Credit goes to Ed for finding this gem. In honor of its existence, I'm creating a new label: Bears.

Smoked Paprika Chicken

Ingredients:

* 4 skinless chicken breasts (about 200g each)
* 1 tablespoon smoked paprika
* 2 tablespoons olive oil
* 2 cloves garlic, crushed
* 1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil leaf
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Directions:

1. Mix together the paprika, oil, garlic, basil, salt and cayenne.
2. Massage this mix into the chicken breasts and allow to stand for about 20 minutes.
3. Heat a pan over medium heat, and saute on both sides until chicken is golden brown and cooked through-about 8 minutes each side depending on the thickness of your fillets.
4. Add a little more oil if you need to, though there should be enough from the marinade.
5. Slice on the diagonal and serve.

Results:
Pretty, pretty, pretty good. Even Chris liked the chicken. It was a little spicy, but that could be because I only bought three breasts and I didn't adjust the spices.

I decided I wanted a sauce to go with this, so after I finished cooking the chicken I deglazed the pan with some chicken broth and got up all the bits the stuck to the bottom of the pan.* Then I put just a little bit of butter in the pan to thicken it up a bit, and returned the chicken to the pan after I sliced it. Turned out well, one might say I kicked it up a notch.

* These bits are a constant problem for me. They're supposed to be "brown bits," but inevitably by the time whatever I'm cooking is done, they've turned into black or charred bits. Untasty. If I know I'm going to be wanting the bits on the bottom for something, I've been trying to remember to heat the pan a little lower than what the recipe calls for, so this chicken I cooked one side on medium and the other on mid-low/low.

To help fill up my copious free time until I find a job, I volunteered to write the occasional article for an EC publication. My first article is here.

We're not in Indiana anymore

Here's an example of the rather stark ways that Wisconsin is different from Indiana. You wouldn't think they'd be that different since they're so close in proximity, but you'd be wrong. This is under the "Get Moving" section of the paper, next to the Walk to Cure Diabetes and the Hike for the Homeless:

Beer and M&M Fun Run
Time: 9 am
Date: Saturday
Place: Owen Park
Cost: Free, but participants are encouraged to bring M&Ms and a six-pack of beer.
Other: The course follows the bike trail south along the Chippewa River half as far as the runner wants to run, and then the runner turns around and returns.

Note the time of the run: 9 am. I'm inclined to think the M&Ms and beer are not donations to the event organizer, but rather would be consumed in the park (a public place, mind, which would NEVER happen in Indiana) after the run, beginning hypothetically as early as 9:30 am.

As supporting evidence, the doggie daycare where we left Harper while we were at the bank the day we moved in had a potluck doggie fun evening one Friday. They had a keg.

It's a lazy, dog-dangling afternoon

Harper is plain worn out from all the confusion. Is Brett Favre retiring? Is he not retiring? Poor Harper, her fantasy football team is all in disarray.

raspberries

I didn't go to the farmer's market today. It seems that just about any day of the week you can find a farmer's market in town, you just need to know where to look. Sort of like an illegal gambling ring. The Saturday market is bigger, and there's slightly more variety, but for the most part your selection from every stall is the same. Everyone has carrots, everyone has cucumbers, everyone has squash, etc, and for all about the same (very reasonable) price and about the same quality. It's not like other towns' markets where there's the bi-color corn guy and the organic lettuce guy, and the cheese empenadas woman, and the heirloom melon dude. The Saturday market hasn't been around all that long, so I'm hoping in future years there'll be more variety.
The upshot of all this is that there's not as much pressure to get out early on a Saturday to go to the market. Instead today I got out early to go raspberry picking. Which was awesome. The berry farm is probably the hardest place to get to in Eau Claire, I got lost coming and going, but it was gorgeous. I parked next to a barn and went in and talked to the elderly gentleman who gave me a spiel about how to pick the berries and sent me on my way. To get to the berry rows I walked through this absolutely gorgeous flower garden that really set the mood. I mean, no matter how many bugs or thorns there were (and there were), it all felt very peaceful and wondrous after walking through that garden. It was a nice outing.
I expected a little more of a price cut, seeing as how I'm doing the labor of picking, but it's actually the same price as what I got at the farmer's market last week. But they tasted just a little sweeter having picked them myself. Next week I might go back for blueberries. We'll see.
Anyway, I picked three pints (took me a little more than an hour, I was picking fall berries and they weren't quite there yet) and a really nice woman I was chatting with while we picked told me that I should lay them out on a cookie sheet and freeze them, then put them in a ziplock for the winter. Which is what I'm going to do, if I don't eat them all first. Could happen, they're really good.

