Lunch

I headed over to what is left of Borders today at lunch to see what was left.  I went in with a small list of things that would be nice to get.  I didn’t find any of them. 

What I did find was kind of interesting.  I picked up a shrink-wrapped cookbook from an author I like (Jaime Oliver), a book about cheese, and a picture filled guidebook to poultry.  I got not only Chickens, but ducks too!  None of those items I even thought I wanted when I walked out the door for lunch.

Sometimes it feels good to just roll with it, and do things you don’t normally do.  I still needed lunch, so I headed somewhere I don’t typically go.

While I was sitting there enjoying the ambiance and fine food; I noticed a man standing by the highway off ramp with a sign.  I watched panhandling for change while I ate.  The last time I gave money to a panhandler was in San Francisco down by Fisherman’s Wharf.  There is a guy there who hides behind a potted ficus tree, scares the living crap out of site-seeing tourists, and then while they are all out of sorts hits them up for money.  He got me for the three ones in my pocket, and the Japanese tourists across the street who were watching presumably got good pictures they can remember forever. Today was going to be different. 

When I was done eating, before I got into my car, I fished a ten dollar bill out of my wallet and gave it to him.  He seemed genuinely surprised, and certainly grateful.  As I got into my car to go, he walked over to some nearby bushed, got a half empty bottle of water, and a couple of small bags of chips out of it, and hurried across the street.  He was obviously on a mission. So I sat and watched for a minute.

A woman appeared from behind a tree across the street and met him.  He showed her what he had, she smiled.  They then walked together, straight over the gas station convenience store, and I went back to work; where I get to do all of the “expected” things once more.

I almost wish I had given him a twenty instead.

Cold War

Good evening, my fellow citizens:

This Home Owner Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Mouse Soviet military buildup in my Basement on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive holes missile sites is now in preparation on my stone foundation that imprisoned island. The purpose of these holes bases can be none other than to provide a vermin nuclear strike capability against my kitchen the Western Hemisphere.

I have been checking my kitchen for intruders since I declared mission accomplished.

While I have seen no “evidence” of kitchen raids; a quick look around the house has found:

Time for more concrete patch, and I think will start setting the traps outside and see what I get.

A Hill of Beans – Pinto, v2

So, last time, I wanted creamier beans and a redder appearance. 

I again started with four slices of bacon and used the kitchen shears to slice it into ribbons.  This time though I added diced onion (no shallot), a couple of clovers of garlic, and two Jalapeños. 

Instead of raw Chorizo I used smoked one that I diced into cubes.  Then I added half a can of diced tomatoes.  I got the creamier beans and redder appearance, and the second try was better than the first.  However, there is still room for improvement.

Next time, instead of the canned tomatoes to add acidity and color; I’ll paprika for color and some diced cherry tomatoes for acidity.  Also I need to find a better smoked Chorizo.  This one tasted more like pepperoni, which is ok, but I wanted more heat, and more flavor out of it.  This version was the consistency of baked beans, which is not what I wanted.  I may either mast half a can of beans, or I guess I could use some re-fried beans.  I want it kind of “pasty”. 

My First

On Open Letter to my first Weber Grill.

Why did you run away?  It’s been over ten years now since you left, and I still think about you sometimes.  It was the night before Father’s Day when you left.  Why did you go?  Did you like the houses across the street better than the apartment we were in?  Did you not like our neighbor, the gas grill?  I had such big plans for us on that Father’s Day.

It was painful, but I have moved on.  The grill I’m living with now is much more understanding.

After 10 years now we are still going strong, even after the warping grease fire that’s made it hard to get the grill properly placed.  Our relationship is so strong that we’ve had a small barrel grill and a smoker move in.  There isn’t even a hint of jealousy. 

Even so, after all these years I still think about you.  I guess you never forget your first.

Scooter-less

So the time has come and gone and the spot in the front yard that I thought was the 2011 rabbit nest was, in fact, empty.

Un-Americanized

I like Chinese food; however what we usually get here is Americanized Chinese food.  It’s not bad though I have had Overly-Americanized Chinese food which is nasty.  I have been looking for Un-Americanized Chinese food.  I once heard that a truly authentic Chinese restaurant typically only prepares one of the eight regional cuisines of china.   

