Do you taste blood in the potatoes and other recent conversations at my house

My sister is a great cook. And she likes doing it. She also has two super weird dogs that do things like lock her outside and a male dog that can’t figure out how to lift his leg to pee. And she should start a blog. But none of that, other than the cooking bit, is relevant to this post.

My sister is a great cook. In particular, she makes this baked coated in French’s onion chicken that is amazing. The last time we went to visit her, she and bratchild made it a couple of times and then bratchild wanted to make it at home. She had supposedly written down the recipe. I say supposedly because she didn’t include pertinent things like how many fried onions to use. (1 can? 1 can after I got bored waiting for you to figure out the recipe and ate half the onions?) or how long to cook them. But, we set forth valiantly.

I was touching raw chicken, which skeeves me out, and dipping them in the non eaten onions that were smashed with a Tim Holtz paper distressing hammer because I don’t own a food mallet and thought a real hammer, like the one I use to prop open the door to my closet room, might be overkill. (I also didn’t realize it had four optional heads until I googled it for this post so I have a hammer with two lost heads.)

Fried onions leave more of a greasy residue then you would suspect.

Since I was messing about with the raw chicken I set bratchild on slicing potatoes that were to be cooked in rosemary and thyme…except we only had rosemary because grocery stores inconveniently don’t organize spices by song lyrics so I couldn’t find thyme. Or parsley or sage. Since I am not allowed to use the “nice knives,” I gave bratchild one of the crap knives and she cut her finger. When J came in, the first aid kit was out–despite not being much help because it’s out of band aids and the giant thing of band aids lives on my desk for easy access.

J: Why is the first aid kit out?
Me: Because we’re cooking?
J: Who cut themselves?
Me: Bratchild.
J: Why  is she using the knife?
Me: Because I was a better choice?
J: Good point.
Bratchild: Do you taste blood in the potatoes?

We finished cooking and then cooked the chicken for too long so it was dry and, errr, crispy. Must figure out correct cook time. Another conversation of late at the house?

Me: Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when I was sick and taking phenergan and those antibiotics that turned me into Lucille Two?**
J: Yeah.
Me: I remembered today that I ordered dozens of unfinished matchboxes but they haven’t shown up yet and I can’t remember where I ordered them from so I don’t know what to do.
J: Super.

**When I made this reference to Lucille Two at 3 am because I was super dizzy and falling over and couldn’t sleep, I was immediately offended because J didn’t laugh and it was SUPER funny. I was then traumatized because I decided to look up my medications for side effects and such and one of them’s description began with the statement: “In the case of biological warfare this medicine may be prescribed for…” I blocked out the rest.

While playing the role of Lucille Two, I also went on an etsy and eBay spree that resulted in the delivery of several house shaped wood shadow boxes, a vintage plastic cake topper of an old people couple, mini plastic pigs, top hats and black cats and some other things I can’t recall right now. It’s pretty fun and kind of like Christmas…except unlike Christmas presents these are a genuine surprise as I have no idea what’s in the box.

(The cooking experiment caused J to clean up the kitchen which then brought about the remark that he was super excited that we don’t have any Tupperware. When I inquired as to why that was, he answered it was because SOMEBODY had managed to get glitter and glue all in them. At that point, I left the room.)