How to Clean a Cast Iron Skillet: 3 steps (with video) - wikiHow

How to Clean a Cast Iron Skillet: 3 steps (with video) - wikiHow

If you don't have this information filed away in your kitchen-brain yet, go ahead and read up -- I use an iron skillet every time I use a skillet, and without this final clean-up step, your pan will die in the most horrible of fashions.  With these methods I cook masala evenly and with no fear, and look really hot doing it.

Beef Liver Doggie Treat

This is my favorite thing to use for a training treat for a dog.  Some cats like it too, although beef is obviously not a feline’s natural diet.  All you’ll need is:

1 – 2 pounds Beef Liver
Water
Salt to taste
Cookie Sheet / Baking Sheet

Bring slightly salted water to a boil, then add beef liver.  Usually the meat section will have liver in 1 or 2-pound tubs, or you can order it through the butcher.  Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.  Boil the liver until all the pink is gone, then wash the liver under cold water until it’s clean of the gross stuff that comes out of it (the slimy froth, try not to think too hard about it).  Dry liver on paper towels.  Put liver on a baking sheet and bake for 20-30 minutes, or until tough.  Let it cool (somewhere your animals can’t get to it) and then cut it up into half-inch squares.  When you feed this to your dog for the first time, they may just wolf it down so watch them for safe chomping.  If your dog shows signs of not being able to swallow it, take it away.  This is a great “distraction treat” for walks or the dog park.

Happy Go Fun Time Movie Now!

I am a film fanatic.  If a movie is seen in the day, the rest of the day is spent silently holding every other flick I’ve seen up against this one to see where it hits me most.  In keeping with this, I include a kind of rude point system after the review that awards points to three categories, on a scale of 1 to 10.  These categories are:

Brain: if you need it to watch this movie, it’s probably scored above a 2.

Heart: how much the movie touches your emotional side, kids’ movies usually rule this category.

Stomach: the gore factor and violence

You’ll get it.  Each of these points is awarded with care to validly represent their categories, but should be taken as just that.  Read the written review to see if I thought it added up to a good movie. 
______________________________________

So are ya’ll as confused after the end of Legion as I am?   Wow.  I expected more out of a movie featuring Paul Bettany in a main role.  Has anyone else seen Gangster No. 1?  It’s like American Psycho, but with English mobsters.  Legion was more of a Stigmata/Armageddon combo, except with very generic characters and more propaganda than you could shake a stick at.  Go on, shake that stick.  You won’t hit any answers.  I can’t even begin to list the teasers they throw in, where you hear something REALLY NEAT once and it’s then immediately drowned by their continuity artist.  Spectacular but improbable gore.  Oh! I forgot to mention: the kid from American Gothic?  Caleb?  Easily recognizable in the main male human role as a good ol’ boy, trying to take care of someone else’s baby AND save what’s left of the world at the same time.  Can he do it?  Kinda.
Brain: 2 
Heart: 4 
Stomach: 8


Then I watched Where The Wild Things Are.  I spent the whole time marveling at the faithful adaptation, and at how dirty everything was.  Most of the budget was apparently spent on dirt and the people to cover everything in dirt.  Oh yeah, and yak fur too.  This movie wins an early Emo Movie of the Year Award for the fact that it doesn’t stop pulling on your heartstrings while it pushes you away with stark contrasts and unexpected dialogue moments as hallucinogenic as any Kerouac.  Although it doesn’t sound like it from my review, I really liked this movie!  Very intricate.
Brain: 5 
Heart: 10 
Stomach: 1


Finally, I watched Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day.  Although a little testosterone-laced, it stands out from the Spike genre (as did the original) by focusing occasionally on the conversation between characters and letting that interaction drive the movie until the next big culmination of gun-laden events.  Lightning choreography keeps you on the edge of your seat at many moments, and you can’t help but laugh at the candid cutscenes that show you how the brothers personally imagine themselves during gunfights.  All around MUST SEE, as was the original.  Aequitas VERITAS!    p.s. also marvel at Dexter’s Girlfriend playing a crazy FBI Special Agent who weaves herself into the nest Willem Dafoe vacated and hatches a beautiful egg.  And Clifton Collins, Jr. (aka Clifton Gonzales Gonzales) plants himself in a pretty main role as well, supporting the brothers as they chink away at the armor of their true enemies.
Brain: 8  
Heart: 5  
Stomach: 5


So that’s it, the first movie review segment.  I hope it helped you wade through the muck of modern media without getting too dirty. 