I have finally found one near me house.  The Famous Szechuan Pavilion 

Its in what used to be a drive through coffee shop.  Ordering my food was difficult.  Though the owner/cook/waitress/busboy’s English was surely better than my Mandarin.  I got the Dan Dan Noodles.  When she asked it I wanted “Small or medium” I though she meant how big a bowl, you know, like a whole or half order kind of thing.  So I got the “medium” Portion size isn’t what she meant.  I found out what she meant was a small or medium spoonful of Sichuan pepper stuff.  My mouth was nice and numb after the first three or four bites.  I could still taste it, but the heat sort of disappeared.

So today at work my Chinese Cultural Consultant brought me:

Sichuan peanuts! 

Very tasty, and not mouth numbing!  The best part though was the back of the package.

I think that’s a great symbol for “CRAP THAT’S HOT!”

Randomness, Part II

Kansas

There’s no salad in Kansas.  Well, there is no good salad in Kansas.  Once, back in the 90s, when Sandy was in graduate school I got to go along as free labor for the field work portion of her thesis.  We were in Kansas to visit a salt mine in the lovely town of Salina (which rhymes with Vagina.  What?  You thought I’d say Regina?)  Anyway.  While we were there I once had gotten the “salad bar” with dinner.  It consisted of browning iceberg lettuce, some carrots, Bac-O bits, and ranch dressing.  Things have progressed, some, in the last 15 years.  We were in Kansas City recently and I managed to get this:

At least the Iceberg lettuce wasn’t brown – yet.  We weren’t there for the salad though.  We were there for The Great Wolf Lodge.  It’s a hotel with an indoor water park attached.

There was also miniature golf

What is the costume he is wearing you ask?  That’s part of the other attraction – Magi Quest. 

It’s an adventure game, with stations set up all around the hotel.  Basically is runs the kids around in circles all day.  We spent two nights, which was just about right.  Any longer and I think they would have started getting bored.

This was almost what I would call a vacation.  I got to spend some time sitting on my butt reading and generally doing nothing.  My favorite part may have been finding this on the way

Once, a long time ago I have vague memories of going on a vacation as a kid.  Every time we stopped for a meal, it was at Stuckey’s, but that’s a different story.

Braised Boy Scouts

So the weekend after the “Bacon and Poo” meeting we had a two night campout planned. 

The reason I say braised is that when I woke up at about 2am Saturday morning it had to still be in the mid 80s with 110% relative humidity, and no matter how much of the Nylon tent I unzipped no air was moving.  I didn’t sleep.  I braised in my own sweat.

But, I digress.  There was a two fold purpose to the trip. 

One was for me to get a few of the first years together Friday morning and go shopping for food for the weekend.  Well that didn’t work out so well.  I had some family stuff planned for Friday morning that ended up running over.  Instead, after everyone was gathered for the trip to the camp site, we divvied up the money and ran to the farmers market.  Boy scouts are suppose to be thrifty, BUT trying to feed 14 people, 5 meals, with an average of $20 per meal isn’t thrifty.  It’s cheap.  So we got the farmers market, divided the kids into 5 groups of 2, and gave them each $15 for their assigned meals with $30 for Saturday night dinner.  The menu plans was:

Dinner 1: Hot dogs, buns, ketchup, and watermelon.

Breakfast 1: Eggs (two dozen), Bacon (1 pound, so yes one strip per person, oh, and it got burnt), and Sunny Delight (two bottles, cause apparently the scouts who did this meal, really like Sunny D),

Lunch 1: Sandwiches.  Two slices bread, one slice of lunchmeat, and one slice of cheese, no condiments, but we had chips!  Doritos and Cheetoes!  

Dinner 2:  The big one! Uh. Bratwurst and dump cake?  Really that’s it?

Breakfast 2: Pop tarts, mini-honey buns, and Oranges.

The other main purpose was to get the first year boys to finish their fishing merit badges.  All they had left to do was to catch, clean, cook, and eat one…

They caught enough for everyone,

But they were too small to fillet. So instead they got de-scaled, gutted, and beheaded.

Some liked their fish, but most of them ate as little as they could get away with.

Another theme of Boy Scouts is to give back to the community, aka service projects.  In this case it was using nearby native material to build up a crossing point on a creek for the farm’s small tractor to get across with the brush hog.  As the scout discovered it easy to get things stuck, and buried in the sand

The tractor got stuck going across, thankfully not too terribly, we got it free in short order.  It did not get stuck on the return trip.

