Tamales!!

Yummmm......I had 20 pounds of chicken thighs in the deep freeze from when they were on sale for 67 cents/pound. I decided to cook up 10 pounds of it this weekend and made up some yummy chicken burritos (with homemade refried beans, a shredded chicken/chilis mix, cheese and salsa--sadly not homemade, we've already used up what we made last year). Tonight I made chicken tamales. I'm going to go insane waiting for them to steam so I can eat them. Tomorrow (hopefully) the last of the cooked chicken will go into two or three family size chicken pot pies. 10 pounds of chicken for $6.70 turned into 10 giant sized burritos, 3 or 4 dozen tamales and about 12 servings worth of chicken pot pie. I'm telling you, stock up while things are on sale. Yes, I had to buy a few other things (tortillas, and stuff to make masa) but that was still only another 5 bucks or so. Everything else I have on hand from also buying it on sale, or else it's growing in my garden.

In live chicken news, the baby chicks are doing well. The naming them chicken nugget thing was just a joke, but yesterday Sierra called one chick-fil-a LOL Seriously though, we need real name ideas. Something with a theme. The only thing I could come up with was an old school Disney thing...Lady, Cinderella, Belle, etc.... More info about the chickens--a few people have asked why we didn't buy pullets instead of chicks. The chicks were available locally, so that's the main reason. The other advantage though is socializing the birds. Right now they're little bitty things living in the house and getting used to us picking them up and petting them. Word has it this will make them much nicer to deal with when they're big birds (with big beaks). A few people have also asked what kind they are. The brown ones are golden sex links and the black ones are black sex links. The "sex link" part means you can tell based on their coloring whether they are male or female as soon as they hatch. This means we don't end up with any rooster surprises....nice bonus. The ladies will all lay brown eggs for us when they get older (somewhere around mid-May to mid-June). And something hilarious I've learned about baby chicks; they will fall asleep standing up and their head just ever so slowly starts to dip until their beak hits the ground and they just sorta pass out there. Then they get all wobbly and go "oh yeah, I can lay down". They're starting to perch a little bit, but mostly they just lay on the ground. Today we came home to almost the entire food thingee dumped out--not sure what sort of chick mischief they were up to. New pics:


And here's the dog wondering what in the world could make such a tasty sounding chirp (yes, the room's a mess, it's our back storage room that we use for laundry and indoor wood working when the weather's bad):


And we all went out to Veteran's Park yesterday because Josh had soccer games. I checked out the sidewalk trails and discovered they have a cool little thing (I think I read it was a mile long) where every twenty feet there is a row of bricks representing one year of US/local history--one brick has the year, and there are 5 or 6 bricks next to it with little factoids. It goes all the way from 1776 through 2007, pretty cool! Here's the girls both zonked out in the stroller: