Seeing Double

There are several Caitis in my life right now. My sister Caiti and Little Caiti are the two that I actually like. All the other Caitis started coming around in the fall when it was dark after I got home so at first it was hard to tell the difference. All the Caitis are varying shades of orange with white stripes and all about the same size. Thus the confusion.

Evil Caiti comes around at night. In the fall she came around several times. She's a little bigger than LC and much fluffier. That's the easiest way to tell the difference. I try to chase away any cats that I don't want to stay around here but at first it was pretty hard to tell the difference and I scared LC a few times (maybe that's why she won't let me pet her). This Caiti is evil because she scared the kitties. Anytime EC came into the yard my kitties would run and hide. And EC has stopped being scared of me. I would chase her away and she wouldn't run, just amble away. I need to get V after her.

Doppleganger Caiti look exactly like Caiti. Same color, same size same everything. Finally I started staring out the backdoor enough to notice that DC's fur is a little darker and his face looks kind of smooshed. But the kitties didn't seem scared of Doppleganger Caiti. They ignored him while he was eating their food, but they didn't hide.

Caiti Cinquo has only been around once. She was about Inky's size and her face looked exactly like LC's. I might have kept Cinquo - she was cute. But she ran away once I walked toward her and she hasn't been back since.

Tonight there might have been a sixth Caiti. I'm not sure yet. It was eating the kitties food so I ran to chase it away and it didn't seem to scared of me. It also had a very fluffy tail so it could have been Evil Caiti with a shave. I took the food and water inside and it hasn't come back. I hope the cat isn't eating the kitties food during the day. I'll have to watch for the cat to come back to find out if it's a 6th Caiti or not. Hopefully not.

Creamed Spinach

Tonight's dinner was a mish mash. I planned our dinner to be pork tenderloin, creamed spinach, and Italian bread. Unfortunately, the tenderloin took about twice as long to cook as the recipe said and V and I were too hungry to wait. So, my dinner was creamed spinach and bread. V had creamed spinach, bread, and leftover pizza. We are such adults.

The creamed spinach was amazing. It was creamy, garlicy, and rich. It's another recipe from The Pioneer Woman. It was very easy to make and I changed the recipe around a bit to suit my cooking style. However, no matter how tasty the dish was, it was definitely meant to be a side, not a main dish. It was soo rich! My tummy hurts. V thought it would be better as a dip than a side. It probably would be good that way. Or it's good by itself, just as a side. But soo good.

Creamed Spinach

1 stick butter plus a few extra tablespoons, separated

1 small onion

3 garlic cloves

8 tablespoons flour

2 cups milk (I used 2%)

Salt

Pepper

Fresh ground nutmeg

20 ounces spinach (she called for 24 but the only packages I could find were 10 ounces, not 8 ounces)

Melt stick of butter. I cooked the onions at this point because I like soft onions. She added the onions at the same time as the garlic. Add in the flour and stir. Let it cook about 5 minutes to brown (I forgot to do this and it was fine). Add in the milk slowly and stir the whole time. Add in the garlic and allow to cook while working on the spinach, stirring occasionally. Melt a few tablespoons butter in another pan, wilt in the spinach. At this point, I would sieve the spinach to get out as much excess liquid as possible. I didn't do that and mine was a little thin. Stir in spinach, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Serve.

Assets

The kitties seem to be obsessed with butts. They like to show me theirs, they like to put theirs in each others' faces, they love them. Inky likes to walk behind me when I'm petting her and head butt me and then walk in between my legs. She loves headbutting me a lot. Every chance she gets. And the kitties also show me their rear ends quite a bit. They'll come up to me, stretch, and then turn around and show me their rears for a minute then come up for me. So, I have a new plan for how I'm going to get Little Caiti to trust me. I think she needs to see that I trust her enough to put my rear toward her. However, that's easier said than done. Inky just helps herself when she wants to go behind me, but LC won't. So, I've been trying to strategically place myself when putting out the wet food or petting Inky so she is facing my rear. It doesn't seem to be working too well. But she has started letting me pet her one time a morning when I am putting out the wet food. So maybe my tush is making her trust me after all.

Chicken Pasta Casserole

Tonight for dinner I made a casserole I found on The Pioneer Woman's website. I wasn't the biggest casserole fan growing up but they've come a long way, baby! V loves casseroles and is always begging me to make them so I'm on the lookout for tasty-looking recipes. Tonight's was pretty good, V said it was a keeper anyway. I didn't quite follow the recipe because I don't get home from work until 5:30 or so so I took some short cuts. But it was still good.

