Not here.

My current blog is at

http://ramblingchicken.com

You'd think that link would lead you right back here, wouldn't you? But no. It's a long story. Creating a domain named after a Blogspot blog but then pointing it to a different Blogspot blog...weird. Long story.

Click up there. That's where the latest stuff is. Not much of it. I hope there will be more.

Chicken: Deschutes Brewery, Portland, Oregon

I just finished the last of last night's fried wings from the Portland branch of Deschutes Brewery.

In writing this post, I imagine  clone of myself drifting through Portland, full of bacon but wistfully wishing for a different form of crispy animal fat.  I recommend these wings to said clone as a fine "fried bone-in" dose of chicken.

I skipped the sauce. My clones and I are not interested in using chicken as a foil for other flavors--I want my chicken to taste like chicken and chicken fat, plus salt. So when the menu promised me "Fresh Squeezed IPA, Thai chiles, togarashi spice, honey, fresh lime" on the Fresh Squeezed wings, I decided that those flavors would want to be the star, and I demoted them. I ordered my wings with no sauce whatsoever, and added my own salt.

They were very good. When a dish remains delicious despite my determination to strip the cook of all of his flavoring tools, I'm impressed.

Big drumettes with nice skin covering. None of the two-bone middle part--what DO you call the three pieces of a wing? I'll need to find out. I miss the middle part, but it means that the ripping and tearing that makes me feel like a chicken-focused sibling of the Cookie Monster is largely eliminated.

And good, crunchy but not excessive, coating. I tend to be a dust-with-flour advocate, since battery coatings often "protect" the chicken skin from frying and rendering, and then why did you fry chicken? But this is a thicker crunchier coating that still allows the skin to fry. It makes me think of rice flour, but the menu doesn't make any gluten-free claims.

In addition to being good hot, they're very good as leftovers; they don't get soggy or drop all their fried coating or develop that old-oil flavor or any of the other failings of leftover fried chicken.

So.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Chicken: The Flying Pig, Vancouver, BC

In the interest of getting the vital chicken data into the blog, I will now and then be posting really short posts. This is one of them.

The Flying Pig in Vancouver, British Columbia is a nice place, a little crowded, pleasant staff, just fine on all the setting and service issues.

I post because the parmesan breaded chicken cutlet on the lunch menu is a nice, satisfying, comforting dose of chicken, of the boneless skinless crusty-coating white meat category. I recommend it.

I also see that the online menu mentions "bone marrow cheezy bread." How could we have missed that?

Chicken: Homer Street Cafe, Vancouver, BC, and a new direction for the Rambling Chicken

So, in my other blog, I once discussed the maddening situation of being in an unfamiliar city and not knowing where the perfume is. Aiee! But there's something much worse: being in a city where crunchy rendered chicken skin is available for sale, and not knowing it.

Homer Street Cafe in Vancouver, British Columbia, sells crunchy rendered chicken skin. See? Now you know. And now I'll remember where that chicken skin was, because I've blogged about it.

I've been thinking that I should blog about where a person can eat good fried chicken. And  other poultry both fried and unfried. Bacon, too, would be represented. Stuff like that. Wherever I eat. Home or traveling. And I happen to have this blog with a nicely appropriate name for that purpose, that has been napping since (hang on...) 2011. And I own the domain for that blog, because Himself kindly bought it for me in case I ever wanted to use it. Right now the domain points to the Other Blog, but we'll fix that in a few days.

So here I go.

We went to Vancouver, British Columbia, over (United States) Thanksgiving. We've gone to Vancouver for Thanksgiving, off and on, for years. There's good food, not too many people are traveling that way, and we're not making the cooks and waiters work on a holiday, since they already finished their Thanksgiving. We went, among other places, to Homer Street Cafe.

It's nice. Bright. Pretty. A well-appointed room and casual happy customers, so you don't feel that you have to live up to the room. Friendly staff. It exceeds pretty much all of my requirements for setting, service, blah blah. I say "blah blah' because what I care most about is the food.

The food included crunchy rendered chicken skin, so the rest of their menu could be limited to bran muffins and lukewarm water served in soup cans, and I'd still be delighted with them. But the rest of the menu is lovely. We shared the rendered chicken skin and an appetizer of chicken wings and drumsticks, and I had a quarter chicken while Himself had the special of roast suckling pig. The menu has at least a dozen more things that I wanted to try, including the maple butter pork belly.

It's both sad, and life-saving, that I won't be in Vancouver more often.

