I’m just working really hard on the move.
We’re getting a lot done, it just means I have absolutely no time or energy to cook, or post.
It will get better, I promise.
On October 7th we move, hopefully we’ll immediately have internet and if I can find cables, I’ll show you what the house looks like with all our boxes right that evening.
For now… Sorry… I’m not gone, just elsewhere!
Sorry about the total lack of food-related-updates. Can’t help it though, I seriously have barely cooked in the last 2 – 3 weeks. This buying and working on and getting ready to move in to a house thing takes up a lot of time and energy. Energy I should be using towards this blog. So I’m sorry, mea culpa, but here’s an awesome recipe for you now!
I told you about our family recipe books we made during our reunion, right? Right!
My wonderful cousin-in-law C gave me her recipe for Chicken Adobo. I’d told her I wanted that. She’d made it for me once when I visited her and her husband (my cousin) in San Fransisco. It was awesome.
So instead of asking her for the recipe, I forgot all about it. Until the recipe exchange that was.
She hadn’t brought the recipe with her so she wrote it down from memory. (Which she didn’t tell me until after I made it.) Her memory served me very well though, because her recipe rocked!
Since we’ve been busy and I’d been feeling sick and whatever other reasons I can think of, I tweaked it a little bit to save me some work. Instead of preparing a separate veggie, I just added some sugar snaps to the pan in the last 5 minutes. Also, instead of boiling rice, I added an extra potato and called it a day. Hey, if you already have potatoes you have a full meal without rice too, right??
But both of those alterations do not really change the dish. Yes, served over rice would’ve been nice to have it take up more of the sauce, but we dealt with it. It worked out fine for us. We’re imperfect people. Or at least I am…
The recipe is super-simple. Make sure though, to you do your prep in time. That said, prep takes about 2 minutes, so it really only means thinking about what you make for dinner before you actually do, but not any more than that.
As said, it was awesome, so I’ll just give you C’s original recipe and let you tweek on your own.
[print_this]Chicken Adobo
- 4 or 5 chicken breasts, cut into pieces
- 1/2 cup vinegar
- 1/2 cup soy sauce
- 2 bay leaves1 tsp of ground peppercorns
- 3 cloves of crushed garlic
- 3 whole cloves of garlic
- 6 yellow baby Dutch potatoes (or if you’re anywhere except for the us, 6 small potatoes), quartered or halved
- 1 tbsp olive oil or other cooking oil of choice
(Tweak note: All my personal notes about the recipe are in Italic. I used chicken thighs, bone in. It was all I had in the chicken department and worked wonderfully – and as said, I added some more potatoes, for carb/fiber purposes and some sugar snaps at the end, for veggie purposes.)
Put chicken in a container for marinating. Pour vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, peppercorns and bay leaves into container with chicken. Cover container and marinate overnight, or for at least 2 hours before cooking
Separate chicken from marinade. Set marinade aside. Heat oil in a wok or non stick sauce pan and sauté garlic for a few seconds (I did the whole cloves in the marinade and the crushed cloves got sauteed)
Sauté chicken in the garlic until outside is no longer pink. Add the marinade and cook for 2 minutes, then add potatoes. Cook for 10-12 minutes covered (make sure potatoes are done). Serve over white rice.
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Again so much has been done. The progress is getting less obviously visible, but no less important. I’ve been a terrible picture-taker however and don’t have much to show. (And haven’t uploaded anything anyways – so you’ll have to be patient and check back if you want to see the few pictures I did take.) Then again, progress that isn’t really visible, doesn’t show too well in pictures anyhow.
Last Sunday (the 12th) was not only L’s birthday, it was also the first day we ourselves really worked in the new house. So far it’s just been the contractors working their behinds off. Sunday however our friend D came over and helped, joined later by her partner J and even later her son T (who just joined us for dinner, but we were happy to have him over regardless.)
I’d decided I wanted to get going on cleaning before anything else. To me it’s useless to start painting if the frames and such aren’t clean. Old paint and wallpaper needs to be gone-gone-gone before new layers are applied. It was a hell of a job, but we got a lot done.
I also went to pick up my vaccuum cleaner and gave the floor in what is to be my sewing/craft room (yay for purposes for rooms!) a try. The carpet had an icky grey hue and a massive stain right next to where the teenage-boy-who-lived -there’s bed used to be. I can only imagine how many glasses of soda and such went over the floor there and were left to dry in.
