Almost there!

I took a short break from blogging to finish up my grad school applications. They'll be done tomorrow, so I'll try to return to my slightly-more-regular updating schedule.

Recipe of the Week 2011 #1: Enchilada Lasagna

Now that my head cold is mostly taken care of, I can cook again without worrying about making Matt and his entourage ill. I decided to hold the inaugural New Recipe Challenge tonight.

I used this recipe and substituted MorningStar Grillers for the chicken*, used bagged Mexican blend cheese instead of queso fresco (because real queso is impossible to find here), and dumped an entire can of chiles in adobo sauce into the sauce mixture instead of just the chiles so it would be spicier. I strained the chiles out before I added the sauce to the casserole dish.

Overall, it turned out really well! The sauce was spicy without being overwhelming, and the whole dish came together very nicely. I'll definitely make this again.

*I hate chicken. I can't eat it without becoming incredibly ill afterwards, and it also tastes really bad to me. Blecccch.

My head is full of rubber cement. Still.

While Sudafed 12 Hour is a miracle drug that enabled me to complete a shift at work without keeling over, I am still too foggy to compose anything interesting or coherent.

I leave you with the song that inspired my blog title, courtesy of youtube.

Incoherent.

I thought that drinking wine would help the head cold. You know, that if I got a buzz going, it would matter less.

Not so much. Wine tastes really terrible when you have a head cold.

So now I'm waiting for Matt to come back with some sudafed and orange juice.

Book Challenges: The Beginning

I am currently downloading books for my reading challenges for this year. One of the many convenient things about owning an e-reader is that you can download thousands of public domain books for free over at Project Gutenberg. All of the books that I am planning on reading for the Victorian Literature Challenge are on there, as are a few of the ones for the Feminist Lit challenge.

The Feminist Literature Challenge books for January are A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft and So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba. The former I downloaded from Gutenberg, the latter I will be procuring from the library. (It bears mentioning that I am flat freaking broke, hence my choice of book challenges: all are easily obtained for free online or from the library.) I've never read the latter, and have read the former only in excerpt. Looking forward to both!


As for the Victorian Literature Challenge, I'm going to start off easy with some poetry. Poetry was always my strong suit as an undergrad; I made my best grades in the classes in which poetry figured prominently. I'm going to be reading the Brownings, Tennyson, and Swinburne. I was going to add in the pre-Raphaelites, but then I recalled that I've already read most of the siblings Rossetti oeuvre and didn't care for the rest. So that's that, I guess.