Friends

I made some amazing slow-cooker Minestrone soup a couple times recently, and I have to share!

Slow Cooker Minestrone

(ideal size slow cooker is the 6 quart size)

1 large onion, chopped
4 carrots, sliced
3 ribs celery, sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 TBSP olive oil
6 oz can tomato paste
14.5 oz can chicken, beef, or vegetable broth
2 15 oz cans kidney beans, undrained
10-12 oz pkg frozen green beans
2-3 cups chopped cabbage (i used shredded cole slaw mix for convenience)
1 medium zucchini, sliced
8 cups water
2 TBSP parsley
2 TBSP italian spices
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1 cup small pasta (i used barilla mini bowties)
grated parmesan

1. saute onion, carrots, celery, and garlic in oil until tender.
2. combine all ingredients except pasta and cheese in slow cooker
3. cover, cook 4-5 hours on high, or 8-9 hours on low, adding pasta
1 hour before cooking is complete.
4. top individual servings with parmesan.

Note: This makes a good 8-10 servings. I ended up putting the rest of the soup into plastic containers and freezing them for lunches!

First time I made it, I used frozen green beans, second time I used a bag of frozen mixed veggies (green beans, corn, carrots, peas.. I liked the mixed veggies better!)

Also: I used 1 tsp of salt, and it wasn't seasoned enough, so i salted again before serving and it was perfect!

A fun cartoon, yet there's some practical advice to be had here

Poll #1494514 Likelihood of needing a gun
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 33

Do you believe you are likely to ever need to shoot anyone in the future for reasons not related to your job?

Has anyone read any of the zombie fiction published by Coscom Entertainment?

Linky: http://comics.drivethrustuff.com/index.php?manufacturers_id=2128

They are included in the sale at Drivethrucomics, so I thought I might check them out.

( daily tweets )

If you’d prefer not to see Twitters in your LJ flist, you can go here to change that.

Well, ladies you had your chance to woo me, (or at least hump me) but I don't know if they'll be much time for that in our future now.

because the zombie apocalypse is fast upon us.

You see it started with a bigfoot sighting, which turned out to be a monkey. But the thing about this loose monkey who's still running around right this minute is the proximity of the repeated sightings are located near the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research.



They claim all of their monkeys are accounted for, but in our little military town we know what can be believed and what is cover up to keep people from panicking.

And isn't this almost exactly how "28 days" starts? (and Dead Alive kinda! plus other non zombie stuff)

Crazy monkey out of biomed lab?

Who knows what experimental diseases or other things this little guy is a carrier of.

Not to mention with so many sighting how do we know it's only ONE?

you can read the original article here.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/So_whats_monkeying_around_at_body_shop.html

Current Music: mc chris is dead

I knew I had seen my copy of Fearsome Floors, a fantastic game where you're being chased by a monster and trying to escape a dungeon. Your best bet is to try to lure the monster towards other players so they get et and you can make a run for it. I went through all my boxes trying to find it, all to no avail.

Found it tonight!

It was not in a game box, it was at the bottom of a box of miscellaneous/non-game stuff. Also with it was a copy of Formula Motor Racing, a card game by Reiner Knizia, a VERY good buy!

I had hoped to take Fearsome Floors to Colorado last week; well, there's always next time.

Cut, so you wont all explode from the cute. ( Read more... )

I took Codie (iguana) to the vet today.

In February she weighed 1.1 pounds.

She has more than doubled, and weighs 2.6.

She's gained at least 3 inches (her tail has regrown that much), probably closer to five or 6 at least (SVL is hard to measure on her).

Her bones are solid, her muscle is firm, and she has some fat beginning to store up.

Her tummy is round and lump-free.

She still HATES the vet's office, thus the difficulty of getting SVL measurement, but I am so pleased with her progress, and her vet is thrilled.

Hooray!

did holiday zombies get everyone?

William Shatner:
If you have money, you're going to get health care. If you don't have money it's more difficult.

Rush Limbaugh:
If you have money you're going to get a house on the beach. If you don't have money you're going to live in a bungalow somewhere.

William Shatner:
But we're talking about health care.

Rush Limbaugh:
What's the difference?

Shatner has a new celeb interview program starting up on the Biography channel called William Shatner's Raw Nerve, I think it starts Sunday. I happened to see a preview when I was at the observatory Tuesday night, and they showed an extended clip of the Rush segment. I quite liked it, sadly, I don't think we get that channel on our cable feed.