After I passed my vaccuum over the floor (with the tiny brush head and me sitting on the floor for maximum effect) the greyish hue started to disappear. The carpet is one of those coconut-fibre-type floor coverings, which really loves to get dust stuck inside. No-one to blame here, that’s just what that type of carpet does, and it’s a pain to keep it clean.
It did however look 100 times better once I’d sucked the grey dust out of it.
I used some spot remover and a steam cleaner on the massive stains – and even though it’ll never come out completely, it’s reverted to a point where I’m quite happy/comfoprtable with what it looks like and I’ll just deal with what’s left. There’s going to be lots of shelving put up in that room, for all my supplies, which means half the stain will be covered anyway. I can and will deal with it.
We’ve also removed wallpaper from 2 walls in that room, so we can cover them with a paint-over-type paper and paint the whole room nice and fresh. I might add a little lavender to one of the walls, and that’ll be that.
L cleaned the sauna. As far as we could tell it was just a little dusty, nothing more, but still. Even though they claimed they’d only used it twice or so, naked strangers were in there, which means I need it cleaned. I know how stupid it is, especially since I do like to go to public sauna’s/spa’s with my friends and naked strangers sit in there too. But still….
L also trimmed the conifer hedge. It was still alive enough to be trimmed back all the way to the edge of the stairs that run by it. This made me happy.
In the mean time, on Friday and Monday, the contractors finished our walk-in-closet by painting the inside. We just need to get shelves put in, but that´s of later worry. They also painted our entire living room and study area, the bedroom walls and the kitchen ceiling. The part of plaster that needs to be repaired over the staircase has been pre/treated, so they can actually plaster it next time they´re over.
And that´s not going to be for a little while. It´s up to us now.
We need to continue cleaning floors, wallpaper and paint.
We need to pick up some linoleum which will go into the pantry and w-i-c (which I have stored at my old-old-apartment) and we need to finish up cleaning other stuff.
Then a couple of days before our move the contractors will come back to finish up the plastering, to saw our countertop to exactly fit my stove, and finish up a couple of other odd jobs we still have for them, but together aren’t more than a day’s work.
All in all it’s starting to shape up. I just called the moving company we chose and we’ll move on the 7th of October. I’d already arranged water and utilities the day we got the keys, but L now arranged for us to have a phone line, internet and tv there from the 5th of October (So if they screw up and do it a day or 2 late, we still won’t be without our life lines.)
I can’t really believe that in only 3 weeks I’ll sleep in our current bedroom for the last time. It’s very exciting!
Wow. Just wow. A coset has been built. Okay, so far just the outer walls and not the interior yet, but that’s still a MAJOR accomplishment. One day we tell them where we want it and what size, the next day there’s a structure, and the next moment they’re plastering it. It’s so awesome.
(Pictures will follow later – haven’t loaded them into the computer yet… I’ve been too busy!)
As I’ve said, our builders are awesome. And funny too. They wrote all over the drywall (before plastering) to give us some options regarding lighting in there. Then one added to the other ones text stating it was bad advice, or a bad question, or that we need to clean up a door they’d re-used for the closet.
Very funny.
So we decided to be funny as well.
L told me that D had told him that there was no electrical outlet in the bathroom and if we wanted one. So I said yes, looked around and as I wanted to point out where, L looked int here and saw there was one right there. Hidden in a cupboard, but still, it was there.
So I left a bunch of notes, leading up to the closet, with arrows and such, to tell them: wow, you’re fast, you fix it without us telling you where AND you make it look like it’s been there all these years.
They had a good laugh about it, even more so because they’d already found that outlet after they’d talked to L.
All in all things are really coming together. The living room floor’s ceiling has been painted 2 coats of white and the walls have 1 fresh coat (maybe 2 by now as I’m writing this).
This weekend we’ll be going there to do some good cleaning and trim the conifer hedge in the yard. Maybe do some painting too.
Tuesday we’re meeting with the last of the moving companies to get another pricing,a fter which we’ll choose which company to use and when we move. It’s really getting close! yay!
Happy 100th-post day to me!
In true blog-fashion I’ll post 100 random things for you all.
- This blog was started on March 20th, 2010.
- I had already talked about starting a blog on my own domain for about 2 years
- I already owned this domain name for over 2 years.
- And the .nl version of this domain name for over 5 years.
- One Saturday afternoon I told L I wanted a food blog.
- He fiddled around a bit and that evening, ‘Love through the stomach…’ existed.
- I like to tell things chronologically.
- Unless I don’t and I just start telling stuff randomly.