Preheat the oven to 350

Cook a bunch of chicken strips (she says 2 cups) I think I had about 3/4 pounds

Break a pound of spaghetti into pieces

Cook the spaghetti in chicken stock - when you drain it save 2 cups of the stock (I forgot to do this)

Mix together the chicken, spaghetti, 2 cans of cream of mushroom soup, 2 cups shredded cheddar, 1 diced onion, 1 small green pepper, 4 ounces pimentos, seasoning salt, cayenne pepper, salt and pepper all to taste. Then, add in the saved chicken stock (I used extra beef stock since I forgot to save it) - until the mixture is moist but not soupy.

Put into a casserole dish. Top with another cup of cheddar. Bake for about 30-40 minutes until bubbly.

It's pretty tasty. Next time I think I would cook the peppers and onions in advance because I don't like crunchy onions. But it was still pretty good nontheless.

Relaxing

This weekend I decided not to do any outdoor work. I need a break and it's rained for the last two days so it's too wet to stain which is our next big project. V might powerwash again but I've told him that we need a break this weekend. But the pool's finally getting warm so we might swim!! I'm looking forward to swimming and mother's day shopping and just relaxing. Maybe a little baking.

I think television has become much better lately. For awhile it was all cop shows but now it seems like there are more comedies and more accessible shows. I'm obsessed with Glee and Modern Family. Parenthood is very cute and it's almost enough to make me wish my whole family lived in the same town like the family in the show. Almost. And Showtime and HBO always have great series. And the kicker.... Dr. Who is back! It's going to be a good spring.

Spinach Pockets

Tonight's dinner was another freezer special. It's spinach pockets from the Real Simple website but I messed around with it a little bit. It's basically like spanakopita and it's heavenly. Salty and flaky and I can pretend like it's healthy since it has spinach in it. This is our new favorite recipe. It's easy to make after work and it's also easy to make extra to freeze. If you want to freeze it put the pockets together and then put in individual baggies and freeze. Then defrost in the fridge overnight and bake as usual.

Putting them in individual baggies makes it easier to bake as many as you want. Which is nice since half the time V doesn't eat much dinner more than cheese and crackers. He's one of those weird people who only eats one meal a day. It's kind of nice because it means we don't have to make dinner every night because I like having cereal for dinner sometimes! But it can be frustrating too when I plan on a meal and then he's not hungry. So tonight when he wasn't hungry I just pulled out on spinach pocket and had it for dinner with no more mess than a bowl of Cheerios. Yummy in my tummy.

Spinach Pockets

• 20 ounces spinach (Real Simple calls for 3 pounds but I find that to be too much, I just buy two containers and that's plenty)
• 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan
• 1/2 cup ricotta cheese
• 2 scallions, trimmed and thinly sliced (I just use my kitchen shears and cut them as small as possible)
• 1 egg
• 1 1/4 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
• 1 1-pound package phyllo dough, defrosted
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
• 1/2 cup lemon juice
• 1/2 cup water
• 3 cloves garlic diced (RS says to thinly slice it but I think it's easier to just dice)

1. In a skillet, combine lemon juice, water, garlic cloves, and 1 teaspoon kosher salt. Bring to a simmer and cook spinach in batches until just wilted. Drain and set aside.
2. Heat oven to 400° F. In a large bowl, combine the spinach, Parmesan, ricotta, scallions, egg, salt, and pepper. Mix well and set aside.
3. Fold 1 sheet of phyllo in half crosswise and place on a lightly greased baking sheet. Brush the top with some of the butter. Top with another folded sheet and brush with more butter. Repeat one more time. Leaving a 2-inch border around the edges, place 1/4 of the spinach mixture at one end of the pastry. Roll up the pastry, tucking in the sides. Brush with more butter. Repeat to make 3 more individual pockets.
4. Bake in the oven until puffed and golden, about 30 minutes

Inky

Inky is the first animal to ever win my heart. When V and I were renovating the interior of the house she would sit and stare at us through the glass doors. She sat with Little Caiti when LC was trapped in the cage. She was the first of the kitties to let us pet her. She's freaking adorable.

Inky is almost a year old. For about the first six months of her life, all Inky had to eat was what she and the other kitties could catch. Because of that Inky was greedy for a long time. She had a hard time believing she would get food everyday and that there would always be enough. Whenever I would give the kitties treats Inky would run back and forth trying to eat all of them before LC could have any. Now she has calmed down a lot and doesn't try to steal food from LC. However, V and I think Inky is going to always be very small since she was so malnourished as a kitten. I would guess she weighs 4-5 pounds. And she has teeny tiny paws. Compared to Inky Little Caiti looks super fat.

Inky started letting us pet her a few months ago. It started when I ran my hand along her tail as she walked by one morning. Then she started walking in circles so my hand would continuously pet her tail. Then slowly we started petting now. Now she is a huge love bug! She tries to keep V and I from going inside the house whenever she can. She's better at guilting me into staying outside with her than V. She would like to come in the house but until she lets us pick her up without any problems she's not coming inside. So she sits and stares into our living room and tries to guilt me into going outside with her. And most of the time, it works.

