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 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!

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:

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.

I wasn’t sure how these were going to go over - we don’t make a lot of fish because I’m pretty picky about it.  Having a fisherman husband from Iceland spoils you.  Between the char he’d catch in the ice-cold Þingvallavatn to the unbeliveably fresh halibut we ate for 6 months after he went to Alaska, I’m just picky.  And I’m OK with that.  You would be picky, too.

At any rate, I recently bought some frozen fish filets - flounder, I think? I laid them across wire racks and then sprinkled on chipotle pepper and garlic powder on them and let them thaw while the rub settled in.

Meanwhile, I made a simple pico de gallo from 4 red tomatoes, 2 yellow tomatoes, an onion, a bunch of garlic, some cilantro, kosher salt, and some lime juice.  I love lime.

After I baked the fish, I shredded it in a bowl and added a little more lime juice, and then assembled the tacos.  I softened the tortillas with the cheese on them to melt it, and then stuffed them nice and full of the fish, a little sour cream, pico de gallo, and some Boston lettuce.

The pico de gallo was so pretty and so tasty! I loved what the yellow tomatoes did to the appearance.

We got home very late, around 12:30am, and I got Isak in the shower to clean off all my blood and gore, made him dinner, took a shower of my own, and finally collapsed, exhausted, in my bed at around 2:00am.

At 5:00am, B startled out of sleep and said, “What is that?  Is that water?”  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” I replied, “just the toilet running.”  Doubting me, he said, “I don’t know…”  Irritated to have been woken up, I said, “So then go check on it.”

As he walked out of the room, I heard “splish splish splish.”

“Splish splish splish” is not a good sound to hear at 5am.

I was up in an instant, and as soon as my feet hit the cold tile past the rug our bed is on, I made my own “splish splish splish”.  I looked down and saw the water quickly moving into my bedroom, and grabbed my camera bag off the floor the instant before it, too, got flooded.  I was very confused, and didn’t quite know what to do except get towels and try and sop up some of the water before it got any more into the rug.

B, meanwhile, was identifying the source of the flooding which happened to be the hot water heater in our utility closet.  He is a quick thinker, and fortunately knew exactly what to do and turned off the two lines going into the heater.  The water, however, was now flooding our hallway, our bedroom, the bathroom, and Anja’s bedroom, and had gone in far enough to get under and behind our dressers.

I used all of our towels, from big huge fluffy towels to small bath towels to hand towels, the towels hanging in the bathroom, as well as the ones still in the laundry, and that still wasn’t enough.  Fortunately, though, since B had turned the water off it wasn’t going any further, so I started pushed the water into the bathroom with the towels so some of the water would drain into the bathroom floor drain.

Meanwhile, B went to check on the situation in the utility closet and when he opened the door was met with a closet full of smoke:  the heater was shorting out.  And we were standing in a pool of water.  He ran to the fuse box across the house, and the fuse had not blown so he turned it off - thank goodness for the recent electrical panel upgrade that was done in housing a few weeks ago that included a clear labeling system for all the fuses in the house.

I’m a heavy sleeper, and I probably would not have stirred from my sleep until the fire alarm went off.  Since the heater is in a closet, that would have meant the fire alarm wouldn’t have sounded until there was already a good amount of fire.  I’m feeling very lucky today to be able to write this. Please, please, check to make sure your smoke alarms are functioning and while you’re at it, label your fuses in your fuse box, too.

It still smells like electrical smoke and the more I think about it, the more thankful I am that we are okay.

It reads:

I am Grayson.  I lie a lot.  Oops, got to lie.  Good luck, I am going to lie about I did not eat cookies, OK.  OK.  OK.  Thanks.  Don’t tell your friends, OK.

This one was brought to me today.  It is, as you can tell, her feelings.

I guess I won’t be buying any more white cheese.