Chicken with Cabbage and Tomatoes

Yesterday I went grocery shopping during lunch. I forgot my entire bag of groceries in my office.

So I had to improvise. Instead of an Asian chicken soup with cabbage (left over from St. Patty's) I decided to do a Scandinavian dish. Here's what I made up and it came out great!

1. Cut up 3 boneless chicken breasts
2. Put 1/4 cup of flour in a ziplock bag with a 1/2 teaspoon of seasoning salt and 1/2 t of celery seed). cut chicken into small chunks (like the size of a boneless chicken leg). Coat with flour mixture.
3. Put a little canola oil in the bottom of a cast iron skillet.
4. Brown the chicken on both sides, set aside
5. Pre-heat oven to 350F. Chop green cabbage (I filled a cereal bowl with chopped cabbage to measure).
6. Saute cabbage in olive oil, season with salt & pepper
7. Add a can of chopped tomatoes (we do the organic ones sold in bulk at BJs so it's a 17.5 oz can I think). These are regular chopped tomatoes with no added flavoring.
8. Add chicken chunks back to pan. Stir and top with Trader Joe's shredded cheese (I do the one that is the mozzarella/cheddar/jack cheese combo).
9. Bake for 45 minutes. Covered with foil.
10. Remove foil for last 5 minutes and add a little more of the cheese.
11. Serve!

You can also add caraway seeds to the flour mixture. :)

Enjoy!

Hope Springs Eternal

Transitions

This has been a transition week for me thus far. We decided to spend a 3 day weekend in Maine after our last trip was postponed due to weather. We were determined to get one last snowmobile weekend in. We were like those Rabid Fans that they used to talk about at MathWorks user conferences. :)

We made it up the 1 mile to the house (I snowshoed, Tyler walked on top of the snow). We packed for a 3 day weekend in 2 small coolers and 2 small backpacks. Try this yourself if you ever want to feel like some sort of Packing Goddess. We were able to snowmobile for a good 3 hour run. Tyler makes fun of me because I really love using hand signals. When you pass other riders you signal how many riders behind you. When I got to lead it was: 1. When Tyler led my hand signal was closed fist to indicate 0 behind me. Everyone waved and everyone was so kind.

Yesterday evening I made a tough choice regarding a friend of mine. I decided to take a bit of a "break." Hanging out with this friend was stressing me out. We seemed constantly out of synch. It got to the point where I stopped spending time with this friend (or making time to hang with them). It got to the point where we would argue about the most simple of topics. For the life of me, I could not figure out this relationship.

So I asked them to take a break and maybe sit down for tea or something in April once we've had a few weeks apart. This was not an easy request. In recent weeks I'd been asking myself: "What is it about this friendship that bothers me?" or "Why do none of my other friends seem so determined to push back and disagree with me?"

Have any of you ever had this type of thing happen to you? I'm 36 years old and at my age if I tend to make a new friend I keep them around for...life. Is there anyone in your life that you just had to say "you're driving me bonkers."

If only life were as simple as an old postcard: