What's in the fridge pasta

Once upon a time there was a blog with recipes. Then there was a wiring project, then an infant who didn't want to be set down, a kitchen remodeling project, then a toddler who could open doors. Lately, there's been a distinct shortage of recipes as a result.

Recipes in our house have morphed somewhat. Here's an example, on the table in less than 30 minutes, or 40 if you have a toddler around to "help".

"What's in the fridge?" pasta

• Start cooking one box of rotini, or 3/4 box, if that's what's in the cupboard
• Saute a few crushed cloves of garlic and sometimes part of an onion (chopped) in a splash of olive oil.
• Add a chopped red or green pepper, saute a few more minutes. Also a cup of fresh tomatoes (chopped), or not.
• Add salt, pepper, oregano.
  
• Add 10 oz of frozen (thawed and squeezed) spinach, or some sad-looking fresh spinach
• Add some chick peas (1-2 cups, cooked for another recipe the other day, or one drained can, if you eat things from cans, which we mostly don't any more), or not.
• Add some dried and soaked sundried tomatoes, or some oil-cured sundried tomatoes, or not.
• Toast some walnuts in the oven, or not. (Don't stir them in until everything else is done cooking.)
  
• Cook until the noodles are done, stir in the "sauce", top with walnuts, mozarella cheese (or not), serve with some romano (or parmesan) cheese

In the photo: Dalton enjoys making chopped tomatoes (from our garden) with his Dad.

Arrrgh

So I spent literally 8 hours figuring out how to automatically move the old chezmodi posts into Blogger. Blogger offers no import tool, but it does offer an email to post option. So I figured I just needed a script that would grab the posts, turn them into emails (properly formatted), attach the appropriate figures (with appropriate mime-types), and voila, I'd be done.

That was 8 hours of work ago. Three different ideas for sending. Much gnashing of hair and tearing of teeth.

Then I finally got it working, and wandered downstairs to tell Tim all about it. Then I came back and discovered that although my script was still running (unsurprisingly, since it's a WHOLE lot of posts), my posts were no longer appearing.

Apparently, if you try to make more than about 10 posts in a day, blogger decides you're spamming, and wants a captcha for each one. If you emailed them, you're supposed to have the saved as drafts (awaiting a captcha I guess), but I don't see them anywhere.

So I guess I'm going to run this dratted script every day for the next month. Or get good at captchas. Or both. Have I mentioned that I suck at captchas?

So if you're wondering why there's only a small assortment of 2004 posts in the archive, well, that's why. :P

The good news is that we should no longer be subjected to comment spam. So leave a comment, ok? :)

Update, Tuesday 9/30 - apparently I can get more than 10 posts a day in, but I'm still getting locked out at about 20-30 a day. So maybe it'll only take me TWO weeks.

Achievement Unlocked!

Dalton learned to open closed doors using the doorknob today. He surprised Cathy with it when she had him in the bedroom trying to get him down for a nap. She was so demoralized that he escaped the nap entirely.

He was very excited about it. "I did it!"

I made sure to give him enthusiastic, if not sincere, encouragement on his accomplishment.

Modi, 1997-2008

(Originally posted on Sunday, September 7, 2008 by Cathy)

Modi died unexpectedly today. We don't know entirely what happened, but apparently something was preventing him from clotting, and he died of a hemorrhage despite our vet's efforts.

The blog hasn't been much about Modi in recent years, but he's still been around, quietly (or not so quietly) underfoot.

We miss him terribly.