Pork chops. Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing, in powdered form. Coat chops, no salt or pepper: the dressing mix powder has plenty of flavor. I had a good result using a little oil in an iron skillet, starting them on the range, then finishing the same under broil (an iron skillet moves easily between the two) until done.
Real easy. Pretty darned good. Kind of a tangy taste. We prefer the thin-sliced chops: two does nicely as a serving.
Coleslaw on the side.
Totally legal on Atkins. And otherwise indistinguishable from just good healthy food.
Tonight, I think, spaghetti and meatballs. If you have a Costco, Kirkland frozen meatballs are almost as good as good homemade. I fix the spaghetti, pop a sufficient quantity of meatballs into a lidded small 1-pint saucepan, heat with a very little olive oil, until they start to brown. This coincides, on low (5) heat about with how long it takes to cook spaghetti. I add a half cup of Classico (pretty darned good) spaghetti sauce from a jar, serve on spaghetti with a dusting or shaving of Parmesan, and the whole deal takes just a shade longer than ten minutes.
During the week, when time is shorter, I often just put diced precooked chicken bits into the same lidded pint saucepan, heat with olive oil, black pepper, tablespoon of dried basil, pour in half a cup of grated Parmesan, stir to melt parm onto chicken, serve as topping for Caesar salad, Cardini dressing, with an half cup of added sugar snap peapods. It’s less than 10 minutes to fix, and cleanup’s a snap.
Long ago, I found a recipe for salmon steaks and Italian dressing mix. Mix dressing with a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, pat onto salmon steaks, broil until lightly browned on both sides. Serve with your choice of green side dishes.
The toe isn’t any worse today, aside from turning an ugly rainbow on all sides, but I may go see the quack tomorrow just to be sure of my diagnosis and treatment. It’s an excuse to stay off the exercise bike, any rate 🙂
We had guests over last night, and surprisingly, Junior was a gentleman, if somewhat reserved. He didn’t socialize much, but neither did he hide, instead he sat at the end of the hall to watch the goings-on. Meanwhile, Zorro usurped the lap of one of our regulars and fell asleep there for most of the evening. So did the regular.
The toe is not still dislocated, is it?! If it is, it needs to be put back in joint ASAP. Even if you don’t think it’s broken, an x-ray would not be a bad idea. I did a number on my pinkie toe once and had a rainbow toe for a week. Hurt like a son of a gun, too. Took it a good two weeks to finally settle down. My pinkie toes are tiny, almost vestigial, but when I bang one (I go barefoot in the house all the time), they seem to hurt way out of proportion to their size.
No, not dislocated. Went to see the doc today; my regular guy at the clinic was booked all day, so I took potluck. The doc came in, took a look at the toe and my impromptu buddy tape job, and said, “I’m 95% certain it’s broken, but you treated it exactly right.” She sent me for an x-ray for verification purposes, but I haven’t heard back yet. I’m assuming it was/is broken, so no dancing this week.
Just so’s they don’t mention the name “Jones”. If they do, things are worse than they may seem. Do not delay getting to a specialist.
Ex-wife got a Jones fracture by stepping around a car blocking the sidewalk. She had to walk down the driveway and didn’t see the difference in height between the street surface and the driveway, and her left foot slipped off and it fractured the 5th metatarsal in her foot. We didn’t find out about it being a Jones fracture until much later, and by then, it was too late. She never could wear her high heels or her pumps after that, and yes, she had lots of shoes, too.
Well, nuts. Tried to call the doc today and find out the results of the x-ray, “Oh, that doctor is off until tomorrow.” Can I find the results of a blood test from 2 months ago? “We’ll have to have your doctor, or his nurse, call you back.” The doctors want us to be ‘informed patients’, but boy howdy is it hard to find out what’s going on!
We have a clinic where really good labs are in the basement, and communication is really excellent. Hope you track them down.
I just realized: Italian dressing mix may contain powdered allium of some variety, which is contra-indicated for you. Oops.
I think I’d make a basic mix for that, without the alliums.
Spice Hunter’s Italian seasoning blend is allium-free, as are their herbes de Provence and their poultry seasoning; so are their Italian and poultry blends in the ‘fresh at hand’ (freeze-dried) line.
We have to watch it with Italian dressing for that reason: garlic is ok in moderation. But that sounds like a great recipe.
Ow, re the toe. I think the doc is a good idea, not that he can probably give you anything, but an expert wrap and a painkiller so you can get some pain-free sleep without worrying about hitting it.
