Tzatziki

Tzatziki is a thick, yogurt-based dip that pairs well with pita bread or vegetables. It's creamy, cool, and hearty, and it's a tasty way to include some yogurt in your diet (protein + probiotics!).

There are a ton of recipes available, and they all have some basic ingredients in common: Greek yogurt, cucumber, garlic, and dill. Then there is a group of folks who add lemon juice to the tzatziki, and a second group of folks who add vinegar instead. Some recipes even call for some of both. I used fresh lemon juice (about half of the lemon) and I liked the flavor. My first batch of tzatziki turned out well, except for one thing: I added too much garlic. I can't remember the last time I added too much garlic to a dish, but I really knocked it out of the park with this stuff. I think it's because I'm used to adding fresh garlic to dishes that will be sauteed/cooked, and I forgot how much kick uncooked garlic has. Kapow! So I'd recommend two small cloves or even just one medium sized clove per one cup of yogurt in your tzatziki recipe.

I didn't use a specific recipe to make tzatziki. I read four or five recipes, drew some conclusions, and filled in the gaps with intuition. All of the recipes I used were for a chunky tzatziki, meaning the cucumbers were chopped/diced by hand, not pureed in a food processor. The volume of yogurt and chopped cucumbers should be about the same. Here's what I used to make my batch:

Just over 1 cup Greek yogurt
Just over 1 cup diced cucumber (peeled, seeded, diced, then measured)
Juice of 1/2 lemon
2 small garlic cloves, minced (I used more and regretted it! I recommend mixing in one minced clove; you can always add more!)
3/4 tsp dried dill (from a spice jar; all the recipes call for fresh dill and I don't have any)
Dash of salt

Also, since the yogurt "leaks" water and the cucumbers have a lot of water in them, tzatziki gets a little watery if you don't prepare for it. I poured off all the water in the yogurt container before scooping out the yogurt. After dicing the cucumber, I wrapped the diced pieces in paper towels to let the excess moisture soak out while I prepped other stuff. The next day, the tzatziki had leaked a little water but was still pretty thick. This recipe made 4-6 good-sized servings. It wasn't enough for a huge party bowl but it's plenty for a small gathering, or in my case, snacks for a few days. Enjoy!

Buttery delicious

On Saturday night we went to a potluck / movie night party at a friend's house. That afternoon we were preparing dishes to bring. I made a chocolate chip cookie pie (I'll post the recipe soon, it's a knockout) and Ike made some mashed yams. As he was preparing the yams, he spooned some out of the dish and let me sample it. It was so good, and it tasted like he'd put butter in it.

"How much butter did you put in these?" I asked him. They tasted so buttery.

He looked at me and smiled guiltily.

"Really, how much? I bet my cookie pie has more butter in it than the yams, come on, that recipe calls for six tablespoons," I said.

He just kept staring, shifting his eyes. So I looked in the fridge. When I'd finished prepping the pie, there was a stick of almost six tablespoons (I'd left that one because I needed six) and a stick of two tablespoons (I'd taken six from that stick). Neither of those partial sticks were anywhere to be seen.

I looked over at him. "You added both of them? That's almost eight tablespoons of butter! You put a whole damn stick of butter in there?" A whole stick of butter for four yams in a little glass dish. Dayum.

We both started laughing at this point. "Well, it's delicious!" I said. Buttery delicious.

New Stoneware Set

Image from Target.com.

I swear we walked into Target needing only to buy ginger ale or something, but we walked out with ginger ale, the stoneware set you see pictured to the right, and probably six other things we weren't planning to buy.

We got the set on clearance for $35. I think those are the first retail-purchased dishes we have since moving to California. I bought some "College 08" stoneware dishes (guess what year), and they are pretty plain (white with green accents). All of our other dishware has come from Craigslisting or Goodwilling. I've never owned square plates before. They don't really fit in the dish drainer very well, but they look badass so whatever. The mugs are pretty big and the handles are big enough for my whole hand. I usually feel like I have big lumberjack hands (which I kinda do) when I pick up mugs by their handles, but this set makes me feel very little-lady-like. I think the plates will look fantastic with brownies on them or green salads.