That is all.

(No image. I failed to photograph the chicken skin, and nothing else seemed right.)

Link: I've moooooooved!

I really have. Moved. Permanently. Over to ChickenFreak's Obsessions. If you've subscribed to this blog, thank you very much, and please, subscribe over there. We miss you!

Update 11/29/2015: OK, "permanently" was an overstatement. Rambling Chicken is back! But with a slightly different focus.

Image: By mattbuck. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Gardening: Plant Wish List

I'm still blogging! Over there. Here's a link.

Image: By Laughlin. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Gardening: Dryfarming

Bwahaha! Still moved! Click here for my latest post!

Image: By Li-Sung. Wikimedia Commons

Link: SOTD: Jo Malone Nectarine Blossom & Honey

I've still moved! A link to my latest post.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Gardening: Ramble. Really rambly ramble. And where's my donut?!

As previously mentioned, I've moved! A link to my latest post on the other blog.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Perfume: Hermes, The Ziploc, and Decluttering Weakness

I've moved! A link to my latest post.

Image: By H. Zell. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: NaNoWriMo is coming, too.

I've moved! Just another link to the latest post on the other blog.

Image: NaNoWriMo

Link: The onions are coming! The onions are coming!

I've moved! Another link to another latest post!

Image: By Filk R. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: SOTD Decision Making, Post One

I've moved! A link to my latest post.

Image: Greg Lundeen. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Travelling gluttony. Oh, and perfume, too.

I've moved! A link to my latest post on what is now my main blog.

Image: By the27thmaine. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Reassuring a Homesick Brain

I've moved! Linking to another post on the other blog.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Link: End of Summer

I've moved! So here's a link to my latest post over on the other blog.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Blogging: Un-juggling (aka: Rambling Chicken is moving back home)

I had a blog. 

Then I had two blogs. Then I had three blogs. One perfume, one general rambling, one decluttering. Then I slacked off on the whole blogging thing, and slipped down to a couple of posts a month, and that's really not enough to keep three blogs warm and fed.

So now it's time to compress. I'm returning to the original blog, the perfume blog, the one with the silliest name. ChickenFreak's Obsessions. That one. It will now resume its original identity as a blog about perfume and rambling and gardening and fiction and decluttering and bacon and fried chicken.

I hope that you folks that only read Rambling Chicken will all join me there. I'll be linking from here to, oh, the first dozen or so posts there, in the hope that you won't forget about me.

Image: By Clive Power. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Plotting and Planning

• The six-foot-wide, sixty-foot-long row that only gets automatically watered on the right-hand two feet and that I can't reach the middle of, isn't a good place for bush beans.
• However, it seems like a perfect place, next year, for vining winter squash. And pumpkins. I can plant the seeds on the wet two feet and let the plants sprawl over the dry four feet. And I'll only have to struggle and stretch to get the finished squashes, not strain my back picking beans every four days.
• Of course, that assumes that the squash can get along with only two feet of irrigated root zone.
• Also, that's a lot of squash. Maybe melons, too?
• Or tepary beans. They're harvested dry, which avoids the every-four-days thing, and sources claim that if you plant them immediately after the monsoons, they'll grow the rest of their lifecycle with no added water. OK, yes, we don't have monsoons; that's when they're at home. But we do have a wet winter.
• Tulips don't like to be watered, either. I've ordered an alarming number of tulips. They might be too many for their allotted space in the cutting row. But would the tulips' proximity to the irrigated two feet give them too much water?
• On the other hand, a sixty-by-six unbroken expanse of cucurbit vines sounds cool. I think I'm going to stick with the squashes and pumpkins and melons.
• And no cucumbers. They not only need to be picked every four days, they hide. With malicious intent. My back can't take that.
• That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: The Cutting Row

So, we've declared that one of the long rows in The Farm will be devoted to cutting flowers. That's eighty feet by four feet of space, all of it with at least half day sun.

Woohoo!

I've already started planting perennials. Two each of a few kinds of Japanese anemones, including Honorine Jobert, my favorite. I'd tell you what the others are, but, um, I forget. I'll have to make a note when I get out there.

Two plants each of a single-flowered and a double-flowered coreopsis. (Cultivars, you ask? I avert my eyes and promise to go make that note, too.) Two Magnus coneflowers. Two black-eyed Susan plants. Eight assorted columbine. In case you're wondering what the unifying theme is, it's that I went to the Grange and bought two of every plant that (1) I like, that (2) wasn't rootbound, and that (3) at least one source claimed was suitable for cutting. Not exactly systematic, but there was bare space out there!

