, had babies at 20, 22, and 25, suffered the loss of a child, moved across the country, and tackled college with three kids . . . am I not an adult???

There is, however, a great deal of difference between doing grown-up things and being a grown-up. And I have changed, no doubt. I have even noticed myself maturing within the past year or so. I'm more concerned with stability, tidiness, health, etc, than I used to be. I used to be very go with the flow, and too relaxed about most things. I'm still like that in a lot of ways . . . but it's true, I do think I'm really becoming an adult.

I will not recommend that my children get married at 18 and have babies before they can even drink legally. I feel that I skipped over an important part of my life by rushing things like I did -- that period of transition between adolescence and real adulthood. I didn't have it. It's no one's fault but my own, but I wouldn't recommend it. Of course I have to be happy about the way things turned out, because I would never trade my children for the freedom to drink copious amounts of alcohol every weekend or to backpack across the world unhindered by my tiny companions. My life didn't end because of my children. But it did get harder, and I think that I probably didn't give them all that I could have if I had been more mature at the start.

Sorry, kids.

School's out for the summer.

Man alive am I tired!! For several days I was going to bed before midnight (which is pretty early for me) and feeling good, and then I started staying up later (until between 1 and 2, generally) and wasn't feeling so good. Last night I had to let my moisturizer/self-tanner soak in before settling in to bed, so I turned on the TV with the intention of watching just for those two minutes, but it was a show about the man whose arms exploded, and I needed to see that, so I stayed up, only to learn that his arms didn't explode at all. Hogwash. The moisturizer, however, is working, and as keen as I'm not on fake tans and the like, my legs always stay deathly pale all summer and I look very strange when my arms and the rest of my upper body is several shades darker than my legs. (Saying several shades darker, by the way, does not imply that I get tan. I just get a little less ghostly.)

But today was my final final, so I am DONE with school until August! Whoopee!! Now. You know what that means. I said that when the semester was finished, I was going to ch-ch-ch-ch-change my life. So, tomorrow. Tomorrow I eat well and read and write and mother attentively and be overall productive.

I've actually been more productive than normal lately (aside from today and yesterday, when my mind was overrun with facts about Quebec. Quebec is a very interesting place, by the way. Did you know that a referendum was held in 1995 for Quebec to become a sovereign nation, and 49.2% of Quebecers voted oui? C'est vrai. Quebec almost became its own country!!) I've been doing a pretty damn good job keeping up with laundry, dishes, and general tidiness. And it feels good. Now that "summer" is here, I'm ready to tackle some bigger projects that have long been on the back burner.

So tonight I will go to bed right after Real Housewives of NYC...and LA Ink...I don't watch those shows, naturally, but, um, I have to stay up until they're over? Er...

Oh yeah, and I'm thinking about moving to Oregon.