Baked Pasta with Prosciutto and Peas

Tonight I made dinner from Williams-Sonoma's cookbook One Pot. I highly recommend this cookbook and any of the cookbooks from the WS line - they are all easy and full of good recipes. This is one of my favorite go-to recipes. I can make a whole batch and freeze half in an 8x8 pan. And it's easy enough to make after getting home from work. I use pancetta instead of prosciutto half the time depending on what I can find. V loves it and doesn't seem to mind all the extra peas I add.

1 lb short tube pasta

1/2 cup unsalted butter

1/2 cup flour

4 cups flour

1/8 teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg

2 cups parmesan cheese

1 cup frozen peas - or more to your heart's content

1/4 lb prosciutto or pancetta or just regular ham

Cook the pasta (you should know how to do this.) Melt the butter in a pan, add in the flour, and whisk for 30 seconds. Slowly add the milk while whisking. Cook until sauce is thick, 5-10 minutes. Stir in the remaining ingredients. Add pasta combine.

At that point you could go two ways. If you are eating it right away then go ahead. If you are making it in advance put it in a pan, let cool then put in the fridge/freezer. When you are ready to eat it, put it in a 425 degree oven for about 20 minutes. Williams-Sonoma says to sprinkle over 1/2 cup of bread crumbs before putting it in the oven. But I don't like bread crumbs on my pasta as a general rule so I don't add them. Try this recipe and check out the cookbook - it's worth the time!

Little Caiti

Little Caiti is kind of dumb. When V and I first moved into the house we couldn't go outside without the kitties running for their hiding places. The kitties always had the same spots the would run to but LC always seemed to forget where hers was. LC has a female name and female pronoun because I named her before I found out she was a boy and by then the name was stuck.

Once I realized no shelters were going to accept the kitties my next project was to find a humane animal trap and spay/neuter them so there are no more little kitties hanging around next summer. LC was the first cat to be trapped (got her in about 5 minutes - again, she's kind of dumb) and I think she was the most upset by it. She cried and cried and V wasn't home to pick up the cage so I had to pick it up, carry it until I got scared I would drop it and then set it down then try over again. Before I picked up the cage I put a blanket over it and sat staring at the cage to build up courage. During that time Inky was sitting on and next to the cage trying to help LC get it. It broke my heart and still makes me sad, even though I was doing the right thing.

Anyway, LC was neutered and then freed. Unfortunately a few weeks later V and I noticed that she wouldn't put any weight on her front left paw. After several days of this we decided to take her to the vet. And that meant having to trap her again which she did not like. After several hours of trying to convince different vets that I was willing to pay for the x-rays despite the fact that LC was feral I found a vet who was willing to help. It turns out all four bones in LC's paw were fractured. We had a cast/splint put on LC and committed to keeping her in our garage for the next two months. After a few days though, we discovered that LC had wriggled out of her cast before she was even out of the carrying crate. She cried the whole time she was in the garage. We kept her in there for a few more weeks to keep her sedentary to help the paw heal as much as possible since it was apparent LC would not put up with another cast.

Now Little Caiti seems to be fine. She still favors her fractured paw when it's raining but she runs and jumps and climbs quite a bit. But I think her weeks in the garage made her more mistrustful of us than she might normally have been. Hopefully she comes to trust us in the future.

Cookie Brittle

I bake way too much. It helps me relax and get my thoughts together. For some people it's exercising (I wish) or cleaning or computer games. For me, it's baking. I know it's not healthy to eat so many sweets and I try to cut back, but my week doesn't feel complete if I don't bake at least a little something. This weekend we were busy outside most of the time. Today we finished about 4 so I thought I would make some cookie brittle. I can't remember where I first saw this recipe. It was going around the internet for awhile and I added it to my computer's sticky notes. The recipe is great because you can add whatever you have in the cabinet. I've made it with just chocolate chips before. Today I used toffee bits and mini-chocolate chips. It's different from anything else cookie-esque I've had before but it's addictive.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Brittle

1 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon salt

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup toffee bits

1 cup mini-chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Pour the melted butter into a bowl and add in the vanilla. Add the sugar, salt and flour and mix. The mixture will be crumbly. Stir in the toffee and chocolate chips. Press the mixture in a thin, even layer onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Try to get it as thin as possible - about the height of a chocolate chip. You might not fill the entire sheet with the dough.

Bake for 23-25 minutes, until light golden brown. Let cool completely before breaking into whatever sized pieces you desire. Store in an airtight container at room temperature.

Flowers in Your Hair

Today was a long day of hard work. V got up and started power-washing right away. After about 5 and a half more hours we are finally finished!