I also bought some unsatisfyingly short things - squat little dahlias and, even worse, squat little sunflowers. I refuse to buy the sad, short cosmos seedlings. Why won't nurseries sell the tall ones? I suppose it's because people who aren't me like "bedding" annuals. Plus, people like to buy annuals that are already blooming, and it's hard to get a blooming four-foot-tall soft plant home without breaking it in half. So if I want the tall stuff, I have to seed it myself. This year I seeded Art Deco zinnias and Double Click cosmos, with delightful results; I'll repeat both next year, plus more kinds of  cosmos and zinnias, plus sunflowers.

I'm busily hunting online nurseries for more perennials. Vintage Gardens is going away in 2013 (noooo!), so I'm making lists of roses and possibly hydrangeas to buy from them--and Himself and I are discussing the possibility of devoting another long row just to roses. And every year I regret my failure to plant dahlias and chrysanthemums, so I plan to finally correct that error, though I haven't begun to narrow down the hundreds of options. I like the whacky ones that look like they need to comb their hair, or they're ready to blast off for Alpha Centauri, or they're waiting for you to get a little closer so that they can shoot spores in your face. That kind.

Then there are bulbs. Tulips, of course. At six inches between bulbs and a four-foot-wide row, that's sixteen bulbs per linear foot of row. That's a lot of bulbs, and enough space to offer at least a chance that they'll come back next year.

And...

Um...

My brain just stopped. Maybe those short squat little dahlias successfully aimed their spores.

First vase photo: By trish. Wikimedia Commons.
Second vase photo: By Patrick.Charpiat. Wikimedia Commons.
Third vase photo: By David Palterer. Wikimedia Commons.
Dahilia photo: By Vulkan. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Random Randomness

• I cut my first winter squash today. Unfortunately, I don't know what it is; the pencil-written wooden tag was rubbed off by the time I thought to make a note, and the woman who sold it to me and said that it tasted like chestnuts wasn't at the next farmer's market. I know that it covers an amazing amount of ground and produces an amazing number of squashes, for a single plant. And the squashes look rather like pictures of white acorn squash, though they turn a slightly darker tan when they ripen.
• A friend ate one of the Delicata Honey Boat squashes at the summer squash stage, and said that it was good and sweet. I've rarely eaten a summer squash that didn't taste like water. Maybe I should start eating immature winter squashes instead.
• I planted three kinds of squash and no pumpkins. What's with that? I'll correct it next year.
• I cut a zinnia and put it in a vase. Two weeks later, it was still alive. This is both good and a little bit frightening.
• There are unidentified round fruits on one of the plants in the cucumber patch. I still don't know if they're cucumbers, melons, or alien pods. 
• I still haven't eaten a sunflower bud. This was one of my big planned experiments this year, but I slacked off. If I don't get moving, all the sunflower buds are going to flower.
• Apparently, I sold about half of my vegetable gardening books to the used book store when I resigned myself to a small garden space. Now I need to decide which ones to re-buy. But I'm more pleased with myself for having done the decluttering than I am annoyed with my errors.
• The two watermelons in the garden are each only slightly larger than a softball. Next year I'm going to try Blacktail Mountain watermelon, if I can get the seeds. I read about it in Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties; it's supposed to successfully ripen melons in cooler and higher parts of Oregon than I live in. I think.
• This is the first time in months that I didn't have a sad, reproachful cluster of plants in pots huddled around the hose bibb waiting to be planted; a friend and I got the last of them in the ground this morning. Of course, I'll buy more any minute now.
• There's a volunteer petunia in the corn. That's just weird.
• Speaking of the corn, the main corn crop is ready to eat! We're in the middle of the generosity/gluttony dance where we want to give lots away to keep it from going to waste, and want to keep it to make sure we don't give away so much that we can't eat ourselves silly.
• I know that corn is supposed to have lots of genetic diversity, but does that extend to pure white kernels and corny yellow kernels on different ears that came from the seed packet? The silk colors were very different, too. Is this normal? And shouldn't the white and yellow be mixed in the same ear, depending on what fertilized what strand of cornsilk?
• Is it wrong to plant tulips as annuals? I need to know!
• Either way, it's time to order tulips. And to make sure that I ordered enough shallots and garlic and potato onions and Egyptian walking onions. And gopher wire. I read that without gopher wire, there will be no garlic whatsoever.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.