Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Waiting for Thomas

As has happened many times in the past month, Thomas came home from work and went downstairs to work out before dinner. He usually takes Rocky with him, as he'll stay nicely on the stand. The rest of the parrots stay upstairs with me. They tend to like to explore the basement, which isn't exactly parrot-proofed. And Thomas doesn't want to frequently interrupt his work out in order to bring a parrot back to the stand.

Max particularly likes the basement, so I'll take her down several times to say hi to Thomas and Rocky. Yesterday, Thomas left the basement door open when he went downstairs. Max flew to a chair close to the basement door, and stared at the opening, probably hoping she could go down:
I was cooking dinner, and when I looked a few minutes later, she had migrated to waiting at the top of the stairs:
I am just happy that she isn't brave enough to fly down on her own at this point! Of course I granted her wish and we went down to say hi to Thomas.

The caiques have gotten to the point where they share a large stand without any fighting, although they do an elaborate dance where they manage to stay about as far away from each other as they can. They still don't seem to want to befriend each other. They have wildly different personalities -- I wonder if that has anything to do with it? Beeps is in the foreground, and Calypso is in the background, on a higher level.After I took this picture, I looked to my left a bit and noticed that I could get a similar picture of the greys:That's Stella on the perch in the foreground, and Max on the chair in the background, near the basement door.

We had a lot of vegetables left over from our CSA. I really am trying to do more cooking, and so I tried something relatively adventurous for me. I am a list-making, rule-following person. I like to find a recipe and follow it quite closely. But I've heard some of the fun of cooking is experimenting and making things on your own. And since I didn't have all of the ingredients on hand for anything I wanted to make, that's what I did last night!

I cut up a bunch of vegetables we had around: eggplant, tomatoes, onions, yellow squash, and red peppers. I layered them in a dish, added some olive oil, crushed garlic, and some spices. Then I cooked this at a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes, sprinkled some shredded mozzarella cheese on top, and baked for another 10 minutes. We served it with some goat cheese on top. It was delicious! I'm hoping this encourages me to do more experimenting!

Here's what it looked like, in the baking dish, before the goat cheese:The parrots got to eat little pieces of cooked squash, so they were very happy!

2 comments:

Sharon said...

I think your birds are so funny. I especially like the photo of the greys hanging out on the chairs... they can make a perch out of anything if they want.

Mooky doesn't eat as many veggies as your birds seem to but recently I found some pomegranite seeds at the Farmer's Market and he actually likes them... it was a big shocker!

Mary said...

Thanks! Our chairs are not in great condition due to their nails scraping them and other assorted parrot messes!

Pomegranate -- now those are also messy! Were you able to find seeds only? I may have to look into that! Mooky is a lucky bird!