I went to the grocery store and Home Depot (for more flowers!) first thing in the morning and then got started planting. All total I planted 27 flowers and 2 hydrangea bushes. It took me about an hour to dig the hole for the first bush. I don't know what I was doing wrong! Then V came and dug the second one for me in less than 10 minutes. It was helpful but mildly frustrating because he was so much faster. But, other than that one hole I dug and planted everything by myself. It would have been easier and faster if V had dug all the holes for me but I'm perfectly capable of digging holes and I don't think he should be stuck with all the yucky jobs just because he is stronger than I am. It's very satisfying pulling in the driveway and knowing that the reason the garden looks so pretty is entirely because of my hard work. Unfortunately our bushes don't look like the photo above just yet, but hopefully in a few years they will.

Pool's Open!

Party Deck

Our backyard has no grass. It's all pool and decking. I know most people wouldn't like it but V's one request in a house was to have a pool and the decking provides a great place for loungers and an outdoor table and a hot tub. It's also a lot lower maintenance for the most part. However, the old homeowners apparently haven't cleaned the deck in a long, long time. So our current project is power-washing the whole deck and then staining it. We've probably spent almost 8 hours power-washing and we have about another 4 left. Then we have to stain the entire thing. It's turning out to be a much bigger project than we thought. But I think it should make it look much, much better once it's finished. Poor Little Caiti runs away as soon as we turn on the washer and doesn't come back until the end of the day. Inky has become pretty used to it. Today she explored the cord and hose attached to the washer and then sat on her adirondack chair watching me wash the deck until she got bored. Luckily they are starting to become more accustomed to loud noises.

Flowers!

We finally started buying plants for the front of our house! The old homeowners had ugly overgrown evergreen bushes that did nothing for curb appeal. V ripped up one and we are going to rip up the other two in the next few weeks. But we were excited to get some color in front of our house so I went ahead and bought plants to fill the spot under the picture window in front of the house and along the path walking to the house. So... here they are!

Our big splurge is going to be the flowering bushes. I wanted to do a color scheme of pinks and blues in the front. We got two Hydrangea Twist-n-Shout bushes. They will be either pink or periwinkle depending on the acidity of our soil.

In front of the bushes is going to be a bunch of columbine flowers. They range in color from white to periwinkle so hopefully they look nice with the hydrangea regardless of what colors the flowers are.

And finally, along the path is going to be a bunch of deep rose blanket flowers.

Cat Scratch Fever

The cats are feral for all intents and purposes. Trust me, I spent a long, long time researching the difference between stray cats and feral cats. Feral cats have never trusted humans in their life, stray cats have spent a good bit of their lives with humans, but have no human caretaker at this point in their lives. The really weird difference is that feral cats almost never make noise (other than to hiss at you to go away.) They never learned that meowing will get them attention (or they learned it will get them negative attention) so the just don't do it. It's pretty weird to have cats that make no noise. They really only meowed when it snowed and they didn't like it.

However, I refused to call my cats feral. It's a negative term and it makes my kitties sound mean. They aren't they just have trouble trusting humans. But we are working on that. We are slowly trying to earn their trust. It's hard since we have been inside all winter and they didn't have much chance to get used to us. Hopefully in the summer when we are outside a lot swimming in our pool we will become normal to them.

We started out with three cats. Little Caiti was born in April 2008 and Inky was born in May 2009. The old homeowners hadn't even bothered to get the cats spade/neutered so we had to trap them in humane animal traps and take them to the Humane Society (love them) to get fixed and get rabies shots. I don't know how the cats got together since they are different ages. But it's probably a sad story so try not to think about it too much.

The third cat was Big Ugly. She was mean. She was very territorial and would hiss and swipe her claws at me whenever I put out food or water. So, I told V that either she left or all the cats had to leave because I was afraid to go out in the backyard (yes, I know it's silly but remember, I never liked animals before meeting mine). Luckily, an amazing woman at the Humane Society offered to take Big Ugly home as a barn cat if I offered to pay for her to be neutered. Thus, the end of Big Ugly at this house. But I don't think the other kitties cared - they seemed to play a lot more when Big Ugly wasn't there to boss them around.

New Beginnings

I've never been much of an animal person. When my friends dreamt of puppies and kittens I was thinking about other things... cookies mostly. However, when V and I bought our new house eight months ago it came with an unexpected surprise... three cats! It seems the old homeowners were feedings the outdoor cats and then just abandoned then when they moved. I tried for several weeks to find a shelter that would take them but most of them weren't accepting cats and then one that was had a three month waiting period. We couldn't not feed them and hope they found a new home because they had been hanging around the house for the last six months when the house was empty scrounging for food and eating anything they caught. So, we adopted them. Or they adopted us. Basically now I'm obsessed with our cats and I watch them from the window while I'm baking... cupcakes.