Need a little smile? Just call the Nestle Crunch Hot line at 1-800-295-0051. When you are asked if you want to continue in English or Spanish, just wait quietly for about 10 seconds and you will smile. Promise! (if you comment on this after listening, don't give away the surprise) keep going and press 4 listen to the options....then press 7, hilarious

I've been making beer chili on the stove for the past year and a half with tons of success. It makes my man feel manly to eat something with beer in it. I stole the original recipe from here, then butchered it until it looks nothing the same. Either way it's good, I promise!

And yesterday morning I decided to try crock potting the recipe with stuff I had laying around in the kitchen/pantry with the beer base to see what would happen. Miraculously, it turned out even tastier than usual! And I didn't have to slave over the stove for a whole half an hour! Whoo hoo!

Here's what I did:
1 can of kidney beans drained
1 can of crispy whole corn kernels drained
1-2 cans of Rotel with juices (I was going to use normal canned tomatoes, but they were nowhere to be found)
1 lbs of LEAN ground beef, though turkey works just fine.
1 chopped onion.
1 bottle of beer...the recipe recommends Mexican. I used Tsingtao last night, and have used anything from Red Stripe to Michelob.
1/2 can of tomato paste
4 cloves of garlic chopped

Optional: Rice, low fat sour cream, cheese, green onions, and other fixins.

Note: A lot of people recommend browning the beef before tossing in it. This was at 6:15 in the morning, and I am NOT browning beef that early. You can't make me.

Toss ground beef into the bottom of the crockpot. Break it up as you add in all the other ingredients. Start adding everything else, save beer to be the last thing you pour in. Try not to drink the bottle of beer that early in the morning. It makes the chili less moist. Cook on low for about 8 hours. Serve with rice, sour cream, a nice salad, or whatever else you like with chili!

Enjoy. I'm ready to eat my leftovers already.

( daily tweets )

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT:
propheticlight@gmail.com
http://www.thepropheticlight.com
http://www.facebook.com/aaron.c.hanson
http://www.talkradioeurope.com
http://www.talkradioeurope.com/ren/listen-now/


Talk Radio Europe will be interviewing Psychic Aaron C. Hanson

Airs Friday Night Dec.4 from 14:00-16:00pm EST on Talk Radio Europe

December 4, 2009 14:00 EST (19:00 Barcelona, España CET) - Aaron C. Hanson will join Presenter Steve Gilmour for a discussion on psychic functioning and the future concerning a one world spiritual form of socialist government, its Caliphate, and the coming financial problems for Europe and the United States. A special emphasis will be placed on a recently remote viewed perspective of Spain, its future, and related world events.

ABOUT Talk Radio Europe - 5 years ago, we identified a need for a radio station that provided the English speaking communities on the Costas of southern Spain with a range of first class talk programmes, and a judicious mix of music, all matching the eclectic and sophisticated tastes of our listeners. Radio Europe Mediterraneo was born from the vision of its founding broadcaster, Maurice Boland and around him Maurice built a team of the highest quality, to present a wide variety of programs and interview a huge range of interesting guests from around the world. The station has been featured on numerous British factual TV shows and maintains a long-standing association with the British and Foreign press working closely with the BBC, ITV, SKY and RTE (Ireland).

In the years that followed, the station has widened its appeal both to its listeners and to its advertisers and sponsors, many of whom operate on both a national and international scale and who appreciate the benefits that a talk radio station offers them in advertising their goods and services. With that in mind, we felt the time was right to re-brand as Talk Radio Europe, leaving both regular and new listeners and advertisers in no doubt as to who we are.

Talk Radio Europe continues the station’s tradition of charitable and community work and is the chosen medium for information broadcast on behalf of the Junta de Andalucia, regional Town Halls, the British Consulate and many other official bodies wishing to communicate with the expatriate communities in southern Spain.

ABOUT Steve Gilmour - Not a formally trained broadcaster, but I have spent most of my life talking for a living. Having spent a large part of my life working within sales for two of the worlds biggest breweries, Guinness and Scottish & Newcastle. It was whilst working for these two companies that I became heavily involved in sports sponsorship, dealing directly with the management and directors of numerous sporting events and the football clubs.

At the grand age of 37 and at the top of my chosen career I suffered a sudden illness, which left me critically ill, and resulted in two major operations and subsequent spells in intensive care. On discovering you only live twice, and over the course of a twelve month recovery period, I decided that life really can be too short and to go after everything I wanted to do in life....

