Shadow and Flame with Magik

https://therecipecritic.com/2016/12/slow-cooker-parmesan-garlic-herb-chicken-potatoes/

This was a pretty nice meal, once again, it needs vegetables like onions and green peppers or something to make it not so starchy.

My son was a huge help with preparing this dish, which is always fun to cook with the little man.

For the chicken, while searing it, I cooked it with parsley, thyme and oregano.

Instead of quartering the red potatoes, I cut them into eighths.  Some probably should have been cut even more.

I never like slow cooker recipes that doesn’t require some liquid into it.  So after the first hour, I added 1/2 cup of chicken broth to the pot.  The potatoes had some water in them but I’ll add a full cup of chicken broth, next time.  I’ll also add onions and green peppers, just something to add color and some additional flavoring.

. . .

We had a big weekend of family events and television watching.  We’re all caught up with our current shows.  We are on episode seven of Stranger Things 2.  My wife has a friend who originally comment that something outstanding happened in episode eight, so we’ve been eagerly anticipating that episode.  Though I thought there were two big episodes before that, six being one of them.  I’m just happy that Max got on the same page as the rest of them, her and Sean Astin, also getting on the same page, was great.  I really hope he makes it through the season, I really like his character, Bob.

Off the recommendation of Comic Book Queers, and wanting a show to end on a lighter note, we started watching Inhumans.  We finished the first two episodes and it doesn’t seem campy or silly, yet.  I’m glad we’re watching it.  My wife finds it funny that Iwan Rheon is cast as another character who is “hassled” by dogs.  He is Maximus on this show and was Ramsay Bolton on Game of Thrones.  Karnak choosing the wrong rock to step on, is super puzzling, from the second episode.  There is only eight episodes, so we should go through this rather quickly.

Referring to eight episodes, we saw another clip of American Vandal, on Netflix, and I was super interested in watching it.  I’m done with Doctor Who Season Nine, and I’ll have to wait until Season Ten is available for the Amazon Prime membership.  I should check again on Hulu to see if Doctor Who made it back there.  So now I’m looking for another show to watch.  My wife saw the first episode with me and she said I could continue without her.  She also recommended I watch The 100, she says it is up my alley.  It is five seasons, right now on Netflix, so that might be more than I want to do.  I’m all about the eight episode season.

I’m currently on episode eight of Comic Book Queers and episode 85 of Living Between Wednesdays.  I’m in the middle of episode 48, which is their current episode.  Instead of releasing the Patreon episodes, all at once, they are labeling them with the next episode number, which is an interesting way to do it.  It makes sense, as it gives them new content to release and it doesn’t drown a guy like me who is eagerly willing to listen to all of them.  I see the third episode is out as episode 49, so I’ll have to listen to that.

https://player.fm/series/talk-is-jericho-1243841/talk-is-jericho-with-freddie-prinze-jr-ep212

FPJr referenced in episode 48, that he did Chris Jericho’s podcast, so I had to add that to my playlist.  Pretty great interview, and I really miss Chris Jericho.  Been a fan of him since his Y2J entrance into WWE.  I was so pleased when he become the first Undisputed Champion and was disappointed when HHH took the title from him, and I’m a pretty big HHH fan but I wanted Jericho to have it for a while.  He never even got to hold the unified belt.

Still, it is episode 212 of Talk is Jericho, and it is definitely an episode worth listening to.  I remember, maybe it was for Batman Forever, of watching (or taping it on the ol’ VCR) and watching all the appearances of the cast.  It may not have been that film but it was definitely for a superhero movie.  The problem I learned, after the third appearance, was that the celebrity pretty much had the same story to tell, and had the same clip, too.  Oh, it must have been the first X-Men film, in 2000, as I recall it was Patrick Stewart.  He even did that thing of not knowing which clip was about to be shown, twice on two different shows and it was the same clip too.  So I choose to stop watching any additional interviews.  That run also made me realized that, when an actor is in New York, they just do all of the New York shows, which I hadn’t really thought about before.  One can definitely tell, which actors were sent to which premieres, and when the premiere was, as they were in town for that and to do press.

A long way to get to the point that FPJr likes to tell certain stories, which I enjoy but I may be following him too closely.  I imagine these are stories that are tested well, and he tells well, so he’s comfortable with sharing these select stories of his past.

I also saw that Turtle Soup 163 was dropped last week, Eric and Ryan are not the best at putting those notices on their Facebook page.  I’m sure it is on the Slack channel, and maybe soon, I can start throwing ten dollars their way.