- After which I start switching in time constantly.
- I’m pretty sure 90 percent of my 100 facts aren’t very interesting to you.
- I still want to do my 100 things.
- The first food I consciously cooked was making hamburgers.
- And chocolate mousse for dessert.
- I was a little kid at that time, though I have no idea how old I was.
- I’ve lived in 8 different houses/apartments in Holland and 2 in the US.
- I’m moving into my 9th Dutch house pretty soon.
- I hope this’ll be the last house I ever move into.
- Though I’m sure I’ll make it to 10 – when I’m 80 or so – a nursing home.
- My favorite food changes weekly.
- Or at least monthly.
- L doesn’t seem to have a favorite food.
- He’ll eat anything and everything I cook and has never once complained and always tells me it’s tasty.
- I have complained about the food I’ve cooked.
- I like kitchen gadgets.
- My kitchen is over-full.
- I’m afraid my new kitchen will be full too.
- But I’ll have a pantry.
- And an option for an extra cupboard.
- And I’ll probably put another nice grocer’s chest in there.
- That way I have more room for kitchen gadgets.
- L supports my gadget hobby.
- And he takes 90 percent of the pictures for this blog.
- I’m still unsure of what to buy L for his birthday.
- His birthday is today.
- I just decorated a birthday cake in the simplest possible way.
- Today is Sunday.
- I have no time to shop tomorrow.
- I’ve been a sailing instructor for a couple of years now.
- I have insane amounts of fun on the water with the kids.
- I wish I had more free time to go sailing myself.
- The last couple of years I chose teaching over sailing myself.
- I’m eating a quiche right now – for breakfast.
- I put a bow on L’s coffee cup this morning – as I didn’t have an actual gift yet.
- I went to journalism school.
- I was only 16 when I was accepted to journalism school.
- I’ve dislocated my knee – twice.
- The first car I owned was a fire-engine-red Jeep.
- My second car was red too.
- I swore I’d only ever own red cars.
- My current car is ice-blue. It’s a very girly color.
- I almost didn’t buy my current car because it was too girly.
- Then I decided that a GOOD car for a GREAT price was more important than it being overly girly.
- I like to watch brainless movies.
- Though I love more relevant movies as well.
- The average Dutch person spends about 8 hours a week on the internet.
- I guess I’m about 6 average people.
- L is on the internet WAY more than me.
- I count my blogging time as i-net time.
- My first camera was a Lubitel.
- Which kinda looks like an old-fashioned 4×4 hasselblatt.
- I was about 5 when I got that camera.
- I got my first SLR when I was about 8 or so.
- When it died I’d started working in a camera store already and bought a brand new EOS 50.
- Which was state of the art back then.
- And cost me the entire summer’s wages.
- It’s worth about 50 bucks now – it’s not digital.
- When I write that down, I feel old.
- I recently turned 31.
- Though I claim it was the 3th time I turned 29.
- I think 31 is really old as well as spring chicken. I’m confusing even myself here.
- I was a total punk rocker in high school and college.
- I’ve had every color hair imaginable.
- I had tons of piercings in my ears and one in my nose and tongue as well.
- I now look very conservative.
- With highlighted hair and 1 pair of earrings – if any.
- My dad always claimed I would turn ‘normal’ if my job would demand that.
- My dad was right.
- I still have my tongue piercing and my students think something like that belongs with someone with pink hair.
- I used to have pink hair.
- I love my job, though sometimes question my loving it when the alarm goes off in the morning.
- Until about 3 or 4 years ago I would start shaking if I’d drank a coffee.
- Now I start shaking if I don’t have coffee in the morning.
- I only drink hot coffee or hot tea.
- I have a sincere hatred of the words ‘career woman’.
- And I have no idea why.
- Especially since according to the definition – I am one.
- I love cooking with alcohol.
- I refuse to believe alcohol doesn’t cook of.
- My bike got stolen during my last vacation.
- I’ve only had about 3 or 4 bikes stolen in my life which really isn’t all that much if you live in Amsterdam.
- Stinky cheese is always better.
- I spend way too much money on cleaning supplies.
- I trick myself into thinking that if I spend more I’ll clean more.
- It doesn’t work that way at all.
- I hate camping – it’s just. not. comfortable.
- My favorite colors are shades of black.
- Which will be the title of my memoirs if I ever write them.
- I like burgundy and deep purple too.
- I listen to all kinds of music, but still love the old goth and punk rock stuff the most.
- I can’t believe I made it to 100!!!
Networks
