leene_chan

Here's what he'll do if he doesn't like where you're scratching him.

I need to stop it with the barely contained laughter at the end of these videos! He's actually not so bad with the biting any more, but when he bites ya, that's what it's like. What a gentleman.

I've grown tired of sewing doll clothes lately, so I decided to try my hand at human garments. It took me two evenings to make these flannel pajama pants. I used a Kwik-Sew pattern designed for beginners. I didn't do a great job matching up the plaid (neither did whoever sewed my storebought pajama pants, but that's no excuse!)...but they are extremely comfortable. And pink.

The finished length was supposed to be 29 inches, but my inseam is a mere 27...::sobs:: I shortened these by two inches and they're still pretty long. I'm fairly petite but there was no way in hell I was giving these a 24 inch waist. I like my pants big and sloppy. I ended up making the medium size, and the waist fit perfectly. O_O

My maternal grandmother was an accomplished seamstress. She even made my mother's wedding gown, which is so tiny I can probably only fit my hand inside. My mother claims she sewed her entire wardrobe when she was growing up. She was always well-dressed (even though she hated that she couldn't have jeans) in spite of the fact that her parents' annual income was $6,000 a year.

I don't know if sewing is the affordable enterprise it used to be. These pants cost $25 to make. That's not terrible, but I'm sure you can buy much cheaper pajama pants. Still, the fabric is really nice quality. The main appeal to me is that I can shorten the patterns to fit my unfortunate figure. The average length of a petite pant leg is 30 inches. Because according to the clothing industry, 5'4'' is standard petite. :O

...contains chuck roast, dried porcini mushrooms, salt pork, carrots, onions, fresh thyme, anchovies, kalamata olives (shoulda been nicoise), tomatoes, orange zest, chicken broth and an entire bottle of red wine. It's Provencal-style Beef Stew from Cook's Illustrated!

It takes almost three hours in the oven, so be sure to only make it on a weekend or a day off! I usually don't like beef stew at all. I'm not a huge fan of red meat; in particular, chuck roast is way too fatty. But this stew is something special. We've made it once before, and it even froze wonderfully. I hardly ever see a whole chuck roast on sale in the grocery store. Most of the recipes we have for stew call for blade steaks, but cutting up a chuck roast yourself works much better. At $2.99 a pound, who could complain?

If I were to change one thing about it for next time, I would add more carrots. You can either serve it over mashed potatoes or egg noodles. I think egg noodles work much better. You can't really do huge portions with this dish (unless you're a big eater)because it's very rich. It's very, very good, though.

I promise to post about something other than cooking soon! I think meals are the only projects I actually finish. ^__^;

Tonight we made Pan-fried Crabcakes from Cook's Illustrated's American Classics. They're made of super lump crabmeat with hardly any filler--they're like an awesome wall of pure crab! This is probably the fifth time we made these. I usually squirt lemon juice on top but occasionally I like to sprinkle them with Chipotle Chile Tabasco Sauce. XD

The side dishes were both frozen. The potatoes were some Birds Eye steam-in-the-bag thing and the veggies are Trader Joe's Brittany Mix. I had wanted to try my hand at smashed potatoes but there was no time! The crab cakes fry up in under 10 minutes and they have to be served immediately. =_=

The crabmeat is like $20 for four people but we always get it on sale. In our neck of the woods, sushi costs $35 for two people, so it makes crab cakes seem quite affordable.

Note to self: invest in better plates.

A typical (or not so typical) morning with Lucas. The video is shaky but I think it makes for great stress relief. Turn up the volume and hear him purr! Pretend you're petting the silky kitty! :D

That head gesture and clucking sound means that he wants you to pet him.

Heeeyyyyy, I've been wanting to post about cooking a lot lately. It's one of my bigger joys in life, I guess (even though I hate the necessary clean-up) ^o^. I belong to the Picturing Food community, but I'm sure that if I posted there I probably would end up on Domestic Snark for my hastily taken photos. But the food, it wanted to be eaten immediately! :O

Here's my most recent tasty meal, Tamago-don. For those who aren't familiar, it's Japanese Oyako-don (a chicken and vegetable omelet simmered in stock and served over sticky rice) without the chicken. Tamago is the Japanese word for egg.

The veggies we used were onions, white mushrooms, bok choy and scallions. Traditionally, mitsuba is the herb sprinkled over the top, but I don't think you can get that in the U.S. This year's parsley crop has been as tough as heck, so I used minced fresh cilantro instead. Yup, I'm one of those cilantro lovers. The dish turned out really well. I ate every bite!