Whenever Turtle Soup drops, that puts me back as the guys give us two hours of the best entertainment so that puts me back on other shows.  Plus, I was pretty busy this week so I didn’t get to listen to as many podcasts as I’m use to.  I also had the problem with wanting to put all of these episodes on my phone and kept running out of memory.  I can’t wait until February when I can get a phone with at least 16MB, that’s all I care about.  8MB is killing me and has for so long now!

. . .

We keep talking about getting a PS4 for Black Friday, Target and Costco are both selling them for around $185, so that’s too good of a deal to pass up.  We’re not longer thinking of purchasing a Switch, as we’ll only want it for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Mario Odyssey, so maybe next year.  There are like 25 games that I want on the PS4 so that’s taking up some brain space.

TMNT Legends, I’m mostly trying to get into a new mindset of going after DNA cards and getting my team expanded.  I almost got Donatello to three stars, I’m only one away.  I may go crazy trying to get Michelangelo, after that.  I did earn Space Michelangelo and now the tournament is for Space Leonardo so I feel pretty confidant that I can earn him as well.  I did so well with Space Michelangelo that I got the two star version of him, whereas I only got the one star version of Space Raphael.

I still miss the old DNA card missions but they did release a new Raphael challenge, last week, so I’m hoping that maybe some ways of getting DNA are coming back.  In the Out of Shadows mode, I got movie Michelangelo and Rocksteady so, of course, I keep getting their DNA packs and rarely anyone else’s DNA.  So close with so many others but I’m just trying to get DNA and getting my main five’s moves maxed out.

Still not enjoying it like I used to but I’m finding ways to get new enjoyment out of it.

In our rewatch of Season Three, we’re on episode Tale of the Yokai.  Since we’re caught up on Riverdale and Doctor Who, I needed a new show and remembered our old show so that’s pretty fun.  I recall these episodes so, somehow, we missed out on some of the early episodes of the season.  Six more episodes and we’ll be able to start season four, which I’m pretty excited about.

. . .

I completely forgot about The Office!  We finished Season Six and well into Season Seven, our next episode is Viewing Party, episode 8.

Easy Dorito Pie

So I’ve really taken to cooking with Doritos!

Next time, I think I’ll go with Spicy Doritos, add onion and some green peppers.

This tasted pretty amazing but it could use some vegetables.  One of these days, I’ll learn to just add onions and green peppers from the very start.

We went to Walmart and was going to pie one of those disposable nine inch pie dish.  It was going to come with two for around three dollars.  Or we could just buy a nice glass one for the same price, so like an adult, I bought the glass one.  We have a pie dish but it has straight edges instead of the nice classic pie slant edge and I really wanted that for the dish.

I really liked the pepper jack cheese so I have to cook with that more.

Maybe this is how I made it but the directions should have a note about how high up the pie is going to look, prior to putting it in the oven.  The Nacho Doritos top layer was falling to the side.  I cooked it for 20 minutes but it probably was done at 15 as the top was a tad toasted.

It was even good the next day!

. . .

We’re really mowing through The Office Season Six, our next episode is New Leads.  My wife keeps wondering when Steve Carrell leaves, so there is this odd build up towards that.  I saw that episode when it first came out and like Phyllis’ wedding episode, enjoyed it but was a tad lost with the ongoing plotlines and wasn’t tempted to revisit the series or pick up and start watching it from that episode forward.  Not sure what made me watch Phyllis’ wedding episode, seems completely random now.

We are now officially current with Arrow, and it seems to be off to a good start.  We have plans to catch up with Legends of Tomorrow in the future, probably watch last season, knowing there is no way to catch up to see the current shows.  But that way, we will not be two seasons behind.

We finally finished Person of Interest in an amazing four episode binge!  Our son wasn’t great towards the last two episodes but some Playdoh later and everything was good.  Such a great finale!  We were not sure how it was going to end with twenty minutes left of the show.

Walker Dennis and me watched Doctor Who Season 9’s Heaven Sent.  We’re in the middle of Hell Bent but the Weeping Angels really scared him so we took a pause on that.  Maybe tonight we can finish it.  It is the season finale, so I really want to get back to it.

We started Stranger Things Season Two.  We saw Netflix has an after show, Beyond Stranger Things.  My wife figured we’ll watch the entire second season and then watch Beyond.

Netflix has a new ‘Stranger Things’ aftershow, but you shouldn’t watch it just yet

Good thing as that website states they give spoilers away so I’m glad we didn’t attempt it.  I noticed it had two less episodes than the second season, so I figured it didn’t match episode per episode.  Odd that they didn’t just do ten and ten, with the purpose of watching the show and then the aftershow and back to the show proper.  That’s how I would have done it.

