Sunday, Funday - Roasted Radishes with Carrots.

Okay. So I'm not good at blogging.

I just can't sit down and bust it out often enough. I take a bazillion pictures that I think, "man, this photo is rad. I'm going to put this on my blog." Then, nope. I look at it on iPhoto. Maybe edit it. Then I take a nap or something. No blog. Oh well. I guess you'll just have to live in suspense. I'll try to be better. Promise. Take this picture of Uter as a pinky-swear:

Anyway.

On Sundays, Sean and I like to make something that we haven't ever made before for dinner. Or something that we have made that was totally awesome the first time we made it. We work together in the kitchen, and come up with something delicious to prepare us for the workweek that's looming ahead like the black death. We call this ritual Sunday Funday.

Last Sunday, Sean decided he was going to make amazing chicken-- brined, then grilled, then simmered in homemade BBQ sauce. Yesssss. So I decided it was time to raid the garden... because the garden is doing fantastically. So fantastically, in fact, that all my radishes are ready to eat at the same time. Since you can only eat so many radishes in a salad, I decided to make something else with them.. and hey, radishes are a root vegetable, so I thought they'd be awesome roasted. And awesome they were.

You've never roasted radishes in the oven?
Well, you should. Because they're delicious. Here's how to do it.

Get some radishes. Hopefully yours look as amazing as these-- fresh out of my garden.

Chop off the tops. Save 'em in a colander. Chop the undesirables off the radishes and halve them so they're all about the same size.

Chop up some carrots and pitch them in too. They're all root vegetables. Any root vegetables are made to be thrown together in the roasting pan.

Throw in some earthy, rustic herbs. I like combinations of rosemary, thyme, and oregano. This year, I only grew rosemary and oregano in my garden. So in they go. With salt and pepper. Always add salt and pepper.

Fire up your best cast iron skillet. Cast iron is badass. Just look at it. Badass.

Get it good and hot, over like, medium-high heat. Pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees F.

Throw in your roots. Cook them for around two minutes, browning the outside a little. 

Chuck those babies into your preheated oven. Leave them in there for around 15, 20 minutes. Until they start to caramelize and look tasty.

Once they're lookin' tasty, take them out and put them back on the burner, medium heat.

Add the greens you saved on top. You were wondering why you saved them, right? 

Let them wilt down into the veggies. While they're wilting, mush a quarter of a lemon over the top-- lemon juice makes it.

Serve with the amazing BBQ chicken your fiancé made you for dinner. Or go in the corner and have a quick cry, because your fiancé did not make you amazing BBQ chicken for dinner. 

Sooooo good. Follow it up with a food coma. Sleeping on the couch at like, 8:30 is fine. It's what I did.

The Neighbors Ain't Never Seen Nuthin' Like This Before

It's been about six months since Sean and I moved to Valatie. We were thrilled to move to a place on a quiet, dead-end street, with a yard and a real kitchen. The landlord was thrilled to have two "normal" tenants that actually paid the rent. It was a win-win situation for both parties. 

When we met with Bill and toured the house, I know what Bill saw: two "young professionals"; one a bank manager, the other a network security engineer; both quiet, reserved, polite. We sure were a change from the previous tenants that he was in the process of evicting. And hey, I clean up pretty nice in my bank clothes, and I certainly know how to interview. We were approved almost as soon as we submitted the application to live here.

Winter came and went. It wasn't exciting. There was no snow. It was warm. I only had to shovel once and park my car in the garage a handful of times. Most of all, it was quiet. Work, school, cook. Work, school, cook. Our elderly neighbors never saw us really, and we never saw them. We didn't hear much from Bill. Time passed.

Uter wonders where all the grass is. 

He hasn't eaten any and puked it up on the carpet in a while.

Then, it was April. There's nothing that wakes me up quite like spring. It must be the Treadwell in me-- my body knows it's time to smash the last of the ice off dad's pond with the raft and jump in the water. It knows it's time to be barefoot, even though there's still a little snow on the ground. It knows when it's time to be outside pawing in the mud. And this year, we had a REAL yard. I asked Bill if he would mind if I planted a garden behind the house-- and he didn't care. Excellent. 

I'm not quite sure Bill understood that when I plant a garden, I plant a garden. None of this sissy garbage. Go big or go home. And to do that, you need some good, quality Delaware County cow turds. My dad and my pal Mark are always happy to oblige my cravings for feces, and trucked up three tons (yes, three TONS) of manure, an hour and 40 minutes, to my house.

