Chicken Salad Tonight

I'm a bit of a seat-of-the-pants cook. I use few recipes, usually preferring to decide what to put together based on what I know about flavors and what is in the larder at the moment. Tonight it was a chicken pasta salad.

I started with mayo (which I do not use very much) and Ken's Honey Mustard salad dressing, available at the local Woodman's supermarket. When I make a pasta salad, I mix all of the more durable ingredients with the dressing before tossing in the pasta and fragile items. It starts out looking gloppy and not particularly appetizing. Here it is with only chopped Vidalia, fresh cilantro, cracked pepper, and celery (which I also use rarely, but my partner likes it):

Oh, yeah. Ask me about wooden cutting boards versus any others to date!

This is the glop with the addition of chicken, water chestnuts, and halved red seedless grapes (sounds awful? tastes great!)

Ewwww! Well, you need enough glop to coat the pasta, about 12 dry ounces. I do have a very large bowl, and I wanted leftovers.

And, finally, plated with leaf lettuce, tomatoes, a handful of cashews and a few grissini. Shown here on Pinzon pasta bowls (as if you could tell).

Yumm!

New Camera

I love using film cameras. I have a thirty-some year old Olympus fully manual SLR that I understand. It has the usual controls: shutter speed and aperture setting. Film speed. Nice light meter. Great lens. And a few additional lenses, and some close-up rings. It's analog: you turn things to change the focus and speed. Analog is something I can relate to by feel rather than simply read and memorize. I'm not so hot with digital cameras. Yet, I bought one.

I was looking for a relatively inexpensive little work horse with not a lot of superfluous features, and I believe I found one in the Kodak EasyShare ZD710.

Now to see if I can upload a picture!


Ah, there she is! Meet Zimt, my eighteen year old cockatiel hen. She's a real sweetie and her birthday is Valentine's day.