oh, salsa.

i've pretty much given up on buying salsa in the grocery store. it's never all that good and it's kinda pricey for mediocre. casey always thinks there is too much vinegar but i think it lacks spice. never packs a punch, if you will.

when i was still living in harlem, one of the few vendors at the farmers' market sold tomatillos and he told me i could easily make salsa with them. at the time, they seemed so foreign with their sticky wrappers and all, though i knew i liked their flavor. and that farmer was right--it's crazy easy.

here's how you do it.
1. take the sticky wrappers of the tomatillos and wash the tomatillos. today, i used six tomatillos and four very small green tomatoes.
2. boil some water and throw in the tomatillos and tomatoes.
3. once they burst through the skin, take them out and put them in a blender. i use one of those mini-choppers and do this twice, but that's because i am lazy and don't want to get out the blender and clean it and all. blend until smoothish.
4. chop up some onion, garlic, and hot peppers. today, i used 3 cloves of garlic, 1/4 of a yellow onion, 1 habanero, and 1/2 large jalapeno.
5. throw it all in the blender. add some lime. i squeezed in the juice of 1/2 lime. add some sea salt (i probably used a 1/2 tbsp) and pepper (maybe 3 twists of the grinder? 4?).
6. blend it all. mine is spicy and delicious.

and yeah, i am sporting navy nail polish. it's fall, kids.

goatober.

do y'all know how much i love goats? i really do. they are adorable. and lovely.

i have this vision that, one day, i'll have a little team of them to provide me with milk and i'll make cheese and they'll eat my lawn (of course, they are lady goats).

but, people have to eat goat to keep the ladies around. it's goatober, kids! eat the man goats. and watch the video to learn more.

so yeah.

after all these years, i did a little redesign. i think it was time. i am not totally certain of it yet, but i am into trying new things.

apparently, you (the reader) can change the way it looks; it's dynamic. i don't really like it in the other formats, so i might change back to something less wobbly. i kinda want to move it away from blogger, but i've just been here SO long, you know? (and how many tumblrs can a girl have? my friend rachel would say A LOT.)

in case you were wondering.

this is what i did with that challah:

it's the baked baked french toast. with blueberry-cherry sugary awesomeness on top. and a veggie sausage. you can make this--it's so crazy easy. 

might be.

this might be my slowest blogging year since i started 5 years ago. i think it's the other things i am up to--like trying to do academic things, and the gardens project, and the bike blog, and twitter, and instagram, and, well, sometimes i am just a little bored and my meals aren't so pretty and so i just don't want to put anything up. 

and cooking for one is not so exciting. but i'll try to be better. 

the best.

you see? this is why i can't have any more roommates. that shira is hard to beat--she sent me a homemade challah IN THE MAIL.

this is happiness and merriment and joy and love:

prince's plus.

back to nashville.

i don't know what to say about the hot chicken. but it was hot. and we ordered a whole hot chicken, a nashvillian specialty: medium hot, which is pretty damn hot. of course we went to prince's for this madness. you order, then you scour the place (the size of my apartment, which no one would call big) for a table covered by a plastic tablecloth, and then you wait. for us, it was an hour, and totally worth it (though this is the likely end of my attempts to consume animals on vacation).

 you eat it with white bread and pickles. not half-sours or anything special, just pickles.

so let's imagine how the recipe goes.
1. marinate chicken in oil with lots of cayenne.
2. make a dredge with lots of cayenne.
3. spread cayenne on the chicken?
4. deep-fry the chicken in oil with cayenne.

yeah. that kind of hot. and we did not order the hottest, as we wanted to be able to taste the chicken and just have our lips burn off.

we stopped into the patterson house later in the evening--lovely and beautiful and full of cocktails with spherical ice. i am not certain if this is shira's most favorite bar ever, or meat. it's really a toss-up.

our morning came with a crazy bloody mary bar, where i proceeded to put like 12 different hot sauces into my drink, along with a variety of pickled goodness.

 a lubricated morning for certain.

and is any trip to nashville complete without an overpriced yet super trip to the country music hall of fame? no. especially when it includes a poster-size photograph of dolly parton as the statue of liberty.

 

if we had more time, dollywood would have been on the itinerary. in my future indeed.