Homade Chick Soup

Here is my recipe for the banging chicken soup I made last night

48 oz. Organic Chicken Stock

 4 c. Water

1 pre-made rotisserie chicken

3 Carrots shaved and sliced

3 stalks celery halved and sliced

1 medium onion diced

1 medium pkg. baby bella mushrooms sliced

1 clove garlic diced

Rosemary

Thyme

Salt

Pepper

Olive oil

In a large pot, I used a cast iron dutch oven, saute the onions and garlic for a few mins in olive oil. Add the celery and mushrooms. Continue sauteing until onions just start to brown. Meanwhile, pull all the meat off the chicken and shred it with a fork and knife in a bowl. Add stock, water, carrots to pot. Stir in the chicken. Add pinches of spices to desired taste, I also add the leg bones to the soup for flavor. Bring to a boil and then simmer about an hour. Remove bones before serving. This starts to taste even better as a left over. (If you add noodles, you may need to increase the fluids)

Foam + Dirtbikes = Fun to be had

Found this little gem of a video from about a year ago, first two jumps are mark, second two jumps are me. Please excuse my first attempt, as it is quite lame. We were about an hour from getting on a plane home from OK, when I made the last second decision to just do it hahaha. Second time I figured I probably wont get this chance again, so I went wide open, well as wide open as my scared ass would let me haha.

Sick of chargebacks

Finally got the STS LLC up and running, and got this dandy CC machine to boot. No more chargebacks due to sticker clients seeing "American Horsepower Products" on their statement and freaking out beyond belief, leading to useless paperwork and wasted time.

Actually switched the AHP merchant account to PNC Merchant Services as well which got me better processing rates, no setup fee's, no annual fee's, no statement fee's so an overall win on all accounts.

Give me your CC, its hungry.

A wifely duty

 

Tonight I got home and saw brown bananas on the counter, which means one of three things: Feed them to the chickens, banana bread or banana cookies. So cookies it was, they are so freaking delicious! Note to whomever makes this recipe, whip the crap out of your batter if you like fluffy soft cookies and not rock hard ones that seem stale after ten minutes. I also just about double the amount of vanilla, for everything I make, mainly because I like the smell of it hahaha.

Two Years and Counting

Sept. 7, 2008

Today is our second anniversary. Time sure does fly when you are rocking it like a hurricane. No crazy plans for tonight, instead we are going to gorge ourselves on good food tomorrow night. I highly recommend marrying your best friend, worked pretty well for us.

Making the way for Solar Panels

Similar to what our panels will look like

Today we signed papers for 45 minutes for a line of credit and checking accounts galore. Another step made towards the panels with R.J. Groner. We are now playing the waiting game to see if Uncle Sam (the PA version) will give us $1.75 per or $1.25 per kilowatt hour credit. Hopefully he is an awesome uncle and not a creepy stingy one!

I'm on a boat!

This weekend Mark and I spent some quality time in Maryland on the bay in our Jason. Our Jason is our time machine boat from the 80's, it fits in nicely with out time machine RV and time machine conquest also from the 80's. During the three hour trip down to Middle River, MD we were praying we wouldn't get a flat on the trailer since we couldn't find the right size spare in time which was probably a direct result of procrastination.

Some places we anchored

It was the first time we had our little vessel the S.S. Newb out on open water, which was kind of terrifying, the poor thing was hammering the choppy water but it made it through. On saturday nigh we gorged on fabulous local seafood like cave people, literally bashing the meet out of our food.

Love the feeling of burning lips from Old Bay, there really isn't much that I won't put Old Bay on, if I could only have one seasoning in my pantry for the rest of my life it would be Old Bay. On the way back in after dinner it was dark, so we went to break out our sweet  boat lights and found out that our back light didn't work, so I ended up holding up a maglite flashlight for about a half hour like the statue of liberty until we got back the marina. All in all it was a good weekend full of boating, margaritas, orange crushes and holding on for dear life!

Thrifty Vintage Chic

Loving the blog and her store, if you are into vintage and recycling wares stop by
simplethrifter.blogspot.com and www.simplethrift.etsy.com.
 

Canning tomatoes

Remember that enormous amount of tomatoes we harvested the other day, well we had to can them. My mom/grandmother did most of the work, it was fun though, and now we can make some nice fresh sauces over the winter... ugh, I hate winter.

Our total cost was $0, but thats only because they already had all the supplies in the basement. Here the jars are sitting with hot water as were getting the tomatoes ready by peeling the skins and heating them up, and some of the supplies we used such as vitamin c, sugar, and basil from the garden.

The jars are filled with tomatoes, the rims are wiped, and then they are sealed and go into a pot of hot water. You bring it to a boil and then let it run for about 15 minutes before removing the jars so the tomatoes don't turn into complete mush. The Ball canning book from 1950 said 40 minutes, apparently thats no good.

Finished product, yum.

Unadilla

We made our annual trek up to NY this past weekend to attend the Unadilla national. At every race we attend this year, were able to meet up with more people that we've only previously met through email or some kind of social networking, so that has been pretty cool. We met up with Jon at Two Stroke Motocross who is helping out our buddy Mike Leavitt who is trying to qualify for the 450's on a YZ250 2 stroke. We also met up with Shawn Taylor this time, and he got a cool shot of Jess and I.

Among the highlights was obviously James Stewart returning to racing, although he only managed a 3-DNF, local NJ boy Dakota Kessler qualified for his first pro national in the 250's, and Eyvind Boyesen was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement award from Alex and the guys at the Legends and Heroes display.

Jess pulled me up to the podium after Eyvind received his award to get this corny picture, where it looks like maybe were important but were really not. "When is the next time we will ever get to do this!" she says.

Jess got some amazing shots for DeLorenzo Photography as usual, and I got some crappy iPhone videos, as usual. On with the eye candy.