The first episode was a pretty good start.  I’m glad that the characters are not pretending that it didn’t happen.  I thought the time jump to the next year was a good way to avoid any initial need to explain things.  We’ll get those answers, as we go.

. . .

I’m on episode 6 of Comic Book Queers, with two more before I’m caught up.  I’m on episode 84 of Living Between Wednesdays, with so many more to catch up on.

On episode 47 of Prinze and the Wolf, they announced that they are no longer doing Patreon episodes but will have a second feed for those bonus episodes.  Which is awesome!  I’ll have to add that backlog to my listening list, once it is available.  I’m not sure how FM Player is going to handle that, as that’s how I listen to the episodes.  Their official page was hard to work through the backlog with but now that I’m caught up, I should revisit it.

I just checked and they don’t have the two feeds up yet.  They released two Patreon episodes so far, so that’s two I can skip in that process.

. . .

TMNT Legends.  I got Space Raphael in the Tournament, so that made me feel pretty great.  I’m on track to get Space Michelangelo, if I can stay in the Samurai II category, I should but it’ll be great to move up a tier as well.   I’ve checked with the Reddit Page –

https://www.reddit.com/r/tmntlegends/

and they share my disappointments with the latest upgrade.  Ludia Games really took away the DNA card option that I and so many others really enjoyed.  I’ll throw a few Greenbacks towards buying DNA at a time but now, they are forcing people to buy five cards at a time for an extremely steep prize.  I’ll just stick with the Gauntlet and the Out of the Shadows mission to try to obtain those DNA cards.  Some people are hoping that Ludia changes the DNA back to how it used to be, which I also hope they do that.

I also just need to bring up my characters so that I don’t just have a top five guys.  I’m slowly getting a new set of five – Karai-Serpent, Shredder, Raphael, Casey Jones and Metalhead to level 45.  That way, I might be able to do a few more things such as the Daily Challenge Modes and the Story Challenge modes, as of now, I pretty much only make it pass one or two levels and get stopped, hard.  Which kills my buzz for the game.  I too wish it would go back to how it was with the DNA card challenges.  All they had to do was extend those challenges from four hours to being all day.  Which they did have all day challenges that ended with DNA packs.  I liked the ones that resulted in points towards DNA wherein we chose the character we wanted, as opposed to the ones that we had to earn like 2,500 points as I could never get to even to 1,000 points.  Or something like that, I might be off by a zero, I rarely ever played those except for the experience points.

So I don’t play the game all that much.  A short time in the morning, during the second half of my lunch hour and a little before bed.  I used to be addicted to the game but now I’ve cooled way down on it.  I have 4,000 Greenbacks, so I’m waiting until I get 5,000 before buying any DNA cards through the shop, by then, Ludia Games may have reverted the system again.  They apparently do read the Reddit page and one of the moderators has access to one of the crew members.

Which I remember that being the way with the super fun Avengers Alliance on Facebook as Playdom was pretty involved with that message board too.  I miss that game so much.  I see TMNT Legends heading in that direction that brought that game down though.  Hopefully Nickelodeon has a better relationship with Ludia Games than Disney had with Playdom.  Disney inherited that game though, which might be a crucial difference.

. . .

I still haven’t read X-Men Gold 13, I see the bag it is in but I keep thinking I’ll have this magical ten minutes but I need to just force it to happen.  There’s something about reading a thirteenth issue and knowing I’m not going to read issue 14 nor the first 12 anytime soon that stops me from doing it.  Then writing the post about it.  I still have five other reviews to publish too, I need to get back into this.

http://thecookinchicks.com/2015/07/parmesan-chicken-casserole/

We really can’t go wrong with a good pasta dish.  This one needs a bit of a kick but it was pretty good.

I cooked the chicken with simple salt and pepper, with garlic powder.  My son helped with that, as he likes to assist with the spices.  Walker Dennis is also pretty great with mixing items, as well.  He helped create the yogurt mixture, too.  My wife doesn’t like mayonnaise, or egg nog for that matter, so I went with the yogurt option.  I’m a huge fan of egg nog, buying a gallon of it from Costco, every payday.  I’m on my second cycle of it and I’m loving it.

