Cantina del Perro Loco

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Careful, señores … hot plate!

We’ve eaten our way through the oven-roasted chicken-and-taters. Likewise the chili con carne (based on me sainted ma’s recipe from our days in Texas). The other day we settled for a simple repast of smoked oysters, cheese, crackers, and salad.

What to cook next?

Mexican, of course.

Herself harvests her latest crop of sprouts.

There were no dried pinto beans to be had on our last hunter-gatherer expedition to Sprouts (gracias, hoarders).

But I found a 2-pound sack stashed away in a cupboard from a months-ago trip to Keller’s. So I cooked up a pound a la Santa Fe School of Cooking, with onion, garlic, chipotle chile, oregano, epazote, cumin, coriander, salt, bay leaf, and chicken broth.

This takes the better part of quite some time, but it’s not as though we’re up to our nalgas in other chores around here.

Flour tortillas we already had. So, burritos, yeah? Claro que si, hombre.

But burritos without green chile sauce are like a day without sunshine. So I thawed some frozen Hatch chile and got after that.

Also, beans without rice? What are you, high? Rick Bayless has a no-frills recipe for red rice in his “Mexican Everyday,” and even a gabacho can make that drunk with one foot in a bucket, or, in my case, sober with one foot in a lace-up ankle brace.

Herself whipped up a couple simple side salads and that was that. Now we have leftovers for a couple days. And then, we’ll switch focus from Mexican to Italian.

The cat’s meow

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
The rest interval.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla is enjoying this whole social-distancing thing.

Suddenly she has two people to feed her; two people to empty the litter box; and two people to play “Chase Me Chase Me.”

This last is a pursuit through the house to the master bath, where the pursuer must sit on the toilet while Miss Mia slaloms between his/her calves and around both sides of the toilet, scent-marking the corners of the surrounding walls and periodically standing on her hind legs to bump her head into an outstretched palm like a particularly gregarious prairie dog.

Afterward there will be a short snort from the water dish followed by a snooze on the back of the couch.

Then, and only then, are we released to set about our own little bits of business. Like waiting for the feddle gummint to send us a G of our own money and then dispatch crews of space-suited carpenters to nail our doors and windows shut so we can’t leave home to spend it.

Happy St. Whatsisface Day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Boggy O’Trotter, fresh from an epic 8-mile ride.
The flowers were in case I croaked en route.

Herself and I kitted up (in green, natch) and rode our mountain bikes over to Herself the Elder’s assisted-living home this afternoon.

It was a resupply op (HtE was out of wine) and the choppers were all grounded, so whaddaya gonna do?

I chose the old DBR Axis TT because it has 26-inch wheels (easy to throw a leg over); fat tires (squish squish squish); and boingy bits (boy-boy-yoinnnnng), all of which help minimize the impact to the bum ankle, which is wearing one of these doodads. Swapped the Time ATACs for flat pedals too.

No land-speed records were set. But it was nice to be riding a bicycle that was actually going somewhere.

Little feat

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
I’m not jumping for joy yet, but spring seems to have sprung nicely.
My new sailin’ shoe.

Tootsie Voodoo said I could lose the Darth Gimp boot and crutches, so I traded up for a lace-up brace that I can wear with socks and shoes.

I may have limped in just under the wire, too. Management was said to be mulling whether to reschedule all non-acute cases.

“Sorry, bub. Here’s a hacksaw. You’ll have to find your own peg and parrot. Next!”

Sounds like a great excuse to do the “Old Folks’ Boogie.”

So you know that you’re over the hill
When your mind makes a promise that your body can’t fill
Try and get a rise from an atrophied muscle,
And the nerves in your thigh just quivers and fizzles