Friday 5.5

1. Good food- I made the best copy cat Chick fil-A chicken sandwiches! I´ve made CFA nuggets before, plenty of times. They were on rotation many years ago. But then I stopped making them. I found a recipe to try CFA sandwiches recently and decided to check out how close they are to the real thing. It turns out they´re close. They´re easy to make, too. I don´t want to make frying foods a super often occurrence but based on how good these babies tasted, I will make them again at some point. Everyone loved them!

I used this  recipe. It calls for four pounds of chicken breasts which is a lot (the author has a large family and often posts recipes that make enough to feed her large family :)). I had a four pound package of chicken so I was in business and didn´t need to worry about adjusting the recipe for a smaller amount of chicken.

I followed the recipe almost to a T. The flour mixtures has fourteen spices/pantry staples in it. I included every one of them. I did, however, use one tablespoon less of ground mustard than the recipe called for. I did that based on a comment someone made in the comment section of the post.

The recipe had the chicken marinate in a mixture that contained baking soda. Apparently, baking soda tenderizes the chicken. It certainly tasted tender!

The recipe did not specify which kind of oil to use to fry the chicken in. Chick-fil- A fries its sandwiches and nuggets in peanut oil. I had some on hand so that´s what I used. I don´t have a frying appliance like a Fry Daddy and frankly do not plan to fry food enough to justify having a fryer... I used my tallest stock pot for the frying and that worked out well. There was minimal oil splatter on my stove.

I mentioned that I made four pounds worth of fried chicken. I think it came out to ten pieces of fried chicken which obviously we could not eat for one dinner! I was worried about how the chicken would taste the next day. I put some chicken pieces in the air fryer for several minutes to warm them up. When the chicken was hot, we ate it and it tasted exactly how it had tasted the day before when it was fresh.  

2.  After the sandwich hit, perhaps a fail was inevitable :(. Alyssa and I love the Thai chicken wrap at Tropical Smoothie. I looked for copy cat recipes for that. From Reddit, I found out that TS purchases Thai sauce to use in their wraps. The brand name was listed and when I looked into purchasing some, I realized that it was only for sale in restaurant sized quantities. Way too much for family consumption. 

So, I looked at copy cat recipes online to make the Thai sauce. The one that I found was... not a hit. At all. As in, I won´t ever make it again. It tasted way too peanut buttery and as Donnie proclaimed, peanut butter and chicken don´t pair well together. 

Later that evening, I was already in bed (had a head cold & I was subbing so I needed lots of rest!) when Alyssa called to ask Donnie a question about her new laptop. Donnie recounted to Alyssa the peanut butter chicken debacle and Alyssa asked him, ¨Was mom trying to make a copy cat of Tropical Smoothie´s Thai chicken wrap?¨ Ah, she knows me so well!

3. My car´s Maintenance Required light was on and had been for a couple of weeks. I was starting to get twitchy about driving for as long as I had been with the light on. I thought it needed an oil change. With my car being as old as it is (9 years), I didn´t want to be driving longer than it needed to be with old oil. I decided to make an appointment at the dealership rather than a local place that we use mainly because the dealership washes cars after it does maintenance or work on a car and I wanted my car to be washed. The dealership is further away but they´ll also give customers a loaner vehicle. I decided to use a loaner to run an errand near the dealership.

The dealership is quite big- much bigger than the small place in town that we normally take our cars to. I had to meet with a guy named Bob prior to them working on my car. Bob informed me that my car did not need an oil change- the tires needed to be rotated. Wait? Was I stressed out about my tires that needed to be rotated? Apparently so. 

I ran my errand, ran home and shortly after that, received a text that my car was ready. I made it to the dealership by 5:00 to check out with Bob (Bob told me he leaves at 5:30). Bob was with a customer when I arrived so I was ushered into the vast waiting area. I couldn´t see Bob´s office from where I was but I assumed someone told him that I was there.  Not so. I was waiting for Bob and Bob was waiting for me. I ended up waiting for half an hour for Bob in the lobby and he was unaware that I was at the dealership.  Argh.  There are some advantages to using both the small service station in town and the dealership. I love my clean car but did not like the wait at the dealership or the drive to and from the dealership at a busy time of day.

Snacks were a nice touch but I really just wanted to not have to wait for so long...

I liked the concept of a quiet lounge but didn´t dare go in it because I wanted people to see me and see that I was waiting... Not that being seen did me any good. I had to go and hunt Bob down in the end. 

4. I subbed three days this week which was the most days a week I´d subbed in 2026. The days weren´t too bad. I subbed two days for the same teacher whom I´d had to give the mini lessons to when I checked the students´ work. This time, it wasn´t as bad because one of the days the students were doing a review... but the test was the next day so they knew the material much better than they had the week before where I had to grade their reviews. I still talked seemingly almost non stop but I didn´t have to give as many mini, individualized lessons. The next day that I subbed in that classroom was test day. YAH! Gotta love test day. You know your voice won´t be hoarse at the end of the day. Test days are boring but I could handle a boring day after a talk filled one from the day before.

Tell me what color Flair pen you grabbed from the teacher´s pen caddy without telling me... I was marking students´ papers with checks and somehow I ended up with a pointer finger looking like this...

What? Brown? Shocking??

5. Remember when we didn´t have a working furnace and we used electric heaters to heat our house? I accidentally bought a fan at Walmart when my task was to go out and buy heaters! I took back the fan earlier this week. While at the service desk waiting to take back the fan, I saw this sign and reading it made my head spin a little. It seemed puzzling to me. 

What´s the difference between 5 per customer and 5 per transaction.?What am I missing? And what are the trading cards anyway? Baseball cards, Pokeman cards? I´m so confused. 

5.5 Not too far from our house, on the state route that our neighborhood is off of, sits a barn where shortly after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, an artist painted a mural in his honor. I´ve seen it several times when driving by it and always assumed that the owner of the barn was a  Charlie Kirk fan who paid someone to paint it. I was curious to know on whose property the barn sat. What I found out was that I had it all wrong! I found a couple of articles about it online. It turns out that the owner of the barn had never heard of Charlie Kirk until Charlie´s murder. So not a fan at all! Instead, it was a young woman artist who wanted to paint a mural in Charlie´s honor. She contacted the barn owner and asked if she could paint the mural. He gave her his permission.

The artist is a young woman named Erica Arndts who is from the area and graduated from the same high school as my husband. She travels all across the world painting murals. 

Of the design, Arndt said, ¨The whole design evolved on its own. Charlie loved this country, he was a true patriotic. You just can´t go wrong with a patriotic flag.¨ She acknowledges that not everyone will like every piece of art, but that´s not the point. ¨There´s a common thread in humanity, if someone is murdered in public... it´s wrong. That was a pretty shameful act that was done to him.¨

The owner of the barn, businessman Jeffrey Heil says he tries not to be political. However, he says he hopes the mural wakes people up and gives awareness to senseless killings. 

¨I looked at it as freedom and the American flag as a reminder that we need to support it,¨ he said. 

Here is a picture of the artist that I got from her website which can be seen here.

Here is a news article from which I got most of the information about the mural. The mural was on my mind because I saw it on Sunday when I was coming back from Columbus after dropping Alyssa off at school. Night had begun to fall and the barn has red, white and blue lights on the top of it. The lights and the mural together are really striking.