What's in that..Friday (and more, natch)

Another cold front coming through is keeping the weather interesting. Lots of sunny skies today but then grey and windy then sun again then...well, yes, like that. During one of the sunny parts of the morning I looked up and realized that the entire bridge was FULL of humans, of both the short and tall variety. It looked like a huge amount of people and maybe it was...apparently a school (with an emphasis on ballet...hey, I only had time to get a small amount of info..that's all I know about that) were here to go to our ecological school to hear a presentation by a biologist about...biology things. Again, I didn't get details. What I did get was a nice flow of shoppers while they waited for their taxis to arrive. Always a good thing. Nice kids, nice grown ups. And then the taxis swooped them away and.....quiet again.

It seemed particularly noisy today, but I think it was the Friday thing...getting road work done and then getting things ready to leave for the weekend. I love knowing that they are leaving and giving us two whole days of peace, because right now they are near the cart (not NEXT to the cart, thankfully) and also about 100 yards up the street from where I live, so I've been feeling surrounded. Bye bye boys, have a nice weekend!

We, apparently, will have no water this weekend. But neither will Vieques along with a number of towns on the big island. Something to do with fixing stuff. It was supposed to start tomorrow, but instead we had an afternoon with no water AND no electricity. The post office and a few other government places closed early (let's get out of here, it might come back on!). I came home to electric and water working fine, but apparently they'd been out as one clock was going winky. Part of living here...we get spoiled when it doesn't happen for a long time though. For true.

Feeling lazy, I didn't do much of anything here except a few chores that required water that I didn't want to use stored water for tomorrow. So everything is tidy and clean, since once you start cleaning one thing it leads to cleaning all sorts of other things. Until before you know it you've listened to a whole radio program and your abode is, if not sparkling, at least not able to support your name in dust. In between spurts of industrious bits, I wandered the yard, picking peppers and tomatoes, transplanting some plants (of course, what ELSE would I be transplanting?), planting a nice leafy green unknown that was given to me today, and taking a few photos. The sky has been fairly dull today, shades of grey, but around what would have been magic light time, there was some good light...in the grey!

And now...what's in that...

I wondered what I was going to do for this menu tonight and realized I'm a total idiot...I'd just made the perfect meal for it LAST night, and it would have made beautiful pictures...but of course, I was just making a meal and eating it, not thinking about much else (ok, I was also making hot sauce and doing a few other things...and I didn't take pictures of any of it). This is the hot sauce that wouldn't fit in my carrier bag and some that I didn't get around to waxing the tops. Along with some 'maters and peppers from the garden. But onto the meal.

I have a love/blah relationship with rice. Nothing complicated...sometimes I just love eating rice and sometimes...rice just seems like the most boring thing in the world, no matter how I fix it. But Milka's got in some wild rice and I had to go for it. Since I didn't want to have it alone, I also got some jasmine rice (yes...there is jasmine rice at Milka's...well, there was the other day). I had grilled some chicken breasts the night before that had been marinaded in a soy sesame dressing/marinade and lots of garlic of course with a few dashes of dried chipotle pepper.

This is what I did next:

1/4 c. wild rice
1/2 c. jasmine rice
2 1/4 c. water (any kind of broth would be better, I just forgot until the first few grains of rice hit the water...)
teaspoon of butter or oil (I had hot sesame oil, so I used that)
1/2 t. salt
1 c. (or so) cooked chicken, diced into bite sized pieces (beef or pork would also work well, and shrimp? well, of course!...but don't add until the last couple of minutes - just enough to heat)
1/4 c. onion minced
1/2 red bell pepper minced
(1 T. butter or olive oil for onion & pepper)
garnish options - chives, green onion tops sliced very thin, cilantro, finely minced

Bring water to a boil, add wild rice. Lower to simmer, put lid on. Cook at least 25-30 minutes. Add jasmine rice. After about 15 minutes, gently add the chicken, NOT stirring it in, just place on top of the cooking rice. Replace lid. Cook another 15 minutes or until water/broth is absorbed. Test jasmine rice. It should be *toothsome* slightly firm (not crunchy!) but not mushy. The wild rice will seem underdone. It's not. Turn off heat, replace lid.

Saute onion & red pepper in butter or olive oil until onion istranslucent. Add to rice/chicken mixture.

I sliced a garden fresh tomato for a side, but any sort of good green veggie will do. While wild rice is a bit splurgy, it doesn't take much to go far and any white rice could be used instead of jasmine - I was just on a roll. When we get something special in the stores here, life is way too short to count pennies!

I looked for a photo online to give an idea of how it looks, but it felt like I was trying to steal a french fry off a stranger's plate, not quite close enough to work. But photo or not, it tasted wonderful, nutty and gently spicy, with the tomatoes doing a zing thing on the side.

Buen provecho!