And bravo for Junior. He seems to be figuring life may just have taken a good turn.
Moderation with garlic? “If your lover objects to your eating garlic, you need a better class of lover!”
Put a package of chicken or beef ramen on the stove. Put 3-5 large to medium cloves of garlic in a largish bowl, microwave for 10sec, just until it starts to snap. Pull out garlic, peel easily. Run the garlic through Suzi back into the bowl, add 1-2T extra-virgin olive oil, a couple pinches of dried basil (or a chiffonade of a couple fresh leaves in season), cover with a small plate, back in the microwave for 55-65sec on half power, depending on just how many and large the cloves were, to flavor the oil and turn the crushed garlic translucent. When the ramen is cooked, pour out all but 1T or so of the “soup”, then the noodles and 1T into the bowl. Add a generous amount of grated Parmesan and stir thoroughly until the near boiling water turns the grated Parmesan into a cheesy sauce. Enjoy. Wipe silly grin and garlicky oil off your lips with a paper napkin. 🙂
Thanks for the recipes, those sound tasty and easy. Will try to pick up the sauce mixes at the store, but given recent store lighting issues, I’ll likely wind up ordering online. (And their spice/sauce mix envelopes are particularly frustrating to look through, even in good light.)
Both the pork chops and the salmon with dressing mixes sound great. — Will have to try those soon. I have some frozen salmon and an almost-out bottle of lemon juice I need to use. So that will likely be after my next store trip.
Those Spice Hunter mixes sound good. I don’t have allergies to onions or garlic, but their mixes might be different/tasty to try.
I have meatballs (a store brand, ho-hum, but OK) thawing now, destined for some Ragù Traditional spaghetti sauce (lazy, don’t want to fix my own today) and pasta of some kind, and parmesan of course. Hmm. Might put it in the oven on broil a while.
For homemade spaghetti sauce, I have been known to add extra black olives (of course), but also a bit of celery including tops, and carrot, because I had it on hand. I was told (by a real 1st generation) Italian immigrant, that “real Italians” will add a bit of whatever vegetables they have on hand to their sauce, including things like potatoes, carrots, or spinach, just not in large quantities compared to the sauce’s mostly tomato base. :shrugs: I was told by another friend, ultimately Sicilian background, that a “real” spaghetti sauce isn’t meat-based, but vegetable-based. :shrugs: YMMV. But I grew up using browned hamburger and diced canned tomatoes and tomato sauce as the base, with bell peppers, oninns, spices, and so on added. — My mom would *always* add Tabasco sauce and/or jalapeños and juice to her serving. Heh.
—–
Broken toe: Ouch! Dealt with that on a 4th toe for a while, and was very glad it could sort-of splint to the other toes. But yeah, ouch, a few years ago.
Junior sounds like he’s fitting in real well. That’s good! And no great commotion with Zorro. Also good. Heheh, I had friends apologize profusely many years ago (I was late high school or early college age) when their cat slept on my heavy coat, laid on a bed while I was visiting for an evening dinner party. Hahaha, I told them not to worry, I had cats, and wasn’t at all surprised or offended. I took it as a sort of compliment from their cat, that my coat was a snuggly warm sleeping spot. 😀
Hmm, one of mine is now trying to con me into early suppertime. — We’ve worked out a very happy solution re the moist food: Smokey gets the whitefish and crab mix, Goober gets the chicken and salmon mix (the Nature’s Design cups you recommended, CJ). This, until they use up the crab flavor, which Goober will not touch but Smokey likes. I’m wondering from this if Goober is allergic or just somehow offended by the smell. (Both flavors smell good to me. I’m a little envious and may have to get some crab because of it!) So the salmon flavor is a hit, and I’ll try the other flavors for them for variety in their menu.
— Have you tried a brand of dry cat food called, “Taste of the wild,” which claims to include venison and salmon and other non-grain ingredients? I got a small bag for variety, since I always get their usual brand. They are liking this and it seems good.
Back with my previous two cats, when they were aging, their stomachs got to where they had trouble with any other brand of dry food. I asked friends, and finally got a recommendation for Solid Gold Katz-n-flokken, the purplish bag, not the “Indigo Moon” flavor. That has been a trusted brand ever since. Those two cats did fine with it and woudl then refuse all other dry food, even if very hungry. My current two much prefer the Katz-n-flokken. It’s expensive, but doesn’t cause tummy trouble. (Yes, they still will get hairballs. Sigh.) (And Smokey overeats and spits up, also sigh.) But they do very well with this dry.