Give up working for large PLCs and all the politics involved
Spend more time with my family Achieve my dream of owning my own quality bar/restaurant business
Do a bit of Club DJ work
Try living/working in Spain – a country I always felt at home in
Achieve a presenting job in Radio/TV

Seven rollercoaster years on I have achieved ALL of these things... I sold my business in Scotland and moved to Spain in mid 2007, and after a well deserved extended holiday I managed to convince Maurice to let me loose on the airwaves as the stations sports correspondent.

ABOUT Aaron C. Hanson - Aaron is the psychic and remote viewer who was featured on the TV Documentary, In Search Of…(remake), in the episode on Psychic Spies. Aaron demonstrated that he could precisely locate a person at a remote location using only his remote viewing skills. He has been featured on such television shows as “SOS” of TV Asahi in Japan, mainstream radio broadcasts such as Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell, George Noory, and others. He was filmed in a major motion picture “Suspect Zero” where he also served as technical assistant. Since then he has been investing using his psychic talent with a higher degree of documented success.

Aaron has done multiple Internet radio broadcasts, and keeps a popular blog on his Facebook, Myspace, and Live Journal pages. You can also contact him on Twitter and various other popular websites where he occasionally reveals winning lottery numbers for specific areas of the world. His most shocking lottery success was posted on November 5th, 2008 for President Obama’s home state of Illinois marking his first in a series of postings. Aaron predicted 666 as this number and in fact, that was the winning number!

If it involves relevance, mystery, and fantastic controversy, Aaron has the “it” and is as always deep within it all. This fascinating man has been described by many as a strange genius, wildly eccentric, inexhaustibly soulful, and enigmatic.

- END -

This one came out pretty good, in fact I didn't make enough!

Onion Crock Soup

Ingredients:
2 lg. Yellow Onions cut in half and sliced thin
1.25 qts. Beef stock
Salt
Pepper
Cayenne pepper
2 Tsp. chopped or dried Parsley
3 springs Thyme
2 Bay leaves
Oil
1 Tbs. Butter

• Heat oil and melt butter in a lg. skillet.



• Add onions and cook till carmalized.



• In crock pot add beef broth(I used Better Then Bouillon.



• Add salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper to taste.



• Pour in onions.



• Top with herbs and close lid.



• Cook on highest setting for six hours.



• Remove thyme sprigs and bay leaves before serving.



• Can also ladle into ramekins, top with crusty bread and cheese and broil in oven till cheese in golden and bubbly.

Current Mood: cheerful

**EDIT Thu Dec 3 23:24:15 UTC 2009 **

Hey Everyone, we are about to run the last alter job that we need to on our database servers. This will effect userpics / scrapbook / vgift images for the next few hours. Have no fear, your images aren't lost, there is just a really intensive process running on the servers which store the information for mogilefs. Thank you for your understanding and all the LJ love...

Hey LJers,

I just wanted to let you all know that we are going to be performing some mogilefs maintenance over the next few days. We will be upgrading our current version to latest stable as well as changing some db config information to better handle the amount of files we are currently hosting. This shouldn't cause a big impact on site stability, but you may see some minor delays with userpic / scrapbook images appearing or other requests associated with our mogilefs. We would love to not have that happen, but unfortunately with some of the steps we need to take we have to cause a delay with images. I figured this was a better solution than taking down all of LiveJournal because well lets face it, we all need our daily LJ fix ;)

Thanks,

Current Location: Jumping out of a perfectly good plane
Current Mood: dirty
Current Music: Bad Religion - Stranger Than Fiction

I made chicken stew yesterday in my crock. Should be simple enough, right? Well...the chicken came out almost inedibly dry. After being cooked all day in an appliance that is MEANT to keep meat very moist!

Here's what I did:

Peeled, diced potatoes on the bottom (I've always read to put long-cooking root veggies at the bottom, under the meat)
Frozen sliced carrots on top of the potatoes
Cubed, boneless, skinless chicken breast on top
Seasonings
Poured broth over the whole thing

The chicken breast was the flash frozen, buy the big bag, type. It wasn't freezer burned or old. I thawed it in warm water for an hour, then cubed it and stored it in a ziploc separate from the rest of the ingredients, overnight.

I turned the crock on around 7:15 yesterday morning...we ate at around 7pm (yeah, I know...long day!). I used my older, smaller crock, which doesn't have a timer so that it could switch to warm after 8 hours.

I had to add more broth when I got home, b/c it just didn't have enough.

So...what went wrong? Do I just need to use more broth next time? Make sure the meat is submerged (it was not submerged when I got home last night, even though I'd assumed it would be, since the chicken should have contributed some drippings to the broth)?

I keep trying to make chicken stew, and I'm just never happy with it.