The boys got a lesson in “you get what you pay for” Saturday night.  They didn’t want to spend the time to gather dead wood for the camp fire.  So the camp fire didn’t last long, which was fine with me.  Camp fires when the day’s high had been in the upper nineties aren’t all that fun.  There were some skits and a scary story by the Scoutmaster.  The scary story really came out of left field.  It was a story of the great economic meltdown of 2008 and pending monetary meltdown.  The story seemed to be based from the perspective of “hard money”, and I didn’t agree with where the story said things were headed.  After a long day in the sun, and a bad night sleep I figured that the scouts weren’t really listening (or understanding if they were listening) to a story of high level macroeconomics, so I didn’t say anything.

All in all it was a sweaty, hungry, sleepy, dirty weekend.  Just the way it should be!

Musical Heresy

I read a column in the online version of the local newspaper all the time.  “The Life Sherpa by Joe Holleman.  Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t: this one though upset me.  Marginalizing someone’s, anyone’s, death isn’t very, Christian, nice, human, whatever.  Either way the comparisons he makes in the article are so off base.

Amy was 27 when she died.  She lived the “rock-n-roll” lifestyle and it caught up to her.  She released 2 studio albums the last one topping out at number two on the US charts and had one top 20 single.  At the end she was booed off the stage for being “under the influence” while performing.  She was made out to be the bad guy for failing rehab.  Without her we wouldn’t have Adele or Duffy.  Even Lady Gaga has given Amy credit for opening her door to success.

Is there a good comparison for Amy out there?  Why yes.

He was 27 when he died.  He too lived a “rock-n-roll” lifestyle and it caught up with him.  He released 3 studio albums the last one topping out at number one on the US charts and had one top 20 single.  At the end he was cheered on stage for being “under the influence” while performing.  He never even tried to rehab.  He didn’t break ground directly for anyone, but still was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Any idea who yet?

Jimi Hendrix…

One is vilified, the other idolized.  Why?

Bacon and Poo

I hosted a patrol meeting the other night to cover some second and first class requirements prior to the next planned camping trip.  I think it went well.  We could have called it the “Bacon and Poo” meeting.  The boys had fun, and may have even learned something.  The scouts each got a blank copy of the food pyramid and I read the different categories (fruits and vegetable, dairy, etc.) to them and they filled in the blanks.  I managed to keep them mostly focused by throwing dark chocolate covered raisons at them.  We then went back and talked about where everything should have been.  I didn’t make them erase, they just drew arrows.  They all knew that, in the words of one scout, that the stuff at the top was “The good-bad like McDonalds.”  I noticed that some of the boys were abbreviating instead of writing it out, and I asked them if they had written down enough that if the scoutmaster asked them to explain what they had written if they could.  They assured me that they could. 

After the ground work was done I told them, using the pyramid, write a menu for breakfast lunch and dinner.  I’d say they fall into three groups.  Ones that sort of pay attention to their food, ones that want familiar things, and ones that probably wouldn’t eat if you didn’t tell them too.  They each took a turn explaining their meals to the group, and I learned something new. 

Ants on a log.  It’s a celery stick, filled with peanut butter, and topped with raisons. 

I asked if anyone wanted to explain the importance of good nutrition.  Someone immediate said, half under their breath “You need fiber so you can have Mr. Henke the Christmas Poo.”, which is one of the few South Park Cartoons I’ve seen.  I then had the embarrassed “I didn’t think anyone heard that” scout explain why fiber is an important part of your diet to the rest of the patrol, and moved on before THAT got out of hand.  All the lists had Bacon and Fruit so we talked about how to properly store, transport, and prepare them, and what could happen if you didn’t do it correctly. 

Each of them had created a patrol menu that included three meals of which two needed cooking (no one wanted to cook lunch).  One list included a good selection of foods from the pyramid so I got each of the boys to talk (all at once, but at least they were on topic) about why it was good to have a variety of foods.  Then my 8 year old showed up with a whoopee cushion.  

We then resumed after the whoopee cushion break with “How you going to cook that bacon?”  Having this discussion shortly after summer camp was a bit of good luck.  Their experiences cooking at camp were fresh enough in their minds that they flew through it in no time.  They even did it correctly, and though I didn’t ask they talked about cleaning up afterwards too.  I then moved from cleaning the pans to dealing with garbage, leftovers.  I reminded them of leave no trace and that if we bring it in we have to bring it out.  We talked about what is appropriate to put in the composting bucket, what can be used as fire starter for the next meal, and what should be thrown away.  We talked about storage and handling which started as “you’ll got hungry if it goes bad”, to “we’d eat it anyway”, to, “if you do”… yep.   We ended up on poo, again.

In the end scouts that showed up did several more advancement requirements, and more importantly no body got hurt, especially me!