Dinner Roast Day

Sunday will be Turkey Day when the folks come down from SD this weekend. Today the featured protein was Dinner Roast. I made mashed potatoes, Easy Baked Cheese & Vegetable Twist, and brought cheese buttons I'd made for a Midwestern Classics potluck last Monday.

Oh and I made another apple pie with grains of paradise. This one was better because I used a teaspoon instead of a tablespoon and since my sister said the first one didn't taste like apple pie because it was missing something, I added a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon. I think I might have hit the mark now. It was a Granny Jazzy Crisp pie since I used Granny Smith, Jazz, and Honeycrisp (thank you University of Minnesota).

"All We Knead Is Love"

That is on the shirt of an employee at Great Harvest Bread Co., a bread store that carries Peet's coffee and tea and grinds their own flour each day. The franchise opened in Lincoln about ten days ago. I had a very tasty oat and berry muffin there and a "deici" (just kidding, it was called a large.) cup of coffee with steamed milk.

I suppose Great Harvest is like the Starbucks of bread stores, which could be good, if they provide really good bread. They are located at 48th and Old Cheney, which if you are from Lincoln, you might know that the Grain Bin, one of Lincoln's mom and pop bread shops, is just two blocks north on 48th. I'm curious what effect Great Harvest's close presence will have on GB.

I like St. Patrick's Day. It is one of many American holidays that has found a way to center around eating and drinking. And I'm all for eating and drinking. So I went to Bread and Cup for some very delicious corned beef on rye with a pint of Empyrean's Irish Red Ale. Then Ivanna Cone had a most delicious Bailey's Fudge Cake. The Bailey's ice cream base was Bailier than ever, and the fudge was decadent, and the cake was silky and not crumby like cake in ice cream often is. It was decadent without being rich. So I got a quart of it on my way out.

I was accompanied on my fine evening by Angela and Katie. Thank you ladies for a lovely night on the town.

I Couldn't Recommend It

Cooperative Somniloquence--when I start talking, they start sleeping.

Like Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots, I'm disappointed they lost the Super Bowl. I was rooting for the Pats because I don't like how the 1972 Dolphins (the only team in the Super Bowl Era to win all their games) celebrate their accomplishment, and I wanted them at least to have company, and possibly have to move down a chair at the table of perfection (the Patriots would have been 19-0 while the Dolphins only had 17 games). However, I'm very happy that it was a great game with great plays. The 3rd down with 5 yards to go where Elisha Manning resisted being sacked by Adalius Thomas and then threw a beautiful pass that was equaled by the prestidigious catch by David Tyree may have been the greatest play ever in a Super Bowl.

I watched the first episode of Jeeves and Wooster from the BBC on my Netflix. It is taken from P.G Wodehouse's stories and stars Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster. I enjoyed the first episode and am looking forward to the rest.

In closing, it is that magical week of getting rid of your eggs and dairy so you aren't tempted with their delectablity for Lent.

Mind If I Borrow Some Quiet?

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first of forty days of Lent. It is a time of penitence and fasting. I am going to fast from noise. There are a lot of ways I'm going to implement this in my life, a lot of them surrounding turning off the radio. Turn off the radio when I'm in the shower, in my car, at work when no one else is around. I'll also mute commercials on television, and not turn the television on unless there is a specific show I want to watch (no TV browsing). I'm going to try to keep my jibber-jabber to a minimum at work too; there really isn't that much that needs saying.

Last night after working out, I went to IHOP for a free short stack of pancakes. Interesting to me, the waitress I had is one of the spirit leaders for the Husker wrestling team (that sentence has some tricky cases in it). This fact, of course, increased her tip. We talked about the Big XII wrestling championships in Columbia, MO the 3rd of March. She has to leave at 4:30 Saturday morning to make the five hour jaunt. Wendy and I, however, are going down on Friday and are coming back on Sunday.

I'm going to ask this question now and have more on this in a latter post: Who or what is to say that God isn't nice and good?

Joyful Boxing Day

So, we, myself, Marcy, Wendy, and Wanda, celebrated Christmas today at 1. Last night, a late addition to our Italian Christmas bill of fare came up as my sister and I were talking about what we were missing: a vegetable. Lasagna, check. Risotto, check. Dessert, check. Apertif, check. Vegetable, no check. So today, (and from this point on I toot the horn that is my own for a bit) I put a couple smaller butternut squash into the oven for an hour to roast while I took a nap, on the account that I woke at 6 AM for some heretofore unknown reason. When I awoke from my nap, I removed the meat of the squash from the skin and added (now I pause here so you can get a pen and paper) a quarter cup of brown sugar (Why does it taste so good?), two tablespoons of butter, two dashes of cinnamon, and one dash of nutmeg. Mash it all up and you have an unequivocal success. My figgy pudding was a hit too. Warmed, my rice pudding, with freshly ground cardamom, would be better. It stiffen'd a bit too much after the cooking and chilling; served fresh, it could be really great.

Last night I had a dream where I had to kill with my hands either a small dog or cat that also happened to be a zombie. Let's just say they don't die easily.

Fact of the day: Les Schtroumpfs is French for The Smurfs.

"OJ Simpson . . .

not a Jew. But guess who is, Hall of Famer Rod Carew; he converted."

While I liked the previous radio station more, when a Lincoln station changed formats a few years back they played the Turkey Song, by Adam Sandler, continuously. The opening line is from another Sandler song, the Hanukkah Song. I had a happy turkey day. There were over twenty-five pies to choose from, this is a good thing. My favorite pie was my mother's raspberry pie, so delicious. And what I really liked about it was that it wasn't ashamed of being raspberry. There was some tart to it, which is what raspberries taste like. There is also some comfort in knowing the raspberries came from our own patch.

I watched a lot of football over the weekend. At one point on Saturday night, I was keeping fairly close tabs on three different games. I know I have a sickness. Most symptomatic of my illness is that I woke up at 6:50 am Sunday to leave SD so that I would be back in Lincoln for the Bears game.

The only travel drama came fifteen miles from home in Redfield where we got a flat tire. Then, of course, our limp-along tire also went flat. This was a very fortunate instance, all things considered, because we could have gotten stuck along the interstate somewhere; instead we just waited for Denny to pick us up. No big deal.

May the only things you consume this holiday season be conversation with friends, homemade food, and (some other good thing, suggestions welcome in the comments section). Don't worry about stimulating the economy; it's doing fine.