Those are some good quality turds, right there.

Sean helped me shovel that pile into an OCD rectangle-- but not until after it sat a few days in the yard and made the neighbors wonder what the hell we were doing. Gotta keep 'em in suspense, you know? 

And then, I planted. Half the garden would be "big plants." The other half, plants started from seed. This is when the neighbors really started checking out my project.

May 22nd. Plants are in the ground.

The garden, at this point, looked awesome enough to warrant a visit from the neighbor-- I think he was pretty impressed with our sweaty progress. This was only just the beginning-- I had only planted the flats of veggies I had purchased from Samascott's-- the seeds were still spread out in their bags over the kitchen table. 

I worked on the seeds a few days later.

When the seeds started coming up, the neighbor started coming over to visit and check out the garden more often.

He offered me some fence posts and a sledgehammer to pound them in. The woodchucks, he assured me, would eat everything before I even got a chance to weed. I guess here in the 'burbs, where it's not appropriate to blast the entrails of woodchucks ten feet with a .308, a fence would have to do. In my procrastination, I haven't set it up yet-- instead, I chase rabbits out of the yard by running after them, screaming, with my arms flailing in the air. 

So much for that quiet, reserved banker they all thought I was.

---

It's been a month since I planted the garden, and it's looking pretty sweet. I mean, I doubt there is anyone else in Valatie with a garden that looks this awesome. They just don't have the Delaware County cow turds that I've got in my yard.

The neighbor recognizes how awesome my stuff is, too, and yesterday, not only did he come over to check it out, he dragged his wife over with him. Seeing that I didn't have the fence up yet, they wanted to know how I was keeping animals out. (They pretended that they didn't see me running and screaming like a psychopath in the backyard after the rabbit last week). 

That's when I told them I planned to shoot the rabbit with a slingshot. And that afterward, I planned to eat it. 

I fully expected them to recoil in disgust. Instead, they offered me a trap as plan B-- and told me to use it, because rabbit is delicious. Man, I love these neighbors. I'm going to have to bake them some cookies or something.

In the meantime, while I'm waiting for my slingshot from Amazon.com, they brought me over a tin pie plate to tie up. "The reflection and the noise will keep the rabbits out." Sweet.

I love growing a garden. The end product-- the veggies-- is only part of the reason I do it. Working on it is a relaxing escape from wanting to throw myself off a cliff all day my job. And now, I've totally loving the attention I'm getting from it. It's so cool that the old neighbor seems as invested in its success as I am-- and honestly, I think if he looked out and saw the rabbit in it, he'd probably run out after it screaming like a psycho too.

And here we are. I've made a blog.

It's been a long time coming. I have way too much stuff in my life that I feel the need to share with people; and posting it on the Facebooks just isn't doin' it for me anymore. That, and I'm totally jealous of Kristina's blog, Sweetfern Handmade.

So here it is. My blog. I know you're excited. I know you can hardly wait to see all the awesome stuff I'm going to post on here. I know that you're dying to see pictures of my cats, posts about all the delicious food that Sean and I make, my wedding plans, and pictures of my garden. 

Well, that will have to wait. Because today, I am only going to tell you how this blog got its name. 

When you decide to make a blog, that's the first thing you have to do: come up with something catchy. I'm great at naming animals. I mean, come on. Jacques? Uter? Those are great names for cats. My future dog will be named Leonard. Or... Horace. But naming a blog? Ugh. I didn't know what to name my blog.How would I avoid naming my blog something dumb?

My mind works in mysterious ways. And by mysterious, I mean that random memories sometimes slam me in the face at the precise moment when I most need to come up with something fantastic.

Blog-naming-time was one of those moments. I suddenly and randomly remembered this:

Once, I went to visit my sister, Lindsey, in Troy. She has two cats-- Jasper and Shirlena. They are fat and spoiled just like my two cats. 

Here is Jasper. In a plastic bag, as usual.

So anyway, we're there visiting-- having a beer, dancing like uncoordinated ninjas in front of Lindsey's xBox Kinect-- when Jasper walks through the living room. Lindsey stopped what she was doing, bent down to pick up the cat, mashed him across her face, took a huge whiff, dropped the cat back down, continued dancing like nothing had happened, and said "yep. Still smells like kittens."

When you randomly remember something this awesome at such an important moment in your life as blog-naming-time, you should take it as a sign. So I did. Into the "Title of Blog" box, I typed "Smells Like Kittenz." Perfect.

Good thing I didn't name my blog something dumb.