Week in review 4/27/2012

We’ve decided to start something new.  At the end of every week, we usually have a big cache of pictures, only a few of which have been used for the blog.  So, starting today, we’ll be posting some of these pictures at the end of the week every Friday.  So, here is this week, in no particular order.

We cooked Chicken cacciatore from the Pioneer Woman’s blog.  Her recipes are always very good, although I do admit to spicing them up sometimes to account for our love of red chili peppers and garlic.  This recipe was easy and very delicious.  Dave does not like green or red bell peppers, but he ate it, so that is indeed something.   We used chicken thighs in this recipe, although I think chicken legs would have worked as well.  I cooked the Chicken cacciatore in a big cast iron pan.  We have two of these cast iron pans, and find that more and more they are our go-to pans for preparing our meals.

Long ago, we gave the road crew permission to park on our property.  So imagine my surprise and delight when we arrived home from work one day to find they’d left a backhoe parked next to the barn.  That’s Chief checking it out.  He is completely recovered from his recent escapade.

We grilled sausages and corn outside.  Those leftovers didn’t last long.   We both took sausages to work for our lunches the next day.  I wish we’d grilled more corn.

We had a perfect week of weather.  It was so nice that we left doors and windows open every day.  I captured Otis, our biggest Irish Wolfhound, while he was sitting on the side patio off of our Master bedroom.  He looks rather fierce here, but he is not.  He is the goofiest Irish Wolfhound I have ever had.  He is the only dog I have known who likes to look a person in the eyes.  Otis is also very kind, and likes nothing more than putting his head in a person’s lap…he’d also like to sit in your lap, but at 200 pounds, is much too large to do so.  He attempted sitting in my lap recently, and was so heavy he took my breath away.   If you look behind Otis, and to the left, you’ll see a dog kennel.  It is not for our dogs (which are entirely inside beasts), but is for Chief and his colleagues, Sophie and Pixel.  They are outside cats.  They don’t do well inside.  Although we do ocassionally invite them indoors (i.e. cold weather, etc.), they prefer to be outdoors.  Dave and I worried that the cats needed a warm place to sleep, so we spent an entire day this past winter, looking at doghouses for our cats.  We’re a couple of engineers, and so you can imagine us in PetSmart and Walmart with our Requirements list, checking out every single dog kennel in stock.  It was ridiculous, and I’m sure people thought we were crazy, especially when I made Dave pull every kennel down from the shelf, so I could check its inner dimensions with a measuring tape.  This is the one that we finally decided to purchase.  It is stuffed with old towels that we remove every week to be washed.   At night, it is stuffed with our three outdoor cats, and it is very cute to see them in there, sleeping together.  I worry that possums will decide to sleep in it, but so far they’ve completely left it alone.