On another note, did you know the fruit is spelled rasPberry? I never noticed that p hidden in there. Man.

squash, tomatoes, and corn with jack cheese

From the Gourmet cookbook:

Ingredients:

• 3 Tbls vegetable oil
• 1 medium onion
• 2 small garlic cloves, minced
• 2 large tomatoes (about 1.5 pounds), halved, seeded, and chopped
• 2 pounds summer squash, cut into .5 inch cubes
• 1.5 cups corn kernels (about 3 ears)
• 2 cups coarsely grated Monterey Jack cheese (about 6 ounces)
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 3/4 tsp black pepper

Directions:

1. Heat oil in a 12-inch heavy skillet over moderately low heat. Add onion and cook, stirring, until softend, about 5 minutes.
2. Add garlic, tomatoes, squash, and corn, increase heat to moderate, and cook, stirring, until squash is tender, 10-12 minutes.
3. Reduce heat to low, stir in cheese, salt and pepper, and simmer, covered, just until cheese is melted, about 30 seconds.

Results:
I really liked the vegetables themselves, and I like that it seems like something I could do with frozen or canned veggies in the winter (if I can find frozen squash). But the cheese sort of did this sticky glomming coating thing with the fork when we ate it, which may be your thing but I find it distasteful. The cheese did thicken the juice, but it didn't add a lot of flavor except for the cloying sweetness of jack that I don't really prefer over other cheeses, and if I'm going to add that much fat to a recipe it'd better make it 50 times better. The next time I'll either leave out the cheese or add a little bit of flavorful cheese after serving so it can melt at the table (I'm thinking smoked gouda or chevre?), and instead add some smoked paprika or, I dunno, maybe celery salt? Hmm... The flavors were very nice the next day for leftovers.

I feel somewhat mollified that the same things that bother me about time travel also bothers physicists. Now, if only I can get them to agree with me about that darn theory of relativity.

Tip: When your corningware containing tacos will not fit in the microwave, putting it in the oven to melt the cheese is a viable option only if you: a) do not put it on broil, b) do not put it on the topmost rack, and c) do not forget about it until you start to see smoke pouring out of the oven.We ate them anyway.

Sour beer and sour grapes

We went to the Great Taste of the Midwest in Madison this weekend and sampled some tasty craft brews. My favorites were the sours from Jolly Pumpkin and the Annun Unum from Flossmore Station, also sour. I didn't like sour beers the first time I tried them, but now I find them refreshing.

The whole event was a pretty neat experience. It's held in a park on Lake Mendota (? possibly Lake Monona), and you get a tiny sampling glass to walk around to all sorts of good midwestern brewers. It was very well thought out, so much so that the lines for beer weren't very long, and I never had to wait in a line longer than two people for the port-o-potties.

The only sad part was a talk on beer and chocolate pairings that I went to in the education tent. Only the people with chairs (of which I was not) got chocolates and beer, and the whole talk was not about pairing chocolate and beer in general, but those specific pairings (THAT beer with THAT chocolate). I could overhear people in the chairs (we'll call them the Haves) chatting with their fellow Haves about how the chocolate was the most amazing chocolate they'd ever had, blah blah blah, while us Havenots were left to sit on the cold muddy ground with nothing to do but watch them lick their fingers. Before too long I left the education tent, as I was not being educated.

Zucchini in pasta sauce

I've been hearing that you can put zucchini in a pasta sauce and you'll never know it's there. It's true! Even Chris grudgingly admitted that he liked it. I shredded a zucchini on my box grater and sauteed the shreds with the salt, pepper, olive oil, and garlic that I was going to use to make the sauce anyway. (Next time I think I'll salt the shreds and let them drain in a collider for a while first, just to see what happens.) I meant to saute it until brown, but the zucchini actually just sort of built up a layer of browned mush on the bottom of the pan and I didn't want that to burn so I just aborted that plan (any ideas for how to avoid the layer of mush?). I deglazed the tasty brown mush with tomato juice from the can of diced tomatoes I was going to put in the sauce, then added everything else. Browned zucchini sort of gets that savory flavor that I'm pretty addicted to this time of year, and it added a subtle smokeyness to the sauce.

Let the bears pay the bear tax

Everytime we drive into Maryland, Chris starts looking for bears. There's signs all over the highway sporting a bear and a deer and it says, Watch for our wildlife. This promise has never been realized as the only bears we have ever seen have been in zoos (so not technically wild). We went to Colorado and Idaho hoping to see a bear. No bears, just disappointment.

Two days ago there was a black bear wandering around INSIDE the Eau Claire city limits. WHY have we been going to far off places to find bears when they were in Wisconsin all along? Will have to keep eyes peeled.