Stacerella

If you live in Ontario, and you have central air, I highly recommend you enroll in the PeakSaver program your local hyrdo outfit is running. Not only do they come to your house within a 3 hour window (as opposed to, say, your cable company who will give you a 5 hour window for you to sit and wait for a tech who never materialises), they bring the thermostat equipment, the install takes 10 minutes and the tech walks you through the use of the thermostat.

I know it might sound insane to most, but the difference of a half degree is the difference between my frozen toes and Joe’s sweaty ass from sitting on the couch. It makes our marriage last longer. It really does. Our old thermostat was from the cold era (I swear!) and we couldn’t ever trust that when we set it for 27 degrees it was accurate since the A/C seem to kick on and off at odd times when we didn’t feel any temperature change. I’m sure we spent a lot of money we didn’t need to in the first few months we’ve lived in our new home. I’m positive we’ll see a noticable difference on our bi-monthly bill like we feel on our skin.

Aside from saving our marriage, our energy money, and our sanity, this program also sports the ability for us to remotely control our settings from anywhere in the world as long as we have an internet connection. Should we, say, rush out the door in the AM and forget to turn our A/C up a few degrees while we’re not there enjoying it, we can do it when we get to work. Or while we’re at work and we feel a heat wave, our local hydro company can also remote into out thermostat and kick our A/C up a few degrees for the peak hours their power grid is overloaded and then remote back in and drop it back down when the power grid load eases up again. We don’t have to do anything - they’ll do it all for us when they need to, or when we are using more than our fair share even if we’re willing to pay for our demanding ways. They’re saving us from ourselves, and the planet from us. It’s a great program. Seriously consider getting into this program if you can!

Addendum:

Screen capture of our first time logging into our thermostat to turn on our AC unit from the work one full hour before we get home. The house should be nicely chilled in time for our arrival. I love saving money and energy. I’m also a geek.

Now that we have our first house, and it comes with some land in the backyard that was already someone’s flower bed, we converted it to a veggy garden. Being allergic to flowers does have its adavantages. *wink*

We planted a few things, and then later a few more things, but of the stuff we planted, so far we’ve been able to enjoy lots of flat leaf parsley, broccoli, cauliflower, and a baby eggplant. There are more fruits appearing this week. This is our latest crop of veg we’ve been waiting patiently for: tomatoes. So cool. Can’t wait to pick them.

Besides the baby tomatoes, I also noticed I might be getting two more baby eggplants. I love eggplants!

Besides the eggplant, I planted some green peppers, but I have long since give up hope when I realised the leaves were being attacked from a fungi. So, imagine my utter delight to realise I might be growing some after all. I’m hoping this blossom gets pollinated very soon instead of just opening and closing each day till it dies a slow death. That would be too much emotional drama for me to take.

Over the weekend, I woke up with an incredible hunger for pulled pork sliders for breakfast. So, knowing that I have some pulled pork already defrosted, I dumped half a jar of basil tomato sauce into a pot and put the pulled pork in with it to heat it all through. While that was, hopefully, not burning, I grated some marble cheese and defrosted some slider buns I had kicked around the freezer.

I made tons. More than we could have humanly consumed in one sitting so we tossed around some ideas of what to use it for later in the day. One idea made Joe’s eyes bug out: pulled pork enchiladas. Dinner idea done!

Super easy to throw together (five minutes) and only need 30 minutes in the oven to heat through, these enchiladas were basically a no-brainer.

Each tortilla had about 1/4 cup of the pulled pork in pasta sauce placed on the bottom 1/3 portion, and then (if you like or have it) a small handful of marble cheese, and them rolled up and placed seam side down in a lightly sprayed metal pan to bake. Over top, I added the last half of the basil tomato sauce and topped it with enough marble cheese to leave a nice cheese layer.

I baked these enchiladas covered with foil at 375 degrees for the first 25 minutes, and uncovered under the broiler for the last 5 minutes till the cheese bubbled and browned a bit. After they came out of the oven, I topped the enchiladas with cut up some bunching onions and flat leaf parsley from my garden, and served them with very healthy dollops of sour cream on the side. Heaven.

Try this today and you’ll agree with me, this is the easiest and tastiest enchiladas you’ll ever make at home. Recipe for the Pulled Pork and the basic Enchiladas came from Every Day Food.

Things I’m thinking about cooking and/or baking in the near future:

Knishes made with wild Canadian mushrooms
Greek Potatoes
Yogurt Pops
Raisin Cinnamon Bread
Pistachio Pasta in Cream Sauce

Which do I think I should make first and publish the recipe to?

Testing the Windows Live Writer Beta software with this post.