I do a lot of things on Sunday. Cooking in the crockpot is one of them. Here is my recipe for chicken and potato stew:
2 pounds of chicken breasts, whole
1.5 lbs of baby yellow potatoes
1 lb of carrots
1 lb of peas, frozen
1 lb of corn, frozen
2 stalks of celery, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
16 oz of chicken stock
3 chicken bouillon cubes
3 vegtable bouillon cubes
1 tsp.paprika
1 tsp. of white pepper
1 tbsp of olive oil
Salt to taste
Start with the olive oil on the bottom of the crockpot, then line the bottom of the crockpot with your chicken. I layer the carrots, onion, and celery on top. I add the bouillon cubes, salt, and pepper next. The potatoes go on top. The chick stock is poured over everything. I dust the potatoes with paprika, cover them, and set the crockpot to high.
Cook for 4 hours then add the corn and turn it down to low. Cook for 2-3 more hours.
Ah... the peas. I didn't forget them. I cook them separately and stir them in last. I shread the chicken at this point and give everything a good stir.
You can knock on the veggies or add other things like fresh herbs and veggies from the garden. Fiver prefers fresh peas and parsley. I've been tempted to add some oregano but the rabbit always has dibs on fresh oregano.
You can also add flour or cornstarch at the end for a thicker stew.
This feeds about 6 with leftovers for lunches.
This recipe gives me time to do other things, like laundry or better yet, paint figures. That will be Part B later today. It is also fairly diabetic friendly as you can work around the potatoes and skip the flour or cornstarch.
While waiting for a basecoat to dry, I got wrapped up in Terry Brooks' Wizard at Large. This is the third book in the Landover series. Questor Thews, Wizard at Large attempts to transform his friend Abernathy back into a human. It seemed like the right thing to do because he was the one who turned the Scribe into a Soft-coated Wheaten Terrier.
Things go sideways and hilarity and terror ensue. This is one of my favorite series because it incorporates 80s sensibilities into a fantasy story. Oddly, the series makes some nods to the 80s and 90s but doesn't dive in too deep. There is an odd simplicity to the stories that somehow dodges the passage of time and advances in technology that would normally break a portal fantasy story.
This gave me a great idea for a D&D hook. Locate Object is a bunk spell, the range is far too short. If this spell would be useful, they get down on their hands and knees and do it the hard way instead of magic. Invariably, if something is far away, the characters look for a sage or high-level Wizard to help. Or a Cleric with Commune.
So here goes the three-way hook. The scenario is, the party needs an item to fulfill some objective. They don't know where it is so they hire a scribe or Wizard to do the job. The characters assume they will be given some trivia about the object and a direction to go to recover the item.
Wrong!
The sage or Wizard does give them that information on how to find the object but decides to toot his or her horn by pulling out a scrying globe or magic mirror to show the characters exactly what the item looks like and its immediate environs. Pleased, the characters thank the sage profusely.
And then it happens.
The sage drops his or her magic item and it shatters. In the discharge of failing magic, the sage disappears and the item itself appears at the feet of the characters.
Surprise!
Now, here are the three hooks:
A) The characters feel obligated to bring the sage back home.
B) The characters take the item and leave, forgetting about the sage. The enraged sage escapes on their own and hunts the characters down.
C) The owner of the item brings the sage home, searching for his or her stolen possession.
The beauty of this is the triple hook is, in no way are you pushing the players to pick a course of action. They'll do it themselves by word and deed. Also, it doesn't tie up the DM too much. The forces against the players can have many motivations and goals, so it doesn't turn into a targeted TPK. You can play it for laughs, for growth, for horror, all based on what you discover your players like.
Imagine the look on your player's faces when they discover the sage doesn't want to go home because they accidentally found the love of their life. Or what if they ran home just days ahead of a demon horde. What if the sage stumbles home and into the party just in time to save them from themselves?
That is so much fun.
I do love a good Locust sculpt, but I have a few more figures queued up for painting.
The jars of dice are my next laser project. I'll be cutting some 3 mm thick lids for them. The next generation will have laser-etched glass, but I need to buy a rotating stand for that.
I've been working on a few Battlemechs for my Thursday outings to Kingpin Comics and Games. However, I own two 100-ton cats. They are beasts. They keep knocking my painted mechs off the shelf.
They are savage. They skip the unpainted ones.
I came up with a stupid solution to a stupid problem. I put the models in a terrarium I had in the garage.
They've tried half a dozen times to get up there and they can't fit. Problem solved?
I made a point of getting Nathan physical copies of the D&D 5e rules. He has two different groups that play and it would be dumb if they couldn't do that due to an internet outage, lost computer, or other silly problem.
Wayback in 2019, I had a campaign where elves and humans were hostile to one another. I couldn't sell it and no one bought it.
Once an idea is out there, forget about changing it.
You'll notice these are variants, with long gun barrels on the arms and no chin cannons. When they arrived, I thought of cutting the guns off to match the other model. The obvious bend in the barrels bothered me to.
I couldn't do it. I want them as they are.
I decided to fix them. These are obviously resin printed, so fixing them is relatively easy and the technique works on many types of plastic models.
Step one: get a cup of very hot water. I've seen people say it must be X degrees and then they name some arbitrary number below boiling.
Stop. Let me offer some free home improvement advice then tell you about using hot water to bend plastic.
You have three basic choices of water heating: on-demand, electric, or gas. If you have on-demand hot water, you can skip this because that will make as much, and as hot as you like water until the fuel runs out. If you heat water by gas or electricity you have a hot water battery in your home called a hot water tank.
Modern hot water tanks have two heating elements, one at the top and one near the bottom. The cold water comes in from the bottom of the tank and is heated by the first element. The hot water rises and is kept at temperature by the upper heating element. Cold water comes in to replace it and the process continues. This is actually kind of neat. When not in use, the water starts as a column of cold to hot and turns into a column of nearly uniform temperature water.
This is very efficient. This is also why I say not to use the hottest water possible for bending plastic. You won't be able to control how hot it can get consistently because of the heating elements.
If you notice you burn yourself at the sink when the dishwater or shower is running, turn down your hot water tank temperature. It's too hot. Remember, the shower will dump water over your head even if it's too hot. Second, turning the temp down can save you enough over a month or year to buy another mech.
This ends my home improvement section.
The reason for no specific temperature is, I don't know what kind of resin you are dealing with and I don't want you to melt it to slag. Repeating this process several times is better than destroying a model with very hot water.
Also, get a cup of cold water. Again, not as cold as you can get it, but cool.
Initially, I held my model in the water for a minute. Next, I bent the gun outwards and dipped it in the cool water. In the picture to the left, you can see the guns are less bent but not entirely fixed.
I repeated the process. Since the water didn't damage the models, I felt comfortable dropping all three into the hot water and repeated the process.
After the next dip, I thought they looked good enough. I might do it again before priming the models.
This technique works well with bent airplane landing gear, drogues, and antennas. You may give it a try on slightly warped larger pieces, but only if you can press the model's complex shape against an opposing shape. I have yet to fix a model where 2 halves of the model are warped by pressing them up against each other.
It is always too much flex to work but you may have better luck.
As always, you can pick up a copy of this game on DrivethruRPG, but if you hit up brick-and-mortar stores, you can get the physical copy with minis. I will be doing a review of my favorite place to shop and play Battletech soon.
The Commando is a light mech and missile boat. It's an interesting option, as it pairs a single laser with two different missile racks. The range is short and shorter, but it's cheaper than a Locust. And there is something to be said about a low-heat mech.
The Commando Gallery