My favorite part was the bok choy. I've loved bok choy ever since I was a kid, picking those "crispy white stalky things" out of the Chinese food cartons so I could eat them all myself. Sometimes the egg in this dish is too rich for me. A crunchy, high water content vegetable like bok choy adds a refreshing balance to the dish. :D

Tonight's dinner came together in only a half hour: Pantry Pasta Sauce with Tuna, Olives and Capers from Christopher Kimball's The Kitchen Detective. I don't know if it looks too tasty from the photo! :O I really need to learn to keep my fork straight, and the curls of steam rising from the pasta fogged up the lens. This is the second time we've made this dish. It's campanelle pasta (shaped like little bells) tossed with a sauce made with extra virgin olive oil, red onion, capers, anchovies, oil-cured olives and tuna. When I first started cooking I would have never dreamed of making a pasta sauce with canned tuna. Apparently it is the dish for Italian bachelors. I'm female and only half Italian, but I think it turned out pretty well!

Cook's Illustrated's Italian Classics has a few recipes for tuna sauce as well. What's different about this one is that it doesn't contain wine, and came from the brain of Christopher Kimball(editor and founder of Cook's Illustrated) himself. Out of the four recipes I've tried, this one's my favorite. The only thing we did to deviate from the recipe was to saute the onion a little longer than called for. No one in our house likes to eat raw onions.

That hardly looks like any food! The bowl was actually pretty deep. O_o

Kristen and I made these from a recipe off the internet that was adapted from a Martha Stewart recipe. The recipe called for almonds, and we used walnuts. Actually, I had little to do with this. I just sprinkled the crumbs on top and washed the dishes. XD The jam we used was Trappist Strawberry Preserves. I have yet to find a strawberry jam I really like. These turned out pretty good but they are soooo sweet! O_o

I am a lousy food photographer. This looks like a huge bleeding mouth coming at you with a fork. I didn't even eat this square--I split one with Kristen earlier and I'm still swamped. We made these to dispel a baaaad memory I have of a strawberry crumble bar I got in Mystic a long time ago. We were going with our parents on a bonding trip to Mystic Aquarium--it pretty much sucked, but I was really looking forward to eating the strawberry crumble bar I got in the Seaport Shop bakery when I got home. It was too big for one person, and I joked with Kristen that I was going to break it in half in the car and eat it like a savage. But no. We were going to have a ceremony, with tea and cute plates.

Well, I was stupid enough to let the paper bag with the cookie out of my sight when I stopped in the bathroom. I was gone for exactly two minutes--enough time to do my business and wash my hands, thank you very much. When I entered the kitchen I noticed that the bag with the strawberry crumble bar in it was gone! The bar was big enough for three people, and my father had eaten the entire thing during the two minutes I had spent in the bathroom!

I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I cried after that incident. After years and years, the wounds are still fresh! I had told both my parents during that freaking two hour car trip that Kristen and I were at least going to split the strawberry bar. It was big enough for even three people! Why did he have to eat the whole damn thing? And I couldn't even yell at him for doing it, because he was so sensitive that if I said boo to him he'd probably have hopped in the car and drove off.

I'm starting to tear up...I'm still a wounded little girl at heart....O__o

Anyway, this is Martha Stewart's Strawberry Crumble Bar. It is pretty good.

Blaaargh...I found two ladybugs in the house today. I don't know if the rest of the swarm has left the premises. They could be hiding in the gutters, or in the attic. The good thing about ladybugs is that unlike a lot of the bugs you find in your house their instinct when they're threatened is to tuck their legs in and play dead. They're very easy to catch, very easy to toss outside. I haven't killed any ladybugs yet. I'm not a barbarian! O_o

I witnessed the freakiest sight I've seen in years this morning when I went outside to throw out Lucas's poo in a plastic baggie and bring the trash cans in. As I was dragging the cans across the driveway I became aware of a lot of small insects sailing through the air over my head. An increasing cloud of flying bugs was gathering around one side of the house, making gross clicking sounds against the siding. We've had problems with wasps before. After Kristen got stung by three wasps in one month, we decided to have them exterminated. I walked back to the house with my arms wrapped around me, cursing that we'd have to get them sprayed again.

I've always been bad with bugs, but my morbid curiosity got the best of me. I went to take a closer look. They looked too small to be wasps. At least five of them were crawling on the picture window. More were flying in from the street. Were they flies? Some kind of pesty beetle?

Then another one boinged off the door in front of me.

It was a LADYBUG.

