Photo-A-Day #310 02/12/06

Allison and Oliver sleep peacefully during the weekend Nor’easter. The local news loves it when we have major snow. They stay up for hours telling you that it is snowing out.

Today Allison and I were quite domestic. We roasted a chicken that we prepared yesterday. The recipe comes from the Everything One Pot Cookbook. It was called Sticky Fingers Chicken and man was it good. The recipe calls for roasting it for 5 hours at 250 degrees. Basting every 1/2 hour. When the bird was done at 1:30 I cut it apart for our lunch and then we began phase two.

We are now making chicken stock for a chicken soup. We took the rest of the bird and divided it into two pots because we do not have a stock pot. So we are using two 5 quart pots on the stove. Using a modified version of Alton Brown’s Chicken Stock Recipe we also cooked up a bunch of wing tips that we have had on ice for the past year, they were vacuum sealed in our food saver from when I last made chicken wings. Those were cooked up and divided between the two pots also. So we have had some great smells in the apartment all day long.

Also I mentioned that yesterday we bought a few things at the home show with Neil and Andrea. We picked up the Mr. Sticky Roller which was actually a set of three. One telescoping roller, one hand roller and one travel roller. I took the travel roller so that I could be cat hair free on the road. It is a pretty neat product. Allison did all the blinds with the medium Sticky and got tons of cat hair off of them.

We also bought a micro fiber mop that is like a Swiffer but you don’t throw the pads away you can reuse them after washing them in the washing machine. I also like this product. We actually got the deluxe model with 3 pads, 2 eyeglass cleaning cloths, two micro fiber towels and a gizmo and pad to clean the ceiling fans. Between the use of both products last night and today we’ve been able to pick up tons of cat hair that our regular cleaning has missed. So we are happy with the purchases..

Happy 70th Uncle Fred

Photo-A-Day #309

Today we had a surprise 70th birthday for my Great-Uncle Fred. Fred is on my Dad’s side of the family. So the whole Bennett clan got together to party the afternoon away at The Moose Cabin in Attleboro. Again Al and his family took great care of us. If you are around the Attleboro area stop by The Moose Cabin. Try the Portuguese Pork and Potato dish, it is fantastic.

My cousin Scott made custom candy bar wrappers and some great metal placards with a recipe for Fred’s 70th Birthday Party, with the history of Fred’s life on the back. Great-Uncle Fred spent many years as a chef. He can make the best pastries. He even had his own bakery for a time and spent many years at the Pomfret School in CT. Grandpa Bennett opened with some great words about Fred and the celebration of Fred today. Fred is also Tara’s dance partner because she is the only one who can really keep up to him. Fred is a fantastic dancer also and he and Tara do some fancy swing dancing at the family parties.

After the party Allison and I went to the North American Home Show with Neil and Andrea. We spent more than we anticipated on some stuff for the house. I’ll talk about that tomorrow when we get more of a chance to try the things out.

After the home show we stopped at Target to pick up a couple of spray bottles and we decided to hit Chilis for a little bite. We split an appetizer and on our way out we ran into Marybeth and Damian. We stopped and chatted with them for a bit and then headed home.

All of our cars are backed into the driveway and off to one side in anticipation of the big snow that we should be getting tonight.