Again, we went with grated Parmesan cheese and not the shredded, I really need to make sure I create the grocery list when Parmesan is an ingredient.  I wouldn’t imagine the consistency would be all that different but I imagine it is better to use shredded when the recipe calls for it.  I imagine that the mixture would have been more soupy, if we used shredded as the grated cheese just sat on the chicken.  So that effected the overall quality but I’m not a hundred percent sure that the type of cheese was the culprit there.  Maybe I should have made it with two cups of yogurt.

Instead of a 9×13 dish, I placed the chicken mixture in a 8×8 as the note states it could become a bit soupy and I wanted the chicken to marinate in the soup.  Instead, the mixture never really went below the top of the chicken base.

I served the chicken mixture over pasta and it was pretty good.  Some bites were better than others but we do enjoy Parmesan cheese so we were happy with that.

I also almost forgot to put the remaining 1/4 cup of cheese on top of the mixture, so I had to quickly take that out of the oven and put it back in.

. . .

With it being the weekend before Halloween, we were running around Helena, attending all sorts of Halloween events, which was pretty fun.  So not much television watching but we got in a few shows.

Our next episode of The Office is Season Six’s Secret Santa.

Sunday night, we knocked out the last two episodes of Arrow’s fifth season.  Which was pretty grand and so we had to watch the first episode of season six.  Our plan is to watch the next two (probably three, now) episodes and stay current with it.  Now that I know Arrow is the lowest watched of the CW shows –

https://www.cinemablend.com/television/1676820/how-the-cws-4-arrow-verse-shows-actually-compare-in-popularity

(Not the website I first read that statistic but I couldn’t find that one.)

There is this odd mind space of wanting the show to get better.  Though I really liked the last season, it could have been two or three episodes shorter but that finale really brought it.

The show is dark but not unwatchable.  The main villain started to ham it up, towards the end, but I can see where people gave up on it.

We’re current with Riverdale, which is still pretty good.

I’m on episode 80 of Living Between Wednesdays and they reviewed the second episode of the first season.  So it is all coming together.  Which is a fun time aspect of catching up with that show, as they near my present day.  Dave and Rachelle joked about what season two will be, as it couldn’t be another murder mystery . . . and it totally is!  What else could it be?  Just pure teen melodrama?  I could be cool with that.

I’m doing one episode of LBW and then one episode of Comic Book Queers, to try to get current with that podcast.  My next episode is the fourth one.  They are not that far behind, they are on episode 8, so I’m at the half way mark, so I’m listening to episodes that were released a month ago.

TMNT Legends just had a massive update, as they added a slew of characters and improvements.  I still wish that, when farming for an item, that screen will show how many of the item I current have.  That’ll be helpful, as well as having my current DNA number, on the individual character page.  Maybe during the next update as I’m sure they are going to be hit by complaints and notices of glitches.

The only one I noticed was during the Super Shredder fight, when he has armor up (meaning he can get hit once, and not be hurt) the animation for the armor, is to his far right (our left) so I’m sure they will update that so the effect is actually around him.  That fight has been brutal as my top characters are all stuck at level 45, until I improve them and Chapter Five Level 12’s end boss is a level 46 and he kicks my team’s butts. So I have to max out their moves, as it’ll take forever to get enough DNA to level each of them up, if I want to stand a chance.  Now that the update has happened, there are level 50 villains and they pretty much murder my team.  Super Shredder punishes all of those around Leonardo and then poor Leo dies a slow death.

So the update is fun but I’m so under-powered that it kills some of my enjoyment as I know it will take months to achieve the success I want and I’m not sure I want to grind that much.  But I did finally unlock Raphael, so that’s pretty cool.  So I have to level him up to 45, which should take some time as I’ve finally hit that point where I don’t have as much Mutagen, which I need to level up characters and moves.  I also now need to spend the time to get Donatello’s DNA so that my three proper turtles can all be level 45 (or on the road to 45).

. . .

Have a happy and safe Halloween!  Walker Dennis is going as a pirate.  Hopefully, the weather holds up and he doesn’t have to wear his jacket too much, while being outside.

https://www.familyfreshmeals.com/2014/09/cheesy-chicken-enchilada-casserole-vegetarian-option.html

I really liked this recipe but my wife only thought it was okay.

http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/mexican-spice-mix/5ec99d6a-f967-475f-9f07-7223db290426

When I prepare chicken, I like to use the spices from the dish to cook the chicken with.  This recipe didn’t call for any spices so I looked up one of our spice blends.

http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/mexican-spice-mix/5ec99d6a-f967-475f-9f07-7223db290426

I think this could have gone better.  I didn’t have coriander leaves but everything else so I stuck with this recipe.  I need to learn to not use as much cumin, maybe half it.  We like it but a tablespoon essentially turns the spice blend into a cumin blend with a cameo appearance from everyone else.

