1. Drip. Drip. Drip. Water. Water slowly dripping out of an opening in the ceiling in the basement bathroom. I went right to work trying to figure out what the source of this dripping might be. I looked at pipes, what pipes go where. It didn't seem like any pipes went above the basement ceiling. I turned off water. The dripping continued. I texted Shawn, asking him to come over and see what he thought was going on.
It turned out I could later tell Shawn that I didn't need his help after all.
Then I had an insight. A little while earlier, I had watered the lawn and left our bedroom window open. Water had gone down an air vent in the floor and I realized that vent is right above the bathroom. I put a bowl on the shelf where the water was dripping down and uttered a quick prayer that the amount of water that could drip was finite, based on the finite amount of water that came into our bedroom window, and that it would end at some point.
It did.
What a relief.
2. Today's undertaking in getting our house put together? Laundry. I stripped the beds we slept in upstairs and gathered up the clothes that had accumulated while I was living up there and gathered up towels and other things and spent most of the afternoon doing loads of laundry and then having a laundry folding and hanging up party with the Deke in the evening.
3. So, I took a whole chicken out of the ice box and let it warm up to room temperature. I poured a shallow pool of olive oil in the bottom of the Dutch oven, heated it up, and then browned the chicken, top and bottom. I removed the chicken, put it on a plate, poured off some of the oil, and sauteed a sliced whole onion. In a bowl, I combined a couple cans of coconut milk with a couple of heaping teaspoons of green curry paste. I had bought a package of fresh tarragon and poured most of it on top of the cooked onions. Then I placed the chicken back on top of the now cooked onions and tarragon and poured the curried coconut milk over and around the chicken and added some brown sugar, soy sauce, and fish sauce and put the chicken, covered, in the oven at 275 degrees to braise for an hour. I checked the chicken after an hour and decided to up the oven heat a bit and braised it for another forty minutes at 325 degrees.
The chicken turned out very moist and tender, infused with the complex spiciness of the curry and licorice tones of the tarragon. The braise liquid turned out beautifully as well, as if I had set out to make an innovative onion soup.
The chicken was the smallest I could find at Yoke's. The Deke and I ate about half of it and are very happy to have plenty of chicken and liquid for another meal tomorrow or another day.
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