Tonight's Low Carb Dinner

Tonight's experimental dinner was fantastic!

I made a meatloaf using 1 lb of ground beef, half a bag of porkies crushed, about a Tbsp of worchestershire sauce, a quarter of an onion chopped finely and an egg.

In another baking dish I poured enough oil to cover the bottom, then mixed in some dry basil and garlic powder. Into that I tossed a bag of frozen cauli, and tossed to coat. S&P lightly.

Both of the above went into a 350 oven.

On the stovetop I put 2 drained cans of sliced shitake mushrooms into a pan with 2T butter (not fake oleo stuff), covered it, and set it on the oven-vent burner. (I don't keep fresh mushrooms because they spoil so quickly; I buy them specially if I have an immediate use for them, but keep canned and dried 'shrooms on hand.)

After 30 minutes I tossed the cauli and returned it to the oven. Then to the mushrooms (with now-melted butter) I added 8 oz of sour cream - full fat of course - a tsp of chili powder, and tsp of beef base, and a generous shake of dry basil. I stirred it all together, re-covered it, and put it on the burner set to its lowest setting.

10 minutes later I removed the meat loaf and roasted cauli from the oven, turned the burner off, and stirred the sour cream/mushroom sauce. I served it over the meatloaf. The cauli was plenty flavorful to stand on its own. The mushroom sauce had a good strong flavor - if I wanted it milder (I didn't) I would have added some cream and used just a half-tsp of the chili powder.

A green salad would have rounded the meal out nicely but we were out of greens. Maybe next time...and I'll make some of Jamie VanEaton's oopsie rolls with it too!

(Note: I don't cook with salt when I'm using foods that have already been salted - such as the beef base.)

Definitely a meal I will make again.

Quick Yahoo Update

Received an email from them, they gave me a number to call. Talked to a rep there who was helpful and nice. Until she asked for my date of birth. I gave it to her an everything changed - she told me to write to account security and what to say, and that was it. Sounded like a flag of some sort must have come up on her screen at that point? What's up with that?

A Rant About Yahoo

Well, golly, so that's what happened to my post about feeding parrots! I thought I was logged into my other blog and couldn't imagine why it wasn't showing up there!

Anyway...this isn't about that. This is about Yahoo. And I will preface it by saying that yes, they provide a whole slew of great free services, and yes I am thankful for them, since they've helped me stay in touch, make friends, meet my husband, and many other things. So, yes, I do recognize I've been getting a lot of something for nothing for a lot of years.

At 2:33 a.m. yesterday I started getting notices that my password had been changed, and then that my alternate email addresses that I use for yahoogroups (among other things) were being deleted. As the notices were coming in, I tried to access my yahoo account, and sure enough, my password didn't work. I contacted them immediately via email, and also forwarded all of the messages to them, with complete headers.

Meanwhile I went to their support site and accessed the help files, which actually were no help - I can't change my password if I can't access my account. They sent me a form to fill out, and I did so, to the best of my ability. However, when I signed up for yahoo, it was well over a decade ago - probably closer to 15 years - and I don't remember where I lived at that time, or the answers to several of the other questions. But the one that REALLY gets me is, "What is the answer to your secret question?" Huh? What is my secret question, and I'll answer it! Do I remember what it might have been after all this time? Even if yahoo was the only thing I ever signed up for I wouldn't remember after all this time!

So I filled it in to the best of my ability, and where I didn't recall the answers, I told them that.

Now I got a note back that I MUST answer ALL of the questions correctly, no exceptions, to recover my identity on Yahoo. So, if that's the case, I will never recover it. Especially after my stroke, my memory is simply not that good going back a dozen years! In that time I've had so many life changes that, gee, the most important things - like my yahoo secret question - have taken a back burner.

I have been chiaowl online since day 1 with yahoo, as well as elsewhere. It has been my online identity almost since I've been online. (I was ^OwlLady^ for a few years before that...yeah, I've got a long history on the internet...) I have never found another chiaowl. If I lose that identity, then life without yahoo will start. No more yahoo groups, no more yahoo games, no more yahoo messenger, no more yahoo spam...er...email, no more yahoo shopping, none of it. I'm too old to become someone else.

No, I'm not feeling spiteful, just tired. A hacker can, within a few seconds and without jumping through ANY hoops, just take what's mine and yahoo didn't protect me from that...but when I try to get it back, NOW they're protecting my account, to the extent that I can't even claim what has been mine for so many years. Where is the justice in that?

Chiaowl may soon be dead, for good.

Feeding Parrots, In a Nutshell

My feeding philosophy is this: fresh is better than cooked; live is better than "dead"; natural food is better than synthetic/artificial/manufactured. While I adjust the foods for protein levels throughout the year (to avoid breeding behaviors or egg laying, and to enhance feather regrowth after molts) as well as per species, the basics are the same.

And, to clear up a couple of the MANY misconceptions that float around the 'net:
- Seeds are unhealthy and evil - WRONG! A diet of all dormant seeds wouldn't be as healthy as a diet of live, germinated seeds, and optimally a diet of healthy natural foods including live seeds would be optimal.
- Seed mixes are seed mixes - WRONG! When we're talking about commercial mixes made for smaller parrots like cockatiels and budgies, typical store-bought mixes are mostly millet, which is one of the healthiest grains there is and is NOT seed. Even cheap seed mixes (shudder!) made for the little guys contain a high ratio of grain to seed.

Oh there are SO many more misconceptions out there. What have you heard?