I get other dry for variety in taste and nutrition, and I get Friskies or 9-Lives moist, but the cats are really going for the new Nature’s Design moist that you recommended. So although it costs more, it’s a big hit, they love it. (Han, and if it smells halfway tempting to me….) So I figure this is worth it. Good healthy food for them equals good healthy, happy cats.
Smokey is still a short, stout little butterball who loves food and more food, thanks to being so starved as a street kitten before I got him.
Goober is always the long and lean fellow with internal appetite control. “No, I’m full, thanks.”
And being the Most Non-Assertive Cat in the Universe, he lets Smokey steal his food. Sigh. Separate them and they get very anxious for each other, even though they fuss like brothers occasionally otherwise.
So there’s always a need to adjust the menu with them. — I’d thought I was going to have to work something out with the moist food, but that’s now happily solved to both their liking. (And therefore mine.)
Goober turned 9 (last Oct. 31st) and Smokey turned 5 (late December) while I wasn’t looking. Goober isn’t quite showing signs of being a senior yet, and Smokey is still young.
Looking forward to trying those recipes. — Fallback: Think I will put the dressing mixes in the ol’ Amazon cart, in case I don’t find them at the store. (I know I should be able to get the Hidden Valley dressing pouches, so I may be OK after all. But their others…. Bad mood lighting or cave lighting. Makes grocery shopping more like spelunking or a dungeon crawl. I had better watch out for grues and trolls….
Those Spice Hunter blends look interesting.
I was quite intrigued by the “Cowboy Rub” and thought of other things. I laughed so much that I decided I had to order the spice mix. Now if there was only a nice cowboy who went with it…. Ahem, er, yes. (I am not so forward in public, be reassured.)
The Cowboy Rub is actually a misnomer. The product’s actual name is Cowboy BBQ Rub, by Spice Hunter. I have a feeling the spice mix is better used on food.
Now where’s Slim? Should I yodel and see if he shows up? … Hmm, so, so unlikely. (And in real life, I’d be so stunned and might very well start running the other way. Dagnabit.) … Still, one can dream. … I believe the phrase is, “Yee-haw!” Ahem.
Uh, really, I’m not so much like that in person. Uh, not sure if that’s good or bad, but it’s me. Slim? Tex? Helloooo….
Pardon me, seem to have gotten a bit hot under the collar. Cowboy Rub? Golly!
Settle down there, Buford 😀
Chanur in ebooks:
Still not yet available in ebook form is Chanur’s Homecoming, although the other 4 volumes are. It’s odd that this one was skipped or is still held up in process. The omnibus editions, The Chanur Saga (first 3 volumes) and Chanur’s Endgame (last 2 volumes) are also not yet availabe as ebooks.
However, I did find two new ebook entries:
(1) El orgullo de Chanur (Ventana abierta) (Spanish Edition) — The Pride of Chanur
(2) La aventura de Chanur (Ventana abierta) (Spanish Edition) — Chanur’s Venture
There were two new entries that appear to be print editions:
(1) La vengeance de Chanur (in French)
(2) L’épopée de Chanur (in French)
I will confess I have to look up épopée, which I think is legacy, rather than homecoming.
There was as well an out-of-print French edition of Chanur, which was the first volume, Pride of Chanur, but a one-word title, with a puzzlingly La Beautée et le Béte (Beauty and the Beast) inspired cover, a male lion-man carrying a disheveled damsel in distress. Ah, well, it’s reminiscent of the old pulps and was printed back in the 80’s or 90’s, so…. Eh bien, élas, c’est la vie. (I ordered it used. It had traveled from France, across the Channel, to the UK, before arriving at my door in the US. So one or two or more people all enjoyed the French translation, which so far, is a pretty fair translation.) — And it’s occurred to me how the French pronoun system does interesting things to be non-specific about gender for characters, though yes, they get it correct when it’s specified. Certain other things end up a bit curious in translation, and I’ll still need to look up some vocabulary that appears surprisingly cognate into English.
Related, there’s also a Spanish language edition of Foreigner 1 (El estranjero).
Also, «ventana abierta» = “open window”; cf. French «fenêtre ouverte», lit. “window opened,” due to Spanish/French noun + adj. word order.
By the way, fenêtre with the little roof over the -e- also has a disappeared-s-, as the Dutch word for window = venster. The only English related word I can come up with is defenestrate, for throwing something or someone out of a window, but it helps demonstrate the principle behind that accent.