Pest-free pants

I'm not exactly sure how, but a spot or two of cat piss got on a pair of my jeans. It wasn't that bad, so I figured I'd just Febreze them and toss 'em in the wash. A few days later, Ike and I were reorganizing the living room and investigating the spot on our new couch that had gotten cat piss on it. Over the past few days, I'd put some baking soda + water paste on the couch a few times and vacuumed it up, and the smell was pretty much gone.

Ike: "It's pretty good. I think it might just need to air out. You know, when you put the baking soda water on there, it's still wet and maybe some time left open would finish it off."
Marth: "Yeah, I think that's a good idea. But can I Febreze it? That should dry pretty quickly and might help the residual smell."
Ike: "Sure, I think that'd be fine."

I go grab the bottle of Febreze from the bathroom. Brandishing the bottle, I say to Ike...

Marth: "We really don't have much of this left."
Ike: "That's not Febreze."
Marth: "What?"
Ike: "That's soapy garlic water I use on my plants as a pest repellant."

*pause*

Ike: "Well, those jeans of yours probably don't have any spider mites on them."

Following this conversation, he relabeled the bottle. Now I need to find the actual Febreze.

Headaches

Rats
Sometimes I think the things in the attic might be larger than rats. I hear them moving around sometimes and they're louder (heavier) than I expect rats to sound. Other times they make rat-like noises and I'm reassured that our traps will catch the head of something instead of just the arm of something. We went up in the attic on Friday and our traps were empty. Ike moved them so they'd be against walls; perhaps we will be successful next time we check.

Cats
We've come to expect certain behaviors from Ceri. She is a very shy cat and is severely affected by separation anxiety or something when we go on vacations. So when we came home from traveling a week ago, we weren't surprised that she was freaking out. No, what surprised us was her insistence on hiding behind the stove whenever we left the house or went to sleep. Lucky for us, the stove doesn't have rigid gas pipes attached to it, so we can slide it out from the wall. It's still not fun to move a stove, though. We put a big piece of cardboard between the stove and the wall behind it, but we had to take it off when we bake things, and last night we forgot to replace it. She was back there again this morning, ugh. We've had to move it at least four times since coming back. If she gets back there again, I might just leave her and see what happens.

Drips
The CatGenie was dripping before we left; gotta see if that's still happening. It's had a bunch of other issues since then, so I forgot about the drip. The hall bathroom toilet tank has a leak, and the shower in that bathroom does, too. We know what's causing the shower one, though. The hot water knob is stripped, so it's hard/impossible to shut off completely. We have some new knobs for the hot water and for the bath/shower toggle. That knob hasn't worked properly in over a month, and it'll be nice to be able to use the bath function of the tub (even though I haven't taken a bath since I was was...what, 18?). I guess it'd just be useful for foot-soaking or something. Unrelated to leaks: Ike replaced the shower head, and the new one is huge and rain-like. I really like it.

Tasty greenery

How do you make a nature-loving, mostly vegetarian girl happy? Grow her a salad. This was actually a joint project but Ike did most of the work. Spinach and all kinds of lettuce! Nom!

We have heat!

I think I'll leave it to Ike if he'd like to recount all of the mishaps, delays, and headaches that went along with this task because I got to experience most of them first-hand and I'm tired of talking about them. Yelp will hear about it, though!

Today was the last step of the heating installation process: pressure testing. A dude came by today and taped up all of the registers and ran some tests to see how the system was working. It passed! He laughed somewhat nervously while telling me all of the results; I think he either thought I was cute or felt bad for being done right at the climax of V for Vendetta. Either way, teehee.

So that's done. We have heat. We've got to put the register vents back in there (not sure why they didn't replace them, but whatever) and we'll be set. It's wonderful having an ambient temperature of >60°F. Just wonderful.