What did your pheasant do today?

An evening alone while the honey is golfing with his buddies.  It started with pulling up to our driveway to see two rooster pheasants fighting in our front yard.  I have to say this was a first.  No, not the first pheasant in our yard.  We have had a pheasant family in our neighborhood for several years and I awake almost every morning to the male pheasant's call.  In fact, while Charlie feels the need to chase almost every bird out of our yard he has come to accept the male pheasant of the clan as he seems to particularly like our yard and is almost as big as Charlie.  So for the most part Charlie ignores him, for which I am thankful because I think he is beautiful and get a kick out of occasionaly seeing him on our garage roof standing sentry.  However, I have never seen more than one rooster pheasant at a time and certainly not in our yard, and most definitely not fighting.  It was quite the sight.

Since there was nobody else to decide dinner with I decided to experiment.  I baked a couple of cod fillets in the oven with the typical seasonings, but I decided to create a caper and dill sauce from scratch with no recipe and with never having actually made it before.  I used a little mayo, a little sour cream, capers and some of their brine, dill, lemon juice, and salt and pepper.  I must say it turned out pretty good, though all the experimenting to get the flavors right resulted in way too much sauce.  Good thing I planned to have it on the side.  I will decide another day what to do with the leftovers. 

For the side I decided to make some miso soup.  I used my favorite brand of miso paste, Westbrae Natural (white is my favorite, but they make all the colors).  I usually add onion and thinly sliced potatoes, but we used the last of the potatoes for Sunday's breakfast.  So I added onion and red pepper instead.  Divine.

This last photo is actually from yesterday, but I have to share.  Charlie loves laying on blankets.  He has recently fallen in love with this one fleece blanket I made this winter (it has colorful little owls on it and I love it too).  Usually it has been left on the couch by yours truly from using it the night before.  Well some efficient soul (that would be Mark) decided to fold it and place it in the metal tub I use to hold lap afghans and blankets in the living room.  Apparently this just would not do for Charlie once he was left alone the next day while Mark and I were at work.  He must have decided to pull the blanket out of the tub and out onto the floor and promptly turn it into the perfect bed because this is what Mark found when he got home first.

I actually had the honors of taking the picture approximately two hours later though because Mark left it for me because he knew I would want to see first hand what our industrious little dog had done.  He was right!  The top right hand corner shows the tub where the blanket was once neatly folded and laying peacefully.  If you look close at Charlie's bed you can see what was probably the curve of his adorable little body pressing down the perfect blanket bed.