We are suckers for homeless cats.  Ala Spit, aka Spitty Kitty, adopted B on a fishing trip where she jumped into the car and made herself at home.  Toyota Celica, aka Yota, suckered his way into our home as a teeny kitten.  Black cats are very hard to adopt and putting him in the shelter would have meant his life would have more than likely been spent there.

And now we have been adopted by another cat.  We heard meowing at the front door the other day and opened the door and in ran this new cat, who immediately ran to the food on the other side of the house like there was a GPS beacon built into it, pooped in the litter box, and then came and sat on our laps.

This cat is amazingly sweet.  While Spitty and Yota constantly fight, this cat just kind of goes with the flow.  Even Spitty, as temperamental as she is, almost immediately accepted her (unlike Yota who from the age of 3 weeks stressed her out).

Meet the newest Siggy Kitty, Susan Navarra Kittycat, aka Susie:

I should note that she has been homeless for quite some time, roaming our neighborhood.  She was flea-ridden and hungry and fairly thin for her size and we plan on posting notice to see if anyone claims her…but somehow, knowing the reputation for cats being dumped when people move, I have the feeling no one will.

I really do love the cooler weather.  I enjoy snuggly sweaters and scarves and pants that cover my chubba-chubby thighs.   I like boots and hats and the shorter days, snuggling up with the kiddies and the kitties, and warm blankets.  And I really like soup.

I like to cook but a lot of what I cook goes unappreciated by the picky little boy that lives in my house and demands to be fed chips and waffles.  Anja will eat most of what I cook, as long as it doesn’t involve a lot of meat, but doesn’t really get excited about anything I make.  But there is one thing that always gets very literal jumps for joy:  chicken noodle soup.

One of the first really cool days here, I made some chicken noodle soup and boy, did it hit the spot.  I made it from scratch, simmering chicken, celery, onions, carrots, fresh parsley all day in my lovely Lodge pot.  As I stirred in my favorite egg noodles, and it made me reminisce about my own mother’s homemade chicken soup, and I started to think about another meal I had looked forward to in my own childhood: chicken and dumplings.

I had never made chicken and dumplings as an adult and when I looked for a recipe, I was surprised to see it was basically just chicken soup with biscuits cooked into it instead of noodles.  So I thought I’d attempt it and see how it all turned out.

In an effort to save time - there is always a shortage of time at home when it comes to making dinner - I decided to try some store-bought broth instead of making it allll the way from scratch.  I was surprised how nicely everything turned out, and it really was easy and quick to make this way.

The ingredients were simple and - score! - cheap:

2 boxes of chicken broth
1 bag of frozen boneless/skinless chicken breasts
3 carrots
2 stalks of celery
1 medium onion
a 4-pack of Pilsbury buttermilk biscuits (the kind that come in a can - they were the cheapest kind)
Milk - or, if you’ve recently passed a physical fitness test, heavy cream

This chicken soup-making phase has made me appreciate my large knife - it’s usually crappy but for chopping carrots and onions and chicken, it’s great!  Please, do not use a small kitchen knife even if it is a great small kitchen knife - your hands will fatigue very quickly.  And use a nice, heavy pot.  I don’t know why it makes such a difference, but it really does.

Boil the chicken until cooked and then drain it and chop it up.
Chop up the carrots, celery and onion.
Bring the broth to a simmer and add the carrots, celery and onion.  Let simmer for about 15 minutes.  Add in the chicken.  Bring the soup to a full boil.

Next comes the fun part: Pinch the biscuits apart into three pieces each.  Drop them into the boiling soup.  Cover your heavy pot with the heavy pot lid and let it boil away for about 5-7 minutes.  When you open the lid, magic!  The biscuits will be all big and poofy.  Start stirring it; the now-dumplings are firmed up enough that you can stir it without everything getting mushy and nasty.

Turn down the heat and let it simmer for another 10 minutes or so, and then stir in some milk.  I don’t know how much - I added probably about 1/2 cup.

The starch from the biscuits helps thicken up the broth a little bit and the cream makes it a really nice texture.  Keep some tongs handy to snip at the little fingers trying to fish extra dumplings out of the pot, and enjoy!

We are such suckers.

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You have to click on it and see it bigger to really appreciate it but…isn’t it beautiful??

And I just had to share my jewelry wall…I don’t have enough space to hang all my fun/cheapy jewelry, and I didn’t have enough stuff up on my walls, so I killed two birds with one stone and made this:

This Halloween, we were soggy and wet - it poured all night last night, all through today, and all the way into trick-or-treating time.  There was one event that they had available to the littlest ones, and Anja just made the age cut-off to be able to attend and showed up in her adorable chef costume.  The one that I bought about 18 months ago and then lost.  Fortunately, I found it about 2 months ago and this time, it fit her perfectly and was so cute on her.

But do I have any pictures of her in it?  No.  I do not.  Instead, I have pictures of her from our night helping at a haunted house.  She was so good in it, too, right up until when she passed out on the couch in the loony bin and slept through the rest of the screaming and chain-saw-massacring and the rattling and the banging and the more screaming.  Maybe it was a self-defense thing to sleep through it all.

THIS is a great story about the kindness of a complete stranger that saved a woman’s house from foreclosure.  I have no other reason to share it other than that every now and then it’s nice to be reminded that there are still good people in the world.