Ladybugs were everywhere this morning. They were coming after us, a whole swarm of them! Three of them got in the house, one came in on my hair. If I looked out the back window I saw them flying in from my neighbor's yard, soaring towards the roof. Each window in our house had a least two ladybugs on it. There had to have been at least a hundred of them.

Kristen said they're going to hibernate. On our roof or in our house? I found quite a few nine-spotters, which I always considered rare. Is this supposed to be a good omen, or a sign our yard is truly an uncultivated hell?

Well, either way, they were gone by dusk. They left a few stragglers behind, but I think they're gone. That was freaky, freaky freaky! I've never seen so many ladybugs in one place. I can't tell if they left or crawled up into the siding. Either way, good night till spring, little buggies.

I would have taken a picture, but I couldn't open the door without them getting in the house.

Cat of the Day! Here's Lucas lounging in his dog-sized bed in the morning sunlight. This one turned out pretty nice!

Last night, rather than doing anything constructive, I watched four episodes of Season 2 of The Mighty Boosh in a row. Since I watched two the night before, I'm sad to say I'm done with Season 2! Is there anything more awesome with this show? ^o^ I bought the Special Edition DVD set as a birthday present to myself. Because when it's your birthday, no one ever gives you what you really want. XD So far I've seen two episodes of Season 1 and all but one episode of Season 3 on Adult Swim. I've watched the entirety of Season 2 uncut. I haven't enjoyed myself so much since I marathon-watched Cyber Formula. There were no episodes in Season 2 that struck me as bad, but my favorites were "Call of the Yeti," "Nanageddon," "The Fountain of Youth," and "The Legend of Old Gregg."

I'll probably watch Season 1 next, and then rewatch Season 3. From what I've seen of Season 1 it's creepier but has quirky charm. Season 3 was pretty inconsistent. I don't know if it was because of the cuts...I guess I'll pass my final judgment when I rewatch it!

As for the main characters, I have a soft spot for Howard Moon, even if he acts like a pretentious tool most of the time. He is an Everyman. Vince has it too easy! He did wear awesome silver go go boots in "The Nightmare of Milky Joe," though.

Hello.

I can be funny about reading books sometimes. I go through periods where I spend every free waking moment with a book in my hand, and sometimes I don't pick up a book for weeks. Within the past ten days, I've read three whole books without so much as pausing for a breath, and it felt great! One of them was under 200 pages, another was just under 300 and another was 400 pages. I'm ashamed to say I'm intimidated by long books. XD Anyway, I enjoyed all three of them, which is pretty impressive for me.

It's snowed in October in CT before, but it still seems unusual. We aren't supposed to get any accumulation in our area, which is too bad because it would've been pretty. It's also good news because I hate shoveling snow! I can do it, though. I can do it good.

I saw a pretty little tortoiseshell cat approaching one of our back windows this morning. I wonder if it was Lucas's girlfriend. The one I saw exchanging intense looks with him from the garden several months ago? I'd say the odds that that cat isn't spayed are about as good as Lucas's not being neutered (he is), but it would be cute if they were interested in each other. In a friendly way. I know that some cats react poorly to another cat entering their territory, but Lucas doesn't seem threatened by other cats. At least, that might mean that Lucas would do all right with a companion cat one of these days.

I wish I could steal her. If she belongs to the neighbor I think she belongs to she probably never gets to go inside at all. She was almost friendly. It's a shame.

So..it's my and Kristen's (tsubasahome) birthday today. Never mind how old we are! Send us some booze! (preferably Chambord or amaretto). XD

Lucas keeps grabbing my ass from behind while I'm on the computer typing this. I guess I'd better get up and play with him.

Oh no, I've become one of those people who won't stop posting pictures of their pet! :O The truth is, the lighting has been pretty good lately and I haven't been able to resist. So, here's Lucas enjoying the inside of a Trader Joe's bag.

It'd be funny if I could get him inside a Christmas stocking this year. I think he might be too big (though he'll certainly try). He's 14lbs and at least 33 inches long. XD

Enough with the cat videos already! O_O This one is pretty grainy quality, but I'm pleased that I've finally been able to capture Lucas's freakish cat-wailing on video. Turn the volume up and enjoy! He usually yells like this when he wants access to a room he's been denied (like the basement), if he's bored, or if he can't find anyone in the house. So basically, he does this all the time. When we first brought him home 2 years ago, he screamed like this nonstop for 24 hours.

He spied me in the hall at the end and came running. I can never predict what he's going to do. XD

Here's a grainy video of Lucas playing with his bee toy. He kept looking toward the side at the beginning because somebody was messing around in the hall.

This is only a small measure of his craziness.