Chicken Stew
9:09 a.m. - 2007-08-09


I was debating what to do with the chicken on Sunday, when I got the idea to call up the EGs and see if they wanted to come over to Sunday dinner. They did, so I decided to make the Ina Garten chicken stew with biscuits. I used much much less butter, and after making the sauce, I stirred in a can of cream of mushroom soup just for the heck of it. I put in the deboned chicken, carrots, cerlery,onions, and potatoes, then made biscuits for the top, using my recipe, not Ina's, because the EGs do not need to ingest a half pound of butter apiece. With it, I served some homemade applesauce, some cucumbers from the garden in homemade dill salad dressing (a vinaigrette), sliced garden tomatoes with basil, and with chocolate pudding for dessert. The stew was really very good. What surprised me was the way they chowed down on the cucumbers until none were left.

This week I have been working on the dressform for Melissa, putting newspapers through the shredder and stuffing it with that. I first tried spray-in foam insulation, but that is a little messy and tricky, so in the future I will just stick with the newspaper. The trouble is that the spouse needs to clear all newspaper destruction first, since he saves clippings for various business reasons, so I have to wait until he says I can shred up this page or that. Today he has given me a whole stack of papers he is done with, so I may get the rest of the dressform stuffed.

I went to the thrift store to look for a standing lamp to use to hang the dressform from, and I found the perfect one, cast iron with four arched feet, but they wanted $20 for it, which was way too much. I think I am just going to hang the thing from that crummy Martha Stewart dress rack I got last year that would not stand up to the weight of dresses, defeating its purpose. It would be OK for the dressform though, which doesn't weigh that much.

Today the spouse is taking off from work to go to the ballgame, so I have to go drive him to the BART station now.