Rotate the foodstuffs!

I love it when things just come out right.  I had read, yesterday, Elise's recipe for cilantro pesto over at Simply Recipes, and was inspired.  I made up a batch of it, then mixed about half of it with some yogurt to make a marinade, into which I put a couple of chicken breasts, leaving them to absorb the flavors for an hour in the fridge.  To prepare, I tossed some thinly sliced onion and potato rounds with olive oil and laid them in the bottom of a baking dish, then placed the breasts atop to bake.  To finish them (well, the one I planned on eating tonight), I laid avocado slices on top, then slices of queso fresco, then let the cheese get all melty in the oven.  Sorry, no picture; I was starving and just dug in!  It was fabulous.  Only thing I'd do different in the future is let it marinate overnight, and maybe pound the thick part of the breast down a bit; it got just a mite dry.  Not that that stopped me from eating them.

The trip down to New Orleans was very relaxing today.  All told, I hung out with Dr. Humphries for a total of three hours.  It took us probably 1.5 or  hours to get through lunch, since every place we tried to go was closed out of nowhere.  We ended up having lunch at some random place on Chartres St., which was lackluster, but had the endearing quality of not being closed against all expectation.  Dr. Humphries' house?  Looks unassuming from the outside, but is amazing inside.  Very nicely decorated, and it's a damn menagerie.  He's apparently very involved with the SPCA and other animal welfare organizations (he's one of the cofounders of Bat Conservation International, apparently?!?!), so he has a number of exotics in his home (fully permitted, etc).  I knew about the fox.  I didn't know about the bats or the lemur or the kinkajous.  Evacuating from NO must have been... crazy.  And I did help give Chester a shot.  Hissy, hissy cat.

Yes, we did talk about my thesis some, but the animals are more interesting.

Also, speaking of animals, they found a bunch of new ones.  I mean, we find new bacteria all the time, new insects pretty frequently, but new higher-order species are relatively rare.  Well, a team of Western researchers went up into a mountain jungle in Indonesia-administered western Papua New Guinea and found a whole slew of things never before described by science.  The native guides said they knew of no human, Western or otherwise, who had ever been there.  The animals were entirely unafraid of humans, and allowed themselves to be picked up without protest.  It's... amazing.  The article's a great read, and it's got a slideshow!