Cop Car's Beat

Enchilada Chicken

Normally, any recipe that I pass along came from someone else. A cook, I'm not! Because Hunky Husband was enthusiastic about this main dish, I'll share it, even though it is my own - made up in panic, yesterday, when I realized that I had less than an hour to fix dinner. I had intended to start the process an hour earlier and make an enchilada casserole. As the chicken dish turned out, it is feeding Hunky Husband and me three dinners.

Cop Car's Enchilada Chicken

Saute to blacken, in a drizzle of olive oil in a cast iron skillet:

2 slices from a medium onion, minced

1/3 large pepper, diced finely (I used a Poblano chili because it was on hand.)

1 clove of garlic, minced (I used 1/2 tsp out of a jar!)

When blackened, mostly, remove the vegetable bits from skillet. Plop into the skillet:

3 large chicken half-breasts

Cook over medium-high heat for a few minutes on either side, to provide a bit of color. (Bits of the veggies will cling to the chicken, too!)

Place chicken half-breasts into a casserole dish. Heat in the skillet:

1 small can green enchilada sauce

3 ounces of cut-up wheat tortilla (I cut the tortilla into 1/3" x 1" dice.)

the sauteed veggies

When bubbling hot, pour the sauce over the chicken half-breasts. Place the casserole, covered, into a moderate oven for 50 minutes (or more, if you have the time.) Let set for a few minutes following removal from the oven. Slice each half-breast into 2 or 3 pieces, cutting lengthwise of the breast half. Serve each piece with the sauce ladled over it.

I won't be offended if you don't wish to try this, nor will I be offended should it not be to your liking if you do try it. HH isn't that enthusiastic about chicken that isn't KFC, so I know this is special!

Don't ever say to an engineer, "...I don't know what the floor plan is like...."

because the typical engineer will, spontaneously, whip out a blueprint. In this case, the blueprint is of poor quality (being old, and scanned to boot!) but I'll walk you through it.

IF you are not already sick to death of my carrying on about my Albuquerque house, please continue. You will be instantly "forgiven" (as if one needs it!) should you choose to go about your business, instead.

Albuquerque house - then and now

This is how my house in Albuquerque looked when I put it on the market in early 1990. As the building of the house had been completed in September 1983, and as I spent most of my time working out-of-state during the time that I ostensibly lived there, it was little changed from the way it had been when I moved in. I had added draperies on the large windows and sliding glass doors in the back of the house, and narrow-slatted Venetian blinds on the remainder of the windows - except for the bathroom windows that were frosted and which I left bare.

In addition to the visible landscaping, I had had the front courtyard paved in flagstones.

For ease of comparison (so that one need not go to the previous posting), this is how the house looked 12 days ago.

 
I had written that the only changes to the house, itself, appeared to be the lights added to either side of the garage door and the ceramic medallion added to the front courtyard wall. I failed to mention that the front, double doors had been replaced with a single door with glass sidelights and the house numbers had been replaced on the garage door facing.

The colors in the top photo are true. The bottom photo suffers from the extremely poor lighting conditions that prevailed at the time I was there - foggy, camera facing into the sun, light snow falling.

Now that I compare the photos, it is apparent that the deciduous trees that peek over the roof are in the neighbor's yard. Just as the plantings in my former yards had grown, so had the neighbor's.

Oh! And a street-side mailbox had been added (left edge of 2010 photo). As I was nearly always out of town, from even before I moved into the house (Bogie lived in my apartment, dealt with the building of the house, and got the apartment stuff moved for me), I did not put out a mailbox. I had a box at the local USPS substation and picked up a large Fiberglas container of mail each time I came home for a few days. Bogie, after all, went back to Kansas to resume living her own life!

P.S. I just noticed that, not only was the 2010 photo taken when the weather was damp, but so was the 1990 photo. That is why the color of the stucco looks splotchy. The house sits at about 6,000 feet in elevation, so it probably gets a little more rain than the 8 - 12 inches/year that Albuquerque records...but...not that much more!  

Playing catch-up

You wouldn't believe how much fun I've been having since the posting of 2/24/2010. Yahoo! Hunky Husband had a 3-day meeting to attend in Albuquerque NM. Having lived there for seven years, myself, I was distraught that I could not hitch a ride with him. I was to teach a 2-day class in Wichita, starting the day that he would be driving home. As things transpired, not enough people signed up for the class; so, I cancelled the class and packed my bag. This was the view out our motel windows when we checked in.

 

About the left-hand photo: the vertical black stripe is where the window glass panes meet - at a 90-degree angle. Hotel Albuquerque features such a window in the corner of each room, providing a spectacular view for the occupants. Embedded within the buildings on the left-hand side of the photo is a small pyramid, which I have enlarged and lightened, below.

It looks rather like the hood of a KKK member, doesn't it? The "eye holes" are actually tilt-out windows (hinged at the bottom) that are installed on each of the four sides. One day, I drove to it and drove down the streets on all four sides of it. It sits behind the garage of what appears to be a private home (the home is to the left of the pyramid in the photo, but not readily discernible.) If it is a private home, I can only speculate that the pyramid accommodates someone's art/craft/small business endeavors. Can anyone suggest what it may be? Were it not for the glass windows, I would have suggested that it is a wood-burning kiln.

When I have time to find a photo that was taken of my home in Albuquerque in 1990, I plan to post a side-by-side of it and a photo that I took last week. For now, I'll post two photos of my old home, taken last week. The photo in the right was taken into bright morning sunlight during a light snow; thus, had to be lightened considerably.

 
To get your bearings between the two photos, note the position of the ceramic sun medallion on the front court-yard wall. The left-hand photo, taken in afternoon sunlight a couple of days after the right-hand photo was taken, views the house from about 100 feet north while the right-hand photo obviously views the house from directly across the street (the house faces west.) Note the two trees in the foreground. They appear to be the same piňons that I had planted in about 1984. What is not obvious in the photo is the presence of sinuous rock "walls" (a foot or so high, each) that are a part of the original landscaping that I had put in.

The only changes I see to the house, itself, are the lights mounted to either side of the garage roll-up door and the medallion on the court-yard wall. I couldn't discern whether the trees peeping up over the top of the house belong to it or to the yard of the neighbor behind. The only coniferous trees that I planted were the two piňons in front and two or three piňons in the back. The green trees behind the house in the photos are not piňons. The deciduous trees that show behind the house might possibly be some of the fruit trees that I had planted in back but are more likely larger trees planted by the neighbor in back.

I loved that house. At 1800+ square feet, it was just the right size for a single woman (I sold it to a single woman.) The pickup truck parked in the drive-way tells me that more than one person now lives there. When I lived there, no one left vehicles parked in their drive-way or in the street. The neighborhood has grown up.

 

HP did me a favor

HP did me a favor by not replacing the power switch/wiring assembly, sparing me the embarrassment should the repair not fix the problem. They replaced the motherboard. In a few months (or, if it fails sooner, sooner) I shall know whether they succeeded. What makes me doubt the competence of the techies is that both times they have worked on my machine, themselves, they have indicated that they were able to reproduce the problem that I was having. Not likely. It's darned difficult to reproduce an intermittent problem and, this time, the techie described the problem as being "spontaneous rebooting". That is something that I've never observed happening! Oh, well.