See you on the by!  Luv, Dags

A Website That Helps In The Kitchen

A Website That Actually Helps In The Kitchen:


I’m a freak about leaving food in the fridge.  I don’t smell-test, I throw immediately.  Any leftovers have a two-day reprieve before they are deemed NON EDIBLE.  Why?  Well, I don’t just have a list lying around of how long everything stays good for.  Wait a minute, here’s one!  Enter a food name in the Keep It or Toss It? box and press Enter.  Voila!  It even unravels the mystery of egg sell-by dates.

Rocking this Week Update:


This Week I Rocked no road rage.  It’s amazing once you sit back and listen how much you hear people actually yelling at each other from lane to lane.  It’s also amazing how hard it is for me to ignore stupid people being stupid, so this one might end up being a Work In Progress.  The tip that worked the best for me?  No mad-doggin’ other drivers.  This actually completely cut out the need to respond and broke the Chain of Ugly.
This Week I Am Rocking:  Every day, I will actively support someone who is doing something that normally would turn me off.  It’s hard to be a useful person when I’m locked behind prejudice against personality types and personal morals.  So this week I will put aside that immediate want to GET AWAY FROM THE ANNOYING PERSON and just see their actions as what they are: their choices.  I’ll let you know how that goes.

Have a great day!!!   Luv, Dags

Kris Kuksi, Delicious Cookie Recipe, and an Awesome Place for Us To Go

Kris Kuksi

A sweet treat for your eyes lays here.  The artist is extremely intricate, and in any medium he chooses you can literally feel the human struggle to become great under duress.  Id versus Religion versus Culture versus Death in a tightly contained package; I could sit all day with my eyeballs making small adjustments.  Ever had a skeleton question your moral standing?  Welcome to delicious Kuksi. 
Segue!


Delicious Cookie Recipe:

1 cup Milk Chocolate Chips 

1 cup Dark (Semi-sweet) Chocolate Chips 

1 teaspoon of salt 

1 teaspoon of baking soda 

1/2 teaspoon of baking powder 

3/4 cups Superfine/Caster Sugar 

3/4 cups Medium Brown Sugar 2 Large Eggs 1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract (not vanilla flavoring, that stuff is crap) 

1 cup of Unsalted Butter (2 half-stick units of paper-wrapped or 8 tbsp of tub butter) 

2 and 1/2 cups Regular Flour (All-Purpose)

 
1. A flour sifter prevents clumps of unprocessed product in the final cookie.  Sift flour into a mixing bowl, adding salt, baking powder and baking soda as you go. 
2. In a different bowl, put in your unsalted butter.  Preferably you would take the butter out of the fridge a little beforehand so it can soften, otherwise nuke a little.  Add your superfine sugar to the softened butter.  Then add the brown sugar and blend until there’s no lumps.  I would get a hand mixer at this point to spare your wrists.  Add the vanilla, and then the eggs.
3. Preheat your oven now, to 350 degrees.  Get out an ungreased cookie sheet.  Flat thin cookie sheets work best.
4. Stir in the flour mixture from the other bowl, a little at a time until everything’s together.
5. Use two spoons to form 1-inch balls of dough and drop them onto cookie sheet.
6. Bake until cookie is golden brown around the edges.  This usually takes under fifteen minutes, so keep a close eye (not too hard to do).

Eat and repeat.  Play around with ingredients, the mixture is lenient in that these cookies turn out REALLY RICH by default.  It won’t hurt to sub margarine in, but the butter is way tastier.

Awesome Place for Us To Go:
This is a section I would love to introduce, where I put down stuff for husband/wife no-kids-some-pets combos to have extreme fun doing while Getting Outside.  May or may not include sun.  I will try to keep mine local, can’t-miss, or cheap; and ya’ll feel free to go off with some of your own.  This is my idea, what’s yours?  I triple dog dare you to beat TANDEM ZIPLINING!

Easter Earthquakes, Rocking This Week, Final Fantasy XIII Eats My Life, and Culottes!

Easter Earthquakes:


Not-fun stuff out of the way -- we had an earthquake Sunday morning, shortly after my first post.  There have actually been over a thousand earthquakes since the first big one in Mexicali, and they stretch all the way up to Santa Ana.  Rebel that I am, I was doing laundry Easter morning and somehow didn’t notice anything was out of the ordinary.  For oblivious people like myself, Google Earth has an useful tool that uses the US Geological Survey site to put location points and related info for each reported earthquake in the last week, and I put that here.  It’s under the Google Earth KML heading.

