Yawn

I don't mind doing the early shift at work, but I still haven't mastered the art of going to bed correspondingly early. If I was a betting man, I would put my money on a short nap happening later this morning. One of the benefits of working from home is that I can do that, and tack the time onto the end of my day to make up for it. For as late as I went to bed, I woke before my alarm this morning to the sound of rain pounding against the window. It has been a while since we heard that sound in these parts.

Now that they have added the features that were missing in the preview, and I have learned my way around it, I am starting to like the new Flickr. I admit that I hated it when they first pushed out the preview of the changes, but the tweaks and fixes they have made to it since then make it seem like they have been listening to their users.

We drove up to Oak Hammock again this weekend, and while it had thawed out considerably since last weekend, it was still largely dominated by red-winged blackbirds and geese. We dressed a little more appropriately than we did last week, and it was a few degrees warmer, which made for a very pleasant walk in spite of the brisk wind.


While the geese and blackbirds dominated the denizens at the marsh, there were a few gulls and purple martins as well.


We don't do half-measures when we get potholes in our neighbourhood. It is hard to gauge the size of this one from this picture, but it is about 30cm deep at the lowest point, and still sinking. Fortunately the city came by yesterday and put up barricades around it to discourage people from trying to drive their cars through it. While it is arguably hard to miss at this point, with the rain this morning this would have become a deathtrap in the making. We have another one just outside of our alley that is doing its best to reach the same proportions of this one.

These are bigger than the normal potholes we see this time of year because they left our street in pretty sorry shape after the sewer work they did last fall. They wrapped up quickly and slapped half-assed asphalt patches on the road just ahead of the first snows last year.

Huh. These are funny looking livers

I pulled a package of chicken livers out of the freezer on the weekend. I bought them some time back and then forgot about them. I stumbled upon then when atara sent me to the freezer in search of something else, and on seeing them I suddenly I had a craving for livers. That line sounded less creepy in my head...

My offer to make them for atara for breakfast on the weekend was met with something a little shy of enthusiasm, so I decided they would make a good lunch or two for me this week since I am working from home. I looked up a few recipes for livers this morning, and then around 9:00 I wandered out to the kitchen to do a bit of prep work on them (you need to trim away the fatty bits). I pulled them out of the fridge, and discovered that they were not livers at all; they were hearts. I had bought a bag of chicken hearts.

I stared at the package of muscle balls and realized that I was not the least bit prepared for dealing with them. Fortunately I have access to the internet, and if I have learned one thing over the years it is that if one enters almost any animal part into a search engine, one will find either a porn of it, or a recipe for cooking it. I was looking for the latter, and I struck it lucky on my first try.

Here is how I dealt with them. First, I washed them and then patted and squeezed them dry (it's a good thing I squeezed, because a couple of them were still filled with blood. By the time I was done, the paper towels I was using look like they had been used to clean up a murder scene.) I put the cleaned hearts into a small plastic bag with some olive oil, salt, pepper and minced garlic and then put them back in the fridge to marinade for a couple of hours.

A couple of hours later I went back out to the kitchen and diced a medium onion. I tossed it into a skillet with some olive oil and enough butter to add some flavour, a bit of salt, and a pinch of cayenne. When the onions were soft, I tossed in the chicken hearts and spread them around evenly pan. I cooked them until they were cooked through, turning them once, then I plucked them out and put them under the broiler in the toaster oven. When they were sizzley and brown on top, I turned them and left them until the other side was nicely browned as well.

In the meantime I used a slotted spoon to rescue my onions from their bath of oil and chicken fat in the skillet, and I piled them on a small plate. When the hearts were done I made a small well in the onions and mounded the little hearts in the middle. It was not the most appealing plating job I have ever seen, but they were good. No, scratch that, they were real good. I would make this recipe again in ... a heartbeat. They were also very rich. After the first couple of bites I realized I was looking at two meals here, so I finished half and put the rest in a container for another day. I guess I will know soon enough if they reheat well.