Living Insanity's Loving Food

We have never started seeds indoors before and also we've never used our own seeds from our mature vegetables (not bought in a packet). We have babies though! It's exciting since it has only been 1 week.

We are starting our indoor seeds this weekend. We bought some shelves, heat/sun lamps, and some containers. To start we are using what my husband seeded from all his pepper plants. Hopefully the effort to save seeds is worth it and we have a few plants by May when we will plant everything outside. We are also going to toss in a few of my herbs, cilantro and dill because I have seeded my plants and had success with using their seeds the next season. Here is our set up!

We were maybe going to have some real snow in the DC area this weekend but it didn't pan out. I still treated today a bit like a snow day. We made breakfast and then I cooked feijoada all day in the crockpot. The hashbrowns are so green because we used a whole green pepper and a jalapeno pepper in them. We finally cracked open the wild Maine blueberry jam we bought at the DC Cooking Show in November. It has tiny whole blueberries in it that are so cute.

We had many varieties of hot peppers that we grew over the summer. My husband made 3 different batches of hot sauce. The process took three months of curing in the fridge before he bottled and labeled the sauces. A lot of these were given as gifts at Christmas time!

My husband made reservations at Timpanos for actual Valentines Day. The restaurant is around the corner and we've gone before for Valentines Day, even without a reservation. In the past they've had a Valentines special where you get drinks, some sort of appetizer, two entrees, and their awesome dessert tree which had chocolate covered strawberries and cheesecake pops. No such luck this year. Not only did we have to wait around for a half an hour even though we made a reservation this year, they also didn't have the same Valentines special they've had in the past. This year you could get lobsters as the special, otherwise you could order off the regular menu. Our waitress took forever to take a drink order so by the time she showed up we had chosen everything we wanted to eat. We both ordered salads, the aged steaks and two sides. The salads came out first and were great. Then our steaks came out. Then there was a horrible crash of dishes and turns out those w...

I made a Vitamix recipe for potato soup this weekend. I think the mixer is so cool and I am happy every time I see it used on Top Chef or during Iron Chef on the Food Network. You can also find this recipe on the Vitamix website. I did make some changes. I bought 4 small Yukon Gold potatoes, boiled them until tender all the way through 3 strips of pepper bacon, cooked About 1/2 a sweet yellow onion, diced and cooked in the bacon grease shredded cheddar cheese 2 cups of 1 milk Italian herb paste salt for the potato water and I added salt to the soup Into the blender went two of the cooked potatoes, the milk, onions, salt, and Italian herb paste. Set blender to variable, 1 then turn to variable 10 and switch machine to high. Blend until everything is hot and steam comes out of the blender vents. This took me about 6 minutes when the recipe said 4 minutes. Then I cut the blender to variable 3 and put in the other 2 small potatoes and turned it off. I used the crumble...

So I've had chicken at a few places in the past week. Buffalo Wild Wings has two limited flavors right now. I tried the Thai curry and it wasn't spicy and really only tasted like curry. To me it tasted more like Indian than Thai. It lacked sauce. It was seasoned chicken but not saucy like buffalo chicken. It was supposed to be on the spicy end of the spectrum and it wasn't spicy at all. I was disappointed. Boston Market has added sauces to the rotisserie chicken. I bought a quarter white meat chicken combo with the mango habenero sauce. The sauce comes on the side in a plastic container so you can control the amount. It was spicy and sweet and perfect! I love this sauce. I hope other people try it out and they keep it on the menu. Love!