Rocking This Week Update:


Every week I am going to self-improve, and I can drag you along with me or you can walk yourself. 
This week I Am Rocking: 
No road rage, at any level, for any reason.  My friend X1 was in a confrontation with a man at a gas station (they noticed as he drove away from the crime scene that his license plate actually said “ROADRGR”).  Before this 250-pound man was done drunkenly pounding on the side of my 125-pound female friend’s head, he had also spat in her face, called her every filthy name he could think of and THREW HER BEACH CRUISER like a toy.  Welcome to the OC right?  And let’s give it up for people so aimlessly violent as to advertise it on a vanity plate!  My goal this week is to be a courteous driver, because I have been guilty of giving the Vicky to a few idiots.  No more feeding the hate.


Final Fantasy XIII Eats My Life:


It really does.  Especially with the switch in strategy guides from Brady to Piggyback.  Way more comprehensive, and available in Collector’s Edition, if you can find someone to part with it.


Culottes for President!


Where I live, we get Big Wind Come Over Mountain and it blows our pretty skirts right over our heads.  My solution: culottes, the mailbag lady staple!  They also allow me to rock the spring florals that I crave with some relative wind resistance.  Even better – find one hooked jumper status to a spaghetti-strap top for your new spring slap on and go outfit.  Not cool: this.

I’ll be back with more before you know it! Thank you for coming back by…………….!!!!

Introductions are in order!

First of all -- HELLO :) to my new visitors.  Thought the first blog should introduce some names that won't be strange to you...and to tell you more about the wizard behind the curtain.
First, there is me:



I am a goob and I have too many random interests to begin in this blog.  I live in sunny Southern California with my awesome husband and a dog and two cats: Spencer, our rescue pup, Samuel - loves to lay claim on anything out of its normal spot: money, clothes, books, and Mazy a.k.a Maizie, whose debatable name matches her debatable past.


All five of us in a little tiny slice of Orange-flavored heaven.  The weather is everything you've heard about, and the rat race is enough to make you LOSE IT.  But with modern technology not quite where it was promised, and then again so much more, I decided to utilize my laptop to bring that fun to your door, along with health and beauty product reviews, PS3 game first glances, movie discussions and pet care.

So you get a little idea of the author, let me start with my first love: animals.  I was born and raised in Florida fifteen minutes from the beach.  The area was purgatorial in its mix of youngsters milling around burning in the sun and old folks who retired and moved down from places with fun-to-say names, like "East Millinocket".  My parents had a sandwich shop which bankrupted us when I was in second grade, and from then on I learned to live (and thrive) without taking anything for granted.  I wore hand-me-downs from family friends, swum in the disgusting Gulf of Mexico and tamed the lizards outdoors.  There was a wealth of interesting fauna in my neighborhood.  I swam with manatees and sting rays in the channels, chased shorebirds, and hunted for living sand dollars on the sandbars.  I raised backyard caterpillars to butterfly-hood in plastic pencil cases and called anything that followed me home a pet, including a mongrel dog I called White Lightning (I guess 'coz it was the eighties, gosh) and a couple of box turtles I caught in the ditch.  My first thing I got to actually keep longer than a month besides the butterflies in the garage was a black cat named Veddie.  She was an alley princess and never really adjusted well to indoor life, climbing the curtains in every room of the house as soon as she heard the vacuum start up.  Oh yeah, and she would attack my fluttering REM eyes in the dead of night.  I loved her dearly.  The pet thing went on hiatus when I moved at fourteen due to my mom's heart surgery, going to stay with my grandmother in South Carolina.  The only animal she owned was an unbroken horse named Pilltoro, who though altogether an awesome creature was easily spooked away and didn't really care about cuddling.  I washed it with the hose one day and it was an all day Farm Proj.   Back to Florida at fifteen and back to adopting animals off the street.  Yadaya, years later, I'm still doing it.  How can anyone say no to a little heart in need?  Pets make our lives very special every day, we should give back to them that comfort and companionship.  And that's a little about me and pets!

Hopefully this introduction post will encourage you to come back.  You're more than welcome here, and please leave comments!  I'm a newborn baby blogger...thanks for growing with me.