The soldier last night at dinner:

“Dear Lord, please help us not eat so much, amen.”

(He’s got Jupiter in Sagittarius)

Per Jilly’s request, this is the recipe I got from the soldier’s mother yesterday. itdates to the 1800’s. It’s very good and very filling.

Arroz A La Valenciana

Chicken

6 boneless chicken breasts (halves)
1 ½ C water
1 T salt
1 bay leaf

Sauce

1 ½ sticks butter
2 1# cans tomatoes
1 can tomato paste
½ C salad olives with pimentos (coarse chop)
½ C pitted black olives (coarse chop)
1/2 C capers
½ C hot mix (hot Italian giardiniera, coarse chop)
½ c vinegar (from the hot mix)
½ C small white pickled onions
2 C garbanzo beans (squeeze off the skins)
juice of 1 lime
1 ½ c chopped onion

Rice

3 T olive oil
½ c very fine egg noodles (crushed lightly - one time)
2 C long grain rice
1 clove crushed garlic

Chicken broth from chicken

Stew chicken with ½ qt water, ½ c onion, the bay leaf and salt. (15 min pressure cooker)
Blend tomatoes and paste in blender
Melt butter in large pan, sauté onion
Add the rest of the sauce ingredients and heat
Slice chicken breast into chunks (it will shred) - add to sauce, heat thoroughly and set aside.
Saute garlic in olive oil, cast iron pan. Add rice and egg noodles and sauté until browned and infused.
Add rice mixture to pressure cooker with 1 qt chicken broth add to pressure cooker - cook for 2 min, remove from heat.

Arrange rice on a platter when pan has cooled, place chicken in the center and sprinkle with English green peas, or whatever else you have that’s green (parsley, green onions, et) Make it pretty.

Have a family recipe? Share it!

If you are following my saga, you know last week I bought a pressure cooker, necessary to cook the soldier’s home food. This weekend I am going to cook a chicken dish he is craving - he called him mother who relayed the complex process over the phone.

The dish takes 2 hours to prepare according to one of his sisters… she methodically gave him the instructions while he relayed them to me with a pen in my hand. Why he acted as translator, I don’t know but I do know it doesn’t matter because the soldier’s mother can do no wrong as far as I am concerned.
Continue reading Pluto Transit To The Moon - Mine: The Weekend Update

mabelle writes on the Pressure Cooker bit:

“It *is* funny, elsa! I had the same thought as satori straight away… I’m not sure I would call it transparent, but it fits with the situation perfectly - I’m surprised you hadn’t realised the connection before Satori pointed it out. Anyway, better to channel the pressure into a pot on the stove than letting your head explode.”

mabelle - I think you’re pretty new around here, welcome!  I think this whole scene is a great example of how Pluto works. My little trip to buy a pressure cooker was so steeped in meaning… well if you had any idea how much I was actually processing as I pulled into the parking lot and parked (this is when satori made the comment) it would be easy to see how I’d miss the obvious.

Continue reading Pluto Transit To The Moon - Mine: Pressure Cooker, I Think I Can Explain

Saturn is in Virgo and everyone is feeling pressured to control their diets… some more than others. The soldier has the double whammy (Saturn in Virgo transiting the 6th house) so he is particularly affected.

Saturn transits force change in a slow and steady manner and we started working on his diet some months ago. It’s been successful. He was on medication and on the verge of diabetes.

His current blood work is much improved and it’s a relief seeing as he has had a family member suffer amputation due diabetes. He is now on a lessor medication but he would like to avoid all consequences of this condition if possible so further adjustments are on the horizon.

Continue reading Astrology And Diet - Limit Your Food - How Depressing!

I just got home, 6 hour drive from Nebraska. The solider is 2 hours behind me.

I got some news on the road, came home and googled and felt my blood pressure sky rocket. Okay, so in my case that means it’s 102/85, but still. I am MAD! So I made some calls… got all the relief I am going to get on a holiday weekend and then decided I best shake it off. How? By sticking with the plan. I am supposed to cook dinner now, see? But as soon as I considered starting dinner I had this thought:

“I can’t cook or the anger will go into the food!”

That prompted me to look at a chart of the current sky and sure enough Mars (anger) is square the Moon (food).

Too bad astrology is a hoax, huh?

(Watch that movie but whatever you do, get the Spanish version with subtitles. The dubbed version is horrendous)

The soldier on the phone today…

“Yeah, P, I’m in the desert and I am remembering things. Do you remember when we’d go to that sub shop by the University?”

“I do.”

“Yeah, that sub shop. This was before Subway and all that. We had that little backpack thing to carry stuff on the bike. Remember? It was not a backpack, just a small bag like a backpack, except you just put it on your one shoulder.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah and when you got the sandwiches they’d be sticking up out of that thing when you got on the bike. We’d take them home to eat. You’d have on the green flight jacket and your yellow pants of course. You wouldn’t even take your helmet off to order them. You’d just walk up to the window and flip the visor up.”

“Hurry home so I can have sex?”

“Yeah, probably.

I laughed. ‘I can remember that exactly. I remember how we felt; I am telling you I was getting the food so we could go home and screw. I don’t know what you were doing. We were like aliens or something. Aliens moving around in the desert, leave the helmet on when you deal with the locals. No need for them to know what we’re up to.”

“Yeah we aliens but I miss those days, riding around with those sandwiches sticking up. It was wonderful, ahhh.”

You can just tell my (Mars Mercury) motor is racing while his (Mars, Mercury, Saturn) putt putts. I always wind up looking at him thinking I ought to grow up too but I just can’t.

Do you feel childlike next to others?

Dreamsareality asks regarding the soldier’s eating habits:

Has he tried the low-carbs diet or Carb-addicts diet? Lotsa food!

Sounds like he’s active enough to burn it all off - and that’s great, but what fun is it to eat and not be full??

Actually, the solider doesn’t have a lick of fat on him anywhere and he never has. He is on the Taurus Sun opposite Scorpio Moon diet which means on Taurus days he eats like a glutton and I mean, he eats and eats and eats, then the Scorpio kicks in and he doesn’t eat so much as a scrap for a day or more…

“Eat!” I say.

“P, I said I’m not hungry so quit asking me if I want some food. If I want some food, I’ll let you know.”

ha ha ha.

You can see how this served him when he was in Special Forces. He could go a couple days crawling on his belly through the jungle… every once in awhile eat a bug and call it good.

The soldier, a Taurus and P… confused over the weekend under the Venus Neptune opposition.

“Well I love you,” I said.

“I know that. I know you love me, P.”

“How? How do you know that?”

“You got me this pizza,” he said.

“What?”

“I know you love me ‘cause you got me a pizza,” he said with a snort. “Men are simple, P.”

Portion controlled food, is it savior to hogs like me?