We must have gotten bigger than six inch tortillas as I started with lining the bottom with six tortillas but then quickly realized that, with future steps, I would only use half of the required amount.

The directions state to not grease the pan, so I thought adding six tortillas was a smart away around that.

We had a decent amount of red enchilada sauce, left over, and that was after I used a pretty generous amount, throughout the recipe.

We could have used more green chiles, two small cans instead of the one small can.  I really like green chiles, as does my wife, so we should double that ingredient.

I also used plenty of cheese, as one can never go wrong with too much cheese and we did get the Kraft Mexican blend, this time.

Step five wants six more tortillas, and we bought a ten pack, which was helpful as it gave me a reason to pause.  So I used two at this step and two more for the next step.

I also missed the corn portion of step five and just threw the rest of it during step six.  Not like it really mattered but I was happy that I looked into the can of corn and noticed there was more in there.

I baked it for 35 minutes and it looked pretty good.  I think the chicken brought it down a little and maybe making it into a spicy dish, would have helped.  More green chiles, would have helped too.

. . .

Our next episode of Office Season Six, is Niagara, Part Two.

We had plans to really commit to Arrow Season Five, so that we could catch up to the current season but we missed the mark by two episodes.  Hopefully we can still catch up, but the season is getting better.  The show really could have been 21 episodes, instead of 23.  A comment I keep making.  I’m just done with filler episodes.  At one point, one of the characters actually said something along the lines of “we have to stop the search for Prometheus and handle this” which is essentially saying “this is a filler episode, ya’ll.”  Our next episode is Season Five’s The Missing.

We went to Great Falls, this weekend, and went to the Applestem Maze, which our son really enjoyed.

https://www.applestemcornmaze.com/

I was hoping for more of a Curious George presence as Walker Dennis is really into Curious George.  Well, he used to be more into his adventures but still perks up when he seems George.  If we were there opening weekend, they did have George and The Man in the Yellow Hat but we were never going to go during opening weekend.

We also stopped by Kelly’s Komix.

http://www.kellyskomixgreatfalls.com/

We were not going to go there, at all, as I wasn’t going to buy five comics of the 115 that I would need to buy to be current again.  But on Friday, I learned that Lockheed was in X-Men Gold 13 so we stopped by and they still had a copy of it!  So now I just need Captain America : Steve Rogers 15’s ResurreXion variant cover and I’ll be current on Lockheed’s appearances.  I still haven’t read the issue yet, but the hard part was buying it.

Such a great comic book store, too.  Probably the best one in Montana.  The Missoula one is nice but Kelly’s Komix has this incredible selection of back issues, and I could probably spend hours in there.  I’m lucky if I can spend 15 minutes.

I was by our storage unit, looking for my notary journal and stamp.  I knew they were in a comic book box, so I found that box.  It only had my journal in it, which is the least important part of the duo.  That box was supposed to have the last five comics I bought from Hastings, too, so that must be in another comic book box.  Next time I go to the storage unit, I’ll have to look for it, again.

My son and I are caught up on Riverdale’s second season.  So far, so good.  My wife pointed out that Mr. Lodge is portrayed by Mark Consuelos, Kelly Ripa’s husband.  He’s doing a great job, thus far.

We’re in the middle of Doctor Who Season Nine’s Face the Raven.  We started it too late so we couldn’t finish it.  Hopefully tonight.

I’m on episode 78 of Living Between Wednesdays.  Rachelle and Dave are going to review X2 : X-Men United.

I would be a couple episodes further but Comic Book Queers is back, as Comic Book Queers Legacy so I’ve heard the first episode and have the second one to listen to, as well.  Then I’ll write a post about that.  I missed Brett and EvilJeff.

Turtle Soup also released episode 162, and Prinze and the Wolf should be releasing an episode on Tuesday.  I’ve learn to just wait until Wednesday morning, to be on the safe side.

I’m almost out of my banked T-Coins in TMNT Legends, and becoming less addicted to it.  They keep hinting at a huge update but it hasn’t happened yet.  I just three starred the movie mission so now I can use my warp passes to quickly get the movie characters.  Of the released characters, the only one I haven’t made DNA progress on is Classic Rocksteady, so that has been fun.  Still a fun game, and I had to grind to beat the movie sidequest, but now that I have completed all of this prep work, the game should be fun again, as I can make progress again.  Hopefully.