BCS, 3 points on the Frbêtebête The title of the fairy-tale is La belle et la bête in French.
1. It’s La Belle instead of Beaute (sorry, I don’t know how to make e-accents on my phone), as it’s supposed to be Beauty in the sense of a beauty, a beautiful woman, and not in the abstract sense of “the beauty of this scene made me sniffle”.
2. Also, the accent on bete has to be a little roof, which is the replacement for the disappeared -s- in words like beast – bete, feast – fete and such.
3. And despite the beast himself being male, the word is female (it ends on an -e, and almost all those words are), so it’s La bete, instead of Le.
Sorry if I’m being pedantic, but you often like language discussions, so I thought I’d mention it and the details behind it.
Oh bother, I tried sticking the correctly accented word in the right spots and it didn’t appear; and now it appears double where it doesn’t belong. Sorry!
Finesse in typography is not a hallmark of WordPress sites, alas.
:lo: ! Finesse in typography…! Hahaha, oh, yes, so very true! — True of the web in general. It’s only with CSS3 that several more things I could do with PageMaker or ReadySetGo over 20 years ago can now be done semi-easily on the web. Still awaiting others.
Hanneke, thank you. I should’ve known better about «La belle et la bête,» including the circumflex (rooftop) accent usually indicating an old -s- from Latin and Old French. Er, I see I put in an acute accent earlier, which is, for me, a strange error. — “Defenestration” in English is the only cognate I can think of for fenêtre, but there could be something else. — Yes, language always fascinates me. 🙂
Do you guys not know about how to get ASCII characters into WordPress and Word Perfect? (It works in Blogger, too, but I don’t know what other programs will take it) If you have the ASCII code number you can hold down the ALT key, type the ASCII code number on the key pad, when you let go of the ALT key, you get that character. (This trick doesn’t work with the top row numbers. It only works if you have a keyboard with a 10-key pad on it, and the numlock on, and you type the numbers on the key pad). This trick works for vowels with all the diacritical marks, greek letters, symbols, British pound symbol, euro symbol, etc. The key code for “e” with an accent circumflex is “136” = ê — et voilá — €, ñ, ç, æ, £, ø. It’s a bit cumbersome but in Word Perfect you can use macros to put them in.
Wol, on a keyboard I can make most accented letters I need; I even know the euro Ascii number 0128 by heart. But nowadays I’m often visiting here on my phone, which doesn’t have a real keyboard. It has 3 pages of symbols but no accented letters I can find. So if anyone knows a trick for making those, I’d be obliged.
It’s a lot more laborious to write neat text on the phone, and very easy to make typos and overlook them, so I hope you all will forgive them. My fingers are clumsy on these little touchscreen buttons, there are no arrow keys to get to a specific wrong letter; and I’ve lost every pick I tried to keep with the phone. Grrrr.
I have the Windows character map pinned to the start menu – I need it for genealogy. It tells me the codes, if I want to read them.
also http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref: mouse over the one you want, and it tells you the codes.
P.J. Evans, thanks for the link. The phone doesn’t have a fixed keyboard, just the touchscreen, so I haven’t got an Alt-key to keep pressed down while typing the number. Is there another way to get the same effect?
The copyright “c” is ALT+0169 = ©
Ha! Aha! I located the Ranch Dressing and the Italian powder mixes. But the latter is a store brand, and I’m not sure how good it will be.
Tonight will be a salmon portion with Italian dressing, and a side of coleslaw, possibly with the same dressing. There’s a second portion of salmon, so two meals plus the remainder of the coleslaw. Pork chops with that ranch dressing later, if I still have some in the freezer. I got avocados, so I may use these too, sliced, on the side.
I forgot garlic bread, but tortillas will do. 😉 Or if I get industrious (not tonight) I’ll make bread.
I also solved the Great Mystery of “Where did they hide the toothbaste in the new layout?” (Didn’t find it despite iffy directions last trip.) Was beginning to think I’d have to stop by another store before I ran out. It’s in an out of the way spot, IMHO, now.
The store must restock most produce Wednesday mornings, which is not good for my grocery trip. Either that, or the store is running too close on margins. I would’ve gotten more fruit, if they had it. Should’ve gotten tomatoes.
I’m now avoiding a local favorite brand of ice cream, which has had too many recalls recently. — And I didn’t see it in the store this time. That’s bad; it’s a very popular old local / regional brand. Hoping that will get better.