DAILY MUSELI: Metal Snakes and Tomatillo Chicken

Good morning. You know something's wrong when you wake up, stare across your bedroom in the relative darkness and you see a long metal-coiled snake pushing up through the floor, toppling over your shoe rack and making an unearthly noise at 7:30 a.m. Groggy, you look over at the tubular intruder and hear some mumbling from the outside hallway: "... Where is it?!"

The electrical and plumbing renovations that were supposed to start next week Monday in my apartment got an early start ... by mistake. Downstairs, they had fed some sort of tube through the wrong pre-drilled hole and up it popped through my floor. When I informed the work crew working in the apartment next door, a work man came in and pushed it back down through, ramming it back to the nether regions of my building with his work boot.



1.) THROWING TOGETHER RANDOM INGREDIENTS, and disregarding any sort of recipe, I created a new dish that I'm calling Tomatillo chicken. I cook by instinct, and in my continuning effort to use up as much of my Sambal Oelek Ground Chili Paste before I must evacuate my apartment for renovations next weekend, I created a dish that had a good balance of heat, spice and sweetness. Next time, I'll probably serve with rice.

Here's what you do.
- Take some chicken breasts that may be sitting around in your freezer
- Dump a tomatillo-based salsa of your choice on top of the chicken in a glass casserole dish
- Put one to two generous spoonfuls of Sambal Oelek Ground Fresh Chili Paste
- Coat the chicken in the tomatillo-chili paste mess, plus add some Parmesan cheese on top
- Dump in a bunch of chopped raw onions and yellow peppers, along with some washed fresh spinach
- Cover in aluminum foil and bake at 350 degrees for a reasonable time until you aren't at a risk to contact harmful bacteria from undercooked chicken (maybe 30-40 minutes)

Voila! Serve with spinach salad and some asparagus and you shouldn't be disappointed.

2.) BLASTED CRICKET. I'm not sure if the cricket that has been chirping in my apartment toward the late evening yesterday was let in through the construction. I checked all the screens on my windows and they all seem fine, but yet, there's a cricket somewhere in my apartment.

3.) CONGRATS PRESTON! A former co-worker just got hired to be CNN's political editor, according to a report on FishbowlDC. Mark Preston will be leaving the Senate beat at Roll Call to take over John Mercurio's old job. Mercurio left for the Hotline.
>> "Roll Call's Preston to CNN" [FishbowlDC]